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“Energy Returned On Energy Invested is the single most important concept to understanding energy, alternative energy, and peak oil.”
~ Charlie Stephens
By Catherine Austin Fitts
Thanks to a highly expensive effort to maintain secrecy and generate complexity and obfuscation, most of us generally have a limited understanding of the all-important topic of energy. This week, I am delighted to welcome independent energy consultant and systems engineer Charlie Stephens to the Solari Report for a two-part interview to enlighten us on energy in the 21st century.
After spending over two decades in the Coast Guard and Navy (retiring as a Navy commander) and another 17 years as a lead policy analyst at the Oregon Department of Energy, Charlie is just the person to lead us through the thicket of complexities that surrounds energy topics. His expertise extends to energy policy, energy efficiency, renewable energy, transportation systems and land use, economic and community development, macroeconomics, international trade, foreign policy and more.
In both Charlie’s and my estimation, a discussion of energy needs to start with the recognition that it is the central banking-warfare and industrial agriculture models and the energy-intensive control grid—and not weaponized environmental issues and “climate change” scams such as those related to carbon and nitrogen—that are the leading causes of environmental harm on the planet today. A second critical point is that for energy policy to be rational, it must take into account the concept of “energy return on investment” (EROI): a ratio that describes the amount of “energy produced in relation to the energy used to create it.”
Join us for Part I as we consider the availability of and EROI for sources of energy such as oil and gas, coal, ethanol, nuclear, hydro and geothermal, wind, and solar—as well as important unanswered questions about breakthrough energy.
Money & Markets:
This is the last week of the month, so there is no Money & Markets. The next Money & Markets will publish on September 7. Post questions at the Money & Markets commentary here.
There is a big difference between his EROEI and other estimates. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2015/02/11/eroi-a-tool-to-predict-the-best-energy-mix/?sh=61f9072fa027
Hi, Bronwen. I took a look at the link you provided, but the only conclusion I can draw is that one has to be really careful about such comparisons. For instance, the numbers can become really different depending on where you draw the analysis boundary. I can’t tell where their various boundaries are drawn, but there are a few clues. First, what they appear to be comparing here is relative energy inputs for the various fuels used to produce electricity – only (there are no figures for oil, for instance, and the note under “Natural Gas” (CCGT, or Combined Cycle Gas Turbine) imply that they’re drawing a notably different boundary around the analysis than Charlie Hall, the industrial ecologist whose work I relied on. Nor do they explain what they mean by “storage.” Electricity storage? Batteries? Pumped storage for hydro? Underground storage for natural gas? There is always a cost for storage, of whatever kind, so the zero storage cost for natural gas and coal are bogus. And I can tell you that the nuclear EROEI they show is not only wrong, it’s preposterous. Even the nuclear industry acknowledges that it’s below 10, and that doesn’t count any long-term energy costs, which are substantially unknown. Example – the Trojan nuclear plant in Oregon was shuttered, decommissioned, dismantled, and carted off to be buried at the Hanford nuclear reservation (at significant energy cost), but it’s still using a lot of energy – to cool the spent fuel in the pool that’s still at the site. That fuel will need to be cooled perpetually for thousands of years. I can guarantee you that none of the significant energy required for this is included in the number you see in the Forbes article. So beware – make sure you’re comparing apples and apples. It’s also true that most of these EROEIs are steadily decreasing, except for solar, which has gotten somewhat better as thin-film technology improves. As is the case with most “current events,” they don’t stay current too long these days. Thanks for the focus on this important issue. And have a great start to 2024. Charlie
Excellent analysis, especially about producing ethanol requiring more energy than it provides. We should use the land more productively ASAP. With respect to the CO2 issue, here is a different perspective:
Recently, Mr. Clauser joined another Nobel laureate and over 1,600 professionals in signing the World Climate Declaration (WCD) organized by Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL). This declaration asserts that there is no “climate emergency,” that climate change science is not conclusive, and that the earth’s history over thousands of years shows a consistently changing climate.
The current models do not account for clouds and are for a world without clouds.
i
Well, Eugene, that argument about climate science not being conclusive is a very old one. I have documentation (so old that it pre-dates personal computers) of the fossil fuel industry’s campaign (still ongoing) to convince people of exactly that. After a time they sensed that it wasn’t working so they shifted messages. Climate change is real, but humans aren’t causing any of it. That campaign has been out there for more than 20 years now, too. So far, they’ve spent billions, literally, and a lot of the messaging is pretty much the same. Meanwhile, the Navy has been measuring a lot of the changes taking place because of the massive melting of ice on the whole planet. I know this personally because I was aboard for one of those submarine missions back in 1972. The physical evidence of the change is pretty obvious if you look in the right places. The mainstream prefers not to look. Try looking at the tundra across the whole of the northern hemisphere. Read up on the problems this is creating for the Alaska oil pipelines now that the tundra is no longer frozen enough to support the pipeline, much less access it for maintenance or repair.
Are humans the only cause of climate changes? No, they aren’t, that’s true. There are other factors. So what are those factors? Are they still operative? What’s the scale of their impact compared to the human impact? Why is everyone so focused on CO2 when refrigerant molecules are thousands of times stronger than CO2 as a greenhouse gas, and we’ve released millions of pounds of those chlorinated and fluorinated compounds into the atmosphere? Given that the same racketeers who are threatening us with slavery have been engineering the weather all over the northern hemisphere for decades now, how do we know what the real climate conditions actually are? The engineering over my head was particularly creative today.
