Checklist for ERoEI*

 

In this post, I will diagram that which I have been unable to explain in words.  In particular, the recycle problem receives special attention.

1. The community must be dedicated to the production of energy and only to the production of energy until such time as the individual's share of the sustainable community dividend can afford such an exchange on a moral basis. 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

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.

 

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 plant

 

Take the Repository of A, which could 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.

ERoEI* (ER over EI star) is better than ERoEI.

 Thanks, Dallas Weaver, for the encouraging remarks and your great way of providing examples. I shall now try to get you to adopt a different way of computing ERoEI. Let us suppose that we can compute ER taking account of defective equipment and its replacement cost and associated down time. Further, let us suppose that we can compute EC, which we shall define as everything that goes into the manufacture, installation, maintenance, mothballing, indemnity for lateness and other delivery contretemps, environmental protection, and retention of storehouses of vital materials at almost negligible drawdown of their global repositories - accounting for the direct and indirect aspect of every category. We have tried to account for everything except support and other payments to the stakeholders whether the process under investigation is their sole interest or only a minor part of their economic activities. Let us take the sum of all such payments to personnel rendered in appropriate energy terminology and call it ES. Now, there is no reason to suppose that anyone had a' priori knowledge of these numbers; therefore, we do not expect ER/EI = ER/(EC + ES) to be exactly 1.0 (as I said incorrectly earlier.). If it is greater than 1.0, we have produced net energy that can be used to support free-loaders or some other specialized purpose. However, every useful citizen has already been paid even if he only hits a baseball with a bat for the amusement of energy workers and their other supporters. If it is less than 1.0, it is not sustainable. However, measures can be taken to improve matters.

Now the point is this: We do not require this ERoEI to exceed 1.0. After all, we could boot out the free loaders rather than support them etc. (I have been calling it ERoEI*.) Take a look at https://eroei.blogspot.com/ for crossed tees and dotted eyes.

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.

Tom Marsh's Train Photos w. background music (quick)

Checklist for ERoEI*

 

1. The community must be dedicated to the production of energy and only to the production of energy until such time as the individual's share of the sustainable community dividend can afford such an exchange on a moral basis. 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. 

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.

3. The maximum sustainable community dividend (MSCD) is the emergy returned (conservatively estimated and harvested on schedule) minus all of the emergy budget items in this list except this one. The net emergy must be subtracted from the MSCD to get the actual dividend. 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. EI* is the emergy returned minus the net emergy. The actual dividend is divided by the number of economic actors in the community. (Dependent children are not economic actors.) 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.

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, 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. 

 

Post to Douglas Nuttall in ResearchGate

Doug,

Before I noticed that the Limits to Growth forced Powering-Down, a Simpler Way, in short, Dematerialism, upon us, I noticed that almost everything that's wrong with the world was caused by people trying to get more money - either because of greed or because of fear. There's a list in one of the appendices at the end of my open-ended (never-to-be-finished) on-line book https://www.dematerialism.net/ops.htm . (I guess by now, I might be tempted to publish it if I received a good offer - in terms of convenience, moral uprightness - not money.) What can be done to remove even the temptation to worship Mammon? In a word: Dematerialism. It removes the temptation. (I may be an atheist, but I am a Judeo-Christian atheist, if you know what I mean. The Book of Proverbs, the Sermon on the Mount, etc.)

I didn't care if AGW was occurring or not. Peak Oil was in our future no matter what. Only a person of extremely limited intelligence would argue that we would always have oil that could be obtained for less energy than we expected to obtain from it. So, if the powerful and privileged owners of the world could convince their minions that there would never be catastrophic global warming caused by industrialization, all they needed to do was create the illusion of an infinite supply of oil in a finite world, which they did by exporting peak oil to places where lives didn't matter - or, worse yet, convince the world that manned space travel for everyone was right around the corner - not in a galaxy far, far away. C. S. Lewis refers to the huge distances between heavenly bodies as "God's quarantine" of our predatory species.  [Perelandra] 

Now, really, Doug, you don't want even more urban sprawl, do you? (I don't think anyone wants epidemic disease to prevent urban sprawl.

Nine topics to be completed later that were suggested by Douglas Nuttall's ResearchGate Post

 

AUG

14

1. From the family to the community that can be viewed from the top of Aristotle's hill to a sovereign nation, which, perhaps, is, after all, too big

I do not know of any scientific principle that indicates your thesis that communism works best in small groups beginning with the family and less well for very large communities such as entire nations; still I believe that it is true. It is a question of the group, whatever its size, reaching a consensus on important questions, like if the band of robbers comes back should we pay or fight, that everyone can live with. We understand there will be conflict and disagreement along the way. One can opt out by not going to the council meetings at the expense of giving up control of ones own life. 

Direct Aristotelian democracy is the basis for the so-called Fractal Government proposed here so as to ensure that all political power is retained by the people. Since every citizen must be a member of a community council which determines public policy, this basic political molecule must be small enough that the village council can be effective.

Its representative at the next most central council is chosen by sortition but recalled by popular vote if necessary. Thus decentralization must be the ultimate goal regardless of how the present system has to be accommodated. In particular, the largest identifiable political unit should be the drainage region, i. e., the contiguous portion of the land that drains into common reservoirs without any of the neighboring areas draining into it. This is the fundamental unit of land in ecology. (Professor Jorge Gabitto, formerly the chairman of the department of chemical engineering at Prairie View University, pointed out that the our maps are drawn in the most regrettable manner from the viewpoint of ecology. Rivers make convenient borders for map makers but not for ecologists.) The space between the basic molecules and the governing body of the entire ecological region is the fractal-like structure illustrated and discussed elsewhere. Additional necessities for decentralization are well known.

