Global financial system implosion begins

[elbows]

By the 70's Hubbert had already predicted peak oil for the end of the 20th century (he was only out because of the decoupling of Saudi oil from the global petroleum system, and that added only 10 years to his prediction). It took 90 years to build oil infrastructure - 30 years to build its replacement using technologies of fractional net energy was not "a long wait" - it would have been "just in time if not too late".

Replace "bought into the prevailing sense of woe" with "taken the threat seriously and done something about it" and, if our parents had done so, we would be in better shape now. Instead, we ignored it.

And here we are with our own generation of unwarranted optimists, confusing our historical capacity to create technology from surplus energy with an ability to make surplus energy from technology (one of the worst examples of causality reversal fallacies in our history), lulling everyone into a false sense of security and preventing us from taking the necessary action.

There are a number of reasons why Hubberts original predictions are imperfect, including politics affecting both the supply and demand picture, and some improvements to recovery rate. But perhaps these will actually cause the eventual decline to be steeper than Hubberts most basic model would suggest, so Im not trying to paint this as a simple positive.

And I don't think it was optimism which caused a much earlier transition to be aborted. In fact there were some transitionary changes as a result of the 1970's, a fair few of the easiest first steps were taken, where it was relatively easy & cheap to move away from oil we did so. But we never got anywhere near the much tougher stages of transition, temporary energy austerity was as bad as it got for most, and the technology optimists with their hydrogen economy obviously failed to deliver. And we had things like the North Sea to buy some time for another round of old style partying.

So yeah, I don't think its optimism so much as the very strong desire of people at many different levels to try to cling to the old ways as long as possible. Optimism can form a part of that clinging but its not really the whole story. What I don't know is whether the economic woe of the present will be enough to shake us out of this pattern, or whether significant declines will have to happen before more people start to think the unthinkable.

 

[free spirit]

Trainer demolishes every form of renewable energy.
http://www.springer.com/environment/book/978-1-4020-5548-5

i can only read 3 pages of the solar PV section without paying through the nose for the priviledge, but I'm slightly insulted that you'd refer to something containing that many obvious errors in the 3 pages I can read, while at the same time accusing all other studies of being wrong. Not to mention it being seriously out of date in such a fast moving industry (PV costs have probably halved since he wrote it for example)

For example, he states that the reduction in output due to operating temperature vs the nominal lab effciencies at STC is around 40% in Australia. This would require a panel operating temperature of 113 degrees C at the average temp coefficient for standard crystaline panels of -0.45%/degree C. In the UK, the peak operating temperature of roof mounted PV panels in full sun with no wind is approx 65-70 degrees, so in the hottest parts of Australia will be maybe 80-85 degrees or 27% reduction at worst. This is in full sun, with no wind though, and the actual average during power production will be far lower than this, so in the UK it would be maybe 45-50 degrees or around 10% average, and in the warmest parts of Australia maybe 60-65 degrees so around 12-13% average reduction vs STC rated output, not 40%.

He also cites a 2001 report claiming inverter and cable losses at 20%, which would have been wrong even in 2001, but now the average would be between 7-12%, and can be as low as 4-5% on the latest transformerless inverters when operating at the peak of their voltage range. If we're talking cable losses though, we really ought to consider that power station to consumer cable losses are in the region of 12%, whereas for distributed SSEG generated energy it's mostly negligible past the meter point as it's mostly either used in the house or in the neighbouring houses.

He then apparently uses these figures to claim output should be far lower than that usually claimed, which I presume he then uses throughout the rest of his calculations, meaning they're all going to be massively wrong.

His cost assumptions are equally laughable (although obviously panel costs were much higher, he talks about the price levelling off when it's dropped by over 30% in the last year), as is pretty much everything in the 3 pages I'm able to access.

Sorry, but if you're going to make claims that are so massively at odds with the vast bulk of the published and unpublished research, you really ought to back it up with something a little more accurate than this bollocks. PV is my specialist subject, and if this is the quality of your sources, then I can fairly confidently say that you're wrong. If you've got something a little more accurate, please post it up, if not I'd suggest you revise your opinions as you've obviously been misled.

