[StarvingLion]

"I happen to think this is a wise use of fossil fuels. Certainly better than most of the alternative uses of fossil fuels."

Hahahahaha...I bet you don't know that the production of nanomaterials is the most fossil fuel and energy intense activity you could imagine and the environmental impact is mind boggling. Ex. the embodied energy of 1kg of carbon nanotubes is the equivalent of the chemical energy found in a 167 barrels of oil. And this nutjob chief materials scientist of Shell admits tons of nanoparticles would have to be injected into an oil reservoir to track, map, and help recover oil.

Energy requirements for carbon nanofibres are 50 times those of primary aluminum used for smelting and 300 times those of steel based on equal mass.

[StarvingLion]

And this wondrous nanotechnology paradise is for what purpose? Compounding growth to pack the human cattle into stalls (ever increasing population density) very similar to todays hog with about the same freedoms. Meanwhile, the keepers of the financial pyramid grow their space behind gated communities. Buy hey, I'm sure you can watch Star Trek reruns in your tiny rabbit hutch and mumble "Look at the technology, aint it just amazing" while the personalized chemical lobotomies from the "Doctor" work their magic.

Growth, Growth, Growth...ahhhhhhhhh

[sunweb]

kublikhan - you are so good at cherry picking that it does no good to continue this "discussion" nor post Pedro Prieto's comment back to me. I see all you propose as BAU and elitist at that. I say go for it. Get off your paper and pencil world and go do it. You and I are done.

[vtsnowedin]

vtsnowedin, of course anywhere dollars are spent energy is used. But there is a vast difference in the amount of energy dollar A uses vs dollar B. Sunweb illustrated this point with a machine that gulps down a gallon a fuel every minute. Contrast that with the dollars that went to pay for the CEOs of America's biggest companies, all $5.2 billion of that. How big do you think the spread is on watts per dollar between feeding that diesel beast and paying those CEO's? Trying to come up with a simple rule of x Euros = y watts is oversimplifying things IMHO.
.

Yes an over simplification but still a good proxy of the upper limit of how much energy was used. Certainly you could not count the executive pay of say Zucerberg of Face book as a direct energy use as he is not working to produce energy as a finished product. But if you are drilling oil wells or building solar panels I think you can sum all the dollars spent including all labor and management , and you will have the sum of the energy invested in that well or panel by just converting from the market price of energy primarily used in the work. Diesel in a oil well and perhaps electricity in a solar panel factory being the conversion factors.
In the future the competition will be in finding how to build our solar panels and wind mills with the cheapest and most efficient source of energy. Worst case we will mine the aluminum using wood fired steam shovels.

[sunweb]

I was wrong not to share Pedro Prieto's response.

Surf wrote:EROEI is nothing more than watts in to make it and the Watts it produces. Anything that is not required to produce energy should not be included.

EROI is energy (not only watts, a form of expressing energy, particularly electric) spent to produce energy. The half interested truth is the second paragraph. To produce energy many things are required. It depends on the observer and the energy input boundaries selected. You may disregard the energy that took the engineer from his home to reach the manufacturing plant of wind turbines, but without him or the last cleaning employee of the WC’s in the factory, the wind turbines will never be manufactured.
...
Security cameras and electric alarms do consume a small amount of electricity. The 138.6 GW?H/Year factor he applies for security is in my opinion simply ridiculously large.

He misses the point. The security and alarms are not only the energy spent to operate them, but the monetary costs of manufacturing, installing them and maintaining them. I have recently had several warnings from the electric operator, threatening to void the energy supply contract, because he could not read remotely the digital meters. After a through research of the problem (not less than three visits from computer experts from Madrid), we came to the conclusion that the communication system we are forced to have for this remote reading (a point-to-point microwave, plus an ADSL line) had been misconfigurated or corrupted…precisely because the lot of voltage sags and swells coming from their medium tension (20 kv) line!!! We keep however, the responsibility, because they claim their company (Chinese walls in corporations!) is only responsible for remote readings, arguing that the company responsible for the quality of the electric supply (that they constantly violate) is another legal branch of the same multinational (Iberdrola). To be sure that they pay us for violating the terms of quality and stability of the medium tension electric grid, we would have to buy a homologated equipment (costing about 35,000 US$), which will have to be installed in the so called ‘frontier point’ between the PV plant and the grid. Is that energy never considered in the EROI traditional calculations (not even ours)?
...
Premature phase out??? Since when does Obsolescence effect the power generation or power required to make something. If a piece of equipment is obsolete but still works and is still being used it will not effect EROEI. And again the 148.4 GWh/year factor is way too big.

