These 9 charts from the Statistical Review Of World Energy expose the myth of the energy transition & show hydrocarbons are growing faster than alt-energy
Fossil fuels are archaic anti-technology, inefficient, expensive, dirty climate killing, noise, polluting, hard to access, racist & classist energy CARTELS.
You cite fossil energy in both exajoules and in barrels.
The two are increasingly divergent.
Art Berman says a barrel of oil has only 90% to 95% of the energy it had ten years ago. They are "cooking the books" to hide the dirty secret that fossil fuel has already peaked, in terms of energy content.
Fracked Permian oil is much lighter than WTI, and so it delivers less diesel, which is what the world runs on. Plus, "fake oil" like NGLs, refinery gain, and even biodiesel and ethanol are being lumped in with "barrels of oil," when they were not in the past.
Berman's curves show that fossil energy is flat, and that total energy growth continues only with the help of "renewables," which really aren't. (There would be *no* so-called "renewables" without fossil fuel!)
Excellent post. And an excellent referral to Edward Tufte. I have two of his books, THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION, and VISUAL EXPLANATIONS. I was particularly interested in the second of these due to the article on the Decision to Launch the Space Challenger. (p 39 - 53) Alan McDonald was a chemical engineering friend of mine at Montana State and on graduation had gone to work for Morton Thiokol. Alan was the only engineer to recommend against launch of the Challenger due to concern about O-ring seals in cold temperatures. Physicist Richard Feynman led the investigation of the resulting explosion and deaths of seven astronauts. Tufte offers suggestions about how McDonald's concerns might have been presented to NASA more convincingly. As it was, McDonald received retribution from NASA and was fired by Morton Thiokol. Fortunately, both actions were reversed after public outcry.
My own education is a BS Engineering Physics Montana State, MBA UC Berkeley, and PhD Industrial Engineering Northwestern in IL with lots of statistical training along the way. This was followed by 40 years in manufacturing technical, environmental, and quality assurance work for nine companies in eight industries. I learned that analyses printed out from a computer impressed managers more than spoken or written reports. Also, that I should never deliver a computer's statistical analysis if I couldn't explain what that beta coefficient was. That technical reports were much more effective if the first page had a consistent format that could be read in two or three minutes (details to follow for those more interested). A good graph of data can be helpful, such as those from Robert Bryce. And finally that there are exceptions to the rule "a picture is worth a thousand words" as some videos have a thousand pictures and can be a total waste of time. Cheers.
You quoted Edward Tufte: "whenever you give people a number, give them a familiar metric so they can make a comparison." But I can't find that quote anywhere. Was it a remark to you? Did you publish it anywhere other than here on Substack?
What about the CPI inflation lie, or as it should be called the CP lie. Inflation is a heck of a lot more than 3% to 4%, it’s at least double that! Just as other government fabricated numbers that never includes all of the taxes we all pay. Inflation is a silent steady stealthily hidden tax on the ever reducing purchasing power of fiat currencies everyone has to use. Don’t piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining. Yeah Uncle Sam, we are all earning more dollars now but it’s buying less and less every damn day because of the increased money creation diluting the existing money supply. Our tomato soup is looking pinkish because your diluting the existing tomato soup / currency with more and more water while many Americans go hungry.
Couple more stats I'd like to see (if they already exist in your substack, point us to them and my apology for not searching for them as a new visitor):
- per capita energy use in each country/region
- the share of hydrocarbon usage for each "renewable" energy, e.g., hydrocarbon input into their materials, manufacture, installation and maintenance. I'm not aware of any solar panel factories powered by solar cells.
Don't play the person, put up the arguments even when you passionately disagree with others.
I think it would help if you were to explain the role of atmospheric carbon dioxide in maintaining a livable world at a temperature that neither cooks nor freezes life. Then I might listen to you argument calling anthropogenic climate change into question, as long as it was based upon the laws of physics.
Most land is too valuable for other uses to dedicate to solar farms. The roofs of buildings work as solar staging and unlivable deserts as well. But is that enough to supply what is needed?