 

[free spirit]

The scaling business is quite interesting and completely non-intuitive. If you take a mouse and scale it in size to an elephant, it would collapse under its own weight - the strength of its legs would increase with the square of the leg radius but the mass would increase with the cube of the body's (effective) radius. So it would collapse. Of course you could invest engineering time, money, energy and materials in strengthening the legs, but there is nothing obvious from the ambition to "scale a mouse" that this should be necessary and, besides, scaling is supposed to make things *more* efficient, not less, right? Engineering is littered with these types of problems.

So, for example. Take the infamous German Solar facility. Scale it to a square grid of dimension 100km (about the size you would need to make a material contribution to the global energy supply, absent hydrocarbon). If you can access, say, 0.5km either sided of a road for maintenance (inverter repair, panel cleaning, etc.), what length of road network would you need to service the array? Answer: about the same length as the Canadian road network. If you need X thousand barrels of oil per km of road to tar this network, how many million barrels of oil would you need? Answer: who cares - at $180/bbl, you can't afford it. What fraction of the grid's output is required to process that quantity of oil? To build the refinary for that oil? To build the vehicles necessary to service the grid? To build the factories in which the vehicles are manufactured? Answer: since you need ALL of the grid's output to do useful stuff - too much.

And so it goes.

there could be some truth in what you say if we were talking about all, or the bulk of new solar PV capacity being erected in huge fields with no existing infrastructure.

In this country at least, this represents a tiny fraction of the total installed capacity, and if the new FIT levels for over 50kWp installations are maintained there's very little chance of any further solar PV installations that aren't either building mounted or if field mounted, then connected in to an existing meter point and only upto 50kWp in size, so not needing any additional tracks to be built.

The real beauty of solar PV is that it can be roof mounted, and therefore takes no additional land space, needs no or very minimal additional infrastructure (outside of the installation itself) other than for particularly large installations which may require a small amount of upgrades to the local transformer.

You may want to retarget your post at largescale onshore wind farms, which do require such infrastructure.

 

[free spirit]

preventing us from taking the necessary action.

do tell, what would this action be in your opinion?

 

[Crispy]

Ps, if you build solar collectors in the desert, you don't need paved roads for access.
Sorry, that just occurred to me. As you were

 

[Falcon]

i can only read 3 pages of the solar PV section ... I can fairly confidently say that you're wrong.

Errrm - OK. I read the other 205 pages which presumably exceeded your attention span / research budget. Thanks for the straw man argument. Trainer presents (1) the state of technology at the time of writing (which you seize on) and (2) fundamental limits to the technology. You correctly state that, since he wrote his book, PV technology performance has improved ... from very poor to poor. What PV technology has not done since he wrote his book - and cannot do, due to the fundamental limits he sets out - is achieve the two orders of magnitude performance improvement that would be necessary for PV technology to offer a material alternative to an energy source with an EROEI of 50-100.

Why? Because it is bounded by fundamental limits of 1kW/m2 incident radiation on a cloudless mid day on the equator, and the Shockley-Queisser limit. Last time I checked, the German arrays were returning less than 150mW/m2, annual average. It is further bound by the fact that electricity is extraordinarily inefficient for the majority of essential applications which comprise the majority of our energy use - especially space heating and moving things around. Claims that it offsets hydrocarbon consumption are easy to make and almost impossible to fulfil because, despite 20 years of intense development, batteries are useless for almost every application except dildos, and many of us live a long way from the equator, in places which, when they are not cloaked in winter darkness, are shrouded in thick stratus.

And you rather grimly ignore the major point - even if it made some contribution, the pace of capacity demand divided by the EROEI creates material, energy and capital requirements which are impossible to meet.

In your confidence, why don't you as a service to the rest of us express 7% depletion plus 1% growth from 80 million barrels a day in annual kWh capacity build, and divide that by German annual average kWh capacity to create how many Germany's we have to build a year to balance hydrocarbon depletion. Then with your encyclopaedic knowledge of the industry, tell us the quantity of silicon ore we would have to mine, the number of silicon foundries we would have to build a year, and the energy consumption of those additional foundries to provide that capacity. Express your answer in multiples of current industry capacity, and use a representative $/GwH multiplier to estimate an annual capital demand schedule. Since PV is the least basket case of the renewable technologies, the result will be a "can't be better than this" rule of thumb, against which everything else will be worse i.e. any blend of renewable technologies that compensate hydrocarbon depletion will be more expensive than this. Thanks.

