Comment by _FKS_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _FKS_ | Hacker News Reader

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In the meanwhile, a few other sources argue that the overall ERORI (energy invested vs. energy produced) is well below a somehow 'sustainable' level. The impression I'm getting is that the day oil/gas production starts to fall due to geological limits, so will the production of photovoltaic & windmills.

Please see: https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.files.wordpress.com...

And: http://science-and-energy.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/201...

And: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqhC6uI8TUY (for french speakers out there)

Please do convince me that we can run the current industrial civilization, at current rates of energy usage, with only solar & wind, on a long enough run, without oil.

If solar power is cheaper than coal without subsides, it has greater than 1 EROEI by a big margin, and the question is settled.

Bottom-up studies suffer from a big diversity of flaws, and there are plenty of them with obvious bias both ways.

Fossil fuels are the base subsidy. It's hard to see how a manufactured product will be cheaper than fosil fuels consumed on the spot (as coal is primarly a local consumption resource). Also the economy of scale principle works here too: how can a (coal) thermal plant which feeds a region, cities, can be replaced by a collection of small scale devices that produce electricity, and pretend to be cheaper? Nothing will ever be cheaper than coal to produce electricity. There's a good reason why the industrial revolution started with coal and not with renewables (which for the record were already available in Europe for a few centuries before that - it was already widely used since the 12th century)

If you use fossil fuels to create an energy supply, and the energy from this supply is cheaper than the original fossil fuel, that means your supply has bigger than 1 EROEI. (Unless your new supply has a subside.)

The first link is about installing panels in regions of moderate insolation like Germany. Areas with more sun make more sense.

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