Renewables will make our energy crisis worse
“We have an energy crisis, we don’t have enough energy today. And yet people are saying that the answer is that we have to get away from oil and gas and invest more in renewables. It will only make this problem worse", says Adam Rozencwajg, CFA, Managing Partner at Goehring & Rozencwajg - Natural Resource Investors in this podcast from 30.9.2022.
For more detailed information from Rozencwajg why renewables will make things worse, see the post "09/ 16/ 2022 on the same homepage as the podcast above, i.e. the "Goehring & Rozenczwajg Natural Resource Investors" blog.
Gail Tverberg has also touted the same fact on her blog Our Finite World, that renewables will make things worse (read for example this article by her), as has also Steve St. Angelo on the SrsRocco Report blog (read for example this article by him).
Why do renewables make things worse? There are many reasons, but the main reasons are that renewables usually do not replace fossil fuels, but just add to our energy mix, renewables are not truly renewable, they have a short lifespan (about fifteen years for solar panels and twenty for wind turbines) and need to be replaced, they need fossil fuels to be built and operated, they have such a bad EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) that they make us self-cannibalize, and they are intermittent, which means the wind has to blow and the sun has to shine for them to deliver energy, which means that they has to be backed up by fossil fuels, and the electrical grid cannot really operate just on renewables, the more renewables there is on the grid, the more problems it has, which has to do mainly with intermittency.
Richard Heinberg has also preached the truth that, because of the low EROEI of fossil fuels, an economy that runs on renewables has to be much, much smaller than ours today. He presents this fact in the book "Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy" (2016) together with David Fridley. But you can start with reading his museletter #272: Our renewable future.
This fact that the economy has to shrink radically if we want to run it on renewables, guarantees its collapse, because our economy is built on perpetual economic growth, and collapses if it does not grow (this has to do with the debt-driven bubble nature of the system).