As of today, June 28, 2020, I believe that the greatest difficulty to establishing Dematerialism as imagined by me lies in the conduct of village or neighborhood councils to which every citizen belongs. Any number of difficulties are likely to arise and will place the greatest demands upon the human spirit. Lovers of freedom who believe in humanity will be hard pressed indeed. I am not certain that even a large compendium of advice would be of the slightest use at that time. (Aristotle imagined a community small enough to view from the top of a small hill.)

2. Jules Verne's island and Samuel Butler's Erewhon satisfy Delaney's condition.

 

On Jules Verne's Mysterious Island, six men who escaped from a 

Confederate prison in a balloon and who are moderately conversant with Nineteenth Century technology managed to establish a tiny enclave in which the most important technological features of their contemporary civilization could be obtained. In reality, it might take a little longer to establish the best of modernity.  Suppose they brought their little one- or two-house village up to date.  If someone joined them with new technology, they would have to think hard to decide whether to employ it or banish it to the museum to be  kept for its curiosity, intellectual, and aesthetic values. They might think like Samuel Butler's fictional characters in Erewhon who relegated all inventions made later than a specified date to a museum or they might think like David Delaney.     

The first dependence on economic growth is in the need to avoid the adverse consequences of innovations that reduce the need for labor.1 By definition, each labor-reducing innovation either increases the amount of a good produced or throws some people out of work.  Firms that create or exploit a labor-reducing innovation create new jobs internally by driving other firms out of business.  The new jobs implementing the innovation offset the loss of jobs caused by the innovation, but the innovating firms don’t necessarily hire all of the job losers, because the innovation reduced the total amount of labor needed to produce the original amount of the good.  In order to re-employ all job losers, the economy must grow to produce more of the good with all of the original workers, or produce more of some other good with the cheaper labor (the job losers) now available. In either case the economy grows.  Much of what we consider progress is due to labor-reducing innovations.  In order to live without economic growth, we would have to give up this kind of progress, or introduce arrangements to allow workers who become unproductive to retain their relative wealth and self-respect, or relegate most people to a repressed underclass.  There is a powerful incentive to avoid these contingencies by encouraging economic growth.  - David Delaney

3. How does economic equality affect racial conflict and evolutionary mal-adaptiveness? Why is economic equality both natural, logical, and necessary?

4. Bikes are nice but walking is better for talking.

5. Long lives and low birth rates: Whose posterity is it anyway?

6. "Specialization is for insects."

7. Our misunderstanding of the exponential (Albert Bartlett), for example, one-half percent growth implies doubling time of 140 years. If you began now to address the problem of twice as much economic activity in the same space, would you prepare for it or prevent it? Is 140 years enough time?

8. How does ERoEI* address all of that and ensure that the total energy budget for the community does not diminish as population at first diminishes and then stabilizes? Conservation measures are introduced that also redound to higher standards of living.

9. What I mean by stockpiles of natural capital.

Energy Is Everything

I hope we all know that everything depends on people doing the right thing, which depends upon people knowing what the right thing is, which depends upon people who know what to do doing the right thing to influence others until right thinking is widespread, which depends upon many things including luck. Ultimately, we need widespread (practically universal) agreement and cooperation. And it better be right. So, let's suppose that the human element is in place, that is, the people are ready.

Then, everything else depends upon obtaining a safe high-grade energy supply that is as dependable as the sun.

None of these things are likely to occur under the present governments and economic systems. It's not just the US government and political economy that needs to be replaced. But, I do not want this last remark to detract from my principal message, which is that energy is not just another thing. It is everything!!!

(It is necessary to employ hyperbole because most of us will continue to undervalue energy.) Energy is to our species what blood is to individuals.

Sustainability Requirements

The first requirement for sustainability is a stable population.

If we merely state that the sustainability of future generations is not compromised, we have said nothing about what is required. We don't know what future generations require; but, if we leave them with the same capacity to produce energy and the same size stockpiles of natural capital that we have, we have certainly achieved sustainability.

Assuming that one can live in a civilized society in which nuclear reactions do not occur, the conservation of matter holds. Then, conservation measures and aggressive recycling are sufficient to satisfy the natural capital requirement with fresh extraction etc. making up the slight unavoidable deficits for thousands, perhaps millions, of years without running out. We may consider this part of the problem solved.

Then, I say, sustainability depends upon an adequate supply of renewable energy. Everything else is in principle solved. Of course, achieving a stable population of intelligent human beings is very difficult, but we know what we have to do.

Thus ERoEI for the production of energy is crucial.  Currently we do not have a truly renewable energy technology.  It is necessary to compute ERoEI in such a way that, if an isolated community in which everything can be done because everything required of nature is available inside the borders of the community, I say, if such a community produces nothing for export except energy, that is, nothing crosses the border - not material, not people, only standard 110 volt AC 60 Hz single-phase electric current (and perhaps none of that), then the requirement for sustainability is ERoEI no less than 1.0.

From the viewpoint of monetary price

THINK of it another way.  We know that every economic transaction has an energy component.  Let's pretend that we know the correct multiplier to convert dollars to emergy units.  Now let us consider the economic events that affect the price.   If investors receive dividends, does that affect the price.  Certainly!   Does the salary paid the worker affect the price?   Yes.   How about the price of a tooth extraction by the worker's dentist?   If it rises, eventually the worker will ask for a raise.   Ultimately, it will affect the price of the solar power installation, if that's what we are talking about.   Suppose the community is isolated  except for net energy crossing the border.   The community consumes everything else that it produces.  Therefore, the entire livelihood of every member of the community must be charged to the sole producer - except for freeloaders who could be kicked out to restore the special circumstances of this thought experiment, which I thought was easy to understand.  However, if understanding something compromises a man's ability to earn a living, he may have difficulty understanding it.