182 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum April 11, 2023”

  1. It’s a myth that renewables are coming to our rescue. Or at least that’t the conclusion expressed in this article:

    The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics

    We are going to have to dramatically downsize the dream of a future in which we replace 150-year-old fossil fuel infrastructure with “clean energy” by 2050.

    That’s the message in a number of recent important reports and books. They underscore a number of problems with the renewables illusion, including the complexity of the task, the toxicity of rare earth mining and the scarcity of critical minerals.

    These grounded realists, including the French journalist Guillaume Pitron and the Australian geologist Simon Michaux, all have three basic messages:

    There are dramatic limits to growth.

    And the world needs a better plan to avoid collapse other than replacing one unsustainable fossil fuel system with another intensive mining system powered by even more extreme energies. In other words, electrifying the Titanic won’t melt the icebergs in its path.

    This article, published yesterday on the blog “Resilience” if about 12 pages long and is a good 10 to 15 minute read. If you are a firm believer that renewables will save our ass but do not read this entire article, you are just sticking your head in the sand. You already know the truth and don’t give a shit what anyone else has to say.

    But if you are really concerned about the future of our planet, and its human inhabitants, then you will read this entire article. Then make your argument. I read his, now let me hear yours.

    1. Ron

      The one problem I see here is too many scattered facts. Impossible to check. I think directionally he is right and that growth forever is not possible and a reduction in needs will be required somewhere in the future.

      About 15 years ago he wrote an anti oil sands book and it created quite an uproar here in Canada. Tar Sands: Dirty Oil and the Future of a Continent, Revised and Updated Edition.

      Since then, it looks like he has had second thoughts and realized we need oil. In the updated book he has seen the light and looked at the merits of CC and the use of small nuclear reactors to supply heat to extract the bitumen. A book review is below and check the last sentence.

      Tar Sands critically examines the frenzied development in the Canadian tar sands and the far-reaching implications for all of North America. Bitumen, the sticky stuff that ancients used to glue the Tower of Babel together, is the world’s most expensive hydrocarbon. This difficult-to-find resource has made Canada the number-one supplier of oil to the United States, and every major oil company now owns a lease in the Alberta tar sands. The region has become a global Deadwood, complete with rapturous engineers, cut-throat cocaine dealers, Muslim extremists, and a huge population of homeless individuals.

      In this award-winning book, a Canadian bestseller, journalist Andrew Nikiforuk exposes the disastrous environmental, social, and political costs of the tar sands, arguing forcefully for change. This updated edition includes new chapters on the most energy-inefficient tar sands projects (the steam plants), as well as new material on the controversial carbon cemeteries and nuclear proposals to accelerate bitumen production.

      1. In this award-winning book, a Canadian bestseller, journalist Andrew Nikiforuk exposes the disastrous environmental, social, and political costs of the tar sands, arguing forcefully for change.

        Thanks Ovi. Most everyone is arguing forcefully for change. Thay actually think there is something they can change to. What we are doing is deadley. What we are trying to change to is just as deadly. It is not a problem, it is a prediciment. There is no solution.

        1. I agree that a conversion to renewables is not likely.

          A reunion of the former British Commonwealth Countries: Canada, USA, UK, Australia, New Zealand has a future.

          Might have enough Coal, Tar Sands, Natural Gas, Rare Earths, Uranium, Military, Food, etc.

          To have a future. USA + Australia = 40% of the worlds coal reserves.

        2. As one who drives electric, my array can fully power my EV in January but not provide all my electrical needs (heating, hot water, etc.). If push comes to shove, I can drive less, bicycle and walk more. Easy to say. However, my non EV Januarys saw my electrical draw from 1200 to 2100 kwh over a decade while my generation ranged from 290 to 400 kwh. This is with a 5kw array with an effective output of 4.4 kwh on a daily basis over a year’s time.

          I don’t think silicon based solar cells are the answer to windless or low wind areas. I’m looking toward Perovskite cells. The problem with them so far has been their chemical stability. So far, they have a less than 10K hour endurance. They have the potential to reach around 45% efficiency but would require 3 different layers. To put that into perspective, if I replace my 15% effective array with 2 Perovskite arrays at 45%, I could get by to more than get by with doing what I currently do electrically. There may be some winters where I have to make adjustments such better insulating my windows (and attic??). The array would have an over power rating of 30Kwhr and an effective rating of around 26.4 kwh.

          I would agree that “renewables as they stand today”, will not power my home fully **today**. I would also say that we are still in our infancy with respect to creating solar cells that could power my home in January. As in the 1920’s, we could not purchase an airline ticket from New York to Paris.

          We’ll see what happens…

        3. The other shoe to drop is electrical storage. A Model 3 has batteries with a storage capacity of 250 wh/kg. Argonne Labs thinks they can get a Lithium air battery up to 1200 wh/kg or roughly 5 times the current energy density of the batteries in a Model 3. Instead of a 75 kwh pack, you’d have a 375 Kwh pack; enough to store my January production for a full month on the low end (300kwh). Thinking of the potential and achieving a potential are two different things.

          Some one else has produced a Lithium Air battery with 685 wh/kg; a little more than half the one mentioned above. I think (hope) we get there. It’ll take the edge off retrograding to the mid-1800’s.

    2. Hi Ron,
      I was just about to post the same link myself, after finishing reading it.
      From RESILIENCE.ORG no less………..

      NOT ONE word about the consequences of the ONLY REALISTIC alternative…… sticking with fossil fuels and the industrial status quo.

      NOT ONE GODDAMNED WORD!

      It’s not a question of whether we can afford to go renewable….. but rather whether we can afford NOT TO.

      Ok……..
      Some years ago, I was convinced we were headed for a more or less total collapse of not only the world wide industrial economy, but also of the entire planetary ecosystem.

      But over the last few years, I have come to believe that while things can and very well might get to be this bad, there’s a real possibility that some of us have at least a fair to good shot at pulling thru the bottleneck, with food in the stores, water and sewer systems working, cops on the street, and so forth.

      There’s going to be hell to pay, even in countries such as the USA. We’re going to HAVE to learn to live on a third or a fourth of the energy we use now per capita.

      But there’s nothing IMPOSSIBLE about going with renewables. Damned near everything used can be recycled. Damned near everything we use as a throw away good can be made to last for a very long time and THEN be recycled.

      And in my estimation, we’re going to see the population peak and decline far sooner than the establishment’s estimated numbers……..

      Because these numbers aren’t computed taking into account what I think, myself, is going to happen.

      I foresee a hard core doomer “end of everything “crash happening in a LOT of places….. but famines, pandemics, and wars are not typically world wide problems in any particular instance.

      Sure people are going to pile up in front of fences at national borders……. machine gunned if deemed necessary by the people behind the fences.

      Famines are going to be quite commonplace. …… but the people starving aren’t going to be able to emigrate to better off countries by the millions. Just isn’t going to happen. Not even the most liberal of Western European countries will tolerate immigration on such a scale, especially considering that most potential migrants won’t know the local language, possess useful skills, or be accustomed to living according to the norms of European society.

      Why?

      It should be perfectly obvious. Such countries are going to be having more than enough problems without allowing in more people by the millions that will have to be fed, housed, educated, and policed when resources are already short and austerity is already the name of the game.

      ( about famines, crop failures, etc.. These things are always regional. It’s completely within reason to suppose that there will be crop failures over very large areas…… say for instance in Southeast Asia, or Mexico, or some of the more marginal farming area in Europe. The people in the UK would probably be able to import enough food , one way or another…. they’re importing half of what they eat already.
      But the people of Egypt……. how the hell could they ever hope to pay for food enough to deal with a really bad year or string of years? )

      If we’re reasonably lucky in countries such as the USA, we will have government that will do what HAS to be done…. shift resources from current uses to building out critical new infrastructure, implementing conservation measures on the grand scale.

      IF we’re lucky, I foresee oversized cars being outlawed, taxed out of existence, micro mini two seater fore and aft cars that will go a hundred miles on a charge that need a battery only a TENTH as big as the battery in a full size Tesla car …….

      People who would otherwise be totally out of work, and on welfare, put to work on large scale projects to help reduce energy consumption, or build more renewables.

      Changes in building codes that require WAY BETTER insulation, etc.

      A SURPLUS of affordable housing in this country……. because the cracker box house built in 1995 that I once owned, with good maintenance, will STILL be a good house fifty years from now, just as it’s a good house today. My generation is leaving enough housing behind to accommodate the population when times get really tough and doubling up and staying with parents as adults gets to be the NORM instead of the trend. Every brother, sister, and first cousin in my family will be leaving a GOOD house empty , one big enough for a family of five or six easily… within twenty years or less.

      My mostly hard core Baptist family, in my grand parents generation, reproduced like rabbits. My nieces and nephews…… well, they’re having only half as many babies as it will take to maintain the population, on an immigration free basis. Great grand children…. well, some of the grand kids are old enough now, but out of the entire extended family known to me…… there’s only maybe a dozen.

      Austerity is in the cards. No way around it. And when times are tight, and most people are having a hard time making ends meet…. they’re not going to be in favor of allowing more people into the country.

      And without taking sides ( I’m generally rather liberal about such things, but I’m also a realist.) it’s my opinion that within another couple of decades, the political cards will fall in such a way that we won’t be allowing very many people into the country at all. So ……. I don’t personally care either way. Right now immigration is good for me. Population growth is good for me. Both are running up the value of my property. Big time. They don’t export any land from China, lol.

      But like you…….. I’ll be gone in a few more years. Maybe even this year, but with luck I’ll be around for another decade, maybe even longer.

      For what it’s worth…… it’s also my opinion that within ten to twenty years we will have a national health care system more or less comparable to Western European systems.

      I’m just pointing out what I think will happen as the shit gets into the fan in ever greater quantities.

      1. https://youtu.be/EM3Y6uw6FtU

        But then, in the 21st century, people awoke from the American dream.

        Years of consumption lead to shortages of every major resource. The entire world unraveled. Peace became a distant memory.

        War… war never changes.

      2. NOT ONE word about the consequences of the ONLY REALISTIC alternative…… sticking with fossil fuels and the industrial status quo.

        The only REALISTIC alternative? Mac, there is no realistic alternative. There is no alternative whatsoever. Oil, as well as all of the world’s natural reasorces will go away.

        Well, perhaps there is one alternative, crabgrass. We can all eat crabgrass. But I have it on good authority that there won’t be enough crabgrass to go around.

        2. Hi Ron,
          I should have inserted a couple more words to the effect that fossil fuels are a realistic alternative for no more than maybe another generation or so at the longest, considering the climate problem, depletion, and hoarding on the part of countries that are current exporters, etc.

          1. I’d add wars of conquest to “hoarding”.
            No one with any power “goes gently into that good night”.

            1. It gets complicated when the fuel you need to exercise your power comes from the very land you want to conquer and the occupants of that land are suitably armed.

    3. Yes, good article, but Old News to those of us here, many of whom go back to TOD days. [Nevertheless, even I blanched at some of the facts in the article when I read it to my partner this morning.]

      A site I write for recently linked to a piece on collapse by Ugo Bardi from a year ago that is also a good read:

      https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/science/articles/why-complex-systems-collapse-faster

      I always come back to the Bronze Age: It was an unimaginably successful period in human history (think pyramids, Cyclopean walls, ziggurats, cuneiform tablets, war chariots, etc.) that was lost forever in a shockingly fast systems collapse commencing about 1200 BC and done by 1150. Probably brought on by famines triggered by a sudden change in climate in the Mediterranean (cold and dry), marauders (“Sea Peoples”) took to their boats and began burning down cities, from Greece all the way to Mesopotamia. Once the tin trade was disrupted, that was the end of the bronze in the Bronze Age (copper and tin required), and that was all she wrote.

      Even writing was lost and forgotten in Greece, for chrissakes, not to be recovered for centuries.

      I’m glad we have ChatGPT. That will save us . . .

      1. Yes, good article, but Old News to those of us here, many of whom go back to TOD days.

        Yeah, old news. Hell I have been thrashing thes goddamn “overpopulation, running out of natural resources, doomer straw since the sixties. That’s how old this goddamn news is.

        Finally a lot of people are waking up to the sad news.

        But most people ain’t. They still don’t have a damn clue. Pity.

    4. Ron:
      I tried to read the document but kept getting distracted by the links to ever more detailed supporting reference material. I’m inclined to want to see the source of the numbers quoted as I have my own prejudices about what data is relevant. Ultimately I came across Tom Murphy as areference to a reference. Short on technical details and numbers but long on calm common sense it probably makes the best case for the futility of any efforts to maintain modern idustrial society. At least it did for me.
      https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2022/12/the-simple-story/

    5. Renewable energy, especially solar, is sucking the profit out of the energy industry. It’s not replacing it, it’s killing it. Arguing that it “won’t save the world” won’t change that.

      The reason is that solar in particular has sunk costs only, and no marginal costs, not that one energy source is cheaper. It changes the business model and makes fuel selling inherently noncompetitive. It happens even if renewables don’t match the output of fossil fuel.

      It will be interesting to find out whether the energy business created the modern world or was just a parasite.

