Sustaining the Wind, Part I...

[RiverLover]

13. What do you think of this author's take, basically a rebuttal of a German study...and it seems

to rebut what you write here as well...

Renewables K.O.-ed by EROI?
08 Sep 2014 by Craig Morris Comments (10)

If it takes too much energy to make generators of renewable energy relative to what these units produce, the energy transition will not be possible. A new study by nuclear researchers finds that the need for storage and backup makes the EROI of renewables too low. Craig Morris investigates.


King of renewables: Hydro power is the most efficient power source in terms of energy payback. (Photo by Rufus46, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EROI or EROEI) is an expression of energy payback – how much energy we get out of the energy we put into a system. Overall, the safest thing you can say about EROI is that it is controversial and hard to calculate to everyone’s satisfaction, as this article in Scientific American explained last year.

Now, a new scientific paper by nuclear researchers in Germany is making the rounds, such as on this popular website among nuclear advocates arguing for nuclear as a way of combating climate change. A version was published by Elsevier and is available behind a paywall. For free, you can access the draft submitted (PDF). Below, my comments apply for both versions.

Much of the paper is devoted to explaining how the calculations for EROI were made. The main tweak revolves around the authors’ rejection of a common way of counting renewable energy – with “renewable” always written in quotation marks in the study. The debate is not new; ....



Here, “buffered” indicates the energy payback of a technology within a supply system, the assumption being that solar and wind (and apparently hydro) require storage and backup capacity, both of which further reduce the “unbuffered” EROI, which only measures, say, the energy put into and gotten from a solar panel.

This is where the argument begins to unravel, for the assumption is untrue. Germany has pumped hydropower storage capacity, but none of it was built for solar or wind. The largest such facility in Germany is in Goldisthal, where construction began in 1997....

Read more~
http://energytransition.de/2014/09/renewables-ko-by-eroi/