[bigato]

You are ignoring the concept of EROEI - Energy Return Over Energy Investment. Basically, how much energy you need to use to produce additional energy. Or, as the comics put it, how many slaves you need to produce additional slaves. The solar farms also require maintenance and ongoing replacement. Their EROEI will never be as high as fossil fuels were when we started mining them, which allowed us to bootstrap the industrial era. We will never have such easy energy from solar alone due to physical limits on the technology. Our economy will be fundamentally affected by this change in paradigm. Even if we use the remaining fossil fuels to bootstrap solar farms, over time the EROEI will revert to solar’s, because fossil is increasingly costlier to extract.

Another way to understand EROEI is, given a solar panel system (including batteries, circuits, etc) typical lifespan of say, thirty years, how many other systems equal to this would you be able to build with the resulting e energy during those 30 years? It’s improving, but if you also account for the maintenance and required labor to keep it working, it’s still looking really bad when compared to the output we had from fossil until a few decades ago.

For more detailed information on EROEI: https://forum.earlyretirementextreme.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t...

[zamfi]

I did not mention this because it bears more on how much energy infrastructure is required to build more energy infrastructure rather than to maintain our energy-hungry lifestyle.

EROEI is much harder to calculate for solar, wind, battery, etc. than for literal mining from the ground, but it seems like we’re around 10 for current utility-scale solar and hydro pumped storage.

That said, there are a lot of studies presenting extremes either way, usually funded by those who would benefit by the real number falling at such an extreme, so who knows.

Also, for those interested, the Wikipedia article on EROEI is actually good resource: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_in...

Nothing will ever beat the EROEI of oil spilling out of the ground ready-to-burn, but it’s also not a given that we need that to bootstrap industrial civilization.