    6. I skimmed through the article and like OFM I was struck by the lack of discussion of alternatives to renewables. Having become aware of the concept of Peak Oil roughly 15 years ago there is one thing I am certain of, we cannot continue along the same (FF) path.

      Take oil as an example, we have been hearing since TOD days that the world was either past the peak or close to peaking. It hasn’t happened yet but, Collin Campbell often said we won’t know when the peak was until it’s in the rear view mirror. With that in mind, the electrification of transport is not a flight of fancy but, a pragmatic thing to do. Without a significant shift to electric vehicles demand for oil will continue to rise, outstripping supply and resulting in perennially high oil prices and a very hard crash once global oil production starts to decline in earnest. I’m reminded of the Hirsch report that said the world would need to start the transition to EVs at least a decade before the peak. Fracking bought us that decade but, largely due to lobbying and propaganda from the FF industries a lot of that time has been squandered. Thankfully it appears that the shift to EVs and renewables will accelerate over the next couple of years, maybe enough to mitigate the looming oil shortages somewhat. We may still get caught with our pants down but, the prospects are far better than when I first became aware of Peak Oil.

      Another thing I noted is the focus on renewable energy and electric vehicles as “the problem”. What of all the other uses for rare earth elements? From this article, EV sector overtakes alloys on cobalt consumption

      Demand from the EV sector accounted for 34pc of cobalt consumption last year. Other battery applications — such as mobile phones and power tools — totalled 31pc of cobalt demand last year, while industrial metals made up 14pc. Superalloys and industrial chemicals each accounted for 11pc of overall cobalt demand.

      The fact that concern is being raised about cobalt use in specific applications and not in others raises the question as to whether the concern is genuine of just being used to cast an unfavourable light on certain applications of cobalt. We don’t seem to be hearing any complaints about the increased cobalt consumption for batteries in mobile devices and portable power tools. The other big cobalt consumer that we never hear about is the use of cobalt in catalysts used in petroleum refining.

      A glaring omission on the part of the skeptics is that the materials used in renewable energy do not disperse into the atmosphere like the products of FF combustion. Use of coal and petroleum based fuels produces predominantly CO2 and smaller amounts of other gases. Capture and sequestration of these combustion products poses extreme challenges in mobile or portable applications and while large fixed installations like power plants are far easier the challenges are still huge (coal plant ash?). Even if the C02 could be captured, there is no economically viable process that can turn it back into the fuel from which it was derived at anywhere near the rate at which FF are being burned. At any rate, such a process would require an energy input and where would that energy come from? The FFs we are burning now were derived from millions of years of sunshine. Turning sunshine, CO2 and water back into liquid hydrocarbons at the rate we have burned them over the past couple of centuries is not an option.

      The materials used in renewable energy and EVs are largely solids or liquids that remain inside the devices in which they are used, making recycling a much more practical consideration. One promising approach is being taken by Nth Cycle. From their home page:

      Keeping Critical Metals in Circulation Forever.

      Demand for critical metals to power the energy transition is growing exponentially. Yet, we know mining deeper and broader, and building landfills higher and wider, works against our fight to save the planet. At Nth Cycle, we see the path forward. We believe all the critical metals needed for the energy transition are already in circulation today. And now we have a clean, profitable way of retrieving them.

      Their web site indicates that their technology is also applicable to mining and refining. Initiatives are being launched to recycle a wide variety of products used in the production of renewable energy from solar panel to batteries and even wind turbine blades (see Wind turbines are almost impossible to recycle. These engineers think they’ve found the answer)

      The copper problem is another one that could benefit from reuse/recycling. One example is residential, commercial and industrial electrical wiring. Large amounts of copper are being used to supply power for lighting. Replacing incandescent bulbs with LED based fixtures uses roughly one fifth the amount of power. Replacing fluorescent fixtures only reduces power consumption by about one fifth. A lot of copper wire that was installed to run incandescent bulbs could be removed and replaced by significantly less copper. More efficient appliances could also reduce the requirements for household wiring.

      When it comes to cars, from this article, New Tesla Model Y Wiring System Is Revolutionary

      The article claims Elon Musk once said the Model S had about 2 miles (3 km) of wires, while the Model 3 had half that amount. Or around 1 mile of wires (1.5 km).

      The new system would help Tesla bring the wiring needs to just circa 328 ft (100 m). Just imagine getting rid of 93.3 percent of all wires you need in a vehicle all of a sudden…

      If that is correct, all carmakers will want to have a piece of that cake. It represents a scale economy of billions of dollars. Tesla could live with no worries just on its wire-system architecture royalties. It is just massive – ironically reducing weight to an incredible extent.

      A car typically contains up to 50 lbs. (23 kg) of copper. Extracting the wire looms from scrapped cars is already being done.

      In my neck of the woods I see a fair amount of houeshold appliances discarded all over the place many of which contain motors and/or transformers containing copper wiring, leading me to wonder how much copper is out there in obsolete, discarded appliances and electronic devices? Around here the value in any such appliances does not escape the scrap metal scavengers that will scoop it up and sell it to scrap metal traders who then export it.

      There is one point that is beyond dispute. Ever increasing numbers of people aspiring to enjoy all the modern conveniences available is not going to end well. The subject of controlled contraction is taboo despite having been approached by the likes of Bill Gates (Bill Gates has a warning about population growth). The problem is, as Ron is fond of reminding us, we will continue to do what we have always done, reproduce and gobble up resources as fast as we can. With that in mind, attempting to transition to renewables energy and EVs might not be a bad thing, considering what would happen if no attempt were made.

      1. … we have been hearing since TOD days that the world was either past the peak or close to peaking. It hasn’t happened yet but,…

        It hasn’t happened yet but…? I mean no offense Islandboy but just how do you know that? Four and one-half years ago, in November 2018, C+C production reached 84,586,000 barrels per day. In December it stood at 81,775,000 bp/d or 2,811,000 bp/d below that peak. Now C+C production may one day eclipse that number. But I don’t know that and you don’t know that. To dismiss that out of hand and declare that peak oil has not yet happened yet, is just more than a little presumptuous.

        1. I stand corrected. Maybe I should have said it is unclear whether or not global oil production has peaked and it remains to be seen if the November 2018, C+C level will ever be exceeded. I need to pay more attention to the petroleum threads,

          1. Islandboy,

            In 2018 there was an oil glut and OPEC cut production in response in 2019, then we had the pandemic and now oil output is recovering. 2018 was one of many previous peaks in World Oil output that have occurred since 1980, my guess for the final peak in World C plus C is 2026 to 2030, with 2028 my best guess, potentially there will be a long plateau from 2016 to 2035 at 81 plus or minus 3 Mb/d (for CTMA C plus C output). My guess is that decline begins to steepen around 2035 as demand falls due to the EV transition.

    7. I saw the way
      Microalgae farms are producing them. They are, for catbon dioxide, fed with exhausts of combustion of the methane produced by, for instance, methanisation of manure or other organic matters. Why not connecting the exhausts of gas power plant to produce microalgae biomass and methanize it to feed in turn the gas power plant with methane ? Of course, the cycle can’t be closed because the carbon dioxide is not used at 100% by the microalgae and the maximum methanisation rate is 87% as part of the biomass is used by the bacteriae to make bacteriae biomass and as carbon dioxide Is also produced in the process. Which means that supplementary carbon dioxide would have to be introduced in the culture or gas coming from an other source would have to be provided to the gas power plant. But, on the big picture, l think that significantly less fossil gas would be used with this process. I say that because l have seen some scientific papers about a part of the process or the other part. What do you think of it ?

      1. When you say: Why not connecting the exhausts of gas power plant to produce microalgae biomass and methanize it to feed in turn the gas power plant with methane ? I assume you are talking about gas turbines. Boilers that use gas simply use smokestacks to get rid of their exhaust. Do you think they could capture and use that? If so, the same procedure could be use to capture the exhaust from coal or oil powered plants.

        However, if you are talking about gas turbines, their exhaust, in most of them, is already used in combined cycle power plants. The exhaust is used to boil water to creat steam for steam turbine power.

        1. One minor quibble. Like you said, in a combined cycle gas turbine plant, the exhaust gases are hot enough to produce steam and are run through a heat recovery system generator that extracts some of the energy in the exhaust gases to produce the steam that is used in a steam turbine to produce additional electricity without using additional fuel.

          No further chemical reactions take place in the exhaust gases so the CO2 is still available for capture and use. Problem is that the exhaust gases are still very hot and would have to be cooled further (to ambient temperature?) before being bubbled through the water tanks in a microalgae farm. There is also the issue of presence of nitrogen oxides in the exhaust which will acidify any water they are bubbled through so, I suppose the nitrogen oxides would have to be removed to feed the algae with mostly CO2 rather than a mixture of CO2 and nitrogen oxides. Although the algae do require nitrogen, they cannot get it from nitrogen oxides or nitric acid as far as I am aware.

    8. I’m very biased towards nuclear power after serving 4 years aboard the USS Enterprise in the Reactor Division. Here are some facts about Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant. It went into service in 1975 and is still providing power everyday. Night or day, calm or windy, hot or cold weather. The plant has the record of 692 days of continuous operation and Unit 1 in 2008 produced at 103% capacity factor for the whole year, also a record. One of home owners near me whose roof is completely covered in solar panels which had a nice shade of Olive green the other day because of pollen but it didn’t really matter that much because the 11:00 am sun from the clear blue sky was notat a ninety degree angle to the panels but the sun light was shining parallel to the panels. Renewables will certainly provide us all with a wonderful standard of living. My point is that one power source is reliable to the extreme and renewables not even close.

      1. Renewables will certainly provide us all with a wonderful standard of living.

        I wish you were correct. Nothing would make me happier. But all I can say as to that comment is… You have drank the kool ade. Nothing will give future generations a wonderful standard of living. Not renewables and not fossil fuels.

        1. Ron,
          Methinks the sarcasm of the sentence you quoted escaped you. Judging from the rest of the post , Ervin most certainly does not believe that. From my point of view that sentence was dripping with sarcasm but, sarcasm is often not detected in forums such as these.

          1. I agree, it was sarcasm. However, my reply was correct even if it was sarcasm. It is a hard fact that at least 90% of the population haven’t a clue as to the predicament we are in.

            My grandchildren are repulsed if I ever mention overpopulation, renewables, peak oil, the deterioration of the environment, or anything that affects their future. They will get up and leave the room if it is ever mentioned.

            Francis Bacon once wrote: “People desire to believe what they desire to be true.”

            1. ““People desire to believe what they desire to be true.”

              https://www.16personalities.com/intp-personality

              In the Myers-Briggs personality assessment (which alot of people take at some point).

              The INTP personality type is the only one that values evidence over everything else.

              INTPs make up ~5% of the population.

              Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Charles Darwin (Not sure how they got his score) and Richard Dawkins are INTPs

              famous INTPs
              https://personalitymax.com/personality/intp/famous/

              INTPs are quiet thinkers who make up a disproportionate amount of the innovation in the world.

      2. One year on (in) a submarine does not enable a sustainable “wonderful standard of living” either.
        I worked for eight years as an engineer building nuclear steam supplies (reactors, to you). The amount of “dirty” waste material created in the process, at various levels of radioactivity, is never mentioned in the blissful discussions about what used to be called “power too cheap to monitor”. It’s an ugly business from conception to cremation.

    9. Ron, yup…a hard push towards harvest of perpetual energy resources of solar and wind will only get part of the transition job away from fossil dependence done.
      If a full global effort is undertaken starting in 2007, I’m guessing it (solar/wind) will achieve 63% of total energy supply by 2060.
      By that time population will have already peaked at 9.6 Billion, and global fossil fuel output will be down to 19% of the 1/1/2023 level.
      But you are correct- renewables won’t be “coming to our rescue”, if by that you mean continued growth without consequence or limit, or without adjustment to the downside of everything materiel.

      Just my wild ass guesses.

    10. Along similar lines: The Green Growth Delusion, https://www.truthdig.com/dig/green-tinted-glasses/ and The Perfect Storm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc84-udJUJg; and related: Counterfeit World – Part Three – Hubris, https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/04/11/counterfeit-world-part-three-hubris/ and: What is Hopium, https://problemspredicamentsandtechnology.blogspot.com/2023/04/what-is-hopium.html#more

      Even if we could eventually replace fossil fuels with (quasi-)renewables it wouldn’t be enough. It is becoming increasingly apparent that unless we can remove huge amounts of CO2 then the climate will not stabilise but will run away to hot house conditions, probably with anoxic oceans. Removing large amounts of very low concentration compounds requires huge machines and huge amounts of energy (as is shown by mineral mines and processing plants ballooning in size as the available ores get more dilute). Whatever technology is used (and at the moment there are none workable at scale) would require an infrastructure the size of, or bigger than, all the current fossil fuel industries). Like the renewable energies all the plant needed would have to be replaced after 20 or 30 years at least once, which to be sustainable would require a recycling industry probably of a similar size (that too would need extra renewable energy supply and all that would have to be replaced every 20 – 30 years, etc.). I doubt localised recycling of all minerals could work so it would have to be global with all the concomitant transport requirements (and highly unlikely in an increasingly fractured and fractious world). The current state of roads, bridges and dams shows just how good we are at replacing infrastructure when the time comes.

