An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.
Why use a bad metric when one can use the actually relevant metrics?
I see this from nuclear advocates when they talk about "energy density". Energy density (or EROI) are only relevant insofar as they affect cost. Why not just use cost? (The answer is that cost isn't giving the nuclear advocates the answer they want, so they have to lie and use some substitute metric.)
That’s just not true.
An energy source with an EROI of 20 but which requires thousands of highly skilled people to tend it is going to lose to an energy source with an EROI of 15 that sits in a field and just works for 30 years.
That is not how RE works at scale.
30 years is generally the guarantee for some minimum output so it's the floor too... could still be outputting 60-70% of original spec for 50 years
Sure but all the residual stuff needs als be considered.
2 replies →
It turns out that economic cost of labor and inputs also factors into energy considerations. It's rather soft thinking to ignore them, and leads to very bad conclusions.
Sure labor amount is strongly correlated with EROI
Why use a bad metric when one can use the actually relevant metrics?
I see this from nuclear advocates when they talk about "energy density". Energy density (or EROI) are only relevant insofar as they affect cost. Why not just use cost? (The answer is that cost isn't giving the nuclear advocates the answer they want, so they have to lie and use some substitute metric.)
4 replies →