I would just suggest that we’ve been awash in propaganda, lies and deceit for more than 100 years now, so we really have no idea what’s true. People just highlight the “data” that supports what they believe. As I’ve mentioned, this didn’t use to be a political debate – it was a scientific debate, at a time when the propaganda about the climate hadn’t really begun. That’s when I started looking at the stratospheric physics. The Russians were publishing some excellent papers in the 1960s and you just had to look in the right places to find them. The physics haven’t changed. The models have, and some have gotten better. But a model can deliver whatever answer you want.
Let’s quit arguing about the climate and stop the racketeers from poisoning us with their industrial “food,” their chemicals, and their pharmaceuticals. Eliminating only those things, for the sole reason of regaining our collective health, would likely resolve whatever climate issues there are, for reasons that have nothing whatever to do with climate change. Charlie
Agree about models and stopping the racketeering, especially the pharmaceuticals.
I would say I agree with Charlie thoroughly. There is no Royal Road to energy. The world is mentally stymied by the nebulous prospect of climate change, which is itself a phenomenon far beyond the pay grade of mankind. Fossil fuels, to use the dialect, don’t enter into it.
We have a wealth of petroleum and related substances such as coal and gas which make tolerable life on Earth for eight billion people possible. It is still the most efficient, in terms of energy available for energy expended, to produce. It is limited by extractive rate, regardless of what we think its provenance might be.
There are Limits To Growth, and the eponymous book will be one of my coming investigations. (I had always assumed its intention.) Nevertheless, I agree that there is such a thing as zero point energy, as discussed this with Joseph Farrell when we met in Louisville. My concept of it is identical to what Charlie suggests, and that it is based on the Planck constant. I do not personally possess the mathematical skill to elaborate it to the satisfaction of scientists, but I can picture how it would work. One of the first things you come to is the acceptance of (A)ether versus empty space. In fact, empty space is the product of empty minds. Space would be defined by what it contains, not by nothing. What it contains is a minimum spacing of matter / energy by the Planck constant.
It stands to reason that compression of space stores energy, and the torsion of space, which is what makes planets and galaxies rotate is the ultimate source of energy, irrespective of the proximate medium. If we have the technology currently, and it is not being shared, that is perhaps the ultimate in cosmic myopia, because its capabilities would be infinite in respect to combustion fuels.
Incidentally, if it was an epiphany you had with respect to the relationship of oil and currency, that they are interchangeable, it is an assumption that most of us in the energy industry understand intuitively. All things in this temporal realm require movement, which requires force through a distance, which is exchangeable with energy. Oil happens to be easily adaptable to what Clif High calls Bronze Age machinery.
It will be interesting to see what Charlie says in part two.
Well John, you and I are a lot on the same wavelength. I’m not sure what your background is but it sounds eclectic, like mine.
There are some fundamental system characteristics and rules that govern a lot of what we take for granted in the world. The way in which plant life is able to harness the sun’s energy and the mineral endowment of the Earth to reduce entropy – to structure and organize the fundamental elements of the universe to make energy is one of the most elegant and impressive systems there is. The way living cells make energy, micro electro-chemically, and another example of how natural systems do for us, just in pursuing life itself.
Humans are at a rather rudimentary level when it comes to understanding how the cosmos works. As a species, we demonstrate that every day. The economic system we’re all embedded in determines what energy sources are used, by whom, and at what cost. In this system, enormous costs aren’t accounted for, because it would call into question the intelligence of pursuing the things we do. Energy is a great place to see how the whole system works. It’s built on material throughput, for the purpose of producing ever expanding wealth, as defined by those with the most wealth. This means throughput is good, liquidation of natural capital is good, waste is good, without end. That’s the primary goal of the system. Every sector of the economy is designed this way.
I wouldn’t say that my understanding of the relationship between oil and “currency” was much of an epiphany. I’ve focused a lot of attention over the last 50 years on macroeconomics, American and world history, American and Western foreign policy, and the activities of the War Department. All of these activities are just part of the worldwide grifting operation of the world’s longest running crime syndicate. That’s too big a subject to tackle here, but unless one understands this fundamental fact, and the various criminal rackets running this whole thing, nothing much else makes sense.
So all of this undergirds how I interpret the information I encounter. Once you understand the system, it’s easy to see it for what it is. A tiny handful of humans have largely determined how we conduct ourselves as a species – as a bunch of spoiled-rotten teenagers. But in truth its a racket that has been selecting for psychopaths and sociopaths for centuries, and is now a collection of the worst the human species has to offer in the collective unfolding of the universe.
So when it comes to energy, we squander most of what we use, no matter the source, by design. Most of the waste is in doing things that shouldn’t be done at all, like poisoning the planet, comprehensively, to the tune of millions of tons of poisons each year. The violence racket consumes vast amounts of energy and resources, for the purpose of inflicting, death, destruction, destitution, disease, and displacement on most of the world.
So we have a lot of growing up to do as a species, provided we don’t commit suicide first. The transformation we need is more spiritual than material. Nice to have you there in conversation, John. Charlie
Thank you Mr. Stephens and Catherine,
You have moved my needle on climate change a smidge.
What struck a cord deep within me Mr. Stephens was when you spoke to the hierarchy of primary goals that our human system is based on. Change the goal and you change the system.
I don’t know if you are a spiritual man but what you describe is a spiritual problem.
And we have a solution.