 

[Falcon]

Ps, if you build solar collectors in the desert, you don't need paved roads for access.
Sorry, that just occurred to me. As you were

I built an oil terminal in the desert once and we most certainly needed paved roads for access. As you were

 

[Falcon]

The real beauty of solar PV is that it can be roof mounted, and therefore takes no additional land space, needs no or very minimal additional infrastructure (outside of the installation itself) other than for particularly large installations which may require a small amount of upgrades to the local transformer.

If I want to charge my laptop, I'll keep that in mind. However, if I want to charge some (yet to be invented) bank of super capacitors to help me keep the street lights functioning, I think I'll need a bigger roof.

 

[Dr Jon]

Some history

 

[A Dashing Blade]

Some history

Er . . . no, simply some 70+ year old quotes?

 

[elbows]

Some history

Do you think the obsession of sections of the American right with central banks and gold-backed money are actually going to help in these times? I don't, because they cling to this stuff, using it to avoid painful discussions about anything to do with the real wider economy. Bankings role in the system and present mess means that these simply tales of evil bankers do have some resonance in this age, but do they offer any proper solutions?

 

[teqniq]

Interesting article in today's Graun:

This economic collapse is a 'crisis of bigness'
......The crisis currently playing out on the world stage is a crisis of growth. Not, as we are regularly told, a crisis caused by too little growth, but by too much of it. Banks grew so big that their collapse would have brought down the entire global economy. To prevent this, they were bailed out with huge tranches of public money, which in turn is precipitating social crises on the streets of western nations. The European Union has grown so big, and so unaccountable, that it threatens to collapse in on itself. Corporations have grown so big that they are overwhelming democracies and building a global plutocracy to serve their own interests. The human economy as a whole has grown so big that it has been able to change the atmospheric composition of the planet and precipitate a mass extinction event.
One man who would not have been surprised by this crisis of bigness, had he lived to see it, was Leopold Kohr. Kohr has a good claim to be the most important political thinker that you have never heard of. Unlike Marx, he did not found a global movement or inspire revolutions. Unlike Hayek, he did not rewrite the economic rules of the modern world. Kohr was a modest, self-deprecating man, but this was not the reason his ideas have been ignored by movers and shakers in the half century since they were produced. They have been ignored because they do not flatter the egos of the power-hungry, be they revolutionaries or plutocrats. In fact, Kohr's message is a direct challenge to them. "Wherever something is wrong," he insisted, "something is too big.".....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/25/crisis-bigness-leopold-kohr

 

[Dr Jon]

Do you think the obsession of sections of the American right with central banks and gold-backed money are actually going to help in these times? I don't, because they cling to this stuff, using it to avoid painful discussions about anything to do with the real wider economy. Bankings role in the system and present mess means that these simply tales of evil bankers do have some resonance in this age, but do they offer any proper solutions?

I very much doubt that there is a 'proper solution' to this mess. But the mess is the obvious result of an unsustainable, growth-addicted financial system, designed and controlled by bankers and money-jugglers. Until we rid ourselves of these parasites, nothing will change for the better.

Also see:
Fiat Money

Also, it would seem that the vermin are getting paranoid:
Here Comes FIATtackWatch: Ben "Big Brother" Bernanke Goes Watergate, Prepares To Eavesdrop On Everything Mentioning The Fed

 

[gosub]

Interesting article in today's Graun:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/25/crisis-bigness-leopold-kohr

You would imagine someone would have pointed out to him the skirmishing that went on throughout the city state period of Europe, though hopefully he would have countered with the lessons of 20C, tying States together, whilst it means war doesn't come so often when it does come it sucks everybody in through mutual obligations

 

[gosub]

I very much doubt that there is a 'proper solution' to this mess. But the mess is the obvious result of an unsustainable, growth-addicted financial system, designed and controlled by bankers and money-jugglers. Until we rid ourselves of these parasites, nothing will change for the better.

