There is no alternative to degrowth

What civilization needs to maintain complexity is a source of energy that has a high ratio of energy returned on energy invested (EROI). If it takes you one oil barrel to transport and refine a barrel of oil you extract from the ground, you can’t maintain a civilization. You can find estimates that the minimum EROI for economic growth to occur has to be at least 11.

The entire green energy transition we’re pursuing now, results in a low EROI. The consequences of this are not immediately obvious. Sure, you can add solar panels to the grid. Sure, you can ride electric vehicles. Sure, you can even store your solar energy using batteries. And then you can charge your electric vehicles using the energy stored in those batteries. But as you do all of this, the overall EROI of your infrastructure declines.

In Germany (and thus the Netherlands too), the EROI for solar panels is 3.9. If you want to store the solar energy, you’re left with an EROI of 1.9. With subsidies you can add such energy sources to the grid, but you can’t build a civilization on the back of such numbers. For stored wind energy, you’re looking at an EROI of 3.9. This is not immediately obvious when you begin your transition. It’s only with high saturation of the grid, that the EROI problem reveals itself, as until that time you’re just mixing it in with high EROI fossil fuels.

To produce solar panels, you need very pure Silicon with no contaminants, which is produced by mining high purity quartz. Eventually you run out of the best quality quartz and your cost goes up to refine the lower quality stuff. China is seeing the carbon footprint of its solar panels jump up, because they’re moving towards lower quality quartz, that needs more refining.

The problem with solar and wind emerges when you try to run the grid on these sources, because you also need to keep alternatives on standby, which is costly. In Germany, with 95% of electricity provided by wind and solar, this leads to the following cost estimate:

I made the German estimate for solar and wind at 95% of the grid bold. That compares very unfavorably in cost to a grid that’s mostly natural gas. In other words, what happens is that in a global economic competition, countries with a solar + wind grid won’t be able to compete with those that stick to natural gas.

We’re not going to store wind and solar energy at any significant scale. Lithium batteries are more efficient than lead batteries, you’re looking at 95% round trip efficiency for Lithium, versus 75-85% for lead batteries. The problem unfortunately, is that if you wanted to base the grid on lithium batteries, you would rapidly run into a lithium shortage. Even lead is insufficiently available in the Earth’s crust.

The EROI problem isn’t just a problem for renewable energy, it’s a problem for fossil fuels too. We extracted the best and easiest fossil fuels first, so now we’re left with the poor quality stuff:

Trump is embarrassed, because the oil companies refuse to invest in Venezuela. The economy is simply not capable of raising prices of oil to the level where these companies would make a profit extracting Venezuelan oil, so they’re not eager to jump in.

So is nuclear going to bail us out? I wouldn’t count on it. The world faces a crucial uranium shortage by the 2030’s. There’s simply not a whole lot of uranium available in the Earth’s crust, if we wanted to get a 100% of our energy from uranium it would be gone in five years. Extraction from seawater is not going to happen either.

The energy returned on energy invested for nuclear energy is estimated at 5. That is, you need 0.2 kwh to produce 1 kwh. That seems to be the best estimate I can find. As you can see here, an EROI of 5 allows you to grow food, but you can’t sustain much complexity beyond that:

The most important factor in the EROI of nuclear energy is the ore grade of the uranium used. The ore grade is not going to get any better, it’s just going to decline in the years ahead. In other words, the EROI of nuclear energy is merely going to get worse in the years ahead.

We’re not just stuck with only poor EROI sources of energy. Estimates for nuclear and renewable EROI tend to vary a lot, but for hydropower, everyone agrees that the EROI is very high, an average of 110. The problem however is that we’ve already dammed all the good rivers in the developed world, it can’t grow. In fact, it’s a shrinking source of energy, because the reservoirs are being filled over time with mud. Climate change induced droughts will also interfere with hydropower.

Globally, electricity is about 20% of total energy consumption. The other 80% of energy we use is still mostly fossil fuels, used for energy intensive processes and transportation. Some of those processes can be electrified, but many others can’t. For example, air travel can’t be electrified.

Conventional oil production peaked in the mid 2000’s. Since then we’ve been mixing an increasing share of lower quality oil into the supply, like the Canadian tar sands, with a much lower energy returned on energy invested. As we exhaust the conventional oil, it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain our standard of living.

This problem doesn’t reveal itself in the form of high oil prices, because the economy can not sustain those high oil prices, high oil prices are only temporary until they result in a collapse in demand and prices go down again as a result.

As the high EROI sources of energy are exhausted on our planet, with them gradually goes the ability of this planet to sustain a complex civilization like ours. There are just no methods left that can deliver us a high EROI source of energy 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, except for the ones we’re already exhausting.

People who figure this out tend to have high hopes for various experimental forms of nuclear energy like Thorium, but we’ve had nuclear power since the 1950’s, with no significant introduction of new models. Any novel forms of nuclear energy will also have a low EROI, as logic dictates that we’ve begun with the least complex forms of harvesting the energy of the atom.

The reality is that we would be best off if we would try to conserve the scarce sources of energy this world has to offer. There is no magical source of abundant energy ahead of us. Unfortunately American elites tend to believe otherwise. The former CEO of Google thinks climate change goals should be abandoned to focus on AI, because AI will then solve climate change for us.

This won’t happen, because AI can not change the laws of physics for us. We live in a world of physical limits. If we don’t respect those limits we will suffer the consequences.