Comment by ambientenv

I only skimmed the article but there didn’t seem to be much written about how much of that non-electric fossil fuel is waste heat. I know there are versions of the energy source-sink graph which shows wasted energy. Why didn’t the author use it? Weird.

There are studies on how much energy is required to decarbonise everything, not just local electricity production. The energy required is far less than what you’d think if you look at the primary energy of all the energy we use today.

One aspect of this is what you see with the transition to EV or from gas to induction cook tops. It comes with a huge reduction in wasted energy.

The other aspect is the transition to heat pumps, which is over 100% efficient, so you need a lot less energy to provide the same amount of heat. There are now commercial industrial heat pumps that has reached 200°C, which enables the use in more industrial applications.

The third is the transition to recycling. At some point we will have enough materials for all that we need to do. The green energy transition requires a big temporary jump in the amount of lithium and copper we need. But once all vehicles have been transitioned to EVs, most of those material will come from recycled materials, cutting the energy required to acquire those materials to a tiny fraction of what we need now.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding but the Author seems to think that the main conversion losses in electricity generation come from renewables

Edit:

I think this paragraph should be enough to show that it is not advisable to trust the author on anything to do with energy:

>Due to the weight of all this stuff, and the relatively mild heat and scattered light coming from the Sun, solar panels produce no more than 20 Watts for each kg of their mass, even on a sunny day. Meanwhile wind turbines, with their massive concrete bases and tall steel towers, generate a mere 6 Watts for every kg of their weight. (Batteries fare slightly better at 240 W/kg.) For comparison diesel fuel produces 13,000 Watts for every kg of fuel burned. A regular diesel engine weighing 150 kg can thus easily produce 110 kW of power, while the same feat would require 5.5 tons of solar panels directly lit by the Sun at noon.

That article's whole premises seems to hinge on the quote: "Energy from non-fossil fuel combustible electricity generation is accounted for on their input heat requirements and non-combustible renewables on the energy content of their gross electrical output."

But that line means the exact opposite of what the author claims it means. He claims that renewables are being overinflated, but the reverse is true. Coal and gas get evaluated based on their heat content, not their useful work output. Wind and solar get evaluated on their electrical output.

All of OECD countries are lying about their growth numbers, and Russia is "gaining strength".

A base sanity check shows this is a load of BS.