Also see:
Fiat Money

Also, it would seem that the vermin are getting paranoid:
Here Comes FIATtackWatch: Ben "Big Brother" Bernanke Goes Watergate, Prepares To Eavesdrop On Everything Mentioning The Fed

bit of a global scoop that, googling it, and subsections of it all references point back to zerohedge.
Though with the amount conspiracy theory about the Fed reserve, is about time they did what basically amount to hiring a PR department

 

[rover07]

Trainer demolishes every form of renewable energy.
http://www.springer.com/environment/book/978-1-4020-5548-5

Do you have any studies from this decade?

 

[gosub]

Do you have any studies from this decade?

2007, apart from the evaporation of venture capital and the "possible" disproving of one of the pillars of phyiscs, how much has changed in 4 years?

 

[Dr Jon]

Talking of parasites - check out this guy...

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Errrm - OK. I read the other 205 pages which presumably exceeded your attention span / research budget. Thanks for the straw man argument. Trainer presents (1) the state of technology at the time of writing (which you seize on) and (2) fundamental limits to the technology. You correctly state that, since he wrote his book, PV technology performance has improved ... from very poor to poor. What PV technology has not done since he wrote his book - and cannot do, due to the fundamental limits he sets out - is achieve the two orders of magnitude performance improvement that would be necessary for PV technology to offer a material alternative to an energy source with an EROEI of 50-100. <snip>

Um ... hang on. This appears to be a much weaker claim than you were making before.

See e.g.your post 2807

It's a technology for (inefficiently) converting hydrocarbon inputs into electrical power via solar cells.

"Solar has a worse EROEI than fossil fuels" is hardly news. It would be news if the EROEI was less than 1, as you appear to be claiming in post 2807, but that's fairly clearly a false claim.

<rant about how annoying it is when people do this sort of shit deleted>

Now, there is a very interesting discussion to be had about the wider implications of renewables (except hydro) having much worse EROEI than fossil fuels.

It's a pity we're going through the usual nonsense with you instead of having that far more interesting discussion ... don't you think?

 

[ska invita]

Stats from the States.

 

[Dr Jon]

Ahem...

 

[Falcon]

Um ... hang on. This appears to be a much weaker claim than you were making before.

Really? One says performance is very poor. The other says conversion is very inefficient. Lost me, old boy.

but that's fairly clearly a false claim.

Really? I've not yet seen a single study that accounts for the energy requirements of the entire supply chain, and the parts that are very obviously omitted (for example, the entire manufacturing and power distribution infrastructure's manufacturing infrastructure) are astonishingly energy intensive. I hardly see why the availability of demonstrably incomplete studies is more convincing than the absence of complete studies - energy economics (in a form not dominated by hydrocarbon paradigms) and supply chain energy analysis is still a new field.

It's a pity we're going through the usual nonsense with you instead of having that far more interesting discussion ... don't you think?

Bernie I quite like you. But I simply can't make any sense out of your post. As far as I can tell, we *are* having an interesting discussion about the implications of renewables having worse EROEI than fossil fuels. The specific implication I was addressing was the primary resource demand implied by the required capacity build, backed out through the lower EROEI. It's an uncomfortable conversation because you only need 2nd grade maths to reveal quite depressing facts which bottom up entirely misses (which may or may not explain the squeaking of those who's livelihoods depend on us overlooking these facts). In the context of a thread discussing the energy/finance interdependence and the inability of renewables to offer any prospect of mitigation, what would you find more interesting to discuss?

For avoidance of doubt, I regard the whole debate about how bad a source of energy solar is akin to a debate about whether we are bailing the Titanic out with teacups or mugs, and basically a misdirection. The economy is dependent upon an expanding supply of cheap, liquid, transportable high EROEI fuel and there is no substitute. Urban75 sophisticates aside, this is still not grasped by the mainstream, and attempts to claim otherwise are, at this late stage, a dangerous distraction.

 

[gosub]

Talking of parasites - check out this guy...