Energy improves standards.of living. Poor countries reject curtailing energy use increases as unfair and wealthy countries will reject lowering living standards to reduce ill effects. The only rational choice is to reduce CO2 emissions and sulphur and other particulates via technology applied to all sources of energy. And sharing the technology.
You’re conflating absolute, relative, and total. Total energy consumption is increasing, and percent renewable is also increasing from 2004 to 2024. Of course non-renewable absolute value. will be greater than renewable. Coal and natural gas is still more straight forward and better established for scaling up capacity. Non-renewables are making okay progress. If non-renewable follows a hockey stick curve we could expect uptake to increase faster with time.
You left off the funniest thing about the top chart: "other renewables" (i.e. other than hydro) includes not just wind and solar, but also biofuels, i.e. hydrocarbons with perhaps a larger carbon footprint per unit of power than even the dirtiest coal or bitumen sands. I love that some US Senator from Iowa or wherever managed to get this insane pork-barrel boondoggle lumped in with wind, solar and hydro under the meaningless label "renewables".
Trying to gauge the support for solar and wind, which seems entirely unwarranted based on their actual contribution, I am struck by one thing - people see a giant wind turbine or acres of solar panels and think "surely something that colossal is solving the problem, right?" No, it isn't. It's a drop in the proverbial bucket. It barley collects enough energy to be worthwhile.
Well Robert, this data is for total energy consumption. Ember just brought out the data for electricity for 2023. 30% of generation worldwide was WWS wind water solar and another 10% was nuclear. WWS is expected to increase to 60% in 2030. Your own data shows that coal has been at a plateau from 2014. Ember predicts that CO2 emissions will start declining from this year. It's a hard slog but progress is being made!
The EIA's data long ago showed that three windmills must be installed just to get full production from one and that ninety-nine solar panels must be installed just to get full production from one.
Gene, I was reviewing CAISO’s “Net qualifying capacity (NQC) and effective flexible capacity (EFC)
• Final Effective Flexible Capacity List For Compliance Year 202406/14/2024, 12:26 PM
• Final Net Qualifying Capacity Report For Compliance Year 202406/14/2024, 12:26 PM”
reports to find how CASIO addresses seasonal performance variability at the Ivanpah facilities.
They dropped the qualifying capacity to 0.5 for January and 3.8 to 4.0 for Feb. for the facilities.
The Dracker Solar unit 4A and unit 1 BESS highlight how solar can be converted to a “dispatchable resource”- 63 MW net qualifying capacity for every month- with addition of batteries.
Helms 1,2,3 are classified as a dispatchable resources and Diablo 1 and 2 are not. If memory serves me correctly wasn’t Diablo designed to work in concert with Helms. Do you recall the system (Diablo/Helms) specifications around dispatchability?
Hello, Mark: Diablo Canyon Power Plant (DCPP) 1 and 2 are dispatchable generators. They produce power day or night, wind or calm, and flood or drought. The marketing claim for Helms Pumped Storage (HPS) was that it could be used for time arbitrage of DCPP's power, "charging up" at night and then discharging during the late afternoon-early evening load peak. The problem is this never happened. Instead, HPS is mostly employed to provide ancillary services - to stabilize voltage and frequency in the face of the large amount of destabilizing solar, wind, and batteries on the California power grid. These three types of generators don't provide significant amounts of synchronous grid inertia (SGI.) Batteries are cost-prohibitive. My 2018 article https://nuclear-economics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2018-01-11-DCPP-1.pdf includes a time series showing the very low annual capacity factor (or percentage of full-power ON time of HPS. HPS maxes out at about 4% instead of the expected 25%. DCPP supplies huge quantities of SGI. You may learn more about SGI at my article on the topic https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important. When SONGS near San Clemente was needlessly shut down at the end of January, 2012, the SGI that used to be supplied by that nuclear power plant was mostly replaced with SGI and capacity from PacifiCorp's mostly coal-fired power plants in and around Wyoming.
Fossil fuels are archaic anti-technology, inefficient, expensive, dirty climate killing, noise, polluting, hard to access, racist & classist energy CARTELS.
Are you saying that solar, wind, and batteries are not??
Thanks; Amazing numbers. Keep getting them out.