      Overall it’s all not just overly optimistic, it’s a cargo cult.

      1. George —

        I agree but you have to admit, all the renewables talk give the cornucopians something to babble about as temperatures rise.

        March CO2:
        2023 = 421.00 ppm
        2022 = 418.81 ppm

      2. Just to clear….for those in the world that aren’t old now
        the collection of perpetual energy sources by wind turbine and photovoltaic s is
        far and away the best choice or option for the other 6.7 billion people,
        who still have aspiration to be alive beyond the next decade….
        Just like those of us who are older now did when we were their age.

        We may identify problems with the path of going whole-hog on perpetuals, and obviously with every other path as well,
        but those identified problems don’t mean that the effort for providing continued energy supply shouldn’t or won’t be pursued by humanity with great vigor.
        And while the level of energy/capita produced in the world will continue on the current decline path,
        most people will learn to live with less.
        And we should remember that survival, and yes even happiness and a meaningful life, are possible with much less energy use than the privileged people of the world have had at their disposal over the past 150 years.

        1. I’m not sure I follow what part of my post you are commenting on – are you suggesting why people are likely to turn to a cargo cult, or is it a reference to something in one of the papers I linked?

          1. George I get your point about the carbon problem…even if fossil fuels were scaled down even quicker than the depletion curve will enforce. I am thinking that people will be trying experiments with sulfur, iron and aerosols on a large scale to blunt warming in the next decade. I have zero optimism about the wisdom of those experiments.

            Articles that you linked include statements such as “despite the promises of Green New Deal boosters, it is impossible to make sustainable the current system that provides billions of people sustenance, shelter, goods”
            I was responding to that.
            I have said repeatedly that downsizing is baked in the cake, but it is fallacy to think that the vast majority of humanity won’t try hard to make it gradual.
            People like to say that attempts to adapt/transition are just wishful thinking.
            Sure, that is likely a part of it…humans we are talking about after all.
            But it is also about seeking the best [least bad] path for the next step.

            1. It is inconceivable to me that the vast majority of humans will not try to maintain the luxury provided by fossil fuels at the detriment of future generations. Humans will make every conceivable excuse to avoid a winding down. Those profiting from the system, those with political power, will enable whatever deception possible to continue to maintain the status quo until even they are at death’s door.

        2. Hickory, of course, we will all try to be happy with a lot less energy. The point that all the Cornucopians seem to be missing is that the world will, by necessity, be supporting a lot fewer people.

          As the population is declining, to the level that the available energy can support, the world is not likely to be a very happy place.

          1. I am not worried about what ‘Cornucopians’ [those who think that a combination of solutions can successfully replace depleting fossil fuels without a decline in the longstanding growth trajectory of humanity] think.
            They will find out along with the rest of everyone what it is like to exist in the post-peak combustion world.
            Just because they are likely to be disappointed with the global status of energy supply, it doesn’t mean that measures that are suggested such as strong push toward better insulated buildings or the phase down of coal with solar or wind energy replacement, or phase out of ICE vehicles,
            are faulty measures to deploy.

            And I suggest that regions that are most aggressive with measures to transition away from fossil fuels ahead of the depletion curve will have a higher chance of declining with a measure of grace.

            I am not naive…realizing that destructive behaviors of some could undo all of the constructive and adaptive efforts of a culture. I think that is of greater concern than energy supply. Ethnic cleansing and its culture wide equivalent is the big risk.

      3. “The fossil fuel industry has plans on the table to extract enough coal, oil, and gas in the coming years to add extract 5 times more coal, oil, and gas than the Earth can tolerate without going into total meltdown mode. “If you want to understand … why the fossil fuel industry fights so hard,” McKibben writes in Rolling Stone, we have to recognize that leaving all that fossil fuel in the ground “means stranding about $100 trillion worth of assets in the soil.”

        1. Unfortunately I think 90% of humanity wants the fossil fuels now and wants some future generation to deal with the problems. It is going to be interesting to see how much pain it will take, and where, to change their minds. Our minds.

    11. Ron, This is right on the money but there is even wose lurking in the background. Few people realise the dependency that mankind now has on the petrochemical industry. I have worked in the oil,gas, and petrochemical industry for nearly 45 years and the ability to move to an alternative energy system will fail dismally without the products it manufactures. It is excatly the same issue as metals problem for renewables(rebuildables).
      We are being forced into a situation where energy inputs will only grow, rather than fall because we are, at least in the west, to aim towards a net zero carbon agenda. Like steel or cement manufature, basic petrochemical feedstocks are energy intensive and there is nothing we can do to reduce the energy required to break chemical bonds. Those basic chemicals feedstocks go towards the maufacture of polymers, surface coatings, resins and counteless other products that are used not only in everyday life, but to maintain our food supply, our infrastructure and our health systems.
      I think the Limits to Growth (30 year update) is going to be uncannily accurate. The biggest threat I see is uncontrolled economic mass migration that is going to overwhelm every western civilisation and place enourmous strains on supply chains, transport systems, housing and health. Europe is in a far worse position that North America but the strains will grow.
      We will meanwhile see our manufacturing base slip away to the far east and the woke elite place ever more restrictions on our lives. I do not have a solution. I do not think there is one because there are far too many people who cannot comes to terms with what the implications of Peak Oil are.
      Climate change, even if you believe the carbon dioxide fallacy (I don’t), is not the problem . Overpopulation is.

      1. “the woke elite”
        That says so much and nothing.
        “carbon dioxide fallacy”?

  2. Well Ron over the years I’ve found it nearly impossible to convince people of something they don’t want to believe. There are many Don Quixote’s in this world. The truth is simply too hard to accept so they embrace the comforting lie. Fortunately the energy system will crack long before mining is pushed to the extreme limit that the article suggests. But it baffles me that the Green Team never considers that in 25-30 years you have to do it all over again. And they call it sustainable??? There is a complete disconnect from logic. However it is sobering to think that these are the minds that are elected to office.

    1. “minds that are elected to office”
      That catagory is so much worse than your descrition that it induces hysterical laughter induced by despair.
      Think, for example, “Ted Cruz”

    2. Politicians can not admit it and get elected or remain in office,
      but what we are all confronting is a situation in the world where
      proactive/managed retreat from the condition of Overshoot and unsustainable level
      of extraction/destruction of nature
      is the best we can works towards.

      Managed retreat is more preferable to any alternative, whether it be with food or energy.
      I see the whole push towards perpetual energy collection mechanisms
      as a facet of that attempt to avoid abrupt collapse of systems and civil society.

      Some may disagree, thinking that it is preferable to collapse quick and hoping to personally survive and or profit from the survival scramble [to put it gently]. Others may think it is futile, so why even try- no comment.
      And yet others see it as counter to purpose- to increase industrial activity (energy systems) while at the same time thinking that massive downsizing is in order.
      I do ponder that latter position, but regardless of what I conclude I know that the horde of humanity will try anything to keep the party from ending quickly.

      1. Hickory
        Agree with your concept that the best theoretical approach to the future is the proactive/managed retreat but I do not think it is politically possible, even in an autocracy ( China stopped their Covid lockdown because the populace stopped accepting it). The ancient Greeks even had a complete state that espoused an austere lifestyle (Sparta), but how did that work out? With the US government running annual deficits beyond comprehension and reports that 58% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck ( let alone those living payday advance to payday advance). With world population rising by an inexorable 70 million a year, and developing countries trying to achieve American standards of living. Where is the support for a managed retreat?
        A lot of the debate over the best path forward gets fogged up by a failure to define the time horizon one is looking at. I personally do not expect the wheels to fall off the wagon before my time is up, and certainly do not plan to practice surviving on insects and tree bark in preparation for a bleak future. Dennis and others do an excellent job of tracking oil production month by month and year by year and try to look forward by maybe a decade, some look forward the expected lifetime of their children, others look at the distant future. Bardi and Smil look at non-renewables along with others.
        We can all speculate on what the ultimate bottom of the cycle will look like and how long it will take to get there, and OFM is certainly right when he says some areas will be better than others, although competition to occupy those areas will likely be fierce.
        When I look at Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs, I see food as being the dominant factor for long stretches of the downslope.
        I decided the best I can do for my children and grandchildren is to make them aware of what is looming in their future, coach them on being aware of what is going on in the economy and world political scene, and to make proactive adjustments early rather than after it is obvious to many.

        1. I very much agrees with your last paragraph, prepare the kids that things will change, hopefully for some kind of same same but different, but also possibly for much worse…
          So as an example (possibly to Hickory´s dismay) a top tip I learned from Airdale on TOD long ago, soak your new chainsaw chain in SAE 80-90 EP or equivalent before first use for long life.
          And also, reduce/eliminate debt load, insulate and put in air or ground source heat pumps, when applicable of course.
          Addendum, since I´m “middle class” in northern Sweden with a woodlot I´m likely better positioned than most, but hopefully at least my kids, or their kids will see how the movie develops…

        2. I certainly do not expect any politician to effectively run on a platform of proactive economic contraction.
          However, there are dozens of economic and policies choices that could support an adjustment to the inexorable growth bulldozer we have had during this past 150 years.
          Examples
          -no longer providing unlimited building permits and insurance on buildings in flood zones
          -taxing carbon emissions at a gradually increasing rate
          -restricting mortgage interest deduction to primary residence and a limited sq footage/person
          -use fees on leisure travel and large vehicles (extra carbon tax)

          Most people are not ready to consider these kind of measures and therefore we will continue to grow as fast as we can afford to, I suspect. The twin effects of greenhouse warming and oil depletion will force greater understanding of these issues. About 60 years late.

    3. You DO NOT have to do it all over again. That’s a patently false bit of fossil fuel FUD.

      Consider a solar farm. The permits, roads, grid connections, etc, are permanent. Nearly all the wiring excepting maybe inverters, etc, will last for generations. The mounts will last indefinitely. New panels are cheaper every year in terms of real money measured as output.
      A crew of maybe a couple of dozen men will be able to replace all the panels at a typical solar farm in a period of a few weeks at most. The new panels will probably produce at least a third more power than the old ones. Maybe half again more.

      Wind farms are much the same. The foundations under towers will last like the foundations under big buildings…. for a hundred years at least. Towers can be built in place from here on out , from flat sheets of steel rolled and welded into shape on site. Virtually everything can be recycled, INCLUDING turbine blades of course.

      Towers will likely last fifty years or longer in most cases. Turbine blades will probably still be a bitch to DELIVER, but they will be cut truck length to haul them away.
      And nothing more than two or three or maybe four big cranes will be needed, depending on the size of the wind farm, plus skilled workers of course, to dismount old generators and put new ones up on the existing towers.

      Local and long distance transmission lines will last more or less forever with routine maintenance, three or four generations at the VERY least. The WOODEN poles in my neighborhood are mostly AT LEAST fifty years old and I hardly ever see a crew out replacing a pole.

      I’ve never seen any actual cable replaced except due to storm or accidental damage. Sometimes larger cables or more cables are added to existing lines, in which case the poles or support towers are also upgraded.

      1. OFM
        Unfortunately, most of the wind turbine towers now in service will be junk when the turbine reaches the end of it’s life, because those turbines have been superseded by larger, more efficient models which require much more robust towers, and the improvement process continues so even the towers being built today may only have a useful lifespan of one turbine.
        Transformers have a typical service life of 40 years and the North American fleet of transformers is already geriatric. No transformers means no electricity, even if, as you point out, many components of the system can last a long time. The fragility of complex systems is frightening. Bootstrapping existing infrastructure will keep some services going on a local, reduced scale for an extended period of time, but it will not be pretty.
        What will things look like 100 years from now ?

        1. It is likeley that the population curve will follow the energy production curve, with roughly a 20 year(?) lag. Emphasis on rough.

        2. Old Chemist,

          It is likely that transformers get upgraded as they fail. I imagine they were not all installed at the same time and will not all need to be replaced at the same time. You are correct on Wind turbines, they keep getting bigger, but on replacement they might choose to go with equipment of a similar size to save on costs. Eventually an optimum size may be settled on and turbine size may stop increasing.

          1. An example, a windfarm in my neck of the woods in northern Sweden was planned to be 1101 turbines but since progress has been made in output per mill (mostly due to higher towers and longer blades) it will likely be fewer, in the 8-900 neighbourhood. Total output 8-12 Twh/year.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markbygden_Wind_Farm
            (Couldn´t find a good link on the number of mill reduction in english and corresponding increase in power per mill, but well known around here, and someone could surely crunch the numbers)

          2. Dennis
            Of course, transformers are replaced when they start to show deterioration, but delivery time for utility scale transformers is in excess of a year and they are quite complex devices with very exacting manufacturing specifications. My caution point is that any disruption of the supply line will result in very rapid impact on the electrical distribution system with no simple workarounds, and the longer the disruption, the greater the cumulative impact no matter how well the rest of the system is positioned to continue operating.
            On wind turbines I expect that they will evolve to a small number of standard sizes, and that they will trend to be more reliable as more experience is accumulated with the design deficiencies of current models.

        3. Hi Old Chemist,

          I think you are right about some turbine towers being scrapped, even though still structurally sound, because it’s more than likely larger turbines will be installed ……. but it’s hard to even guess how many.

