Checklist for Computation of ERoEI* redux

 

Sustainable Renewable Alternative Energy Technology

In this post, I will diagram the recycle problem, which, as Denis Frith has always said, is the greatest challenge to sustainability or to the sobriquet "renewable energy" as applied to the technology for harvesting sunlight.

 

1. The community must be dedicated to the production of energy and only to the production of energy until such time as the people can afford to extend their mission. Until then, nothing produced by the members of the community including art and music and science, including spectator sports as well as building maintenance and healthcare, serves any other ultimate purpose than the production of energy.  Every item in the monetary budget has a counterpart in the energy budget. 

 

a)     Manufacture

b)     Installation

c)     Operation

d)     Maintenance

e)     Storage of energy

f)      De-Installation  This usually amounts to merely building another installation after retiring the previous one; but, in the odd case, it is necessary to restore the plant site to its original natural condition.

g)  Environmental protection

h)  Maintain in steady state the readily-available storehouses of materials essential to a through g.

 2. The steady-state condition of the managed stockpiles of vital materials is met by solving the recycle problem as discussed in the appropriate section of https://www.dematerialism.net/ . The inevitable deficits due to imperfect recycling are made up from the residuum of the resource, by which I mean the world supply minus the stockpiles, in such a way that the half-life of the residuum is not reached during the first one thousand years, after which time other arrangements must be made.

 

 Figure 3. AAED with associated storehouses at A, B, C, D, & E, repositories of A through E, and recycle installations at ea, ed, bc, and cd serving the Autonomous Alternative Energy plan

The Repository of A might be a rare earth that is used in solar cells.  It is very large whereas the Storehouse of A might better be called the Box of A inasmuch as we are pretending that only a few molecules go into each cell. The repository might take in one half of a continent, whereas the Box might be a shoe box.  We might be sure that the residuum of A will last 10,000 years at the present rate, which we have a right to assume under a de-growth regime.  We do not replace solar cells unless they bring back the corresponding retired solar cell.

3. The maximum sustainable community dividend (MSCD) is the emergy returned (conservatively estimated and harvested on schedule) (ER) minus all of the emergy budget items in this list except this one (EI’). The net emergy, EX, must be subtracted from the MSCD to get the actual dividend, ED*. Then, ERoEI* = ER/EI* where ER is emergy returned and EI* is the emergy invested, which is the sum of all the budget items in this list except that, instead of the MSCD, add in the actual dividend, ED*. EI* is the emergy returned minus the net emergy, that is, EI* = ER - EX. The actual dividend, ED*, is divided by the number of economic actors in the community. This determines maximum community consumption. The individual economic actors determine the final disposition of the actual distributed dividend. Does it satisfy the technical pre-condition of happiness? The net emergy is the MSCD minus the actual dividend. The community must decide what to do with the net emergy. It should be obvious how to include foreign trade in the balance sheet and not so obvious what might go wrong with it.

ER = Emergy Returned

EI’ = Energy Invested except the actual dividend with which the stakeholders support themselves and those who depend upon them

ED* = Actual dividend

MSCD = Maximum Sustainable Community Dividend = ER – EI’

EX = Net emergy for export

EI* = EI’ + ED* =  ER – EX

EI’ + ED* + EX = ER

4. Prevent pollution altogether regardless of environments self-healing capabilities.  Don't forget sound and light pollution and the intrusion of ugliness where formerly there was beauty.  Finally, there is motion pollution and the filling up of space that was formerly empty.

5. Sustainability amounts to providing a sustainable renewable energy technology, a technology that harvests energy (corrected for entropy) from the sun in real time and that returns more energy than is consumed to install it, operate it, maintain it, store enough energy to complete its mission, maintain its storehouses of natural material capital, prevent or repair environmental damage including aesthetic damage, and support the community that serves the renewable energy installation both directly and indirectly.   It's one thing producing enough computer chips for half of the world.  This may indeed require a non-stop cyclical operating schedule.  But to make one or two chips every ten years for only the economic actors in the autonomous alternative energy district (AAED) we can use a slightly more primitive batch process, which might run only when the sun shines.