PAX
As it happens, I’m pretty deeply spiritual, Kari. And solutions to our human predicament are as much a spiritual change as a change of habit or conduct. The Dark Side that is destroying most everything it touches is very old, and needs only the absence of light to prevail. I sense that we’re awash in religion but we have an acute shortage of spirituality in practice. In the same sense that society is awash in old people but we have an acute shortage of elders. Charlie
I agree the goal is definitely control to harvest, or rather exploit, resources and populations, not to generate money, which is simply a tool and like Catherine said, can be printed out of thin air. I might use the general term of “acquisition” to state their goal, as it can encompass all of the above. Loving this interview and all the information from the presenter! It’s got to be one of my favourite Solari reports so far.
Thank you very much, Natasha. It’s nice to have you in the conversation. I have no idea where it will go but I’d very glad for all of it. Charlie
Dear Catherine and Mr Stephans,
Thank you for this wealth of useful information. Charles, please share name of the engineer and or the particular asphalt i-beam road design which might turn up material about the project. Links would great.
We are responsible for a 2000ft rural road which needs repaving every 2 to 3 years at great expense for our business. W’d pay royalties to get a 60 year service life on the road.
Best wishes, NB
aka Think-R-thwim
I second this request!
Well, Nicholas, I happen to have a nice little .pdf file about it, with a side-by-side design comparison as part of the document. I would just have to figure out how to get that to you as part of the Solari context. Perhaps Catherine or Carolyn can advise me on how to do that. Charlie
Charlie:
Just email to me and I will have posted on the server so you can post the link
Catherine
Oh Joy, Thank you! I have an Apple burner email below:
celladorr@icloud.com
A Dropbox link or equivalent would be great or just send the file if it is small enough for your mail server.
Sent by e-mail. Charlie
Would it be possible to post the link on this page so it can be downloaded by all? Thank you so much!
Charlie: If you send, we will post on server and post link.
Yes I agree that nuclear should have to absorb the risk but that’s not stopping them from implementing regardless of we the people.
It seems to me they’re pushing for a nuclear future.
Press Release
Oklo Inc.
Oklo Tentatively Selected to Provide Clean and Resilient Power to Eielson Air Force Base
08/31/2023
The Defense Logistics Agency Energy, on behalf of the United States Air Force and the United States Department of Defense, has selected Oklo as the pending contractor awardee to site a micro-reactor at Eielson Air Force Base in Alaska to provide clean, reliable power to the facility.”
https://oklo.com/newsroom/news-details/2023/Oklo-Tentatively-Selected-to-Provide-Clean-and-Resilient-Power-to-Eielson-Air-Force-Base/default.aspx
I’m afraid you’re right – the nuclear racket intends to continue. One just has to understand that every one of the energy rackets is tapping the public treasury, which is deep in the red. That’s how rackets function – the racketeers go to work each day, like many of the rest of us, and work in their own interest. They just have much more wealth and power than most of us, so they get to design the system. This is just one example of why none of Adam Smith’s characteristics of a free market economy are true, and never have been, except at the smallest scale of market transactions – local, at the neighborhood or community level. Most communities wouldn’t choose a nuclear power generator if they had to buy it, maintain it, take on all of the risk connected to its proper and safe functioning, and deal with whatever disposal issues may need to be dealt with in the future. There are less expensive, safer, and simpler systems.
If we truly had a free market economy, and if all of the public subsidies went away, we would have very different economic and energy systems. Charlie
Great interview. Chicago school economics being the chemical which the tapeworm releases to make the host hungry. I laughed out loud at that. So true. The chemical affects us on a mental level.
“Why is nuclear so successful in France?”
Jimmy Dore covering the recent French bombing of Niger, alleges that they have deals where they get Uranium at far below market rate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=to1ngiM-Y0g
This article seems to downplay the role of Niger, but 20% of French Uranium imports does not seem insignificant to me.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/how-dependent-is-france-on-niger-s-uranium_6080772_8.html
Hi, Brandon. Nuclear is so successful in France for the same reasons it’s successful here (there are about 400 nuclear power units operating in the U.S.), and it’s because of massive subsidies. Energy prices are also a good bit higher in Europe (one reason why they tend to be more efficient in their use of energy), which helps justify the extremely high costs (per MW of capacity) to build and operate these plants. You’ll also find that the countries with the most nuclear generation are also the countries with nuclear weapons – they go hand in hand.
France does, indeed, get a good deal on Niger’s uranium. Back in the early 1960s, Africa began to decolonize. By 1964 many countries had declared independence. But France’s colonies – in the Sahel – never really escaped colonization. They went from a physical colonization to an economic colonization, all dealing with each other and with France using the French franc, all producing commodities that are subject to world commodity markets and trading (run by the financial mafia), and importing finished (value-added) goods from France. Their commodity sales revenue tends to be less than they spend on the finished goods, which is great for France and not so great for the Sahel countries like Niger, Mali, Gabon, etc. They’re all in hock to the banksters, many of which are French banksters.
No one has yet figured out what will be done with the spent fuel from these plants all over the world, and none of those unknown costs are accounted for in the economics equation for nuclear generation. It’s presumed that the public will pick up the tab, as just another giant subsidy for the industry, but one that’s pretty essential for the military-industrial-surveillance complex. It turns out that we really have enough power generation that we can forego the 20 percent or so that’s provided by nuclear. But we will still have to deal with the waste at some point, and a lot of it depends on the electric grid being reliably there to keep the stuff cool in the meantime. None of the energy associated with these unknown waste disposal solutions is included in the nuclear EROEI. Charlie
dear Catherine,
thank you for your work and for this amazing discussion about energy with Charlie Stephens. I’m just finishing the first part and I had to stop the video when Zero Point Energy was named… I should have written to you much earlier about this topic but my deep rooted aversion to take part in the digital galaxy had so far prevented me to do it.