          It will depend on how the numbers pencil out. Replacing a turbine with one the same size might be the most practical solution in a great number of cases.

          It’s my opinion that so long as Old Man Business As Usual manages to hobble along, we will be building more new wind farms at a very fast pace, and that many or most of them will be a long way from customers, because that’s where the best wind is…… out in the boonies.

          These new wind farms will very likely be built mostly with super sized turbines.

          How much bigger they CAN be is an open question.
          There are hard limits on engineering solutions due to factors such as the square cube problem.
          If anybody knows something about this point, please post.

          1. S
            I do not think anyone knows how big a wind turbine can be until somebody fails at the limit. I recently saw a design concept where the blades are on the downwind side of the support structure. That makes a cable stayed support structure feasible. The higher energy content of the airstream at higher elevations is powerful motivation to build bigger.

    4. JT, I knew that any response you got would not address your very valid point, blades, nacelles, panels the electronic inverters will all have to be replaced. In an earlier post I mentioned that since 1975 Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant is still running just fine. I once read a public relation’s article from a concrete company about it supplying 135,000 tons of concrete for the construction of a 300 MW wind farm in Ohio. Eco concrete for sure. Calvert Cliffs has the electrical infrastructure to provide 1700 MW of power which it does almost every time it’s online for the last 47 years. That 300 MW wind farm has the infrastructure for 300 MW but rarely ever reaches that level. Money well spent in Ohio .

      1. Ervin,

        New wind and solar are far cheaper than new nuclear.

        Old nuclear plants are being shut down because they are no longer profitable, just a fact.

        1. Dennis
          Nuclear is expensive, for sure, and fissionable materials resources are nearly as limited as oil and gas but without realistic accounting for storage costs to compensate for the intermittancy of wind and solar we cannot say what these rebuildables true cost is, and right now the market is biased to pay the same price for intermittent power as for continuous power.

          2. There is nowhere near a limit being reached for fissionable material. This talking point needs to end. If that card gets played, then the appreciable rare Earth deposits needed for a rebuildable economy are practically negligible in comparison.

            1. Much as I hate to admit it the ability to breed fuel from Thorium probably means a near infinite supply of fissionable material. I hate to admit it because I am opposed to nuclear power for so many other reeasons.

        2. Someone tell China this. Their entire energy policy is apparently expensive and dumb.

          Old nuclear in the US might be expensive, but I can assure you, the maths works out much better for non-failed countries. Using the USA as a benchmark here is the problem. Think France and China and South Korea.

      2. We will know when new nuclear power in the US is a good option-
        When the utility companies start putting in new orders for nuclear generating stations it will be the point when those with the greatest expertise and biggest stake in the decision making process have determined that it is an economically feasible choice.

        If you think that new nuclear should be a part of the future generating mix,
        then I encourage you identify a location in your region that is viable and eager to host the National High Level Radioactive Waste Repository.
        I say ‘in your region’ because you can’t rely on anywhere else to accept the hosting of this critical piece of the nuclear industry puzzle.
        Let us know when shipments of the spent nuclear fuel and thermonuclear bomb scrap material mega-tonnage are being accepted at the entry gate.

        1. Be sure to tell those folks that the new, as yet untested, reactor designs are certain to never experience accidents. Or so I’ve heard.

  3. Furthermore, assuming Old Man Business As Usual manages to stay on his feet, there WILL be AFFORDABLE solar roofing materials that will go up fast and easy, on new houses or old, that will last at least a couple of generations.
    There will be plenty of ways to create de facto batteries to store surplus solar power for off peak use, for instance adding gravel in an insulated pit under a new house for heating purposes, or putting in oversized water heaters with capacity enough to last two or three days…… meaning the water heater would hardly ever need grid sourced juice.

  5. Gas can’t compete with wind, solar and storage, even in world’s biggest market

    The fact that this is also the case in the US – the biggest energy market of all – is deeply significant. Best in class wind and solar cost a fraction of their fossil fuel competitors, the Lazard study shows.

    More than that, but shows that even based on the “marginal” cost of generation – essentially the cost of maintenance and burning the fuel – wind and solar still win. And the technologies most affected by the cost of capital (rising interest rates), are the conventional generators too – nuclear in particular.

    The interesting new addition to the Lazard study is the “cost of firming intermittency” analysis on wind and solar, and its comparison to the existing “flex” load, gas generation.

    The study is limited to the main grid markets in the US from the east coast to the west coast. But it’s worth noting that even in the US, where gas is relatively cheap, the lowest cost gas peaking plants are more expensive than the most expensive “firmed” wind and solar.

    The only exception is California, but in that state it is only the cheapest gas peaking plants that win out. And in no cases does gas beat the combination of solar PV and battery storage. Interesting.

  6. “Beginning of the end of fossil fuels” as wind and solar take centre stage

    Fossil fuel generation may finally have begun its era of decline, with wind and solar grabbing a 12 per cent share of the global electricity generation market, and poised to nearly quadruple that share over the coming decade.

    The latest report from UK-based energy think tank Ember note that wind and solar now have a greater than 10 per cent share in more than 60 countries – and 25 per cent in Australia in 2022 – and met 80 per cent of the increased electricity demand (694 terawatt hours) in the last year.

    In spite of the global gas crisis and fears of a return to coal, it was that rise in wind and solar that limited the increase in coal generation, which grew by only 1.1). Gas power generation fell very slightly (-0.2%) in 2022.

    That still meant that power sector emissions increased by 1.3 per cent in 2022, reaching an all-time high, but the Ember report predicts that it may be the ‘peak’ of electricity emissions and the final year of fossil power growth.

    It predicts that 2023 will be the first year when clean power growth is likely to exceed electricity demand growth outside of a recession.

    “It is the beginning of the end of the fossil age,” says lead author Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka. “We are entering the clean power era.”

  7. Island boy if wind and solar with storage is cheaper than gas why do they need tax subsidies? Why aren’t VCs flocking to the feeding frenzy? Why do EVs need subsidies? If they’re truly competitive let them compete on a level playing field. Why are the major wind manufacturers in the red? Even with the lowest EROEI fracking out performs wind and solar from a ROI bases as long as everyone accepts that their initial investment is toast. No matter how you look at it it’s a race to the bottom because you can’t build or maintain wind and solar without fossil fuels.

    But that’s not all the electrical grid is only 20% of the problem. Without fossil fuel you can’t feed the population. Without fossil fuel you can’t make steel, concrete, or asphalt. Without fossil fuel you can’t maintain international trade. And of course the most important is without fossil fuel (specifically natural gas wells) you can’t produce helium to fill birthday balloons. Is that the kind of world you want to live in?

    1. From the USGS web site, How would sea level change if all glaciers melted

      There is still some uncertainty about the full volume of glaciers and ice caps on Earth, but if all of them were to melt, global sea level would rise approximately 70 meters (approximately 230 feet), flooding every coastal city on the planet.

      (bold mine)

      If we don’t drastically reduce CO2 emissions it is quite likely that by the early in the next century most of South Florida will be a popular scuba diving location with spectacular underwater seascapes of locations like the former Miami International Airport, the former headquarters of the Miami Herald, the former American Airlines Arena, the former Mall of the Americas and the lower floors of the many high rise condos in the downtown Miami/Miami Beach area.

      In the same scenario 11 of the world’s 15 cities with more than 10 million people (Tokyo, New York, Bombay, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Calcutta, Buenos Aires, Seoul, Lagos, Osaka, and Rio de Janeiro) are close enough to sea level that they will suffer a similar fate, with all the geopolitical upheaval and mass migrations that will ensue. By that time I will most certainly be history (dead) and even if you were a teenager, it is likely that you will be dead too. If you have adult offspring it is likely that they will have past their expiry dates but, their offspring, your grand kids will live to see this. Is that the kind of world you want your grand kids to live in?

      1. I would sign up for scuba diver school to be able to dive down deep and take a picture of Ron Desantis’ home with fish swimming overhead.

    2. “Without fossil fuel you can’t make steel, concrete”….Really?

      CEMEX and Synhelion achieve breakthrough in cement production with solar energy

      The Synhelion and CEMEX R&D teams set up a pilot batch production unit to produce clinker from concentrated solar radiation by connecting the clinker production process with the Synhelion solar receiver. The pilot was installed at the Very High Concentration Solar Tower of IMDEA Energy, located in Spain. Synhelion’s solar receiver delivers record-breaking temperatures reaching beyond 1,500°C. The solar receiver heats a gaseous heat transfer fluid and thus provides the necessary process heat for clinker production.

      “Our technology converts concentrated sunlight into the hottest existing solar process heat – beyond 1,500°C – on the market,” said Dr. Gianluca Ambrosetti, CEO and Co-Founder of Synhelion. “We are proud to demonstrate together with CEMEX one specific industrially relevant application of our fully renewable, high-temperature solar heat.”

      The pilot is the first successful calcination and, more importantly, the first successful clinkerization ever achieved using only solar energy. The clinker was used to produce cement and was then further processed to produce concrete. In the next phase of their joint research and development project, CEMEX and Synhelion aim to produce solar clinker in larger quantities as they work towards an industrial scale pilot at a cement plant.

      Green steel moves step closer to commercialisation with ‘first of its kind’ hydrogen cavern storage

      Startup promises green steel by 2025 as decarbonisation race heats up

      ‘Green steel’ is hailed as the next big thing in Australian industry. Here’s what the hype is all about

      For low temperature extraction of other minerals see More Profits from Existing Critical Mineral Mining.

      For the use of EVs in the commercial and mining sectors, I refer you to Electric Commercial Vehicles, a ten year update – Part 3 from a series of articles I contributed here in 2019.

      1. Hydrogen are you serious? The hydrogen industry produces more CO2 than the aviation industry. I’m sure you’re dreaming of thorium reactors or the ten year away fusion for electrolysis. Do you understand what hydrogen does to pipes? The infrastructure is impossible even if you could produce enough to be meaningful.

        1. These people are thinking way ahead to when solar and wind are overbuilt by a factor of two or more as described by Tony Seba in this video, where he describes something he calls “Super Power”. Super Power is the excess electricity that will be produced by overbuilt renewable energy systems and will be virtually free, use it or lose it. You might as well perform electrolysis on water and use the hydrogen for whatever makes sense. Not my idea. Blame Tony Seba.

          1. Tony Seba is to energy what Bankman-Fried was to crypto. We can do better than the green tech Shellenberger. Yeah, we just need to overbuild a system that hasn’t even replaced a quarter of electricity production globally, nevermind ALL energy usage for Watt/hour equivalents. Gonna wager that doesn’t happen this side of 2050.

            Which, incidentally, not seeing how replacing our FF fuelled industry growth with rebuildable equivalents is a win for us or the planet.

            Too many people on this energy blog are fixated on, uh, energy. Yeah, I know, shocking. But nothing changes drastically for the better because of EVs and solar cement. I also heard of this Jevons guy and neoliberalism banding together to rain on the parade.

            2. To be fair to Bill, he’s almost on the cusp of acknowledging actual collapse, but the mask never quite slips off.

              Course, easier to be that way when you wrangled your way to becoming a billionaire through hard graft, I mean extortion and monopoly practice.

            3. Kleiber , “Tony Seba is to energy what Bankman-Fried was to crypto.”
              JT , ” I’ve some limited experience working with hydrogen. It IS a bitch to store and transport.”

              Bingo guys .

        2. JT,
          I’ve some limited experience working with hydrogen. It IS a bitch to store and transport.
          But it’s altogether possible to run a hydrolysis plant , using grid sourced juice from wind and solar farms, locating the hydrolysis plant at places hydrogen is needed locally.

          Hydrogen can be used to generate electricity just like natural gas….. meaning running gas plants on hydrogen to back up wind and solar power.
          It”s also an essential industrial feed stock and can be processed and used on site at various manufacturing plants.
          Hydrolysis plants scale up easily.
          Hydrogen can also be used to run internal combustion engines wherever they’re needed for stationary work, if there’s enough need for it.

          It may or not scale up for highway use in trucks and cars. My personal opinion is that it will work for heavy trucks traveling mostly on major highways…. where they can fuel up at truck stops.

          It’s going to be practical to run diesels designed for doing so on mostly hydrogen with just a little bit, five percent or less, of diesel fuel.

          And let’s not forget that this IS a national security issue.

    3. JT,

      The wait list for Tesla Megapacks is about 2 years. Utility scale energy suppliers are already flocking to batteries as they are cheaper than peaker plants. The subsidies exist to accelerate the transition to non-fossil fuel energy as the climate crisis is a clear problem for those who understand science.

      Fossil fuels will continue to be used for another 50 years or more, the aim is to reduce the use of fossil fuels as much as possible. We start with the easier tasks such as replacing fossil fuel use in electric power output and reducing fossil fuel use in land transport, then move on to the next easiest task, over time better methods are devised in tackling the easier tasks that are applied to the next task with continuing improvement in knowledge and technology along the way. Most adults with 1 year of college education can understand this fairly easily.