You cite fossil energy in both exajoules and in barrels.
The two are increasingly divergent.
Art Berman says a barrel of oil has only 90% to 95% of the energy it had ten years ago. They are "cooking the books" to hide the dirty secret that fossil fuel has already peaked, in terms of energy content.
Fracked Permian oil is much lighter than WTI, and so it delivers less diesel, which is what the world runs on. Plus, "fake oil" like NGLs, refinery gain, and even biodiesel and ethanol are being lumped in with "barrels of oil," when they were not in the past.
Berman's curves show that fossil energy is flat, and that total energy growth continues only with the help of "renewables," which really aren't. (There would be *no* so-called "renewables" without fossil fuel!)
Excellent post. And an excellent referral to Edward Tufte. I have two of his books, THE VISUAL DISPLAY OF QUANTITATIVE INFORMATION, and VISUAL EXPLANATIONS. I was particularly interested in the second of these due to the article on the Decision to Launch the Space Challenger. (p 39 - 53) Alan McDonald was a chemical engineering friend of mine at Montana State and on graduation had gone to work for Morton Thiokol. Alan was the only engineer to recommend against launch of the Challenger due to concern about O-ring seals in cold temperatures. Physicist Richard Feynman led the investigation of the resulting explosion and deaths of seven astronauts. Tufte offers suggestions about how McDonald's concerns might have been presented to NASA more convincingly. As it was, McDonald received retribution from NASA and was fired by Morton Thiokol. Fortunately, both actions were reversed after public outcry.
My own education is a BS Engineering Physics Montana State, MBA UC Berkeley, and PhD Industrial Engineering Northwestern in IL with lots of statistical training along the way. This was followed by 40 years in manufacturing technical, environmental, and quality assurance work for nine companies in eight industries. I learned that analyses printed out from a computer impressed managers more than spoken or written reports. Also, that I should never deliver a computer's statistical analysis if I couldn't explain what that beta coefficient was. That technical reports were much more effective if the first page had a consistent format that could be read in two or three minutes (details to follow for those more interested). A good graph of data can be helpful, such as those from Robert Bryce. And finally that there are exceptions to the rule "a picture is worth a thousand words" as some videos have a thousand pictures and can be a total waste of time. Cheers.
You quoted Edward Tufte: "whenever you give people a number, give them a familiar metric so they can make a comparison." But I can't find that quote anywhere. Was it a remark to you? Did you publish it anywhere other than here on Substack?
Those numbers don’t lie, correct.
What about the CPI inflation lie, or as it should be called the CP lie. Inflation is a heck of a lot more than 3% to 4%, it’s at least double that! Just as other government fabricated numbers that never includes all of the taxes we all pay. Inflation is a silent steady stealthily hidden tax on the ever reducing purchasing power of fiat currencies everyone has to use. Don’t piss on our legs and tell us it’s raining. Yeah Uncle Sam, we are all earning more dollars now but it’s buying less and less every damn day because of the increased money creation diluting the existing money supply. Our tomato soup is looking pinkish because your diluting the existing tomato soup / currency with more and more water while many Americans go hungry.
Couple more stats I'd like to see (if they already exist in your substack, point us to them and my apology for not searching for them as a new visitor):
- per capita energy use in each country/region
- the share of hydrocarbon usage for each "renewable" energy, e.g., hydrocarbon input into their materials, manufacture, installation and maintenance. I'm not aware of any solar panel factories powered by solar cells.
But Sue, whose "fact"?
I think Patrick's request is reasonable.
Don't play the person, put up the arguments even when you passionately disagree with others.
I think it would help if you were to explain the role of atmospheric carbon dioxide in maintaining a livable world at a temperature that neither cooks nor freezes life. Then I might listen to you argument calling anthropogenic climate change into question, as long as it was based upon the laws of physics.
Most land is too valuable for other uses to dedicate to solar farms. The roofs of buildings work as solar staging and unlivable deserts as well. But is that enough to supply what is needed?
Energy improves standards.of living. Poor countries reject curtailing energy use increases as unfair and wealthy countries will reject lowering living standards to reduce ill effects. The only rational choice is to reduce CO2 emissions and sulphur and other particulates via technology applied to all sources of energy. And sharing the technology.
