now here's a few largescale ground mounted solar PV installation.
These are
tiny in relation to the facilities that would have had to be constructed to replace even a fraction of current hydrocarbon. We need arrays 100 km x 100km.
The access requirements of these arrays was discussed simply to provide a visible example of the broader principle of hidden infrastructure energy requirement. Since the vast majority are hidden they are, by definition, hard to describe. Whether this one example, in 126 pages of examples, was well chosen or not does not alter the fundamental point, which you now seek to misdirect: your argument cannot accommodate the manufacturing, operating and maintenance energy requirement, not of the array, but of every single component of the system that must function for the array to be viable, right down to the factory that makes the ball bearing that goes in the gearbox of the truck that mines the ore that makes the metal in the girder of the factory that houses the industrial oxygen facility for the silicon foundry - all currently powered by hydrocarbon. You, and the academic papers sponsored by vested interest - ignore it completely, because otherwise the process would be demonstrably non-viable and there would be no industry.
Show us a solar powered silicon foundry of industrial output capability. Show us a solar powered ore mining complex. Show us a solar powered truck factory. Show us a solar powered potable and waste water distribution system serving the city the workers live in. Show us a solar powered global transportation system bringing all the (depleting) raw materials from which the arrays are constructed. Show us a solar powered field maintaining the tripled food yield upon the workers depend (oops). Allow the thoughtful person reading this to do the thought experiment and try and conceive of what the attempt to construct such facilities implies. A couple of holiday snaps and publicity shots of some hydrocarbon built toy facilities won't do, I'm afraid.
And even when you've done that, you won't have made your point, because the point of the exercise is not to show whether renewables can power their own manufacturing and operating facilities and subsystems and the wider societal systems upon which their continuity depends. The point of the exercise is to show that they can do so with enough marginal power to carry on doing the things we currently do without the energy burden of having to manufacture our own energy production systems - like the colossally energy intensive process of growing enough food for 7 billion people - in a timescale governed by the non-negotiable rate at which our remaining economic reserves are depleting.
A thoughtful person will understand that the pictures you show represent only the tip of a very large iceberg, comprising all the globally extensive, energy intensive systems, extending right back into the foundations of our society, which must be functioning and powered for the little arrays in your pictures to exist. And that iceberg is powered - unsubstitutably - by hydrocarbon. That is the dirty little secret of the hi-tech renewables industry, and you hate that I point it out.
But thank you for providing yet another opportunity to illustrate both the magnitude of the problem, and the extent to which you underestimate it.
He really is talking complete rubbish when it comes to solar PV, as the vast bulk of academic EROI calculations on solar PV demonstrate, with only the odd one supporting his position, and that's the one that also thinks you must need vast quantities of tarmac for largescale solar, which you clearly don't.
I've read the academic EROI calculations on solar PV to which free spirit refers. Their common and hilarious feature is that they don't account for the total energy requirements of the systems they purport to quantify the EROI of - the "whole lifecycle energy requirement", to use the language of energy accounting.
It all hinges on system boundaries, and where you place them. If I exclude my mortgage payments from my budget, I can afford to live in Chelsea. Wrong system boundary - mortgage payments are inside my system. Wrong conclusion.
People - like free spirit - who understand that this accounting method is deranged, swallow it whole when it is applied to their pet projects.
"Oh", says free spirit,
"you are double counting your mortgage payments. They will get picked up by the operation of society as a whole. You really are talking complete rubbish". So his friendly academic's calculation goes:
"Assume the existence of a hydrocarbon powered industrial manufacturing system. This paper estimates the EROI of a solar blah blah". They don't state it like that, of course, but that's free spirit's Fallacy of Consensus for you.
The "odd ones" to which he refers are the ones that don't assume the existence of a hydrocarbon powered industrial manufacturing system. There aren't many of them because it's quite hard to do - we didn't design our system, it is an emergent property of the rules by which our system is governed. So it's quite hard to map our energy uses, and we stand in relation to them in approximately the same way a fish does to the water it lives in - utterly dependent on it, and utterly unaware of it. All we know is that, everywhere we look, we find bigger and bigger uses.
Anyway, these energy accountants attempt to "include the mortgage payment in their budgets". Which, when you think about it, are the ones you need when you are evaluating the scope for replacing hydrocarbon with something else. Free Spirit doesn't like those ones, and labels them "odd" because their conclusions are not consistent with his wonky-accounting paradigm. But rather than using that as an opportunity to examine his paradigm, he rejects them, using that old chestnut of the paradigm-trapped victim of the Fallacy of Consensus: "
Everyone who's opinion I like disagrees with this conclusion. It's a balance of probability thing, you see".
It's bollocks, you see.
Meanwhile, I very clearly stated that EROEI estimates cannot be used for quantitative purposes, and provided *indicative* data which shows the *trend* together with the reference to promote conversation. Yet you have devoted several hours constructing one of your tedious straw men arguments as if I had asserted it was quantitive, and attacked that. Taking data out of context and forcing it to bear examination it was never designed to bear is yet another tool in the toolbox of deniers everywhere.
Free spirit - I'm weary of your hostility and refuse to engage with you any more on this basis. It is entirely possible to discuss this subject in a civilised manner - it is physics, after all, not politics or sociology. But that capacity seems to elude you, there is no synthesis of anything new or interesting here, and so I'm going to terminate this exchange with you now. You are free to make your own life choices on whatever mental model you feel serves you best, in which endeavour I have no interest other than to wish you well however it turns out for you.