      Nobody is suggesting fossil fuel use stops tomorrow, but it is expected that fossil fuels will peak by 2035 and then output will decline. It is pretty obvious that some energy substitute will be needed, wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear power are the obvious choices and of these wind and solar are likely cheapest. Note also that the intermittency problem can be overcome with a widely dispersed and highly interconnected grid requiring perhaps as little as 1% backup with pumped hydro, batteries, vehicle to grid, or synthetic fuel in peaker plants.

      1. Then again, you may be trading with the village in the next valley for weapons.
        (Obviously, we are both wrong)

        1. Hightrekker,

          It could all fall apart and also decline in fossil fuel output might be gradual, population growth may reverse as people choose to have smaller families (East Asia is leading the way here with very low fertility rates) and this may reduce energy needs, food needs, mining needs, and general environmental destruction. There are many policies such as better product design with recycling in mind that can reduce environmental impact as well, along with better technology such as heat pumps, passive solar building design and improved building envelopes and insulation to reduce energy needs. There is also better urban design so that less driving of autos is needed and people can bike or walk to work, restaurants, shopping etc.

          There is much that can be done to improve future outcomes. Policies that improve women’s rights and education levels are a key to reducing fertility levels, along with access to healthcare.

          1. This stuff was talked about fifty years ago and nothing came of it. Like how expert systems were going to replace most jobs and too cheap to meter electricity was going to be a thing and the Internet was going to be this free town square for all. Remember how we realised the threat of climate change in the ‘70s and fixed that?

            No. Me neither.

            1. Kleiber,

              These things take time, we are approaching the steep part of the curve. I remember when communicators on Star trek seemed high tech and when I saw my first iphone thought, those will never catch on.

              The future is difficult to predict, many of Tony Seba’s predictions have been pretty good. I think he is too optimistic by a decade, but I am often wrong.

            2. It’s not even the technology. It’s the will. And that is not changing. They could solve most world problems with redistribution of wealth. Not happening.

              The New Green Deal is how to continue capitalism without switching it up as we experience FF decline. Otherwise, this would have been a solved issue in the Carter administration.

            3. The matter of “will” is the way it is largely because of the “will” of one individual:

              ‘No individual alive has done more to divide America than Murdoch’ Fmr. Australian PM Turnbull says(10 min 45 sec Youtube video)

              IMO Murdoch has done more harm to the English speaking world (not just America) than any individual alive. Sure, Charles Koch is way up there as well and I consider both men partners in crime. Their efforts would be far less effective if they were each acting alone. Let me link to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse’s Time to Wake Up 286 presentation on the Senate floor. From 8 min 38 sec in:

              Corporate America has built the biggest political influence operation the world has ever seen. It surrounds this building, surrounds us here in congress. Lobbyists, dark money, trade associations, political contributions, phony think tanks, it is an awesome apparatus and it is one that corporate America has yet to switch on for climate legislation.

              Koch funds the creation of the narrative and Murdoch amplifies it through his global (English speaking) media empire. I’m not saying that they coordinate but, they sure as hell find each other convenient! This is not a conspiracy theory.

              As long as these two MFs are alive corporate America will never switch on their political influence operation to favour anything that goes against the interest of either of them. Their influence extends way beyond politics and permeates discussion all over the place, including this forum. Murdoch is 92 years and Koch is 87. What’s the grim reaper waiting for?

            4. Let’s not pretend that the only reason we didn’t solve an otherwise easy problem with ready made solutions like climate change is solely because mass media exists. It’s not like there aren’t millions of potential alternatives to Murdoch et al that wouldn’t jump at the chance to live the same luxurious life. How many real life Logan Roys exist? Betting a fair few.

              Or, indeed, the people part of the Green New Deal making out like we can carry on as we are and it’s totally fine. Removing all billionaire oil execs is not going to solve for this. Let me just check my notes on Elon Musk’s carbon footprint, you know, guy who cares so much about planet he is rapidly stripmining as much of it to make more fucking cars, lol. Oh, and go to Mars for some reason.

              We could Thanos snap ALL of humanity away today and climate change would still keep happening. This is all just a done deal now.

              With that said, helicopters are the greenest transport because of the number of billionaires they valiantly kill for Gaia. More helicopter rides for industry magnates, please.

    4. JT, along with what Dennis said I’ll add that
      with fossil fuel peaking it will be important for economic function to
      rely more and more on other sources of energy.
      Got to conserve oil and nat gas for uses that are difficult to replace, for the long term.
      Light transport is a waste use of oil product, now that a viable alternative is in place.

    5. JT,

      Without horses and mules the oil industry would never have been born.

      We have subsidies for renewable energy and electric cars, etc, because we collectively decided that it’s good policy to SPEED UP the growth of these industries to the maximum practical extent.
      I hear this same argument from my old friends who don’t believe in electric cars and trucks.
      What I tell them is that every new electric car sold means that SOME BODY somewhere will have TWICE as much gasoline available for his pickup truck, lol.

      It’s true for now that we can’t run the economy on renewable energy. It was true in 1900 that we couldn’t run it on oil. Twenty years later we were half way there transitioning away from coal.

      One thing is for sure. Oil, coal, and natural gas come out of holes in the ground, and every hole is eventually all used up. At least half of the potential productive holes belong to people and or countries who to put it as mildly as possible are NOT our friends.

      What we’re going to be FORCED to do, eventually, is to severely limit the use of oil and gas for NON CRITICAL purposes, and divert the remaining supply to ESSENTIAL industries…….. such as agriculture.

      In the meantime, we’ll be learning how to use more and more renewable energy more and more efficiently.

      Between upping the production of renewable energy, and using ALL energy FAR more efficiently, we can at the very least delay the day we’re looking at a crash and burn hard landing.

      I frequently remind people that our best hope is that we are hit with a steady stream of figurative bricks upside our collective head to the point that we are forced to the conclusion that our only hope is to go to a wartime kind of economic footing in order to maintain at least a basic bare bones industrial economy with the lights on, food in stores, cops on the street, etc.

      We went from isolation politics to blood thirsty politics in a matter of a week when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

      It may well take a shock of similar magnitude to get our attention so that we get ON with the job of going renewable.

      And I’m absolutely not talking about the whole world going renewable. What I’m talking about is that some of us, especially in countries that are still rich, still well endowed with natural resources, etc, have a shot at pulling thru with the lights on.

      There aren’t going to BE mass migrations, once the shit is well and truly in the fan.

      The countries that migrants will be headed for will use whatever means are necessary to protect their borders.

      Any country that’s barely able to survive on it’s own food production that doesn’t have something ESSENTIAL to sell on the world market will be up shit creek without a paddle.

      A nation wide crop failure, and ensuing famine, will reduce the population there to such an extent that if the next year’s crop is ok, the famine will be over……. because there might be maybe only half as many people left.

  10. Oops, another Carbon Bomb

    BIDEN APPROVES ALASKA GAS EXPORTS

    The US energy department approved Alaska Gasline Development Corp’s (AGDC) project to export LNG to countries with which the United States does not have a free trade agreement, mainly in Asia. Backers of the roughly $39bn project expect it to be operational by 2030 if it receives the required permits.

    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/14/biden-alaska-lng-liquefied-natural-gas-exports

    1. Virtually one hundred percent of all the hard core poorly educated voters in love with trump and the Republicans are as sure Biden and the Democrats are out to shut down the oil industry as they are about the Seven Days of Creation and the Flood.

      1. “S” gets my vote for the best name on the site.

        Ask ChatGPT what “S””s thoughts about Peak Oil Are? And see if it can differentiates his/her pattern from all the other S letters in the text.

        1. If S isn’t incognito OFM, then it’s his identical twin, separated at birth.

          1. I’m S. Don’t know exactly how this came to pass, just a simple overlooked typo I guess.

  11. I borrowed a single-bottom plow from a neighbor yesterday and spent part of the day plowing under about a half-acre of ground to resow to pasture. (We’re downsizing our garden now that we’re no longer selling to market but simply growing our own food.)

    Our little JD 2520 tractor used but a couple of pop bottles-worth of diesel to get all that hard work done, just a few bucks’ worth, turning over sod and popping out a bunch of rocks in the process. (We live on glacial till. Impossible to dig.)

    No, I cannot imagine how we could live without cheap liquid fuels.

    1. What you describe will make one realize very quickly
      just how priceless good soil is!
      [actually it is priced very high compared to marginal soil]
      To voluntarily attempt a market garden based on glacial churned land is for someone who loves great challenge, or I suppose has a mission in mind?
      Hats off to your efforts.

      Over the prior thousands of years of ‘civilization’ it has been good soil that
      people have been desperately motivated to occupy and hold.

      And will be again once the dust settles.

    2. 2023 Kubota ELECTRIC LXe-261 Battery Operated Compact Tractor (YouTube)
      Maybe this might stimulate your imagination. Like everything else, these things start out being expensive (prohibitively?) but, at some point they may well end up being less costly than tractors powered by infernal combustion engines and will get the same work done for less money’s worth of electrical energy,

      1. Islandboy , this is a concept tractor , just like you see those concept cars at the trade shows and never hit the road . Question , what do you do when you are in the middle of your farm , the battery goes low ( not zero ) and you can’t drive back to your loading pole ? Drag an extension cord ? 🙂

        1. Nope this is NOT a concept tractor. You obviously didn’t watch the video. For those who did and are interested, here are some more videos featuring electric farm machinery:

          Electric Tractor : Worlds First Practical Battery-Powered Tractor (6.5 min posted May 7, 2019)

          Farmtrac Electric Tractor as featured on BBC Countryfile | 100% Independent, 100% Electric (16 min, posted Aug 18, 2020 on the Fully Charged YouTube channel)

          What is the best battery-powered electric tractor? ( 6 min, posted Jan 29, 2019)

          This Electric Tractor Might Change the Future of Farming and Food! (13.5 min posted Jun 11, 2022)

          California Farms Go Green with Zero-Emission Electric Tractors (5 min, posted May 10, 2021)

          Top 5 World Electric Tractors (5 min, posted Oct 4, 2021)

          10 Advanced Autonomous Tractors And Farming Machines (Modern Agricultural Machinery and Robots) (12 min, posted Nov 11, 2021)

        2. Nope this is NOT a concept tractor. You obviously didn’t watch the video. For those who did and are interested, here are some more videos featuring electric farm machinery:

          Electric Tractor : Worlds First Practical Battery-Powered Tractor (6.5 min posted May 7, 2019)

          Farmtrac Electric Tractor as featured on BBC Countryfile | 100% Independent, 100% Electric (16 min, posted Aug 18, 2020 on the Fully Charged YouTube channel)

          What is the best battery-powered electric tractor? ( 6 min, posted Jan 29, 2019)

          This Electric Tractor Might Change the Future of Farming and Food! (13.5 min posted Jun 11, 2022)

          California Farms Go Green with Zero-Emission Electric Tractors (5 min, posted May 10, 2021)

          Top 5 World Electric Tractors (5 min, posted Oct 4, 2021)

          10 Advanced Autonomous Tractors And Farming Machines (Modern Agricultural Machinery and Robots) (12 min, posted Nov 11, 2021)

          1. California should worry about water rather than electric tractors. I hear it’s hard to farm almonds without the former no matter how many of the latter.

        3. Holeinhead,

          Obviously electric cars will never work, I drive one all the time. The “concept” works nicely. My neighbor has a battery powed lawnmower that seems to work nicely and battery powered tools also seem to work well. I have never seen an electric farm tractor, so less sure about those.

  12. If you buy a tractor built by a reputable manufacturer you will generally find that it’s equipped with an infernal combustion engine that is VERY likely to run five thousand hours at least before it needs more than routine maintenance.

    That’s usually five to ten years on a farm.

    But considering the possibility that diesel fuel may eventually be unobtainable, an electric tractor and a personal solar farm might turn out to be the best decision ever.

    1. Electric tractors will soon be good enough, if you can afford the extra ten thousand bucks minimum, to use them for utility work around a farm……. meaning they will run a couple of hours, working hard, maybe a little longer.
      Now it WILL be possible for contractors who need to run machinery such as excavators and backhoes in Quiet Zones such as on hospital grounds to pay a few tens of thousands extra for electric models.

      The grid out in farm country is utterly and absolutely totally inadequate for supporting any charging capacity above maybe ten to twenty kilowatts at any given location. The rural grid is JUST barely built to support homeowners and existing farms, etc.

      The battery in the biggest and baddest Tesla S or X won’t run a SMALL tractor more than one to three three hours doing field work. A Model S cruises on fifteen or maybe twenty horsepower. A fifty horsepower tractor pulling a plow uses at least thirty five or forty and sometimes the entire fifty.

      1. How about a tractive power source that self replicates and contributes to soil fertility? Go long work horses.

        Yes, a significant portion of farmland will be needed to feed them.
        So it goes.

        1. We considered horses, years ago, for farm work.

          They’re too damned expensive.

          And there’s little infrastructure around for caring for them. (Harness makers, wheelwrights, large animal vets, horse-drawn equipment makers and repairers.)

          People around here with horses tend to be leisurely types.

  13. The Republican Party has just managed to figure out that BUD LIGHT and the company that makes it is a MAJOR R party donor, lol.

  14. seeking input (I also put this on the other thread)

    Peak Global Combustion Day…what is your guess?

