Can Renewables Power the World?
If you’ve heard that the net energy of renewables is too low to run society, and that as a result the renewable energy transition is destined to fail…then you need to listen to this interview with net energy researcher Rembrandt Koppelaar and check out his new research. His findings will probably surprise you.
May 18, 2017
China energy outlook: an inside look at Chinese energy thinking
Globally, only two reports are published on an annual basis wherein the world’s energy situation is fully scrutinized…A number of years ago China decided it needs its own version of the truth.
November 14, 2012
Shale oil: The latest insights
The impact of unconventional fuels like shale oil on the global energy system is still an issue of great uncertainty. Not so much because of the size of the tank (the resource base), but due to the large physical effort necessary to obtain a sizeable supply of this type of fossil fuel. For instance, to exploit tight shale oil formations we need large capital expenditures to obtain relatively low flow rates from many horizontally drilled wells.
October 26, 2012
World energy consumption – beyond 500 exajoules
Today’s post goes into the global consumption of energy and provides a dataset in Excel for researchers on global primary energy consumption from 1830 to 2010. We are now burning 10 times as much energy as a century ago to provide the goods and services we consume. Energy consumption is still increasing rapidly
February 16, 2012
Thoughts on a sustainable human ecosystem
In this post, different modeling approaches to gain insights into sustainability will be discussed. We hope that readers will contribute their thinking of what a sustainable ecosystem would look like, and how to map the road towards it. One of the parts of this post is the initial outline of a project to model a human ecosystem from cradle to grave.
September 24, 2011
Jevons’ coal question: Why the UK Coal Peak wasn’t as bad as expected
In his book The Coal Question from 1865 William Stanley Jevons examined for how long the United Kingdom could continue to fuel its economy based on cheap supplies of coal. At the time the UK consumed about 93 million tons of coal providing nearly all of its energy supply. His estimate was that within a maximum of a hundred years, or perhaps even within one or two generations, production would be in retreat due to an increase in the cost of mining which would, in Jevons’ words, “Injure the commercial and manufacturing supremacy of England.”
In this post I’ll look back at history to show that Jevons correctly foresaw the fate of the British coal industry. In Britain a peak in production occurred around 1913 caused by increasing coal mining costs, lack of technological innovation, rising competition from abroad, a number of political decisions disadvantaging coal as a fuel source, declining profits, and a slump in British economic growth coinciding with World War I.
August 15, 2011