Great article Richard. You could add to the importance of oil, as witnessed by its relatively high ERoEI but also by its “storablility” and “transportability”.
Renewable sourced electricity is a high quality energy but electricity cannot be stored in meaningful quantities. It must be converted to potential energy (pumped hydro), chemical energy (batteries or hydrogen) or heat energy (heat storage) with large round trip energy losses.
Oil and coal are easily stored in tanks and heaps and oil is easily transportable in tankers and your car petrol tank.
Direct access to electricity requires physical connection to wires or rails.
Wind & solar sourced electricity is LOW quality energy, because it is intermittent and unreliable. If you ever went off-grid with solar panels as your energy source you would quickly discover how low quality that type of energy is. Any high quality energy source must be able to give you energy where you want it, when you want it, in the amount you want. Solar, Wind fail in all 3 of those categories. And then you can add EROI, which is too low to be a feasible source of energy for an industrial society. That makes them even lower than low.
I mean that electricity itself is high quality energy but obviously in the context you cite and in relation to storage it is of low quality.
Civilisation has progressed by accessing increasingly higher quality sources of energy, however, if those sources cannot be stored or their intermittency regulated they are of more limited use. Water -> coal -> oil ->gas ->electricity+plus all of the previous.
Removing water, coal, oil and gas from renewables limits their quality significantly.
Great article Richard. You could add to the importance of oil, as witnessed by its relatively high ERoEI but also by its “storablility” and “transportability”.
Renewable sourced electricity is a high quality energy but electricity cannot be stored in meaningful quantities. It must be converted to potential energy (pumped hydro), chemical energy (batteries or hydrogen) or heat energy (heat storage) with large round trip energy losses.
Oil and coal are easily stored in tanks and heaps and oil is easily transportable in tankers and your car petrol tank.
Direct access to electricity requires physical connection to wires or rails.
Wind & solar sourced electricity is LOW quality energy, because it is intermittent and unreliable. If you ever went off-grid with solar panels as your energy source you would quickly discover how low quality that type of energy is. Any high quality energy source must be able to give you energy where you want it, when you want it, in the amount you want. Solar, Wind fail in all 3 of those categories. And then you can add EROI, which is too low to be a feasible source of energy for an industrial society. That makes them even lower than low.
I mean that electricity itself is high quality energy but obviously in the context you cite and in relation to storage it is of low quality.
Civilisation has progressed by accessing increasingly higher quality sources of energy, however, if those sources cannot be stored or their intermittency regulated they are of more limited use. Water -> coal -> oil ->gas ->electricity+plus all of the previous.
Removing water, coal, oil and gas from renewables limits their quality significantly.
Great article once again