    The day when combined combustion of wood, biofuels, peat dung, coal, nat gas, oil derivatives, etc
    reaches an all time maximum.
    Certainly it will be a landmark day in the history of humanity.
    Many competing factors are at play- from depletion to sanctions, war to incentives, population growth to poverty rates, and a dozen more.

    My guess is July 27, 2033
    subject to change daily.

    btw- take note that all of the earths combustion feedstock energy came from the light emitted from the local yellow dwarf star.

  15. The point that most miss with the discussion about renewables (and nuclear) for the future is the embedded energy in their construction. It’s currently all fossil fuels, and by necessity will continue to be unless large subsidies are given.

    Money equals energy in our modern world, mostly embedded energy, so with huge subsidies of energy is what makes renewables possible. They don’t create large net energy at all, barely creating the energy that went into building them, despite all the nonsense numbers put out by each of the wind, solar, and nuclear industries to keep themselves in business.

    Whenever you see a new proposal for XXXX that is renewable technology, work out the energy cost of building it from electricity, including all the steps of conversion of electricity to a liquid fuel to make the mining of the metals involved possible, from remote low grade mines, that are the mines of the future.

    Everyone promoting renewables and nuclear wants to overlook the fact that with more expensive energy, the costs in dollars are currently going up, not down, just as gas, oil and coal prices have risen over the last 2 years. The cost of solar panels has gone up by close to 50% in the last 2 years here in Australia, despite getting cheaper over the prior 10 years.

    I saw an earlier post about making clinker from a concentrated solar array. OK, fine now work out all the energy cost embedded in all of that construction to produce ‘what quantity’ of clinker per year? How does that compare to current manufacture on an embedded energy basis? Similar question to every other scheme out there that is meant to save the world from declining fossil fuels.

    We are in the predicament that a small proportion of the world’s population lives an energy intensive lifestyle off the back of fossil fuels, which are greatly harming the environment around us and are soon to leave us.

    We clearly will not have the energy needed for the mining of lower grade, deeper in the ground minerals as highlighted by Calvo and Mudd’s work a decade ago, that showed a 30% increase in world copper production came at a 46% increase in energy use between 2003 and 2013. We now have average grades lower with no new mega mines in the outlook. By the way, the USGS ‘world reserves’ for copper do not exist, they often refer to known resources that are uneconomical to mine from remote sites, that will become even less economical as oil prices rise due to depletion.

    1. Well you better hurry on over to reneweconomy.com.au and let them know all of this before they keep on spreading nonsense like this:

      Investors release “credible” 1.5°C grid plan with rapid exit for coal

      Rooftop solar keeps bouncing back, as households pile on the panels

      Australian homes and businesses installed a total of 271MW of new rooftop solar capacity in March, just 5 per cent more than the 259MW installed in February, buy 20 per cent ahead of the national tally at the same time last year.

      The latest rooftop solar data from industry analysts SunWiz shows a market that is continuing to build up momentum after a slightly shaky start with a small market contraction in January.

      Australia is the country with the largest installed per capita PV capacity in the world at 990 W per capita at the end of 2021 (1,166 according to the IEA’s Snapshot of Global PV Markets 2023 (PDF)). Australia also has the highest share of electricity generated by PV (15% at the end of 2021) of any country in the world. Why do so many Australian homeowners and business seem so hell bent on buying PV systems despite all the warnings from Murdoch owned media outlets?

      1. @Islandboy, If you look at AEMO data, during the sunlight hours the wholesale electricity price is mostly negative, meaning any more solar (from Spring to Autumn) has a negative return for any investors.

        Of course in Australia, building more solar is subsidised by government, plus has the subsidy of rules allowing the pricing of ‘generation’ to be in small blocks throughout the day instead of a continuous basis.

        Of course solar is growing in Australia, it’s highly subsidised and people get their own electricity to use instead of paying really high retail prices. The retail price of electricity in Victoria was falling in real terms for most of the 20th century until the 1990’s when it was privatised and renewables started to creep into the mix. Since then the retail price has risen in real terms, with another 30% increase forecast for this year alone, so of course people taking care of themselves using government subsidies makes perfect sense, even at higher prices than 2 years ago.

        1. Could it be that the increase in prices since the 1990s has more to do with privatisation and less to do with renewables? The folks over at reneweconomy.com.au seem to think the private owners have been gaming the system to extract super profits at the expense of ordinary Australians. Who woulda thunk it?

          Maybe if you could wean yourself off Murdoch owned media outlets (kinda hard in Australia) for a month of two and get your “news” and opinions from Giles Parkinson and the gang over at reneweconomy.com.au things might start to make more sense to you.

    2. Poor people may starve because food suitable ( properly handled and processed of course) for human consumption is used for dog food.

      But when the time comes that we HAVE to have copper for wind and solar farms, or for cars and trucks….. we’ll have ENOUGH…….. because the actual cost of the copper in such machinery is only a VERY minor part of the total cost.

      Right now Tesla is either building or ready to build cars using seventy five percent less copper, excepting the copper that goes into the electric drive train.

      Small electric motors such as are used in washing machines are typically made out of aluminum these days.
      There’s no real reason bigger ones can’t be built this way, and still be energy efficient……. if necessary.

      Naysayers don’t get it. Renewable energy and energy conservation will be life and death national security issues within the lifetime of middle aged people reading this site today.

      “Rust and depletion never sleep.” Matt Simmons, IIRC.

      1. Naysayers want a world to still be available outside of human industry, but lol, we’ll do fine by using much more diffuse energy infrastructure that literally needs open pit and strip mining operations never before seen on this planet.

        A better green idea is nuking America off the face of the planet and giving the rest of the Earth’s peoples a better existence. Guessing that’s not on the cards. Oh well.

    3. “They don’t create large net energy at all, barely creating the energy that went into building them, despite all the nonsense numbers put out by each of the wind, solar,”

      Not true. If you keep a solar panel in a closet it would be true,
      but if you put it out in the sun,
      or a wind turbine out in the wind,
      then the lifecycle Energy Payback Time is in the range of 6 months to 4 years depending on the particulars.
      Examples of information on this topic.
      https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35489.pdf
      https://www.vestas.com/en/sustainability/environment/energy-payback

      You might want to update you preconceptions.
      And you can do a common sense reality test on this-
      If the embedded energy cost in a PV panel or wind turbine was high compared to the output, no place in the world would be shelling out any money to install them. To the contrary, countries are reaching for the great price for electricity eagerly. China had global record installation of new wind and solar in 2021, and increased that by 25% in 2022, for example. These forms of energy also accounted for the majority of new generation in Europe and the USA.

      1. I already addressed this with the largest solar energy installation study by Hall et al. The NREL numbers are bunk.

        And gee, a company that manufactures wind turbines happens to find them economical. Stop the presses.

        I hear Exxon has some words on how much better oil is.

        A for investment, please read The Value Of A Whale. There’s money to be made in this, it’s not some deeper altruism, I’m afraid.

        Y’all getting taken in by the same jokers who said we could all live off fossil fuels without repercussions. Well, good luck in the grift. I’m sure some execs and shareholders will make an absolute killing out of trying to replace 200 years worth of FF industry with more complex and mining intensive machinery than humanity has done in the last 10,000 years of civilisation.

        1. Hall did his work about 15 years ago.
          A big source of error using his analysis on solar in the current day is that the mass manufacturing of PV has dramatically reduced the energy input/unit required.
          That is reflected in the price per module, which has dropped 10 fold since his analysis.
          Not all of that price drop was due to lower energy inputs required, but it is likely a big part of that dramatically improved price and energy performance.

          It is a good example of how many people who formed ‘beliefs’ previously have failed to keep up with changes to the scenario. Most of the opinions on this are formed on old data, and is not reflected in the reality of the current day…which utilities around the world are well aware of as they make they their long range decisions.
          Because of the dramatic change in PV manufacturing (and thus price and EROEI) over the past 20 years, the global solar energy reserve went from close to zero in 2015, but by 2018 it became gargantuan.
          How it that?- It didn’t get brighter on earth, rather PV energy became economically viable.
          Economic viability is one of the two criteria for an energy source qualifying as a reserve. The other is technical feasible of production with current technology.
          I won’t vouch for PV pricing or EROEI in a closet or in cloudy Ireland, but over 80% of the worlds population live in regions where it is plenty sunny enough for very good results. With or Without further fossil depletion.

          1. Case in point:

            India’s largest oil company targest 10 GW of renewables by 2030

            ONGC, India’s largest crude oil and natural gas company, aims to reach 10 GW of renewable energy capacity by 2030 with a capital expenditure of $12.18 billion. It had 348 MW of installed renewables capacity as of May 30, 2022, and is targeting 5 GW by 2025.

            The company said it sees favorable government policies and viability gap funding for offshore wind as key enablers of the energy transition. It has already signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of the Indian state of Rajasthan to set up 5 GW of renewable energy projects. To achieve its goal, ONGC has partnered with Norway’s Equinor and Indian developer Greenko.

            1. Islandboy , let me give you some facts . ONGC has no money for CAPEX . It is a cash cow which is milked by the Govt for dividends and also an instrument used by the Govt to raise USD funds(loans) to augment the Fx reserve of the government via SOE ( same as Pemex , Petrobras , Petronas ) . Green energy investments in India are a disaster . Look up Suzlon ( largest wind turbine manufacturer) and Adani Green . By the way memorandums and mandates are BS crap . I expect due diligence from you .

        2. Here is an updated analysis from a German outfit-
          https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Photovoltaics-Report.pdf

          I refer you to the page 8 slide for their summary on PV Energy payback time.
          Its very similar to the US NREL summary that you chose not to believe.

          “A PV system located in Sicily with wafer-based Silicon modules has an Energy Payback Time of around one year. Assuming 20 years lifespan, this kind of system can produce twenty times the energy needed to produce it.”

          1. China added far more coal power to the world in the last twelve months than any was decommissioned elsewhere. Yeah, they’re building a fuckton of PV and wind. They’re building a tonne of nuclear and coal and gas plants too. They need energy, so they’re outright getting everything they can.

            Why, then, did they not just go full in on PV and wind? Why exacerbate their already monumental pollution problems by continuing to go with inefficient, costly and dirty FFs?

            How about Germany going for coal and closing nuclear? Hell, even France has expanded FF usage to offset energy deficits.

            And none of this has appreciably changed the trajectory of all energy being additive to the sum usage.

            This would all have been great… fifty years ago. Now, it doesn’t matter. At all. Maybe you get to run A/C when wetbulb gets to lethal levels, assuming the rest of society isn’t clobbered by other factors that are completely unrelated to energy supply.

            This is propping up a failed system. You ask why would people invest so much money into something if it didn’t work. I ask that same thing for DAC and recycling whenever I read a new ecology paper. And yet everyone doubles down on magic fixes because they literally cannot imagine another way.

            1. Klieber , ” Maybe you get to run A/C when wetbulb gets to lethal levels, assuming the rest of society isn’t clobbered by other factors that are completely unrelated to energy supply. ”
              I am currently in Delhi for a family visit . Right now it is midnight and the temperature is 31degrees centigrade . A/C is full blast . Daytime temperature was 39 centigrade . Hell here . Understand this is air temperature and not ground temperature , Delhi is a concrete jungle .

            2. https://t.co/2RfO1qprRA

              We’re trying to stop things that are already happening that are happening at vastly accelerated rates to what AR6 predicted, never-mind the previous reports.

              My condolences to those in nations about to get shafted by the imperial core wanting to keep up appearances.

    4. Hideaway

      There is no doubt instances of poorly thought out renewables projects, where costs went out of control. The inner Mongolia wind farms and the integration of offshore wind in China for example have not been smooth at all.

      When it comes to subsidies for renewables; bear in mind that if in the short term renewables are more expensive than fossil fuels – that does not have to be the case 10 years down the road. Hence the subsidy. You could argue the way you do, and say that fossil fuels will become more scarce. And metals too. So the scarcity of energy and minerals overall will drive up the cost of both renewables and fossil fuels for the consumer. In that scenario we are headed towards a low carbon society. That is probably the direction overall, with some countries being an exception. In the low carbon society scenario, essential resources has to be priortised to maintain renewable energy output, critical infrastructure and to mitigate decline in fossil fuels as well. The global growth model is on its last straws, except some places where they can still fuel growth on late developed natural resources.

    1. First hint, the WSJ is a News Corp. owned outfit so Rupert Murdoch’s anti renewable agenda is in force. Second hint, it blames the February 2021 power outage on renewables. Here’s the take on the February 2021 outage from Utility Dive
      ‘A terrible idea’: Texas legislators fight over renewables’ role in power crisis, aiming to avert a repeat

      Republican leadership was quick to criticize renewables for the role they played in the blackouts, with Gov. Greg Abbott, R, claiming on national television that renewables caused the outages. They “cannot be dispatched” by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) and therefore “cannot be relied upon,” said state Sen. Kelly Hancock, R, who chairs the Senate Business and Commerce committee. Hancock sponsored Senate Bill (SB) 1278, which would impose reliability costs on “intermittent generation.”

      But the grid operator’s post-event data showed Texas renewables over-performed winter forecasts by 6.34 GW while natural gas underperformed by 15.8 GW, according to an assessment of ERCOT data by economics professor Peter Cramton, who resigned from his position as independent director of ERCOT’s board after the grid failure.

