by Graham Palmer | Nov 11, 2017 | Electricity, EROI, Uncategorized
The allegory of Flinder’s Island In 2008 US dollars, the Apollo program cost $98 billion, encompassed 17 missions and included six lunar landings. Nobody believes that successfully landing a man on the moon proved that colonising the moon was in any way...
by Graham Palmer | Jul 29, 2017 | Energy, EROI, Uncategorized
Pathways to the Post-Carbon Economy In June 2017, Nafeez Ahmed published an article 3 ways Clean Energy will make Big Oil extinct in 12 to 32 Years — without subsidies which illicited debate in the sustainability community. In response, Nafeez suggested a symposium...
by Graham Palmer | Jul 8, 2017 | EROI, Uncategorized
Japan as a template for how societies might reconfigure with economic stagnation and declining net-energy Japan has enormous debt, falling population, and faces a demographic ‘time bomb’. But my current visit to Japan reveals a vibrant, friendly, and civilised...
by Graham Palmer | May 23, 2017 | EROI, Technology, Uncategorized
The competitive struggle between technology and resource depletion The study of EROI may be of little more than academic interest except for two factors. Energy extraction has conformed to Ricardo’s ‘best first’ principle, meaning that the easiest resources to extract...
by Graham Palmer | Apr 22, 2017 | EROI
A Framework for Incorporating EROI into Electrical Storage The fundamental problem with a transition to renewable energy is that modern society has been structured around demand-based power flows. Any quantity of power is available at any time – the only limit...
by Graham Palmer | Apr 13, 2017 | EROI
The EROI energy multiplier hypothesis A common narrative in EROI discourse is the energy multiplier hypothesis. The reasoning is that it doesn’t matter what the EROI is, providing it’s greater than unity. From this reasoning, it follows that even very low EROI’s (say...
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