“Imagine it, Smithers, electrical lights and heaters, running all day long.” – The Simpsons
If Dyson® releases an electric car, I think they’ll suck.
This is the next in an occasional series of posts about the economics of energy.
There was one headline from the last few weeks that has really amused me. The Swiss, makers of cheese and hot chocolate let folks with electric cars know: don’t charge them until spring. Instead, they suggested the Swiss citizens continue to use their diesel and gasoline cars.
Electric economy?
No.
In fact, we’re far from that. Again, the electricity has to come from somewhere. Wind is great, when the wind is blowing. Oh, and Lefty environmentalists are against it because it kills bats and birds. Hydroelectric? I love hydro power, except the number of new dams that can be built is approximately zero, since the environmental permitting process and protests don’t allow that.
Solar?
No.
Investing in solar energy won’t happen overnight.
Here is where I have to bring in the concept of Energy Return on Energy Invested. Not dollars. Energy. The idea is simple, if I eat a food that takes more calories to digest than it provides me in available calories that I can use to smoke cigars and think of PEZ®.
If I eat a food that takes me more calories to digest than I get, I’ve invested more energy than I get out of it, and the return is negative. If the price of oil is a bazillion dollars, and I invest more Btus than I can get out of that oil, it’s the same idea. Regardless of the dollar price, if the energy price is too high it will simply make me poorer in terms of energy that I could use.
Solar, in the best case I can find, is about a 10 to 1 rate of return on energy returned from energy investment. The most recent number I saw is 2 to 1. That means, over the whole lifetime of the solar cell, it produces twice as much energy as it takes to make it, ship it, install it, and junk it.
Sounds great, right?
No.
Like a Dyson®, it sucks.
I think if coal is so bad for the environment, we should just burn it all.
Coal is about 30 to 1, even with stringent environmental controls on soot and sulfur and nitrous oxides. Natural gas is about the same. Hydro is 35. Nuclear (by the most recent estimate I’ve seen) is 75, though I think that’s optimistic.
But nuclear isn’t 2. And it isn’t 4, like wind turbines.
Where, exactly, is that energy coming from?
And how are we going to get it to houses? The grid in California can’t take a typical Tuesday in summer, so how is it going to power all the air conditioners and all the PEZ® mines and incubators and tent cities and, on top of that, all the cars?
I tried to sell a tent company to investors. It was difficult to pitch.
It simply won’t. Even now it’s so overtaxed that some summers the electric companies release more energy in forest fires than they do in electricity.
We look for efficiency in the world and are taught a mantra – efficiency is good. The power companies around the country and even in Switzerland have heard that. They have enough power generation and transmission capacity for most days. But not every day. That wouldn’t be efficient.
Mathematicians don’t ever get blackout drunk. They know their limits.
Why not? Most days aren’t peak days. To build that extra capacity in generation and transmission means spending money. And that isn’t efficient. It’s more efficient (and better for the bottom line) to have a series of brownouts and blackouts.
It is.
That’s the way it is, today, with all of the gasoline-powered cars. Imagine a decade into the future with all the Tesla® and Edizzon™ and Voltaire© new-model electric cars, and a grid that goes down when it’s 89°F (34 megajoules) outside. Finally, the achievement of a full socialist worker paradise – everyone has equal-opportunity HVAC with the people living in tents under the overpass.
Does anyone, I mean, anyone still think that controlling energy has anything to do with climate change?
Even if there were a magical energy source (unicorn hair? Obama sweat?) that provided electricity better than sweet, sweet fossil fuels, the investment in the grid in the United States to keep the current standard of living using electric cars would be more than Biden spends on anti-senility drugs and the Ukraine, combined, in a month.
It’s a lot. And that’s ignoring the cost to build the treadmill that Obama would have to run on and the Obama-sweat power generators. Investment of this type takes decades. Decades where we haven’t spent the money – not only in California, but everywhere. Because, instead of wanting resilience, we wanted efficiency.
The end result is this: the Swiss are right. Electric cars are not, in any foreseeable future, the answer. See? You can always trust people who make great cheese and hot chocolate. Heck, I just got a Swiss flag for my collection, and that’s a big plus.
Remember, never give up. Share this with someone who might need it.
