Luís de Sousa

British Petroleum (BP) publishes its Statistical Review of World Energy, venting out a few catchy phrases that the mainstream media mindlessly repeats. This time the catch-phrase was: “overall energy consumption is growing faster than renewable energies put together”. This discourse is naturally convenient to those set on promoting fossil fuels and/or detracting renewable energy. But is BP really a trustworthy source on the matter?

Photo-Voltaics (PV) is an energy source where this problem has been more acute. Equipment and installation prices collapsed four or five fold since 2010, but published EROEI studies have not converged; in fact it appears they dispersed even further.

In the last press review of 2015 I asked if that had been the year petroleum peaked.

In the first half of 2014 the volume of debt issued by the global petroleum industry was equivalent to the GDP of Austria.

Using a simple cost model this article shows that PV technologies can indeed supply electricity to the grid for less than 0.10 €/kWh in large swaths of the continent…

An interpretation of the recent crisis as due to mineral scarcity.