Wot no bandwidth

 

[Bob_the_lost]

EROI of various renewables: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3910

For the record, solar is only around 4-10 (some claimed as high as 20:1) whilst coal can get up to 20:1 and oil ranges from 12:1 to 100:1 although it's doubtful any fields are still producing near the top end any more. Hydro is the king of the hill at over 200:1 in some studies, possibly far more.

 

[free spirit]

Errrm - OK. I read the other 205 pages which presumably exceeded your attention span / research budget. Thanks for the straw man argument. Trainer presents (1) the state of technology at the time of writing (which you seize on) and (2) fundamental limits to the technology. You correctly state that, since he wrote his book, PV technology performance has improved ... from very poor to poor.

There's no straw man arguement, virtually everything trainer wrote in those 3 pages is fundamentally wrong, was wrong at the time he wrote them just as it's wrong now.

Was I wrong to assume that he went on to use the figures used from these wrong calculations to go on to support the claims you make?

I have the research budget, but am not inclined to waste it or my time on a book by someone who get's his basic facts and calculations so badly wrong in the section I'm able to check without paying £30 for the privilege.

If you're relying on this guy as your source material, then this says a lot for your ability to check basic facts and assumptions, which you've spent the last few pages boasting about, and criticising others for not doing.

Do you have any other more accurate source to support your specific assertion that solar PV has a negative EROI?

 

[free spirit]

(for example, the entire manufacturing and power distribution infrastructure's manufacturing infrastructure)

This would be missing because it's not a factor or a very minor factor in the vast majority of cases, unless you're talking about huge PV farms where a new grid connection is required, which the UK specifically is not supporting.

you appear to not understand how SSEG implementation works.

 

[Falcon]

This would be missing because it's not a factor or a very minor factor in the vast majority of cases, unless you're talking about huge PV farms where a new grid connection is required, which the UK specifically is not supporting. you appear to not understand how SSEG implementation works.

By "huge PV farms" you mean the size of PV farm that makes any significant contribution to depletion on this scale, and that you are confining your observation to projects that make no material contribution? OK. As I said, toy science projects are not the issue being discussed here.

But great post for illustrating the casual assumptions regarding hydrocarbon powered infrastructure. Solar energy is renewable. Solar infrastructure is *not* - it must firstly be manufactured, then subsequently maintained, then ultimately renewed. The factories in which the infrastructure is manufactured must be manufactured. The mining and transportation equipment supplying the factories manufacturing the infrastructure must be manufactured. The factories in which the mining and transportation equipment is manufactured must be manufactured. This is enormously energy intensive. Your 4-10 EROEI calculations have simply had a frontal lobotomy on this inconvenient aspect i.e. "*assuming the prior existence of a manufacturing infrastructure*, EROEI is etc.". When the current distribution system has decayed, it must be replaced. What will they power the steel and silicon furnaces with - digested corn on the cob, algae exudate and your "not huge" PV farms?

 

[elbows]

I feel that part of this disagreement is to do with what timescale & stage of the game we are discussing.

Many of us could hopefully come to agree with statements such as 'renewable energy technologies can play a meaningful role in the decades ahead'

This is not the same as saying that renewable energy can save the economy as it is presently structured. And it should not imply that such technologies, and heavy investment in them, will provide mass sustainability for many hundreds of years. After all,I suspect there are several reasons why human imagination led us to sci-fi visions of mining other planets. Given that this shows no signs of happening, when imagining a genuinely sustainable longterm future for humanity I have to look elsewhere. If I don't insert any scientific miracles, then I can't come up with anything that resembles the ways & scale of living that we know today.

But to be honest I think that is looking too far ahead to be appropriate for this thread. If we focus on the next 10 years, and the crisis as it is presently manifested, then perhaps you can see why your words are at odds with many others. Perhaps you could clarify how you see things playing out over this period, because your depletion figures and desire to class renewables as pointless tend to suggest a rather dramatic unfolding of the woe, and its not clear to me that this is how things will really be paced. My prime reason for saying this is that I don't see why, following your logic, you could not have made the same points as you are making now, 3, 5, or 7 years ago.