Zero Point Energy is real, and a devise that produce energy has been already invented and is ready for mass production.
I’m an Italian living in the US North West, and the inventor of this devise is Italian as well, Andrea Rossi, that move some year ago into Miami. His story is a long one, is difficult to summarize for me know, but I’ following is work for about 14 years and even if is not known ans when named is almost always denigrated, I believe his invention is real. He has some unknown financial backer, he claims that the production plant is ready and what he needs it to reach a confirmed pre-order of 1 million of his 100Watt units, with no money upfront. The reason for that is that his device could be relatively easily revers engineered.
His e-cat (this was the devise original name) doesn’t use any fuel, doesn’t generate any pollution, doesn’t emit any radiation, it’s portable and may last many years. We can guaranty 11 years of continuous use.
He has a video on Youtube that show a lamp powered by his device with no other electrical connection going on for several months.
Here the link:
https://www.youtube.com/@ecatthenewfire
Here the web site of the Leonardo corporation: https://ecatthenewfire.com/
Here the his very interesting blog address, that is basically a a question and answer platform… He answer to anyone who ask questions… and the level of the discussion is very high.. with a lot of engineers and scientists discussing his invention:
http://new.rossilivecat.com/
He have also planned a presentation of his device for the second half of October where two electric cars, one regular the other with the ecat will run around a track in south of Italy for 12 hours. The bet is the car e with the e-cat will never stop (except for the change of the pilot) and at the end of the 12 hours the battery will be still fully charged.
I hope you are going to have a look at it and spread the voice to your subscriber to help him to reach his 1 million unit order.
thank you again Catherine, if you need more information just mail me:
lenuvole@protonmail.com
riccardo pompili
Thank you Riccardo. I am aware of Rossi as a result of participating in a series of Breakthrough Energy conferences put on by one of my partners over the last decade. See the link in the Lost Century documentary which is movie of the week this coming week – I recommend it – a great overview. Another one of my partners is an investor in Brilliant Light – also breakthrough Energy. Off and on have worked briefly with investors who had been doing venture in breakthrough energy. Lot so potential. I am wondering if the push for total control is so that such technology can be introduced and adapted.
I’ve just finished Part I of 21st Century Energy with Charlie Stephens and I’d like to put a few thoughts down before moving on to Part II.
First my thanks to Charlie, particularly for his insights into Limits to Growth. I know that grappling with the setup and the code of a Model is very different that looking in from the outside, and I would be very interested to hear of any further insights he may have. I’ll add that I note that some processes peak around 2015~2020 in the model – any comments on that?
I suspect we all have a gut feeling that the corruption in this world is strongly linked to pollution, and that came through quite strongly.
Similarly, much of what was said is viewed through a US lens. Germany is now grappling with much higher costs, electricity costs of around 35 US cents equivalent for retail electricity as an example. Hence while using electricity to manage a building may reduce energy consumption in that building, it isn’t necessarily cost effective, nor energy-effective globally.
And yes, subsidies allow for “cheaper” energy at the point of consumption, but that results in houses that leak energy, and once built, they will be with us for 60 years or so. Plus the propaganda that urges people to keep the thermostat high on their central heating in winter rather than put on a pullover.
Getting back to the helicopter view … Nations have to have an Energy Strategy. They trade Diversity and Security for Efficiency and Costs. Hence it is possible to calculate the cost of having, say, 20% of electricity from nuclear generation versus natural gas. A political decision then gets made on what the future is likely to hold, which is where Limits to Growth comes in.
I’ll have to revisit some calculations but take this as a personal view : I’d guess nuclear generation has an ERoEI of 10 and that to keep the conditions to which we have become accustomed an EroEI of 11 is necessary. But that is slightly different for each Nation and each land and climate.
I look forward to Part II.
Hello, Richard. Thanks very much for the responses here. I’ll apologize in advance for some brevity in my answers – I could go on for quite a while based on your cues here.
For a bit of background, I spent 17 years at the Oregon Department of Energy, representing the interests of the people of Oregon in a number of state and federal processes. I spent a lot of time helping the Oregon Public Utility Commission in regulating our natural gas and electric utilities, and fully engaged in national energy issues, including the decommissioning of nuclear plants and all of the policy and analytical work that went into those processes. The Pacific Northwest was an excellent setting in which to immerse oneself in all of the complex issues around energy supply and demand. I’ll get to the Limits to Growth area at the end here.
As far as the US lens goes, I can talk about Europe’s situation to some extent, but I’m not as fully knowledgeable about those circumstances as I am about energy reality in North America. But I will say that I’m not vehemently against the use of natural gas at this time in history, even with its carbon footprint, which is a lot better than coal’s carbon footprint. But from a physics perspective, it turns out to be a far more efficient use of natural gas to burn it in a combined cycle combustion turbine plant, at 51-53% efficiency, and then use the electricity to run heat pumps for most low-temperature end uses. Every kWh of electricity in that scenario gets a high COP – Coefficient of Performance, which is the ratio of energy output or energy moved to the amount of energy input to produce or move it. At a COP of about 2.5, you use less natural gas by making electricity with it than you would if you burned it at the building, even with the most efficient natural gas equipment. Most heat pump systems today, if properly selected, installed and controlled, deliver a seasonal COP between 3 and 4. Natural gas combustion turbines are also used to “shape” the more intermittent renewable contributions to the grid (like solar and wind), which is a good thing.