Your post illustrates why we need to build energy resilience into our own lives. If staying warm in the winter is important to you–and it probably is–best invest in a wood stove and the means to procure enough wood for several years worth of being slightly cooler than normal. If keeping the freezers freezing matters, installing a small solar system will keep that 800 pounds of moose meat from thawing out and going bad when the grid goes down for a few hours. Or days. Or weeks. As Aesop said, investing in this stuff now is a good plan. Too many people are still blowing money on silly things that have no EROI (or any ROI for that matter) and they are going to be hit hard when the incredibly fragile infrastructure we’ve all become so reliant on fails. And it will fail. It’s only a question of when.
Don’t give up–there is a lot we can still do. But no one is coming to save you.
I started on energy resilience WAY back when we (well – some people) were worried that when the date ticked over from 1999 to 2000 – that everything would stop working and the world would come to an end. OK – maybe it’s just been a delayed reaction (about 20 yrs worth), but still…
I’ve got a heat pump for when it’s above 30 and we still have electricity,
I’ve got a high efficiency wood stove insert to heat the house when we don’t have electricity and/or it’s under 30 – I also have procured sources for and keep on hand AT LEAST a 30day supply of wood, even for when I’m burning it as fast and as hot as the stove will allow…
I’ve got kerosene heaters (yes, more than one), and enough fuel to run them for weeks – if necessary.
And of course, we’ve got cold weather clothes and such, if most or all of the above fail.
Resilience – on a personal level, is about layered backups.
Works for heat, water, food, and self-defence.
And yes – I’ve got ALL of those covered. I decided back during Y2K that I wanted to be able to live completely off-grid and cut off from outside supply for a minimum of 3mos, and have extended that minimum and now can do it for any season.
I’m still working on improving each level whenever possible – and finding new and better backups/layers, because I’m like that – and I know that preps can always be made better/more resilient.
Exactly that – resilience is about having more capacity and time than you need.
Don’t worry about the electricity being produced if you don’t know about coal you are uninformed. They never talk about the scrubber technology on those plants and how effective they are(not perfect).
Concrete, yes concrete. Can anyone do with out it? An ash byproduct of coal burning is a component of concrete to vary its strength based on the engineered design of the structure to be built whether it be road, bridge, elevator shaft/buildings.
Has concrete gotten expensive? Go ahead, shut all the coal plants down.
Dumbasses.
The coal plant that produces our power sells the gypsum they make from scrubbing CO2 and sulphur. The only byproduct they don’t sell is the water vapor.
(When did the language get so dumbed down that autocorrupt doesn’t like the word “sulphur”?)
I think that I’ve seen the analysis that showed solar’s 2:1 EROI. It took into account everything they could imagine for a utility-scale installation, including acquiring the land, the legal fees required to get through the permitting process, the lost value to agriculture of the land, laying gravel for the trucks to carry the components, DC/AC conversion, planting the posts and beams for the panels to be mounted on, upgrading the grid connection… all valid concerns, but a large part being one-time expenses amortized over a finite span (10? 20? years), and a lot of those expenses not involved with simply laying solar panels on an existing building near the point of use (whether residential or commercial).
The bigger problem with solar is just that we don’t have the land area or materials on a finite planet to provide “the lifestyle to which we are accustomed” to an infinitely growing population. And infinite growth is what people are asking for when they worry that a constant-population workforce “needs” immigrants to provide for the increasing retired population.
Agreed. It’s probably not 2. But it’s not 10. And the biggest problem is night. Solar energy is diffuse, oil is concentrated. Nuclear?
More so.
The solar thing cracks me up, lots of Amish power household stuff using solar and are always grumbling because in winter or when it rains or is really cloudy they end up having to crank up the diesel generator to make up for the loss of sunlight. Plus the new lithium batteries that are hugely expensive require them to plug in electric blankets and wrap them around the batteries to keep them from freezing up when it gets cold. That sure will work for 350 million people!
Those would most likely be Mennonites, not Amish. There’s a difference.
I’m sure the Leftists won’t want to give them that level of comfort.
Electric cars and solar power are the future: if you can afford it now, for when there’s no gas, and no grid. Going off-grid now makes no economic sense: until you suspect that one day, the economics of having no energy, or cooking on woodstoves, aren’t going to power your a/c, refridgerator, or transportation.
An electric car juiced up by grid power just removes the pollution to farther away than the tailpipe. But five minutes after the grid is but a find memory, having it means you’re the only one not driving a horse, or a push cart. (For as long as the parts last.)