Again, misinterpreting the factor. Premature phase out refers to specific and dedicated equipment in the solar PV manufacturing plants throughout all the world, that have been forced to close, due to an economic and financial crisis that has collapsed sales in mainly all Europe. They are idle of creating dust in abandoned factories. Certainly, some of them are sometimes (sheldom) resold to Chinese manufacturers (not now). All of it, much before they have been amortized (long periods are calculated to this effect). But premature phase out also refers to sophisticated and very expensive R&D and manufacturing equipment bought by manufacturers that becomes obsolete also much before the amortization period they were originally calculated. Just thing in the myriad of breakthrough promising technologies, for which ad hoc machinery was produced, than then failed to reach the market in sufficient volume. Is this not energy in the PV global system?
...
All of this section is not an energy cost or necessary energy expenditure. They are simply optional financial cost. As far as I know there is no mathematical formula that links dollars to watts. Without such a link dollars spent cannot be considered a watt in or watt out.

Prieto and Hall EROEI calculations have come up before on Peakoil.com. Basically they make one massive mistake in there analysis. They assume Dollars = Watts. It does not. Some people get paid a lot of money for sitting at a desk and doing nothing (or nearly nothing) Others get paid little but do a lot of work. Since most of the cost for anything is the money spent to pay workers, assuming Dollar = watts is simply wrong.

Charlie has given to you enough explanations to this effect. Money (good money, real money that supposedly has to back PHYSICAL things or measurable and real SERVICES) have an undoubtable link to energy spent to produce them or to render the said services. It is somehow an unintelligible earflapping nt to see this. As it is not to understand that when the oil global production will start to slide, slope or cliff, those systems, like PV or wind systems, absolutely underpinned in a fossil fueled society, will start to climb to unaffordable heights (Doesn’t him feel the breath in the neck, with the last European installed power evolutions, including not only bankrupted Southern European countries like Spain, Portugal or Greece, but also Italy and even the technically and financially mighty Germany. The last two of them precisely after we wrote our book, not before?)

A good EROEI excludes labor. Then electricity, oil, and gas (all in watts or BTUs) is used to make it is totaled up to generate the energy in number. And then all the watts or BTUs of electricity , oil, and gas produced is totaled to generate the energy out number. And then finally the Energy out is divided by energy in to great the EROEI number.

Big mistake. A good EROI should never exclude labor. This gentleman is excluded from any serious conversation on the subject. For his information, we include labor only very partially.

The vast majority of researchers do it right and generate numbers significantly higher than the 2.45 EROEI number Preto and Hall came up with.

As Charlie has mentioned, we have talked and discussed extensively with most of these researchers. Conclusions have been drafted by Charlie very well. One of the persons intervening in the open discussion (Michael Jefferson, today editor of Energy Policy) came even to conclude that if methodologies adopted by the IEA on the solar PV EROI (basically prepared by Fthenakis et al, also endorsed by Raugei) had not included or calculated our factors, the IEA methodology should be seriously revisited. That’s all, that it is not little.

Pedro

I will tell you, I wish the solar dream was so, not because I have a financial investment in it which I don't but because it is going to be rough, so I can understand the wishful thinking.

[kublikhan]

StarvingLion, as far as I know most solar panels are not produced with nanomaterials. Nor am I arguing for infinite growth on a finite planet. The intend of my post was more along the lines of what Raugei was saying:

To conclude, I would like to dispel all doubts and clearly state that I do agree with the aforementioned ‘pessimists’ that if we (as a society) do not come to grips with the notion that there is no such thing as infinite growth on a finite planet, and re-align our goals and ‘development’ strategies accordingly, then all the technological fixes in the world stand little to no chance of being enough to avert an ominous crash. But, why write off PV (and other renewables) and deny their value as useful tools to (hopefully) help us out on a safe slide along the slopes of a "prosperous way down"?

sunweb, it was not my intention to cherry pick but there are a few problems with me rebutting Hall & Pedro's book.
#1 - I have not read their book. I have only read 2nd hand summations of the book like the one you posted. Therefore at best, I can only rebuttal the summations not the actual book. This is not an ideal situation as the summations and book might not be conveying the same information. You already saw this with Hall and Pedro's reply about premature phase out. I would like to read it but as far as I can tell it is not available online. I might pick it up next time I am out book shopping.