Personally I would not like to even predict when the energy aspects of this doom will next reveal themselves to be a central villain in this story. A variety of economic woe, unwinding of bullshit, new flavours of bullshit, as well as the responses of both elites and the masses in various different nations, have massive implications for how all this stuff plays out, and whether we get a clear picture of supply limitations as opposed to seeing demand destroyed, with a variety of non-energy explanations given for the demand destruction.

A variation on the 'is capitalism doomed' articles that have popped up, is the idea that the necessary changes to the economic system may not happen via the global system, it will fail, and it will be left to nations to do whatever they think necessary, restructure, etc. The implications of such eventualities could be very large indeed, not quite as much as the complete death of capitalism, but still potentially quite different from what we've been used to.

 

[free spirit]

By "huge PV farms" you mean the size of PV farm that makes any significant contribution to depletion on this scale, and that you are confining your observation to projects that make no material contribution? OK. As I said, toy science projects are not the issue being discussed here.

England has a total building footprint of 2376km2 according to the land registry data.

so no, not a toy science project.

But great post for illustrating the casual assumptions regarding hydrocarbon powered infrastructure. Solar energy is renewable. Solar infrastructure is *not* - it must firstly be manufactured, then subsequently maintained, then ultimately renewed. The factories in which the infrastructure is manufactured must be manufactured. The mining and transportation equipment supplying the factories manufacturing the infrastructure must be manufactured. The factories in which the mining and transportation equipment is manufactured must be manufactured.

I'm glad you pointed this out, as I'd been operating under the assumption that the equipment we install every day was produced overnight by pixies from pixie dust.

I take it from this waffle that you're not going to back up or retract your previous assertion about solar PV having a negative EROI then. I usually find this occurs when the other person in the argument is wrong, and this will be my working assumption here until you're able to supply compelling evidence to support your case.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Pretty clearly, there are a number of sustainable energy technologies with positive EROEI, but it's also extremely clear (to me anyhow, but I think also to most of the people active in this thread) that if you do the numbers, that they're not able to replace fossil fuels in any approximation of "business as usual". Even if you assume the aggressive development nuclear energy, that's probably not going to happen, although debateably, nuclear energy might on balance help more than it does harm.

What I think that calls into question, for a fairly large variety of reasons (fossil fuel depletion, climate change, unsustanable food systems that are dependent on fossil fuels) isn't whether sustainable energy is a worthwhile field of endeavour, but rather how much longer we as a society can afford to pretend that "business as usual" is still viable.

So the next question starts to look very political. What do we do instead of "business as usual" and how are we going to get there?

As soon as you start thinking about that, it's pretty obvious that "business as usual" isn't going to go quietly. We can already see very clear evidence of disinformation campaigns by unsustainable industries against inconvenient science. We can see people on wingnut welfare queueing up to use PR smear tactics to present anyone who questions "business as usual" as a nutcase. We can also see, rather more insidiously, neo-liberal capitalist governments re-aligning the law in order to supress dissent in these areas. For example by redefining "terrorism" to include most effective kinds of direct action, by introducing restrictions on protest, by prioritising green organisations as a target for secret police activity (when there are actual Islamic nutbags and far right loons demonstrably trying to murder their fellow citizens rather than just annoying business interests) and of course, by stitching up the electoral system even further in the direction of only allowing neo-liberal capitalist parties to participate effectively.

The relationship between neo-liberal capitalism and unsustainability isn't a straightforward one however. For example, one of the particular characteristics of the neo-liberal variant is that it tends to promote unproductive and destabilising finance capital over productive industrial capital. So there isn't a straightforward relationship between capital's need to grow by some positive percentage per annum and, for example, energy use. If possible, neo-liberal capitalism seems to prefer to grow by generating ficticious capital, rather than by producing anything that's actually useful to people but which requires the use of oil energy rather than say, cocaine energy to create. Some analysis of this preference would be very interesting.

Where growth does result in increased energy use it's very possibly going to be an increase in energy use in places like India and China and to be indicative of improved quality of life for at least some class segments in those countries. The reasons why neo-liberalism does that though, are intimately connected to worsening quality of life in a lot of other places and class segments however.

Sorting our understanding of all that stuff out is, in my personal view a really important project.