The book’s thesis in one line: the renewable energy transition cannot work — not because of politics, not because of cost, but because of physics.
This is the topic for challenging that claim head-on. If you think the argument fails, say where: energy gradient, energy density, areal power density, or the system arithmetic built on them.
Strongest objections get engaged first.
I wouldn’t say physics, because if you can make a 400W solar panel that costs £100 with all costs taking say 500kWh of energy to produce, that delivers say 350kWh per annum in its first year, with a 1% decline in output per annum, it delivers 17.5MWh over a 100 year life-span…35x the energy input.
Say 20p/kWh, gives a return of £3,500.
At 30p/kWh gives a return of £5,250.
With a 1.5% decline in output 11.725MWh total output, i.e. lasting 67 years the returns are:
£2,345 at 20p/kWh and £3,518 at 30p/kWh
With 1% decline or 1.5% decline per annum, 10p/kWh gives:
£1,750 or £1,172 return over 100 or 67 years respectively
If the price of electricity increases, it increases the return (thousands of pounds of savings) for that £100 investment…who wouldn’t invest in that?
If you have a panel still giving 80% of its output after 20 years, you don’t throw it away, you add some extra panels, to expand the area by 20% to make up for the lost output.
Theoretically with a 1% annual decline in output, you reach a steady state of replacing panels after 100 years, with 20% of original total rating added every 20 years from the outset and thereafter, or with a 1.5% annual decline in output, you reach a steady state of replacing panels after 67 years, with 20% of original total rating every 13.4 years.
If you want to maintain a narrower power output range, then work with 10% after ten years, or 6.7 years respectively.
Each £100 of cost delivering at least £2,000 of value.
But if your electricity costs are less than 10p/kWh, each £100 investment could be returning less than £1000 over the 67 or 100 years.
The question to ask, is how much energy does it take to manufacture that solar panel?
£100 cost suggests 500kWh at 20p/kWh, or 1MWh at 10p/kWh to manufacture, giving a minimum energy return of 11x input energy.
If say the panel takes 500kWh of energy, then the minimum energy return is 22x the original input energy.
Isn’t the real problem with raw material supply, just like oil and gas. You only get the return when the ores and minerals are cheap, easy to extract, Just like oil and gas, without 100% recyclability, the minerals and ores will be used up, turned into detritus.
As the difficulty of extraction of the ores and minerals increases, the energy return (profit/benefit) reduces, just like oil and gas, unless you are recycling 100%. With 100% recycling it actually gets a lot easier, with lower energy input required for new recycled panel production.
Whatever you do, you don’t want someone throwing away working equipment just because the output has declined a bit. It may be less profitable for a centralised power generation company, but for an end-user it doesn’t make economic sense to throw away something that is still producing power without further investment, and that it reduces the further investment needed to maintain the output. Imagine in year 20, just needing to spend £20 (today’s money) per 400w output to maintain the output, and not spending another £100 (todays money) per 400w output. This is the critical aspect of running a renewable power generation system, stopping it being run by people who don’t understand the basics of the economics.
The lifetime of the renewable power generating equipment and the replacement/renewal strategy of the equipment/system components is critical to the economics. The recyclability of the equipment/system components will ultimately determine how long “renewables” will work for in centuries or millenia.
And yes, the power will get cheaper after a few decades, much cheaper.
The lower the recyclability, the more important it is to get every kWh out of the system.
There is nothing difficult about any of this, it isn’t contentious, it’s logical and stating the obvious from the manufacturing, supply, installation and system efficiency viewpoints.
Diffuse power collection works for trees and all photosynthetic organisms on which we depend for life. Don’t knock the physics, there’s nothing wrong with it.
If you throw it all away after 20 years, with it still producing 80% of output, then as they say “a fool and his money are soon parted”.
If you don’t think long-term in planning, and I mean in decades and centuries, the real economic benefits are easily missed. These days every thing is done with a short-term view, which, unfortunately, is just plain economic madness.
A season for a tree may be one year, six months of growth and then shedding of leaves. For a renewable PV solar system, a season should be as long as the solar PV panels are producing power…decades, half a century at least. Those PV solar “leaves” should only be shed once they’ve stopped producing power. Many passenger aircraft are maintained for decades, up to 50 years. You don’t scrap something that is working that is giving an economic benefit, but some companies may push the system into a cartel arrangement, where to maximise profit, and highest cost to the customers, by adopting predatory practices. Who will control the economics and recycling of the renewable power generation system? Those are what really matter, the physics isn’t a problem.