Yesterday consisted of stating one very simple point, many many times over.
In order to produce one single PV panel, very many diverse systems must function. Those systems include the manufacturing process of the panel itself. They include the manufacturing processes of all of the apparatus through which the the panel is manufactured. They include the raw material extraction process for the device, and the manufacturing process of the raw material extraction apparatus. They include all the social institutions that maintain the stability of the conditions under which those processes can function, such as the military processes by which access to resource is maintained. Critical ones, such as marine transport, cannot be converted to run on electricity in any timeframe relevant to this analysis.
yes. These are incorporated into the energy demand figures for society that the combined energy mix of renewables, nuclear and decreasing amounts of fossil fuel inputs will be required to meet.
I'm not sure how many times I need to spell this out for you, but the marine transport and anything else that is actually incapable of being powered electrically from renewables, will no doubt continue to be powered from oil for a long time into the future. This is not querying the fact that oil production is almost certain to be dropping signiicantly in the near future, merely pointing out that there will remain a significant volume of oil available to be used for purposes such as shipping for an extremely long time into the future - shipping accounts for less than 10% of world oil supplies (and I'd expect shipping could fairly simply be reduced by 50% or more with a reversal of the globalisation process of recent decades... don't forget one of the biggest shipping sectors is oil and coal, so less of that = less shipping of it), and we should be pumping those sorts of volumes for a long time to come. Maybe at some point in the distant future alternative fuel sources will need to be used, but let's just take this one step at a time and deal with the stuff we need to worry about for the next 50 years or so first, then deal with that later.
We can say two things about the energy pathways. (1) They are currently sustained by energy sources of EROEI many times higher than solar (2) They are not yet fully understood and therefore cannot yet have been fully mapped.
If they have never been mapped, then your naive estimations of solar EROEI are too high. I'm afraid it is simply too naive to present some material on the embodied energy of paint, and a simple calculation of motive power energy exchange loss from which a full account of the manufacturing losses is necessarily absent, and conclude that hydrocarbon is substitutable by renewables in all the systems and subsystems of the global manufacturing process, the defining one of which cannot be powered by renewables derived electricity. Your point was never made, and so does not stand.
You have acknowledged that the manufacturing energy mapping process is fiendishly difficult. You know that, as manufacturing pathway energies are mapped and accounted for, solar EROEI will fall further. You do not yet know, as they are accounted for, whether the EROEI of solar might tend to unity or below while commercially achievable conversion efficiency is approaching its theoretical maximum. Since the quantity of manufacturing energy and resource increases exponentially to infinity as EROEI tends to unity, the uncertainty of your proposition that solar is a substitute is grossly sensitive to further small reductions in EROEI. You have failed to acknowledge that uncertainty.[/quote]
You're wildly exagerating the potential per unit energy content of any 'unknown unknowns' missing from current EROEI calculation, and as you've already demonstrated you don't have a clue what actually already goes into them I suppose that's not that surprising.
For most of the stuff that you mention that has any validity at all, if it weren't already included, then combined together it would add at most a few percent to the energy input calculations per panel. Essentially most of the stuff you're talking about is so far downstream that those energy costs would be split up between tens / hundreds of millions of panels produced by the factory in its lifetime using the downstream manufacturing plant in their lifetimes.
What you're also missing is that I'm using fairly worst case scenario figures produced 5-10 years ago, and since then the supply chain has had to become much more energy efficient in it's production methods in order to cope with the rapidly reducing prices being paid per unit. Most manufacturers are using thinner cells, and more efficient methods of growing the crystals etc than they were when these figures were first produced.
In the longer term, once we get to the need to replace the first generation panels, you also miss the significant impact on the energy costs of this replacement that will occur through the recycling and reuse of the aluminium frames rather than using virgin aluminium. Plus, as I've pointed out, the panel lifetime is likely to be significantly longer than that used within the EROEI calculations IMO.
Setting EROEI uncertainty aside, you have been presented with very specific problems of manufacturing and operationally maintaining your technology as the current motive energy behind the manufacturing system depletes with a 7 year half life uninvested in an environment of capital formation impairment, energy competition from higher utility end uses, and severe emission restriction. You have failed to acknowledge those problems, much less account for them.
That's because I'd generally prefer to settle one point prior to moving on to the next, whereas you seem to prefer to pretend you never made that point, then move on to something else once I've shown you to be wrong on the point.
Setting engineering aside, you have been presented with the referenced observation that no complex civilisation has been observed to survive a reduction in the EROEI of its primary energy source, with the further observation that ours is the most complex, high EROEI dependent civilisation in recorded human history. Your response has been "liar, liar, pants on fire."
My response was to refute in detail your original statement, which you even acknowledged had been wrong.
I then pointed out the key difference between this situation now, and these previous occasions you brought up, namely that in those previous situations the EROEI figures were mainly a function of distance from the civilisation (distance to woods, coal mine etc), and would continue to get worse until the civilisation collapsed.
That's not the situation now, where we have alternative energy sources to switch to which have EROEI figures that may be lower than for oil / coal's thermal EROEI figures, but should still be viable, and most importantly, won't continue to get worse until such time as civilisation collapses. So the situations aren't comparable.
It has been an interesting exchange, but one in which you may not conclude that you have yet made any point. Conversely, I seek to make no other point than the one summarised in this post - your claim that solar is a viable substitute for hydrocarbon is, at best, speculative.
being as you have no other credible alternative energy source to bring to the table, and my 'speculation' is supported by detailed research data, and is based on sound engineering principles and calculations, I'd humbly suggest we'd be better off getting on with implementing the only credible solution that's on the table until such time as you actually come up with a better plan for replacing those lost hydrocarbons.
Energy efficiency will not achieve this alone, and I'd personally prefer to aim for the option that kept as many of humanity alive and living decent quality lives in a relatively high tech society as possible, so won't countenance any option that is predecated on the death of a significant proportion of humanity.
You will now ignore the bulk of this carefully written post, extract the one sentence from which you believe you can construct a straw man, elevate that straw man to evidence of the complete failure of my entire argument, and advance it. A process with which I am weary.
If you stopped making so many completely wrong statements in your posts then I'd not have to pick you up on them so often. I'm not inventing these strawmen, I'm merely responding directly to points you're making in your posts - sorry if you find this an annoying habit of mine, but it's easily rectified by ensuring you know what you're talking about before posting this stuff up.