I introduce myself to the Peak Oil forum

Hello, I am Tom Wayburn. Some of you may remember me from Running on Empty 2, Energy Resources, Energy Round Table, or even Jay Hanson's America 2.0. I have just joined (or possibly rejoined) this forum after writing, arguing, and complaining elsewhere.  Lately, I have been uploading papers to academia.edu for better or worse and to ResearchGate where a lively discussion is going on regarding the meaning of and the possibility of sustainability.  Also, equally confident scholars on both sides discuss anthropogenic global warming (AGW) with absolutely no one changing sides - ever.  I come to this forum with a way to compute the well-known energy returned over energy invested (ERoEI) datum in such way that if it is no less than 1.0 we have a sustainable alternative energy technology; but, if it is less than 1.0, we do not have truly renewable energy.  To do this, I have to include some items in the energy-invested term that are normally omitted, namely, the energy equivalents corresponding to the living expenses of every person whose life depends either directly or indirectly upon his or her dedication to keeping the alternative energy flowing.  Energy isn't just one thing out of many.  Energy is [i]everything[/i].  I hope I am forgiven this figure of speech, because no matter how important we think energy is, it is probably more important than that.
Let us indulge ourselves in a little thought experiment:  Suppose a very special community occupies a portion of the Earth's surface where repositories of every element needed for the manufacture, installation, operation, maintenance, and moth-balling of an alternative energy installation.  In addition, it has whatever additional repositories are needed to feed, clothe, shelter, keep healthy, preserve from drudgery, entertain, and elevate spiritually.  These are finite repositories although most of them are extremely large.  Out of each repository a reasonably sized storehouse is kept at steady state, making up for such deficiencies of recycling as are bound to occur by drawing from the surrounding repository sufficiently slowly that the repositories will not reach the analogy to Peak Oil for some agreed upon length of time in excess of 1000 years certainly and maybe much longer under NO GROWTH.  
The people of the community possess all of the expertise necessary to keep the energy flowing and to manage  precisely whatever else is needed to support the people who manage the energy technology, although they needn't be specialists.
The sun shines on the community and the junk heat radiates to deep space.  Other than this nothing crosses the boundary of the community (thought of now as a region) except possibly energy that is exported free of charge to the neighboring regions. If ERoEI is greater than 1.0, there is some net energy available for export.  (The reason it is free of charge in this thought experiment is that I don't want to be concerned with anything coming back.)
The entire community produces energy and nothing but energy; therefore, everything consumed and everything produced (except the net energy) within the community is overhead for producing energy and belongs in the energy-invested term.  In this figment of our imaginations, we have no control over what the members of the community produce and consume.
Now, here comes the punch line:  If we should run into an engineering study in which an ERoEI is computed by a methodology that can be applied to our thought experiment, we may take the results of the study seriously.  If the methodology is lacking in any important respect, it is probably not trustworthy.
I'll give an example of an omission of a component of sustainability that can be missing with only a slight concern.  Suppose the analyst does not include the energy costs of restoring the plant site to its pristine natural beauty in case the plant is shut down or moved for one reason or another.  The operators of the plant can apologize for this in a number of ways.  In any case, we might open up a category of near-sustainability.  Of course, we wouldn't put up with the mess frackers leave behind for two minutes let alone two years. 

The Qualitative Answer and Its Pitfalls

I hope no one "starts acting" who is satisfied with a qualitative definition of sustainability and who does not recognize that sustainability amounts to providing truly renewable energy as determined by balance equations to a population stable at its optimum size until astronomical events intervene. I went to a lot of trouble to spell out exactly what is required. It is just a little discouraging to see people reject the hard answers in favor of goals that are easy to counterfeit or goals that are so vague that it is impossible to know whether they are being achieved or not. Perhaps this forum wants politicians to pretend they are solving the problem without changing anything of importance.