Not exactly true. Electricity can be used convert abundant nitrogen into nitrate salts, power tractors and allow modern agriculture.
The question is about the Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI) of the power sources that we do have. As long as we hit 50:1 or better, it is not a problem but when we go below that… that is when the mass starvation and death will occur.
Have you looked into actual renewable infra EROEI? Especially buffered https://arxiv.org/html/2607.14784
When people glibly assert we can power modern agriculture and its infrastructure with renewable energy the evil thought that comes to my mind that they come in a situation where they themselves had to do it. At least for a while.
Yes, just like I looked into the energy costs of carbon capture and conversion into stable carbon forms. (Reverse coal mines etc). We can make oil from the carbon in the atmosphere if we have enough free energy to do so.
Hence why we need to fund scientists and engineers to build a future instead of just waiting to die.
While I’m all for funding science , we kind of know what the option space is for energy, and sometimes you can’t innovate your way out of situations, sometimes that magical energy saviour doesn’t appear , and sometimes the solution is just being a more sane society. One example I always give , make mixed use neighborhoods legal , if you made grocery trips walkable in every city it could be billions less fossil fuels consumed per year . If you banned advertising people might consume billions tons less etc… but people will cling to a dead branch in history and end up dead because of it.
I agree that urban mixed neighborhoods are a good idea and I can even understand how putting regulations on advertising is a good idea (but it is not possible to ban as humans will recommend things to their friends and neighbors).
My hope is to help people through this time of transition because every mind saved is another mind that might be the key to our next set of problems.
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To just look at the math and the physics of a proposed class of solutions makes me an unserious person?
You could have just pointed out the inefficiencies of various implementations and gone that it wouldn’t be viable to maintain an energy storage and distribution leveraging carbon molecules because of (useful technical details) and then we could have had a productive discussion about excess energy production and socially beneficial but wasteful energy consumption as part of grid planning.
What’s currently above 50:1?
Depending on several factors: Solar, Wind, Geothermal, Hydro, And nuclear.
Formerly that list included oil, coal and natural gas but as they were extracted and they become more difficult to extract; the EROEI for them is collapsing.
Your numbers are way off. Also, if you want to run this planet on electricity alone: you’re going to need a lot more than 20 TW and you will immediately run into mineral extraction limits.
How exactly are they way off?
And there are multiple industrial processes that a thermal cycle would be better than producing electricity.
But I agree that we definitely are going to run into a great many issues during this time of transition and why we need as many thinking minds as possible to find solutions to them.
I really don’t understand this thought, but I want to. A friend of mine was basically saying something similar, and I just can’t follow this idea.
To my way of thinking about it, to convert a lot of nitrogen into fertilizer and and run tractors, you need a power source that has a very large energy power output value, period.
But what my friend was saying was that basically energy efficiency is what matters. Eroei is basically a measure of this (output per unit of input).
Can you explain this thought? Is there a baked in assumption you’re not explicitly stating? Why do we care how much energy it costs us?
Example:
Let’s say I want to run tractor X and it needs 10 solar panels of 1:50 power production. Can’t I also just run 20 panels of 1:25 efficiency? (Same top level power, worse efficiency conversion.)
There are too many innumerate optimists handwaving vigorously to address. If we feed these even more will come.
I think it makes more sense to cater to those who’re already in the know.
You can’t simply look at the power output of a petroleum tractor and convert that to the equivalent electric tractor. Even though the electric tractor may be more efficient, other inputs such as fertilizer are less efficient when they’re made without petrochemical inputs.
That’s pretty much exactly my thought.
When you look at our industrial civilization, all the critical resource flows are basically running on very high power equipment. That’s stuff like ships, trucks, trains, tractors, airplanes, construction equipment, rockets, heavy machinery etc.
For any of those things to work, they require very large amounts of power and a very good weight to power relationship.
None of these seem to have any serious technical substitute. Notice there are no obvious “green” versions of any of these devices. You can do some of the things more efficiently, but apparently you cannot substitute for the power required.
A green tractor that has a battery big enough to replace the power of a diesel motor will sink into the dirt and not have the traction needed. It will be too big and heavy. A battery big enough to pull a semi trailer a good distance weighs as much as the loaded trailer, etc. A battery airplane is too heavy to lift a cargo and fly to another continent. Etc.
Diesel is around 35X as energy dense as batteries on a watts / kg basis.
A gallon of diesel has as much energy as a 200lb battery. So when a semi takes 150 gallons, that would be a 30,000 lb. battery. If the electric motor is twice as efficient, it’s still a 15,000lb battery. A semi pulls 50,000lbs max…
Think of the system now. If every single semi loses 30% of its towing capacity, sure the motors can be more energy efficient but you might need 30% more trucks to do the work. At some point we have 500 horses instead of 1 locomotive. It’s not really a clear advantage.
Think of it as a black box. That if it has an EROEI of 4, then it would cost you 1 barrel of oil to make and you get 4 barrels of oil out of it (before you need to spend a barrel to replace it). Then assume that you can buy and sell oil for $100/barrel of oil (we are just using this as a placeholder for discussion, not that it represents the real value of oil but go with me here). Meaning that you can turn $100 into $400 every time you make the black box.
So people are naturally going to prefer energy sources that have as high EROEI as possible (an EROEI of 50 or higher means that you can get $5000 (or more) for your $100 investment.
Oil had an EROEI of around 80-120 and it has been going down ever since. (Currently it is below 30). So any energy source that has an EROEI of over 30 is a better investment than oil.
Ok, let me explain my confusion here.