Is an electir car better than a gas or diesel PEZ delivery van? No. Until there’s no gas or diesel to be had. Then it becomes wizard.
Any other contemplated use is silliness and virtue signaling, as well as telling everyone you don’t know economics, without telling everyone you don’t get economics.
All electric world?
Only if it’s powerd by nuclear power. Which is great, until the next Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.
Hindenburg– and Titanic-level disasters tend to stick in people’s minds.
This isn’t a bad thing, when you bear in mind we’re all the direct decendants of the people who learned to run from lions and bears. The people that thought they could pet them didn’t make descendants. They just made scat piles.Of themselves.
As someone said, the only way to power electric cars in the US is to build a nuclear power plant every week for forty years, starting ten years ago. That doesn’t include strip mining the planet for the rare minerals to produce the batteries.
Meanwhile, back in the 1970’s they calculated the US had enough coal reserves for 2,000 years, with a growing population and increasing power consumption.
I thought about that, but you’d have to make your own electric car to retain control of it, as modern EVs are managed remotely.
Also, while I *can* make and store electric power, at the moment, I cannot make the silicon to maintain and repair these systems indefinitely. I *can* however, make and maintain internal combustion machines, and I can make diesel fuel in small quantities, or easier, methanol from wood distillation, which serves well in carbureted cars.
And of course there’s wood gas…
Fido you can mine and smelt the metals needed for building an internal combustion engine? You understand and can build the precise machining required into an internal combustion engine?
I’m impressed or more likely to hand you a shovel (give a man a tool, eh?) and say go for it.
Salvage technology I think your discussing here. Salvage meaning little to no primary production but adapting existing parts to make do. Rust, wear and man-made destruction (30-06 through the engine block anybody) are the enemies that will eliminate your salvage “supply”.
Wood gas is prime salvage tech but unless you’re doing an excellent filter you’re going to have to tear down, clean and rebuild your engines pretty often. One guy I know has 5 engines to rotate for his wood gas generator (and two spare generator “heads”) as to be able to take the offline for tear down and cleaning and spare parts.
As far as the ONLY VEHICLE running and all that top of the world stuff you best be THE WARLORD of the area too feared to be ambushed for that pretty sweet vehicle.
Even an easily charged electric bicycle with a trailer would be an “Interesting” target for Gimme Dats and others of the uncivil class.
Look towards Low Trust Societies like South America where folks too poor to have glass in their windows HAVE Bars in the windows and walls with broken glass or Razor Wire to keep sneak thieves away.
They also tend to have extended family compounds to have enough manpower to keep small scale thieves “honest”.
It takes many men working together to build real stuff. From the Amish barn raising to bridges to nuclear power plants.
It takes very few (and often ONE) destructive idiots to destroy that (for example) Barn and the valued animals with in.
My personal trigger when S has really HTF is when the Power Line workers, EMS and Police are staying home to protect their families. I could add the water and sewage folks here also, but the point IS it’s SHTF when the Folks that Keep the Lights and such ON quit.
For me and mine we’re going dark for about a month after the grid is destroyed to allow the stupid idiots to kill each other off-starve-die from no or BAD water. Our blackout is to prevent us from being a LIGHTHOUSE calling in trouble. I’ll have enough trouble killing those locally that need to be killed that I don’t want to draw them in for miles around.
A bit of solar makes a lot of things worthwhile. I like freezers and water pumping. Lights are a two-edged sword for the above reasons as blackout is hard to truly do well. A Generator is a COME HERE Call for many a never-do-well as well as many Help Me folks.
Rebuilding is HARD, and harder still if you’re battling wanna be warlords and Gimmie Dats. I’d stay grey until most of the shooting stops.
Those Irish Monks had to survive the nasty era before they could show the survivors the old but now new technologies they Saved.
I do not have, nor am I likely to aquire, the means to smelt or found metals (I can do light casting), but near endless resources meeting my needs can be found in junk and scrapyards for the foreseeable future. Casting is fairly trivial for aluminum, and not *that* hard for steel if you’re willing to invest the trees. Over engineering can make up for metal of uncertain propery.
I do understand and can build the precise machining required into an internal combustion engine. Not that difficult really, if you have even an older mill, which is not expensive to aquire. Accuracy to 1/1000″ is not hard, and historically 2/1000″ was more than adequate for complex automatic weapons. We’re not making turbines.
Yeah, wood gas is a stopgap solution, which is why I concentrate on methanol, from non-food cellulose.
