The idea of a net energy cliff was about comparing fossil fuels, solar and wind, and corn ethanol. Solar is near the letter f on your graph—not nearly as efficient on an EROI basis, but clean, renewable, and well within the sustainable and useful range of the graph. But if you’re arguing against corn-ethanol, I’m on your side.
Regarding the UK specifically, renewables currently provide close to half of UK power, so it’s strange to claim they can’t provide more. Storage tech is mediocre at present, but the focus of a lot of investment, and rapidly falling in price over tiem. And they have accelerated their nuclear power plans for coming decades.
Sorry, the claim “UK basically do not have enough land to produce the energy they’d need”… misses “with solar”.
According ESO, in 2022 the UK renewals mix was Wind − 26.8%, Biomass − 5.2%, Solar − 4.4%, Hydro − 1.8%, less than 40%. And wind is roughly half-half regarding on- and off-shore. Many countries are not big islands, or are more or less close to the equator, or have a lot of land. Really hard to scale.
EROI: low but acceptable EROI + storage + need to overinstall = pretty bad effective EROI. And EROI is not all that counts, of course.
While taking a look around the forum for some answer before, I came across this post series (so far I have only skimmed it) that seem to flesh out pretty much my concerns and does it much better I could have. Have you seen it?
The idea of a net energy cliff was about comparing fossil fuels, solar and wind, and corn ethanol. Solar is near the letter f on your graph—not nearly as efficient on an EROI basis, but clean, renewable, and well within the sustainable and useful range of the graph. But if you’re arguing against corn-ethanol, I’m on your side.
Regarding the UK specifically, renewables currently provide close to half of UK power, so it’s strange to claim they can’t provide more. Storage tech is mediocre at present, but the focus of a lot of investment, and rapidly falling in price over tiem. And they have accelerated their nuclear power plans for coming decades.
Sorry, the claim “UK basically do not have enough land to produce the energy they’d need”… misses “with solar”.
According ESO, in 2022 the UK renewals mix was Wind − 26.8%, Biomass − 5.2%, Solar − 4.4%, Hydro − 1.8%, less than 40%. And wind is roughly half-half regarding on- and off-shore. Many countries are not big islands, or are more or less close to the equator, or have a lot of land. Really hard to scale.
EROI: low but acceptable EROI + storage + need to overinstall = pretty bad effective EROI. And EROI is not all that counts, of course.
While taking a look around the forum for some answer before, I came across this post series (so far I have only skimmed it) that seem to flesh out pretty much my concerns and does it much better I could have. Have you seen it?