#2 - Hall & Pedro's reply was to Surf's post not my own. I posted Surf's post, you posted Hall's reply to that post, then you got upset I did not step in and speak on behalf of Surf. I'm sure you can see that all of these 3rd party rebuttals is a less than ideal debate format. I got into this mess once before on another forum and it did not end well.

As far as "going out and doing it", I still think Solar PV systems are too expensive for me to install at this time. You might know this if you had simply asked me instead of assuming I am blindly supporting PV out of wishful thinking. However costs are dropping fast and I might revisit this decision in a few years.

[sunweb]

kublikhan - I couldn't send all the posts to Hall and Prieto. They are email friends and very busy. I think their responses covered a lot of ground. I am holding a peace laurel out to you. I think we will perhaps disagree on the future or at least the immediate future. As I said in general, my concern is not to create false hopes. I believe on a finite planet we are in overshoot both in population and in resource use. I personally am trying to build an orchard/garden set up for the next generations. We have just picked our first blueberries yesterday. We are building up a very clay soil to give good yields. Our water system can be run with out electricity if necessary. I built a greenhouse using glass and not plastic that we are just learning to use. I built a root cellar with underground walls and for two years in a row we have had our produce last until the end of June. We are learning to dry foods using several methods including solar drying so that I just finished some potatoes and mushrooms that are from last year. We have amassed a lot of hand tools. The tractor I use in a 1956 Ford 860 a beauty. I have used the best fencing I can for the future. We have an annual picnic (10th year) with our neighbors to develop community here in the country. I drive a 1991 Honda CRX HF that gets 46 mpg and a Honda Reflex scooter that gets 65 mpg. I have pictures of most of this on my blog. All of this is a learning experience. I wish you the best of luck.

[GHung]

@yellowcanoe - I hate to burst your bubble, but we do have a few of those 'luxury' items. A properly sized off-grid system will have significant surplus on certain days after the batteries are fully charged (those that don't will have problems with battery longevity). Today is one of those days. Since the batteries are fully charged, I just turned on the small air conditioner to dehumidify things, and am running a load of laundry, the vaccum cleaner, etc., trying to utilize the surplus. Even then, the system is dumping power into the hot water tank. I suppose if we were grid-tied we could be putting those kWs on the grid for someone to keep their jacuzzi hot. Maybe I'll go bathe the dog instead, since the water tank began overflowing about noon and there's plenty of hot water.

If centralized, top-down systems could learn to more fully utilize RE surplusses which invariably come along during times of peak production, perhaps the fossil fuels could be saved to create more RE surplusses, which could be more fully utilized to save more fossil fuels..... Seems to work on a local scale anyway, where profit isn't involved. Instead, 'we' have more electronic billboards and such.

[kublikhan]

Sunweb, I also wish you luck.I don't have the green thumb you have. But I'd like to share one experience I had with clay soil. We were having trouble getting things to grow as the arable soil layer was thin and beyond that was a layer of hard clay. I ended up digging up the clay and replacing it with leaves, grass clippings, manure, dug up topsoil, etc. We eventually got some nice evergreens growing.

But now one of the trees is badly infested with some parasitic insect. Not sure if we can save the tree. We are worried the infestation might start spreading to the other trees if it has not already. Got some pesticide, hope it works.

[vtsnowedin]

Sunweb, I also wish you luck.I don't have the green thumb you have. But I'd like to share one experience I had with clay soil. We were having trouble getting things to grow as the arable soil layer was thin and beyond that was a layer of hard clay. I ended up digging up the clay and replacing it with leaves, grass clippings, manure, dug up topsoil, etc. We eventually got some nice evergreens growing.

But now one of the trees is badly infested with some parasitic insect. Not sure if we can save the tree. We are worried the infestation might start spreading to the other trees if it has not already. Got some pesticide, hope it works.

Cut it and burn it. Every twig. then wait a year at least before planting a replacement or try a different species.