My fundamental point though is that we’re currently generating far more electricity than we need to use, or should use, not because of the environmental damage (which is extensive, for sure), but because we waste a majority of it. Which is great for the energy rackets’ revenue, but benefits no one or anything else. Given enough time, I can describe more fully where a lot of that waste is. For instance, you’d be shocked to know how much of our total energy is used by the violence racket, directly (for military operations) and indirectly (to power the entire defense industrial complex). And then there’s the massive use by the chemical industry (more than 30 percent of commercial and industrial energy), produce many products that are so toxic to life that they shouldn’t exist at all.
As for nuclear power, it has an EROEI of about 5 – less than what we need to have just to maintain our societal infrastructure as it is. And given the destruction that’s being meted out by the rackets in recent years, Lahaina being only the most recent example, we’ll actually need a lot more than that. You’re correct that the minimum EROEI is different for each society, and the more technological and complex the society, the higher its minimum EROEI will be.
Truth be told, none of us really knows the real cost of any of our energy sources or systems. The subsidies for every one of them are so massive, so long-term, and so opaque that we really have no idea what makes true economic sense, and we don’t even ask whether they make physical or environmental sense. Trillions in revenue are at stake by now, which is the source of the inertia in the subsidy program and where public and private money is invested in energy technologies. Zero Point energy (a term coined by Max Planck many years ago) exists and could be easily tapped, but it would end much of the trillions in revenue. But that’s another whole topic of conversation.
As for the Limits to Growth, the model’s scenario projections from the early 1970s have been validated much more recently (2012) by others. But I’ll add that the model was overly optimistic and we knew it. It didn’t, and realistically couldn’t, take into account the impacts of the violence rackets. It’s clearly impossible to predict what sort of war, where, for how long, with what level of damage, death and destruction should be modeled. But we do know that all of the impacts are highly negative for life on Earth and human societies. We also didn’t realize that the human systems we were modeling were increasingly controlled by a giant matrix of syndicated criminal rackets of long standing – rackets that would have no interest in more sustainable outcomes, because all of their wealth and power come from activities that are, in economist Michael Hudson’s terms, killing the host. They’ve designed their system – predatory capitalism – with a reinforcing feedback loop that, in the absence of balancing feedback loops, always destroys the system. No exceptions. That loop is called “success to the already successful.” In nature it’s called overshoot.
So there’s a lot to talk about and digest here. Thanks for bringing some important things to the surface for discussion. Charlie
WoW – huge thanks for that reply. How to begin to respond?
LTG : The Business as Usual (BAU) model turned out to be predictive. I read that only China’s one child policy made a sight dent in the numbers. The last modelling I looked at (2014) suggested that the peaks may be delayed by a few years. I’m guessing that may cause the declines to be more rapid. And pollution was one of the vectors, hence I’m wondering if renaming it to “corruption” might be closer to the truth.
Nuclear : one of the factors in nuclear is the purity of the fuel. Submarine reactors use 95~98% enriched fuel and are much more compact. For obvious reasons the commercial reactors use 2~4% uranium 235 in the fuel rods. That choice may affect the ERoEI. Risk versus costs? And regarding subsidy, The deal that Theresa May did with China for the UK’s latest reactors was to guarantee IIRC £39 per MWh which was close to twice the cost of wholesale electricity just then.
That is not the entire story. I’ll do a bit of scene-setting to explain.
Blackouts have costs. One figure I read a while ago would be the equivalent of today’s $50,000 per KWh for the first hour of blackout.
Imagine a little Island Nation has the following legacy generation total = 1000MW. It has 500MW of CCGT, 250MW of Gas Generation, and 250MW that it can swap between coal, gas or HFO. Recently, 500 MW of wind and solar generation was installed, because green. (and subsidies)
And somehow, people now believe they can move to electric cars because in summer almost all the generation is from wind.
There’s not a huge amount of industry, and it it wasn’t for “renewables” fossil fuels would go to transport, industry, household, and electricity in the ratios : 25%; 25%; 25%; and 25% – except in winter, when the household ratio % is higher. And they don’t have heat pumps.
To move all of the transport and some of the heating to electricity and avoiding blackouts means installing, notionally, another 1000MW of electricity generation. And reinforcing the entire grid to handle it.
Pick an answer …… I’ll go for 500MW of nuclear and 500MW of CCGT, but if you have a better solution, that’s worth discussing.
There’s another problem. Nuclear power plants, in particular, do not like rapid changes in load. Maybe shorter design life is the only problem, but idling nuclear generation impacts their ERoEI too.
Well there’s lots of good information and observation here, Richard. I don’t find much to disagree with. With regard to the peaks in our societal curves in the World 3 (or other models), there are quite a few exponential equations that underlie the curves of the variables we examined. That causes things to look just great, the moment before the peak of the curve, and the decline down the other side. One thing you have to remember about these models, you actually have to ignore all of the outputs that happen after the crash of the system, assuming it really is a crash. That’s because the crash renders all of the equations used to describe the system behavior in the past are largely irrelevant, and there’s no way to predict exactly how the downside will go.
I guess my most important point is, and has been for most of my public policy career, that we waste so much of the energy we generate and mine that we can do without nuclear- and coal-fired generation entirely and still have enough. The key is getting rid of all of the economic activity that is destroying life and the planet. All of that activity uses more than half of the energy we consume, and the system outcomes are highly negative for the vast majority of people and planet. In other words, before we argue over what power generation technology we want to use, maybe we should seriously assess how much we actually need, and then maybe even try an actual market approach, without the subsidies, and see what makes the final cut.
