PowerSwitch

.....can sustain the level of socioeconomic complexity required to produce them.

I am thinking specifically, here, about the idea that renewables can ever replace high energy dense sources such as hydrocarbons in running a complex industrial society.

Discuss.

We've (PowerSwitch) known at least a decade that renewables can't replace fossil fuels like for like. However it's not black and white as renewable's EROI is increasing whilst fossil fuel EROI is falling. It's no longer the case that renewables have low EROI and hydrocarbons high, with a clear gap between. Some renewables are much better than some hydrocarbons.

The real question is what EROI is needed to run 'complex industrial society'?

It may well be possible to run something widely regarded as complex industrial society on a much lower EROI than it currently does.

For example, we could double global vehicle fleet efficiency whilst maintaining total vehicle miles driven.
...we could also reduce the vehicle miles.
We could use gas and electricity more efficiency than we do now...
We could manufacture a whole lot less crap than we do now...
We could use less energy in agriculture than now...

In my opinion, renewables can't run this complex industrial society but I don't rule out their ability to sustain a reformed complex industrial society. However, they won't be able to without a huge amount of effort - think biggest project humanity has even embarked on, global political consensus, $500bn per year spend for the next couple of decades (taken from $1.7tn global military spend today).

Technically possible, politically unlikely, so plan for collapse of this complex industrial society.

Funnily enough, I just came across a similar thread on Peakoil.com:

http://peakoil.com/forums/debt-eroei-gdp-t72292.html

As much as I support renewables, I just can't see them supporting anything like the energy requirements of somewhere like Canary Wharf.

I was down there today, and was just amazed as to how much energy all these new buildings must require....

Not a scientific answer, but will hopefully do for this time of night

Edit - CLVs response sums things up nicely....

I wonder if the problem is more fundamental than that. I wonder if the very underlying technologies and industries (with all of the organisation that requires) that serve as the backbone to renewable energy technology being produced on a mass scale are, themselves, unsustainable when fuelled only by renewables due to the inevitably lower energy (and, therefore, lower complexity), overall, in the societal system.

Charles Hall, in the Energy and the Wealth of Nations, said that an EROEI of 5 was necessary to keep the energy producing system and the basic society going. To do anything else would require a higher EROEI. The more complex a society gets the higher the EROEI is necessary, i.e. the more spongers off the basic society, the more bankers, artists and accountants, etc., the higher the EROEI of the energy source that is required. Basic society is the people growing the food to keep going the people producing the energy to provide the raw materials to produce the machinery to find the energy and raw materials and grow the food to keep building the machinery and the buildings in which we live and work.

Even basic society is quite complex when you come down to it. Then, with a progressively higher EROEI, you can add on the medical staff and the people to build the hospitals and all the machinery in them: the providers of the machinery of transport, some of which you could add to the basics: then come the artists and musicians: then other things that we find necessary for a pleasant life and finally the real spongers, the financial wizards and *ankers who supposedly provide us with the money to do all these things but in reality extract increasing amounts of money from the real system and play with it and gamble with it in their own little isolated world.

5 kW of renewable derived energy will do exactly the same amount of work as 5kW of fossil fuel derived energy in whatever machine or appliance you care to use it. The fragility is in the reliability of supply so a renewable system would be required to have far more redundancy and storage in the system than a fossil fuel system.

Oh, shudder! We 'advanced' people need to live with the sorts of energy levels most people still live with.

AutomaticEarth wrote:I just can't see them supporting anything like the energy requirements of somewhere like Canary Wharf.

I went there once. I couldn't work out what it was for. Nobody seemed to be digging anything up, growing anything, fishing of making anything. I didn't even see anybody engaged in the arts or social care.

(I expect the per capita energy use is not so very high as there are an awful lot of people sharing the same space.)

emordnilap wrote:Oh, shudder! We 'advanced' people need to live with the sorts of energy levels most people still live with.

We do live in a colder climate than most people in the third world so our energy usage is going to be greater but our houses are a lot bigger, even poorer peoples house. But our poor are rich compared to the third world's poor!