Let’s assume
- 500 horses produce the energy of 1 locomotive
- 500 horses are cheaper than 1 Locomotive
- 500 horses do the same work as 1 locomotive
You would argue that horses are a better return on investment.
However, if we consider POWER (the time dimensions) like how fast this work can get done, the locomotive is better than the horses even if it costs more. Who cares what it costs?
Also
- nobody pays $ for the energy component of fossil fuels, they only pay for PROCESSING the fuel. The energy in the fuel was put there without any human work, it’s just as free as any sunlight only a lot faster, it’s basically arbitrary how fast we choose to use it
- converting free sunlight into alfalfa into horses into work takes months, the rate is limited
- wasting energy you got for free has no penalty as long as you get anything above a zero return
- 5000 or 50000 horses are not as fast as a locomotive, and they can never be
- if a locomotive cost 500,000 horses, it would still be faster and it might be so fast it could replace 5 million horse’s work per a given time period
- in biology and nature, organisms win by maximizing power, not by maximizing efficiency
- in human societies, the societies with more absolute power have dominated those with higher efficiencies. E.g., think of the Amish people within the USA versus the dominant society.
Horses don’t produce the energy of one locamotive, also locamotives don’t produce energy. They both consume energy and convert it to work, your whole framing is confused.
I should have said, “produce the work energy”
I’m trying to frame it so that it’s completely obvious that energy and power are not fungible by picking a very unequal example. Many people are confused on this point.
Energy is not power. Power is not energy. Just because two things are equal in energy terms does not mean they are equal in power terms.
The relevance of this idea is that it’s fundamentally the same idea that’s baked into the accounting around the green energy transition or other similar ideas. Basically its that “if we had enough horses, we’d have a locomotive” is a clear fallacy.
I think right now we are using 400 years worth of sunlight energy every year in fossil fuels. So yes, If you could make solar panels that are more efficient than photosynthesis, it might make efficiency sense from an engineering standpoint to cover farm fields in solar panels… Like plants are less efficient…
But the bigger question is whether we are even within an order of magnitude on the power side. Like, we are focusing on a very weird metric as if that’s a goal. The REAL goal is the power we need. We need that energy to be delivered as fast as fossil fuels delivers it and converts to work
Ok. So your question is about energy density (in terms of time). In which case, nuclear reactions simply produce much more. And is entirely reasonable to say that. Solar power, wind power and geothermal power are all methods of indirectly collecting energy from nuclear energy sources.
To which conversations about liquid thorium fluoride being used in thermal cycles in industrial processes is definitely a valid one.
The reason why most people discuss solar is because it scales down nicely to satisfy domestic energy needs (which reduces the total energy consumption of the more dense energy sources that are needed in industrial processes).
Dominating other civilizations is actually rather wasteful, it is much more efficient to just bring up the living standards and then they will happily incorporate themselves in your civilization. Which brings more useful minds and new perspectives that would enrich your scientific tapestry; which is likely the keys to the next sets of breakthroughs. (You don’t have to defeat your enemies militarily if you can bribe the right people and get them to destroy themselves for you).
Efficiencies free up resources to be utilized for whatever your civilization values. Much like how certain keystone crops (like corn, wheat, rice and potatoes) make up the hyper majority of calories consumed because they are the most efficient.
Only a foolish civilization would throw away efficiency and returns on investments. And the biggest return on investment has always been feeding people and public libraries.
energy density (in terms of time)
The amount of joules per unit of times is POWER, measured in watts
Efficiency is a concept that has no units. Efficiency just looks at how many joules get wasted that isn’t the work you want to do.
However, notable is that nearly every physical process does not maximize efficiency when it maximizes power. This means you have to throw out power or reduce power to optimzed efficiency, which is the cost of pursuing efficiency to living systems.
Life’s goal is that life maximizes the rate, not the efficiency. The amount of waste product is generally not important.
Efficiencies free up resources to be utilized for whatever your civilization values.
Or you can simply grow your resources you’re exploiting.
Let’s say you have
Turtle species A that eats three pizzas a week. Hare species B that easts three pizzas a week.
Turtles decide to order 2 pizzas and save $ off the budget and carefully manage the leftovers to reduce spending. If they went to the downward limit, they could save no more than 3 pizzas reduction.
Hares put 5 pizza restaurants on speed dial and throw the budget out and have a massive pizza party paid for with credit cards. There is not any upward limit to this growth.
Who wins the life race?
Well, as we don’t exist with perpetual abundance and ecological overshoot routinely occurs.
And the hares suffer the same fate as the bunnies.
https://bsidneysmith.com/writings/essays/all-the-bunnies-in-the-meadow-die
And the hares suffer the same fate as the bunnies.
You probably mean that the hares suffer the same as the tortoises.
But inverting that, the tortoises suffer the same fate as the hares, right?
So it’s not efficiency that matters. Here are two groups that pursue different efficiency optimums, and it makes no difference?
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Right. But we never had the degrees of freedom to limit their use, collectively. And now we’re in the decline phase due to extraction limits. Which is just as well, as we’ve already cooked this place medium.
I love seeing a day old account banned immediately, I can only imagine what was said in response to this article.
Yeah I saw that yesterday and it’s what made me so curious what heinous shit was said or implied.
Seems to be the same guy: https://lemmy.zip/modlog?page=1&actionType=All&userId=33143785
Eeek, should be a permanent ban cuz it doesn’t seem like they have offered anything.
Bot wouldn’t be surprising.
Looking at the profile it was a high volume poster. Perhaps a bot? Need to look at instance mod log to see the reason.