I have a sense that all of this will be moot very soon – we actually won’t need any of this. Charlie
My son is a PhD Chemical Engineer currently employed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. His current area of research is catalysts to increase the efficiency of conversion of natural gas into chemicals used as feedstock for plastic. He gave me this little tidbit of information:
Ethanol is used in gasoline as a substitute for tetra-ethyl lead (which is present in order to get the ‘octane’ rating of the gasoline up to what is needed for the current gasoline engine design; at a lower octane rating, your engine ‘knocks’–which in turn lowers the efficiency of the engine).
Richard Purdy
Your son is correct. However, this situation may have a long history that he’s not aware of. It was Pierre Du Pont, on the board of General Motors in the 1920s, who put Charles Kettering on the task of finding an octane booster to help deal with the growing problem of engine “knocking” (the premature detonation of part of a cylinder charge – well before the piston in the cylinder reaches TDC – top dead center – because of the increasing compression ratios of the engines of the day). Charles Kettering discovered that ethanol would do the job, though it has a lot lower Btu content than gasoline (85,000 Btu/gal versus 125,000). However, Du Pont observed that anyone could make ethanol in their back yard. He wanted something patentable. Which is how we ended up with tetra-ethyl lead for managing this problem. It was well known at the time that lead was toxic to all animal life, including humans, but Du Pont didn’t care. It took decades for the health concerns to win out.
I believe in the end we’ll find that natural gas is too precious to be used for making plastics. Part of the reason that research is being funded is because the production of conventional natural gas is declining fairly quickly. Lots of other hydrocarbons accompany the production of conventional natural gas – ethane, propane, butane, pentane, hexane, and on up the molecular size chart. All of these have traditionally been used to make plastic, chemicals, and pharmaceuticals. As conventional natural gas production declines, replaced by fracked natural gas, the supply of natural gas liquids also declines, which leaves the market having to figure out how to more effectively use methane, only, as a feedstock. In the end, what we really need to do is use a LOT less plastic. Charlie
Just LOVED this presentation! Thank you, Catherine, thank you!
oh wow. An interview with someone who was involved. A recent paper on Nature.com really exposes their intentions. I wonder if Charlie has read this:
Inequality can double the energy required to secure universal decent living | Nature Communications
Hello, Zhirayr. I hadn’t seen this Nature paper, partly perhaps because I’ve come not to trust this particular source much anymore. This is a very complicated subject that would merit a whole conversation just about that. However, one has to keep in mind that there have been lots of people living a very decent life in recent years using dramatically less energy per capita than we do here in America. In fact, our economy is designed to use vast amounts of energy while wasting most of it. I’m having no trouble reducing commercial building energy use by two-thirds, and our commercial buildings use a huge fraction of our electricity. And then there’s all of the commercial and industrial energy use that shouldn’t happen at all because it’s being used in the cause of poisoning us all. The folks who wrote this paper looked at a very limited set of measures for changing energy use – they see it as a supply constraint instead of a waste problem. Charlie
Thanks for posting all these replies, I’m enjoying reading the comments. Personally I can see that all electric, under the current system, is designed to facilitate control under the guise of efficiency. I have no doubt in my mind about that. However when you do these jobs electrifying to improve the efficiency of these commercial buildings, how much consideration is being taken to identify the impact on the humans which inhabit these dwellings? I ask because here in Australia we’ve experienced a massive push in residential as well as commercial to replace all light fittings, meters, appliances etc etc with “energy saving” bulbs, SMART meters etc. The problem is these devices make it impossible to get a good night’s sleep, think clearly etc due to the EMF and unnatural generation of the source of light or frequency, as opposed to something which is analogue in nature. LED or Fluorescent vs Incandescent being the most straight forward example. They might be more efficient but they make you feel like you’re living in a laboratory instead of a home. Electricians will say oh you just need the warm one or turn voltage down but frankly they are not the same, the body knows the difference. That is my and many other’s personal experience. The latest in Australia is government wanting to get rid of everyone’s efficient and effective gas stoves and replace with slow and expensive electric, so that once everyone is fully on grid they can turn power usage on or off to a particular household or neighbourhood based on arbitrary quotas or credit scores, whilst tracking everyone’s usage (compliance). Of course efficiency is necessary, but not at the behest of human slavery. Even regarding heating systems, an electric heating unit which blows hot air might use less power (I’d need to be convinced of that, as they always seem to have highest bills), but the heating effect is awful for health when compared to a water heating, oil or gas heating system. All I know is that the body knows when the source of generation is not organic, and suffers accordingly. I think better to focus on addressing agricultural practices to switch to regenerative farming as discussed to reduce waste and need for generation in first place. We should also be perfecting analogue technology and maintaining and repairing existing infrastructure, making it as efficient as possible, not changing everything over to digital to save on waste in a system designed with waste in mind, as was so correctly pointed out. I know my efficient, organic, analogue world is nothing but a pipe dream as everyone is so obsessed with and addicted to all this digital stuff and will never go backwards, but it never hurts to voice an opinion nonetheless.