The power used by all the computers and multiple screens in Canary Wharf must be massive.

kenneal - lagger wrote:

emordnilap wrote:Oh, shudder! We 'advanced' people need to live with the sorts of energy levels most people still live with.

We do live in a colder climate than most people in the third world so our energy usage is going to be greater but our houses are a lot bigger, even poorer peoples house. But our poor are rich compared to the third world's poor!

The power used by all the computers and multiple screens in Canary Wharf must be massive.

Poor people's houses are not bigger than they were, say, 40 years ago. They are smaller.

Even only thirty years ago, when i was in my early twenties, on a hospital porter's wage, I was able to but a three story old Victorian terraced house in Whitey in North Yorkshire for 15k which was, at the time, 3 times my salary. Even taking into account inflation and the fact that a mortgage can now be had on a 5 to 1 ratio, most people in their twenties now could not, in their wildest dreams consider buying such a big house now.

On top of all of that, new build house have been shrunk into ever smaller space in order to maintain profits over the last several decades as land prices have increased. If you don't believe me, go onto any 1950's housing estate and look at the size of the houses and then do the same for a recently built estate.

Most ordinary people under the age of 40 are being forced to live in shoe boxes. In some cases, brand new, shiny shoe boxes. But shoe boxes nonetheless

I was comparing the size of our poorer people's houses with those of people in the third world to justify or rather explain our higher energy use.

As a building design consultant I am well aware of the sizes of different aged houses in the UK and how they have been getting much smaller over the years. Yes, we are now being offered shoe boxes for the price of mansions compared to what we were offered in the 1970s. They are slightly better insulated shoe boxes but we could still do better with the insulation.

They are still mansions compared to the concrete boxes that most of the third world live in although many of those in the third world who have access to outside funding often live in palaces, even compared to first world living standards. But that's the corruption of the third world for you.

Modern houses and flats are a lot smaller and have far smaller gardens (if any) than council houses built in the 50s. Those were some of the best houses ever built, and the most generous gardens. Modern houses are built to a uniformly low standard of construction and insulation, relative to best practice, not so different to the Victorian back to back slums. In 50 years, the structural softwood timbers will have rotted, the PVC will have cracked and they will be plagued with unrepairable leaks and mould.

At the top end houses just keep getting bigger and bigger with ever smaller footprints, a bit like top end London victorian terraces, but the same rubbish construction materials as small houses.

The difference between now and victorian times is household sizes. Households are far smaller, so space per person is still far higher.

My house (6 rooms, kitchen, bath, shower) is one room more than the 4 of us really need, but was originally 2 houses knocked into one, and then extended on three separate occasions, and the original houses probably averaged 6 occupants each. At the same time the footprint has fallen by 80 % as the land behind the house was sold to allotments in the 19th Century (although we gained land through enclosure in the 18th C).

Parker Morris standards were good. However, the main thing about EROEI is that there needs to be some. Otherwise it depends where the energy invested comes from. If it comes from the energy returned it is just a less efficient system.

johnhemming2 wrote:Parker Morris standards were good. However, the main thing about EROEI is that there needs to be some. Otherwise it depends where the energy invested comes from. If it comes from the energy returned it is just a less efficient system.

??? Sorry, I don't understand what you are saying here.

kenneal - lagger wrote:

johnhemming2 wrote:Parker Morris standards were good. However, the main thing about EROEI is that there needs to be some. Otherwise it depends where the energy invested comes from. If it comes from the energy returned it is just a less efficient system.

??? Sorry, I don't understand what you are saying here.

Not to butt in. Again but perhaps he means that you might take energy from say hydro power or coal and use it to produce (at an EROEI loss) a liquid fuel ( ie. oil) and because the liquid fuel will fly your air plane and both hydro or coal will not you don't mind that it took you 1000 BTUs of coal to net 300 BTUs of jet fuel.

It's widely held that new builds are smaller than existing properties and I'm sure there are plenty of examples where it is the case, but the stats in the English Housing Survey don't support it as a rule. See Annex Table AT1.14: New builds and older dwellings by number of bedrooms, mean and median floor areas, 2013

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistic ... ing-report