      “There is no reason to attack renewables with costs for reliability that subsidize fossil fuels,” Cramton said. “But we cannot accept this critical infrastructure failure. Regulators must reform the natural gas system and design reliability into the transitioning Texas electricity market.”

      Utility Dive also has a more balanced take on the Texas bill here:

      Texas Senate passes $10B plan to develop 10,000 MW of gas-fired ‘insurance’ capacity

      This just underscore the point I made further up about the influence of Murdoch owned media on the discussion. The use of lobbyists, dark money, trade associations, political contributions and phony think tanks to create a misleading narrative creates a set of “alternative facts” that people consume, thinking it is genuine news. At least the pro renewable information is coming from sources that have a clear interest and are not hiding behind phony front organisation and are not using names that do not betray their biases.

      I think the 3x cost of peakers is not the plants themselves but, the cost of the electricity they produce. From the Power Magazine web site Are Simple Cycles or Combined Cycles Better for Renewable Power Integration?

      Higher efficiency results in a lower cost of generation. Electricity from a combined cycle can be on the order of one-third the cost for electricity from a simple cycle.

      Contributing to this is the fact that their capacity factor is 4x less than combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT). According to Statista the CF for a CCGT in the US in 2021 was 54.4% while for simple cycle gas turbines it was 12.1%. The fact that a CCGT will produce up to 50% more electricity for a given amount of fuel makes the cost of electricity from a peaker up to 1.5 times higher on the basis of fuel cost alone.

    2. It’s not even a news piece – it’s an editorial from “editorial board” – so worthless.

  17. Hideaway,
    “They don’t create large net energy at all, barely creating the energy that went into building them, despite all the nonsense numbers put out by each of the wind, solar, and nuclear industries to keep themselves in business.”
    Bullshit, pure and simple.

    Land-Based Wind Market Report: 2022 Edition
    Department of Energy (.gov)
    https://www.energy.gov › eere › wind › articles › land…
    Aug 16, 2022 — Wind turbine prices averaged $800–$950 per kilowatt (kW) in 2021. The average installed cost of wind projects in 2021 was $1,500/kW, down more …

    Why don’t you tell us how much you think coal and or natural gas will cost to generate a kilowatt hour, grand total, for the life of a wind farm?

    Use a thirty five percent capacity factor, lol. Most newer wind farms beat that.
    And lets not forget that a wind farm will NEVER actually need replacement. It will merely need new turbines and possibly some new towers. Everything else will last more or less indefinitely……. for generations, even centuries.

    The global weighted average levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) of new onshore wind projects added in 2021 fell by 15%, year‑on‑year, to USD 0.033/kWh, while that of new utility-scale solar PV fell by 13% year-on-year to USD 0.048/kWh and that of offshore wind declined 13% to USD 0.075/kWh.Jul 13, 2022

    1. OFM

      I am also a big proponent of the wind power industry. The cost/benefit analysis is probably very confusing for people reading this blog. What I would say is that some wind farms that are carefully planned are very profitable. If you place the same wind farm 50 km away it would have been useless (wind patterns, elevation, practical placement like a steep slope etc). For offshore that is easier in some ways, but you have to keep fishing and merchant lanes going. And wind conditions must be good enough compared to the cost. The biggest driver has been wind reach through hight for some decades now. It is not that wind energy is the solution to everything, just a part of it. I totally agree to the thesis that it is possible to replace just parts of the installations, once a big wind mill is up. The turbine blades are not critical, can be made of all sorts of materials. The raw materials that eventually becomes critical; it has to be pinpointed (rationed?) to its most critical use.

  18. Monday humor?
    “I can’t believe people are comparing Zelinsky to Satan!
    Yes, he’s evil, but he’s certainly not as evil as Zelensky.”

    A non US view

    1. You meant an ultra-nationalist Soviet viewpoint….it seems to me.
      ‘how dare the Ukrainian people and their leaders resist the re-establishment of the USSR’

        1. Humanity is toxic
          but it is Russia that choose to invade and is killing civilians wholesale and without hesitation…
          as a tactic.

          1. You think I’m defending Russia, a conservative and reactionary country?
            I’m defending Ukrainians, who are “ruled” by a coup installed (2014) right wing dictatorship.
            Dombas Russians have been oppressed from 2014 on.
            Ukraine is larger that France, with many different points of view.

            1. Hint: You like to post little controversial open ended statements or so called jokes with little to no explanation. Then expect everyone to guess what you mean.

              It’s not about “Dombas Russians”. It’s all about the military value of Sevastopol and Crimea. Your drinking the Russian propaganda. What next, China’s justification for invading the U.S. because of oppressed people in Chinatown ?

              So your humor was really about a geography and everybody has a different opinion lesson ? Who would have guessed.

            2. Its one thing to discuss or argue the merits of policy.
              But you choose to offer up a quote saying that the Ukrainian president
              [elected in 2019 with 73% of the vote]
              was worse than Satan…presumably for resistance to the invasion.

              You might think that Ukraine should be a part of Russia.
              Ukrainians don’t think that, anymore than most Canadians would want to be part of the US, or Koreans would want to be Chinese.

              But none of that has anything to do with the Ukraine president being ‘worse than Satan’. Stinks of antisemitism to me.

            3. Crimea was part of Russia from 1783
              In 1954, it was gifted to the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine by the then Russian Premier, Nikita Khrushchev (we would not be having this discussion if that had not happened)
              Crimea is 85% Russian

            4. Stinks of antisemitism to me.

              You should point that out to my Jewish Wife

            5. Oregon, California and Texas were part of Mexico in 1783 until the U.S. started a war with Mexico, because Mexico wouldn’t sell. Sounds like you should sharpen up on your Spanish.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican–American_War

              The dissolution of the Soviet Union

              By late 1991, amid a catastrophic political crisis, with several republics already departing the Union and the waning of centralized power, the leaders of three of its founding members declared that the Soviet Union no longer existed. Eight more republics joined their declaration shortly thereafter. Gorbachev resigned in December 1991 and what was left of the Soviet parliament voted to end itself.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union

              You need your wife to defend you ?

              Get back to me when your wife stands up for native Americans & Mexico and turns your home over to them. Maybe they will be kind enough to offer yourself a Hightrekker walled in reservation.

              African Americans were owned property(slaves) in 1783.

              What’s your point ? Two wrongs make a right

        2. You know what the cake said to the fork ?
          You want a piece of me !

          Is there anything stopping you from moving to Russia ?
          You could join the military !

          You get it ? Go, tells us how it works out.
          Now that’s funny

          HB’s view

    1. I didn’t get far because the article very quickly walked on thin and cracking ice.
      “we can safely say, that a nationwide stable electric grid (which is available on demand 24/7, just like today) is practically impossible to build based on renewables and battery power alone,”

      Even if true…so what. Its an irrelevant line of thought.
      Indefinitely , and certainly for the next say 3 decades [the planning and financing timeline of utilities]
      perpetuals, and grid storage, will be added to the nations generating mix that includes
      nat gas turbines, coal, nuclear, hydro, and some other minor contributions.

      Its an old fallacy argument to say its a failure because you can’t easily do it 100%.

  20. The new Irena renewable capacity statistics are out for 2022.

    https://www.irena.org/publications/2022/Apr/Renewable-Capacity-Statistics-2022

    It just illustrates that some sort of economic prosperity is needed to facilitate the shift to renewables. A covid lockdown and a war in Europe was not helpful, and the statistics shows a stagnating capacity growth overall. Some nations are doing very well like Brazil (if they stop killing the rain forest from now on it would be excellent). Nothing is given, and there is still probably a window of opportunity to build out renewables to something resembling “a max” this decade (much easier to maintain than to expand).

    1. Hideaway take note-
      The data from the annual update shows that in 2021 81% of the new electrical generation capacity deployed globally was renewable energy systems.
      The utilities of the world are not stupid enough to pay for and deploy energy production facilities that are anything but strongly net energy positive.

      And you will look back in a decade and realize that in 2022 the world was still in the early 2nd inning on the solar/wind deployment pathway. In 2040…it will be early 4th inning, and these two sources of energy will each separately be greater in capacity than the #3 source- natural gas.

        1. Once the shit is well and truly in the fan, and the lights are going off here and there, because an OLD nuke goes down, or a natural disaster takes a lot of fossil fuel capacity off line……… when natural gas is rationed……. etc..

          Such power lines will be promptly approved……. hopefully it won’t be so late in the game that getting them built will be impossible.

          If we’re LUCKY, we will go to a wartime economic plan……. with the enemy being fossil fuel depletion allied with runaway climate.

          The public will eventually understand, if we’re lucky, and get with the program.

          We could build ten thousand miles of such power lines using no more talent and materials than it costs to build one more aircraft carrier. ( I’m glad we have the ones we have, but I’m a long ways from convinced we need some new ones.)

          The public will finally GET IT when it’s necessary to wait in line for gasoline…… with ration tickets.

          And when the news shows a steady stream of crops burnt to toast in the field due to super hot spells.

          It doesn’t necessarily take drought to kill a cornfield.

          Within a few more years, we’re going to see corn dying in the field here in the USA due to extreme heat. A week can be more than long enough when the corn is still small.

    1. If you type “site:[web address]” after your search term on the Google search page you will get results from the site you specify only. So, for example:
      “sodium ion batteries site:https://cleantechnica.com” will pull up all the articles from Clean Technica on sodium ion batteries.
      Similarly:
      “sodium ion batteries site:https://insideevs.com” will bring up artiicles from Insides EVs.

      Those two should keep you busy for a while!

      1. Also, when searching with google, keep in mind their algorithms that prefers you to find sponsored/paid for/prefered content…
        Just a friendly reminder.

        1. Thanks guys.
          What I’m really hoping is that maybe somebody with expertise will post his own opinions.

          1. Sorry for the hijack, seems interesting but I´m mostly in the “use much less, and stay low”- camp, But I thought the flow battery, for medium/large scale storage, looks promising, this looks good too. Will do some reading.
            Btw, new acronym proposition, BEP, beer enhanced post : )

            But to the point, there are several interesting battery/storage developments in progress, some battery chemists claming 5x power density compared to current lithium, But we´ll see, hopefully.

  22. How about people go to the keeling curve site, currently at 424ppm CO2, and have a good long look at the continuing exponential rise, no faltering due to all the renewables we have built over the last 2 decades. We have not even slightly changed that curve, meaning an exponential rise in fossil fuel use, which has kept energy prices relatively cheap for the wealthy 12% of humans.

    All our infrastructure, all our renewables and nuclear have been built with this cheap energy. In 2021 energy cost for the system was about $43/Mwh. This is based on several sources, from the IEA, world bank numbers for energy spend (about 6%-10% of GWP of $US102T). Also just happens to be a fraction below the average price of oil in 2021 of around $75/bbl.

    Using these numbers, it’s easy to work out how a 10,000Bbl/d new Saudi well costing about $10m to sink, lasting for a couple of decades and an ongoing O&M cost of cents per barrel has an enormous energy return over 110:1. I can do the same for every other form of energy, like coal mines and gas wells, providing we can find the all the costs. Likewise they have huge energy returns throughout their life. This is what our current system is built on.

    When I use exactly the same methodology on solar, wind and nuclear, the returns on energy invested are very low. For example a large solar farm of 400Mw ($US400m cap cost) in Australia with an average sunshine hours of 5.5/d over a 25 year life and using a low 2% O&M cost (from solar industry, even though beyond 15 years O&M is often 4%+), only gives an energy return of 1.4:1.

    The problem with all the reports people point to, is the energy returns calculated only account for the steel, copper, concrete, etc that goes into the building of whatever renewable or nuclear project, it never includes the background embedded energy in the system, like the engineers involved in planning and building, nor the roads to get to site, or the ships used to import the solar panels, etc .

    The only true way to measure the full inputted energy is in the capital, operating and maintenance costs. This is the only way to include ALL energy inputs , including the embedded energy of the system in which building these things operate.

    Not one person bothered to do the energy calculations of building any type of a bright green future, from electricity, something no-one anywhere has bothered with, because it’s horribly inefficient. Instead people prefer to believe in whatever they want to believe in, even though all renewables and nuclear are all built with fossil fuels.
    More renewables simply means burning more fossil fuels to make them, keep the system around them growing, and watching the Keeling curve continue upwards, until it becomes impossible to burn more.

    1. Thats a lot of typing to say stuff unhinged from reality.
      I guess we all need to get used to even more of that.

    2. Alright then! I guess we should just abandon all these nonsensical renewables and just continue poking holes in the desert in search of oil. Let’s just burn more stuff and enjoy the luxurious lifestyle cheap fossil fuels have bought most of us. Who cares if all the ice on the planet melts? That’s what you sound like mate.

      I have a new wager. Who will die first? Rupert Murdoch or Ghawar?

      1. I’m not an advocate for burning the planet, which is why I pointed to the Keeling curve, nor would I bother watching the BS from Fox or other Murdoch media.

        I’ve been studying the problem since I first learned of the problem in 1975, my first unit in an environmental studies university course was Limits to Growth. I bought my first small solar and battery setup in 1985. Our house runs on solar, with a third solar system totally off grid with 20kwh of batteries we’ve had for 7 years.