I have to agree with a lot of what you say here, Natasha. I’m not a big fan of digital and lighting is a whole area of discussion. I prefer daylight, actually, and good building daylighting, but that was displaced by “technology” a while ago. What I do in commercial buildings simply makes warm air or water using a refrigerant (oddly enough, in colder climates, the refrigerant can be CO2) instead of burning fossil fuels of any sort. Our equipment is 300-400 percent efficient, versus the 80-95 percent efficiency of natural gas equipment. But the key to the whole-system optimization revolves around the ventilation system, which delivers 100 percent highly filtered outside air, all the time, at almost no energy cost. I try to be mindful of every aspect of all of the systems I study and use, including impact on living things (and yes, RF radiation is harmful to living things, at exposure levels much lower than the Tech rackets are allowed by rule to inflict on us all. That needs to change. So for me, simpler is better, analog is better, manual can often be better than automatic, etc. You sound like you’re on the right track to ways of conducting ourselves that aren’t so harmful. Charlie
Thanks Charlie for your reply. That’s awesome to hear – a refrigerant for heating is an interesting idea, certainly haven’t heard of it before but if anything like what’s in the dehumidifiers then it sounds like nice clean air! This conversation has shown me how necessary it is for us to explain what we mean by commonly used terminology, such as “energy efficiency”. I was thinking one thing, and you were referring to something completely different. Governments and media always co-opt these terms to mislead everyone. And hear hear on daylight in buildings! My office has two massive old fashioned skylights, it might not have a window which isn’t ideal lol but the skylights are awesome. Make such a difference. Also we know CO2 isn’t bad, it’s necessary for life! Great if you can put to such good use. I enjoyed your explanation of the current issue with CO2, being its predominance in the atmosphere instead of being absorbed by and stored in the soil. It makes so much sense. And that’s a problem that can be solved. By reconnecting with nature. Just goes to show it is possible to explain what’s going on without resorting to alarmism… wish the media would take note ha ha.
I loved studying systems theory in college and am so grateful Charlie, for your policy conclusion of just simply stopping all the wasteful choices…..THANK YOU! I attempt to teach wholistic and systems thinking to my counseling clients. I find it very challenging as the fracturing and fragmentation in our perception is deep and fissured. I will play this interview in class and I look forward to more of these.
So gratified to see how much you all are enjoying this series with Charlie. I have looked and looked and looked for someone who can talk energy on an integrated picture from Macro to Micro to Macro. Charlie has been a blessing as this is a very important conversation to have.
Thank you very much, Sharon! I think it helps a lot to be someone who has always wanted to know how everything actually works. Systems thinking is the polar opposite of reductionism, which our scientific and technical community has been rutted in for many, many decades, if not centuries. Do keep trying with your clients – it’s worth it.
While not mentioned in this discussion, another problem with biofuels is that they deplete nutrients in the soil that could otherwise have been used to feed us.
Very true, Lauren. Biofuels are a big component of industrial agriculture, which needs to end, for a number of important reasons. Charlie
that’s not really true since they only extract carbon and sulphur and the remainder is like perfect humus and -at least over here in germany- being spread on the fields. the farmers even pay for it, it’s bio fertilizer!
i mean really, they put in highly acidic chicken-, turkey-, pig-, and cow-excrements and produce perfectly usable compost.
This one goes into the column of an instant classic! Thank you for the discussion.
I’ve begun the search for some acreage, probably in the mountains of NC. One of the things I am in the early stages of investigating is the feasibility of a micro hydroelectric generator. I hope Charlie goes into that in part 2. If not, I’d love his thoughts on that as a source of energy , and the degree to which it might be scalable for multiple homes privately.
The Solari investment has a tremendous ROI, and this is just the latest example.
Hello, Neal. Great area to discuss, but we don’t get into that level of detail in Part 2, so I’ll answer here. Micro-hydro is a fine way to generate electricity. Provided you divert only a small part of stream’s flow, over the shortest distance possible, it’s probably one of the lowest-impact ways of making electricity. Your power generated is a product of head (vertical height between the water inlet and the generator) and the mass of water going through the turbine. So more height allows you to use less water, and vice versa. The best places are at waterfall locations where the only impact is on the amount of water going over the falls. As long as you have a year round stream with sufficient volume in the summer and into the fall, you have potential. Obviously, the more homes you connect, the more impact you’ll have. Remember to make sure that your home(s) is/are as efficient as possible, which keeps the impact and cost of the project at a minimum. Charlie
Has everyone seen this retired Firefighter talking about Maui all the rest of the horrific fires America has had in the last decade or so?
https://rumble.com/v3dgiiq-firefighter-whistleblower-maui-attack-not-a-wildfire-insurance-adjuster-spe.html
I don’t know who he is, but he seems knowledgeable. He has a tiktok but I don’t know how to use that, so I found the same video on the Tim Truth Rumble site. The firefighter’s tiktok is listed under the video.
AND
Have you seen what the EPA is going to be spraying on the Maui burnt homes/ash piles? It is a nightmare. The spray called a “soil tackifier” (uh, sounds important. NOT) It was going to be dyed pink but after the backlash they are going to spray the crap without the pink dye.
I can’t think of anything more toxic than what the EPA is going to use on these homes! The spokes person for the EPA in the video says he is doing it to stop the ash that might be toxic from going in the ocean, but the stuff they are spraying on the ash has a warning on the label to not use near rivers, lakes and other bodies of water!!!! Ah!
Oh and to top it off the EPA guy was there in Northern California on video“cleaning up” fire victim’s homes and belongings…to “keep everyone safe”, there might be something dangerous or toxic in the rubble.
Complete nightmare. I can’t stop saying that.