Not interested in being a warlord, but might work for one if I can find one with ethics. Either way, always have an exit strategy, preferably involving shock and awe.
Gimme dats have no future. They’ll be a problem in some places for a short while, but not in harsh mountainous (or otherwise defensible) terrain. Never forget: The function of police is to protect criminals from the public. Without police, there is still law enforcement, it’s just ugly broad strokes, and a lot of mistakes get made. Trade, is the basis of society. Both are a function of trust. There are no “low trust” societies. Low trust is the absence of society. Either the police, or the public will eventually prune the untrustable, and society will begin to build. The untrustworthy are kept (physically) outside of society, usually by military (warlord) force. Bars and concertina are woefully inadequate.
Generators are a problem due to noise, maintenance, and fuel production… Solar might actually be *more* problematic, if your surrounding terrain does not protect you, because it *must* be visible to the sky, and therefore to googleearth.
Rebuilding is hard. Life is hard. Things worth doing are not supposed to be easy. Become acclimated to pain.
A good post but I suspect I’ve spent far more time in 3rd world countries than you have. I too have done blacksmithing and cast replacement parts for water pumping windmills to include Babbit bearings. Salvage and rebuilding are a handy thing even in Amazon.com America.
Gimme Dats have an oddly amazing ability to survive and even become Politicians and Police. Shooting trouble often brings more trouble. As that western movie comment “Bastards have brothers” and often, they don’t announce their intent but shoot you in the back later.
Thus, in low trust 3rd world situations you find the windows without glass, but those poor folks find some way to afford bars and razor wire. It’s NOT a good idea to call in the Police in those areas, might get robbed (and worse) twice that way.
Saw it often enough in 3rd world South America and expect it here.
“Bastards have brothers”
And they can kneel alongside a ditch, as well. And their cousins. And their neighbors.
In certain circumstances, to be merciful is to be foolish.
Yup. The energy of the future will always remain . . . in the future.
Awesome post! The Swiss made another decision this week. No on non-binary gender acceptance. The legal position is we are comfortable with our 2 gender TRADITION.
Yup. Those Swiss can’t miss (ducks).
God has provided all the energy that this planet requires for the amount of time it will be in this form. Read the Book.
Yup. He always gets the Last Word. And the First Word.
Okay this may double post, not sure what happened.
You notice how they never talk about coal burning scrubber technology, it’s pretty effective(not perfect).
Do you know a byproduct of coal? Concrete, yes concrete. The fly ash I think it’s called is used in concrete to determine its strength based on the engineered design be it roads, bridges, elevator shafts/buildings.
Has concrete gotten expensive? Go ahead shut down the coal plants. Never mind the electricity produced.
I challenge you. It’s all theoretical but compare the supposed availability of coal compared to oil.
Yup, it’s fly ash. And, yup, they sell it.
An obscure French SciFi writer proposed the answer over 100 years ago – 50 million hamsters on treadwheels. Unfortunately, Joules Verne’s idea was met with ridicule and scorn.
Hahahahahaha!
John – – You are correct: Mathematicians don’t ever get blackout drunk. They know their limits.
And you might recall from the Olde Daze, that constipated engineers used to work it out with slide rules.
Sadly today, constipated engineers have to work it out with their smart phones…….
I wanted to see that new movie about that. But it hasn’t come out yet.
The fact that the math doesn’t work for replacing current energy sources with all wind and solar electric is a feature, not a bug. The globalists and environmentalists want to change the lifestyles of a dramatically reduced population.
And want to eliminate 15 out of 16 of us.
20 years from now (assuming we are here 20 years from now), the big discussion will be on what are we going to do with all the solar panels that we can no longer use and batteries that can no longer be used.
Designing an energy system with an effective expiration date of the materials used to generate the energy is not the plan of a civilization that expects to survive long term.
The solar panels installed in 2000 are now hitting the California landfills. EROEI.
Did they actually decay to the point that they were unusable, or were they shattered. I have not yet seen significant decay, though I’m expecting it, but I’ve seen alot of breakage about… I’ve even seen broken ones get used for a time by various means of weather protection. Getting rid of broken panels “legally” is difficult in California. They actually “require” them to be sent to another state for processing, not that that actually happens.
I didn’t dig that deep into it. My guess had been an end-of-life degradation, primarily because they 20 year span was mentioned . . .