        I’ve been an advocate for solar and how unsustainable our current system is for decades, yet it was only last year when I became suspicious of all the positive spin put on EROEI numbers from solar, wind and nuclear. It all has to do with the complexity of solar and the embedded energy of the background system to make it possible. It was the Haru Oni project in Southern Chile that started my intense research into EROEI, as in the real return of energy invested, not all the BS propaganda that is in EVERY report showing a bright green or nuclear future.

        The Haru Oni project is using a 3.4Mw wind turbine in an area with 70% wind capacity, pretty much the best in the world, yet will create only 130,000 litres of synthetic fuel per year.
        At about 10Kwh of energy per litre of synthetic fuel = 1,300Mwh of energy returned (before O&M costs), yet the energy generated from the wind turbine is 20,848Mwh, so the process efficiency is just 6.2%.

        The cost of this project, where all the equipment is matched for size to operate as efficiently as possible is $US74M, spent so far. There is no indication anywhere about how many people it takes to operate the plant, so working out any O&M cost is impossible. Over the life of the plant of say 20 years, which is generous given the forces on the wind turbine and the embrittlement of metals by the hydrogen, the plant will produce 2.6 million litres. That’s over $28/ltr from the capital cost alone, allowing nothing for O&M.

        This project, that is touted by Siemens, Porche, the German government and many green groups as the future for liquid fuels, it woke me up as too how people are just deluding themselves, because the numbers don’t add up at all.
        If these numbers don’t add up, then what else doesn’t add up? So I came up with a methodology that explained the current EROEI of the world (about 12.5:1) from our current energy mix. The numbers for nuclear, solar and wind stunned me, nowhere near what is proclaimed in thousands of reports. Every single report about how great the EROEI is leaves out the major embedded energy of the complex system it operates in

        We are in a clear predicament, with no answer to keep civilization as we know it going, when we get depletion from fossil fuels, oil in particular. We mine coal with diesel, we drill oil and gas wells with diesel, so all fossil fuels go up in price, relative to everything else with scarcity.

        Yet we need to vastly increase mining and high level heat processes to build the bright green future, while the ore grades are declining on average and therefore energy use in mining is increasing for the same quantity of ‘product’. We’ll need new roads, new bridges, new drainage, new ports, new ships, etc just to get the increased mining products to where they are processed, yet no-one wants to include any of this extra energy spent inbuilding these as a part of the energy cost.

        We have a highly complex system drowning in debt, yet the bright green future advocates seem to think we can mine, process and build a massive amount of new stuff, while the overall system suffers from a decline in energy availability. It’s a total lack of understanding about what the background system of civilization needs to operate ‘normally’, while being able to build more of anything.

        We will only be able to keep increasing production of renewables and nuclear while we keep increasing the use of fossil fuels, as has happened over the last 2 decades. Once we pass fossil fuel peak production then production of renewables, nuclear and everything else will also decrease because of the way the economic system works. There will simply be less money for investment into the new energy sources as their price skyrockets due to the huge energy inputs in their mining, transport, processing, manufacture and building on site.

        1. Picking a worst use case and using it to try and invalidate the best use case isn’t very convincing. Using electricity from a wind turbine to make synthetic fuels which are going to end up being burned in an ICE with 30% efficiency at best cannot compare to putting that same electricity directly into an EV battery.

          Using the average European fleet wide fuel economy of 4.7 liters/100 km, 130,000 litres of fuel would work out to 2.766 million km. Taking the same 20,848 Mwh that was used to produce the 130,000 litres of synthetic fuel and using it to charge EVs directly would facilitate more than 100 million km of travel using the European 2021 average energy consumption of BEVs of 166Wh/km and assuming 80% plug to wheel efficiency. If you reduce the plug to wheel efficiency to just 50% you’re still looking at more than 62 million km, more than 20 times the distance as going the synfuels route.

          In the case of charging the EV batteries directly from the turbine you are using 20,848 Mwh to get the equivalent of burning 4.7 million litres of fuel, that is 47,000 Mwh. Just goes to show how inefficient it is to move vehicles with infernal combustion engines!

      2. We haven’t heard much about Ghawar lately. Back in the old Oil Drum days we must have seen a graph or a chart or such once a week predicting it’s demise. How’s the old lady doing?
        I guess my copy of “Twilight in the Dessert” isn’t much use for prediction.

    3. “When I use exactly the same methodology on solar, wind and nuclear, the returns on energy invested are very low. For example a large solar farm of 400Mw ($US400m cap cost) in Australia with an average sunshine hours of 5.5/d over a 25 year life and using a low 2% O&M cost (from solar industry, even though beyond 15 years O&M is often 4%+), only gives an energy return of 1.4:1.”
      Bullshit.
      This is so WRONG it’s impossible to know where to start explaining the bullshit.

      Solar farms produce electricity…….. nice clean electricity that when it’s produced in a fossil fuel plant means forty to sixty percent of the energy in the fuel goes up the smoke stack.
      That fuel in and of itself has a HUGE embedded energy cost, because it has to be found, mined or pumped, transported, and burnt…….

      I could go on all day.

      My old truck gets maybe twenty percent net from the gasoline I put in it.

      My neighbor who has an electric car gets as eighty percent net on the energy used to charge it and run it……… and he’s going to be getting most of it from solar panels that will soon be installed……. for LONGER than he will live. His per mile cost of driving, assuming his electric car lasts as well as a conventional car, will be WAY lower.

  23. Coming “soon” to a Volkswagen dealership near you!

    2025 Volkswagen ID.7 Debuts With Up To 435-Mile Range In WLTP Test

    The ID.7 is available in two trims: Pro and Pro S. Both have an electric motor making 282 horsepower (210 kilowatts). The Pro comes with a battery that has an 82-kilowatt-hour gross rating (77-kWh net) that provides an estimated WLTP-cycle range of 382 miles (615 kilometers). The system supports 170-kW DC charging. The Pro S gets a pack with a 91-kWh gross capacity (86-kWh net) that offers an estimated 435 miles (700 km) of driving distance. The DC charging capacity is 200 kW.

    1. People need to stop wanting more super long range EVs that are not only massively expensive, but massive full stop. Two tonnes of steel and extremely volatile battery (check out any Tesla or BYD fire, of which, many such examples) hurtling along the road is not any better than the morons buying F-150s and rolling coal. The EV “range anxiety” thing is an infrastructure problem, and not many countries are helping people get to grips with that. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve passed a service station or supermarket that has all chargepoints occupied by SUV sized cars or has multiple out-of-action ones.

      What happened to small cars? You can’t even get them in Europe now as more and more dealers go full electric and screw the buyer and the environment in on fell swoop. Great for their bottom line, of which, VW particularly bad given dieselgate.

      My 1 litre EcoBoost, 3 cylinder MHEV Fiesta gets 70 MPG/gallon and cost a third of a brand new ID.3.

      1. Well, Volkswagen also has this in the works:

        Volkswagen ID. 2all Concept Previews The People’s Electric Car

        Volkswagen’s long-awaited affordable electric car is finally here – albeit in concept form – and it’s completely different from the ID. Life that debuted in September 2021.

        It’s called the ID. 2all and it offers a first glimpse of Volkswagen’s future EV that will arrive in 2025 in Europe with a base price under $26,400 (€25,000). Looking at the photos, it’s pretty clear that this is less of a futuristic concept car and more of a pre-production study.

        Nissan Launched this in the Japanese Domestic Market in May 2022:

        Nissan, Mitsubishi Debut Sakura and eK X Electric Kei Cars In Japan

        The five-seat, four-seat minicars are powered by a 20 kWh lithium-ion battery that feeds energy into a front-mounted electric motor that makes 47 kW (63 hp) and 144 lb-ft (195 Nm) of torque. The range is estimated at up to 111 miles (180 kilometers) based on Japan’s WLTC cycle. While that doesn’t sound like much, Nissan says the Sakura is “perfect for daily use,” especially in Japan’s major cities.

        On Nov. 4, 2022 it was reported, Nissan Stops Taking Sakura Mini EV Orders In Japan Over Huge Demand.
        The Sakura electric kei car is so popular customers need to wait a year or more for delivery.

        In China a GM joint venture produces this:

        China: Wuling Hong Guang MINI EV Sets Massive Sales Record

        Wuling – Hong Guang MINI EV specs:

        Two battery/range options
        120 km (75 miles) of range using 9.3 kWh battery
        170 km (106 miles) of range using 13.9 kWh battery
        top speed of 100 km/h (62 mph)
        electric motor: 20 kW peak and 85 Nm
        4 seats
        741 liters of space with the rear seats folded down
        2,917 millimeters long, 1,493 millimeters wide and 1,621 millimeters high, with a 1,940-millimeter wheelbase

        Tesla has used a top down disruption model that is working very well for them. They have used premium priced products to scale up their manufacturing capacity and are finally working towards a compact economy car:

        Tesla Teases Three New EVs Including Compact Car With 53-kWh LFP Pack

        Producing a low cost, economy car without using higher priced premium models to spur development is harder but Nissan, GM/Wuling and Volkswagen are trying to do things the hard way.

        1. VW had a concept model they canned that was more like a Polo sized vehicle a couple years back, along with the e-Golf. Stuff like that is what America needs, since Europe and Japan still have (for now) city and compact cars. Alternatively, make every ICE a hybrid like I went with. Annoyingly, Ford killed the Fiesta this year and now the Puma, a larger crossover, is the alternative (and a good few brand pricier too).

          It’s less heartening when people go from an F-150 to a Lightning, when they never needed a pick-up in the first place.

  24. Just a question to Ron, Ovi and Dennis (all doing a great job btw.) but really also to all others:
    Have you read 1984?
    (Semi spoiler, it´s quite illuminating, scaring and presently also scaringly accurate, recommended reading for everyone actually)

    1. Studied in University in the 60s and it seemed far out. Certainly right on following/tracking everybody.

    2. Yes! No one seems to notice it’s really a tender love story. All the rest is just background and setting.

    3. I’ve read it, multiple times, and all the other well known books of this genre. Brave New World is one you should have on your personal bookshelf as well.

      I’M SICK of trying to explain to well educated people that while Ayn Rand is, or was, an idiot, there’s EVERY reason to read her books..

      Her antiutopian novels We ( We the Living) and Anthem are seldom mentioned, because she’s been painted as a right wing pariah ( true but IRREVELANT) are good enough to keep you awake for a long time if you take one to bed with you.

      The POLITICAL portions of Atlas Shrugged are pretty much dead on, in describing how corrupt governments operate as things go downhill. You will recognize a lot of current day right wingers if you read it.

      And there ARE such things as totally corrupt left wing politicians…….. or they at least describe themselves as such. Consider current day Venezuela.

      The Atlas Shrugged heroine, Dagny Taggart, is as good or better as a feminine role model as any character in any novel written by anybody else, PERIOD, in my experience, and I’ve read at least one or two serious books almost every week since I was a kid, up until the last five or six years.

      Sure her books have been hijacked by the right wing trump type crowd.

      That’s no fucking reason not to read them. Not reading them means you have been had by the left leaning political and literary establishments.

      And while there are no guarantees, there ARE new technologies that at least have the POTENTIAL to save us. Magic oil wells maybe not, but solar and wind farms are as real as it gets.

      Hey guys, they’re just BOOKS. NOVELS. Not even good ones in many respects.

      It’ SUPPOSED to be the RIGHT WING that’s for burning and banning books.

  26. https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/a-first-hand-look-at-a-california-solar-farm-with-earth-mounted-panels

    This is the future. Wind turbine towers welded up on site with portable fabrication equipment are the future. Windows with built in solar film are the future.
    One baby per woman is very likely to be the future in lots of countries within a few more years.

    No….. renewables aren’t going to save ALL of us.

    But if we get our shit together, renewables at least have the potential to save a lot of us…… including a few hundred million in places such as the USA.

    We are NOT going to be overwhelmed by human waves of migrants. We do NOT have to have Chinese rare earth elements. Unless of course we fail to mine our own.
    We do not have to have electric cars that are as big as yesteryears conventional family cars, and they do NOT have to have all day driving range.
    We do NOT HAVE TO HAVE very much at all in the way of air travel.
    We do not have to have miles of subdivisions without grocery stores, doctor’s offices, and such.
    We do not have to have supermarkets stocked ninety percent with throw away merchandise and highly processed foods that cost more to process and package than they sell for wholesale ……. and we don’t HAVE to eat all this highly processed crap thereby shortening our lives, on average by over a decade.

    We don’t HAVE to die because there’s a climate and economic crisis baked in due in the last analysis to overshoot.

    Most of us probably WILL die due to overshoot, sometime within this century.

    But we don’t HAVE to.

  27. We NEVER seem to hear anything in the major media about the UPSIDE benefits of low birth rates.
    But the younger people in Japan aren’t going to have to spend a fortune on building or buying a house, except in urban hot spots.

    The old folks are leaving behind millions of decent houses as they die off. You can buy one of them dirt cheap if you’re interested in living in Japan. The same situation will apply before too much longer in various European countries.

    Look it up.

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