Video about pink goo and the EPA:
https://rumble.com/v3db1fg-sprayed-with-pink-goo-epa-to-nonconsensually-coat-victims-off-limit-homes-w.html
Video after the pink goo was stopped after a public backlash, but they are still going to spray the junk, just without the pink:
https://rumble.com/v3dey7o-stealth-spraying-after-backlash-feds-will-not-be-adding-pink-dye-to-the-non.html
Praying for all of the fire victims. Praying for us all.
-Jen
Hello Gerdt, and thanks for the good questions and observations. I’ll work my way down through your information here.
Catherine is correct that energy self-sufficiency, to the maximum extent possible, is very desirable, as Europe has been reminded with the Nordstream attack. As a rule, agriculturally derived liquid fuels have a very low EROEI – typically less than 1.5 :1. But if you have a farm and can use farm byproducts or waste to provide energy for the farm, that makes perfect sense, as long as you count all of the inputs. But overall, in a complex society like we in the West enjoy needs an overall EROEI between 5:1 and 8:1, according to professor Charlie Hall, who published a good paper on this back in about 2013.
As for efficiency of use, that’s very definitely important, and from a systems perspective, always to be considered. In basic terms, one has to look at what you want to do with the energy. From a physics perspective, it doesn’t make thermodynamic sense to burn a fossil fuel at 1,900 degrees C to heat water to 55C or heat air to 20C. The thermal waste is quite large. That’s why natural gas furnaces and boilers are less efficient overall, including power plant losses, grid line losses – all in – than using a good 21st century heat pump system. Natural gas heating systems – the whole system, pumps, fans, controls, cycling losses, piping losses, etc. – are somewhere between 60 and 80 percent, typically. A typical heat pump is about 300 percent. I do a lot of that kind of work in commercial buildings these days – the savings by converting are typically 60-75 percent.
Turning to transportation, internal combustion engines aren’t very efficient at all – about the same as a coal-fired power plant – mid-30 percent or so. Lots of waste heat goes into the air through the radiator and out the tailpipe. Big electric motors are more than 90 percent efficient. On the other hand, batteries are a disaster from a cost, toxicity, and environmental perspective. So I’m holding out for an electric vehicle that doesn’t need batteries or charging, and won’t be spying on me everywhere I go.
But the big play here is reducing waste. Europeans waste a good bit less than Americans, in my opinion, but our economies are really designed to produce a lot of waste – that’s where the rackets’ revenue comes from. A huge energy saver is just making the things we produce in our economies last a lot longer. We throw stuff away at an incredible rate. Who fixes much of anything anymore? The amount of embedded energy and resources in the stuff we buy is huge – in this country, an internal combustion vehicle has about 30,000 km of driving energy in the car before you drive it off the lot. It’s as bad or worse for electric vehicles, because of the batteries mostly.
I’m getting long-winded. Thanks for weighing in with the good material. Charlie
Many thanks for you reply, Charlie. What I appreciate most is your hands-on experience, most obvious in your rules of thumb, like your ability to save 60-75 percent converting to electricity in a building environment.
I have just come back from a meeting with a university friend who now works at Arcadis, a Dutch multinational engineering firm. We are going to try to get more systemic, engineering knowledge into our K-12 school (and who knows, perhaps adult-learning too), so people will have the necessary knowledge and language to have an informed systemic conversation with each other. This is where I believe the systems change needs to come from.
Just for your interest, I once developed a Systems-course for strategy consultants. One of the team of three was an ex-PhD of John Sterman, that other icon of System modelling.
Looking forward to next week part 2 🙂
have a question related to the EROEI-discussion. You seemed to be getting into it when Catherine suggested you might want to make ethanol to be independent. That would obviously NOT be the case if you first had to buy the same amount of energy you are going to produce. So there I understand it is only EROEI that we need to take into consideration.
But, energy is as much about production as it is having it in the right format at the right time. So, in all places where there is no oil, gas or coal, you need to import. And then get it in the right format. And then it is all about efficieny (and safety) of transport and transformation (into heat or motion usually). Do you consider this part of the energy question too? It seems that here oil and gas are far superior to electricity due to its energy density as a carrier and the relative high efficiency of combustion engines (although NOx is obviously an environmental issue in urban environments). Would be interested to hear why you are enthusiastic about electrifying everything.
Thanks for the enlightening first part of this interview :-).
Dialogue today with Charlie. – read from bottom
On 30/08/2023 15:25, Charles Stephens wrote:
Catherine and Charlie, I will send on this comment to the family in Montana, if they haven’t seen it here already. ; )
I didn’t know that about air conditioners, I knew they were toxic but I thought the recapture was much, much higher: 3% vs 20%? Awful. Of course with the heat we have here in Southern California, without air conditioners, it gets very dangerous for the homebound who can’t leave to get to a “cooling center”.
I never had central air growing up until we moved into a new home in the 1980’s. I also remember our older homes “breathing” better than they do now. Heat would rise and be able to leave, moisture could evaporate etc… nowadays the newer “green” house paints and coatings, “greener” insulation- not the blown in shredded denim looking stuff we had during the 1970’s. It seems everything has been made to seal in water, heat, toxins. Add in the electromagnetic waves and mold can grow fast and furious. What a toxic soup.
Thank you for the informative interview and comments.
Have a wonderful weekend,
Jen
Agreed
This was fantastic. And great teaser for Pt. 2! Thanks ?
This was incredibly interesting.
Catherine you are incredible. Great interview. Solari enlightens its subscribers and allows us to use critical thinking. I thank you & pray for you each day. GOD BLESS YOU!