You’re conflating absolute, relative, and total. Total energy consumption is increasing, and percent renewable is also increasing from 2004 to 2024. Of course non-renewable absolute value. will be greater than renewable. Coal and natural gas is still more straight forward and better established for scaling up capacity. Non-renewables are making okay progress. If non-renewable follows a hockey stick curve we could expect uptake to increase faster with time.
You left off the funniest thing about the top chart: "other renewables" (i.e. other than hydro) includes not just wind and solar, but also biofuels, i.e. hydrocarbons with perhaps a larger carbon footprint per unit of power than even the dirtiest coal or bitumen sands. I love that some US Senator from Iowa or wherever managed to get this insane pork-barrel boondoggle lumped in with wind, solar and hydro under the meaningless label "renewables".
Nice to see all these numbers in one handy place.
Trying to gauge the support for solar and wind, which seems entirely unwarranted based on their actual contribution, I am struck by one thing - people see a giant wind turbine or acres of solar panels and think "surely something that colossal is solving the problem, right?" No, it isn't. It's a drop in the proverbial bucket. It barley collects enough energy to be worthwhile.
Also consumed huge amount of energy to create and install and the structure has limited lifetime and is not recyclable.
Try to convince the Cultists of the Church of Anthropocentric Global Warming of anything outside their belief structure is just a waste of time.
Well Robert, this data is for total energy consumption. Ember just brought out the data for electricity for 2023. 30% of generation worldwide was WWS wind water solar and another 10% was nuclear. WWS is expected to increase to 60% in 2030. Your own data shows that coal has been at a plateau from 2014. Ember predicts that CO2 emissions will start declining from this year. It's a hard slog but progress is being made!
The EIA's data long ago showed that three windmills must be installed just to get full production from one and that ninety-nine solar panels must be installed just to get full production from one.
Stop chasing unicorns.
Thank you for another "killer" essay, Robert.
Gene, I was reviewing CAISO’s “Net qualifying capacity (NQC) and effective flexible capacity (EFC)
• Final Effective Flexible Capacity List For Compliance Year 202406/14/2024, 12:26 PM
• Final Net Qualifying Capacity Report For Compliance Year 202406/14/2024, 12:26 PM”
reports to find how CASIO addresses seasonal performance variability at the Ivanpah facilities.
They dropped the qualifying capacity to 0.5 for January and 3.8 to 4.0 for Feb. for the facilities.
The Dracker Solar unit 4A and unit 1 BESS highlight how solar can be converted to a “dispatchable resource”- 63 MW net qualifying capacity for every month- with addition of batteries.
Helms 1,2,3 are classified as a dispatchable resources and Diablo 1 and 2 are not. If memory serves me correctly wasn’t Diablo designed to work in concert with Helms. Do you recall the system (Diablo/Helms) specifications around dispatchability?
Mark
Hello, Mark: Diablo Canyon Power Plant (DCPP) 1 and 2 are dispatchable generators. They produce power day or night, wind or calm, and flood or drought. The marketing claim for Helms Pumped Storage (HPS) was that it could be used for time arbitrage of DCPP's power, "charging up" at night and then discharging during the late afternoon-early evening load peak. The problem is this never happened. Instead, HPS is mostly employed to provide ancillary services - to stabilize voltage and frequency in the face of the large amount of destabilizing solar, wind, and batteries on the California power grid. These three types of generators don't provide significant amounts of synchronous grid inertia (SGI.) Batteries are cost-prohibitive. My 2018 article https://nuclear-economics.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/2018-01-11-DCPP-1.pdf includes a time series showing the very low annual capacity factor (or percentage of full-power ON time of HPS. HPS maxes out at about 4% instead of the expected 25%. DCPP supplies huge quantities of SGI. You may learn more about SGI at my article on the topic https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important. When SONGS near San Clemente was needlessly shut down at the end of January, 2012, the SGI that used to be supplied by that nuclear power plant was mostly replaced with SGI and capacity from PacifiCorp's mostly coal-fired power plants in and around Wyoming.