With the current political debates in Australia around energy and climate policy, it’s easy to neglect the sleeper of Australia’s energy policy - the lack of an oil strategic reserve. The IEA was established in November 1974 in response to the first Middle Eastern oil crisis. One of the rules of membership for oil importing …
The speciation of technology
In the evolving technology space, there can be a tendency to assume that a single class of technology will come to dominate. The stand-out example is Tony Seba’s projection that all new road vehicles—buses, cars, vans, trucks —will be entirely electric by 2030, and that all of these vehicles will be autonomous or semi-autonomous. Seba’s …
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 tend to be the first. But at the same time, human ingenuity continually pushes the technological frontier forward. Hence, there is a competitive …
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Electricity networks and disruption
Clayton Christensen’s theory of disruption was originally based on his observations about disc drives. He saw that the manufacturers of 14” drives for mainframes had been driven out of business by manufacturers of 8” drives for mini-computers, and then the companies that made the 8” drives were subsequently driven out of business by manufacturers of …
A few thoughts on the electricity ‘death spiral’
One of Germany’s exports has been the idea of ‘energy democratisation’ - the Energiewende is not just a transition to renewable energy but a switch to energy democracy. But was does energy democracy really mean and is it a useful model for thinking about future energy supply? The thing that makes the democracy idea interesting …
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Energy technologies and the Silicon Valley mindset
Horace Dediu identified the twin personalities of Google - Google A solves problems of humanity and Google B solves problems for advertisers. Google A is known for their moonshot programs and optimism, Google B pays the bills. So it was with interest when Ross Koningstein and David Fork announced the termination of Google's RE<C program in 2011. …
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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 is the circuit breaker in your mains connection. But the major scalable and affordable renewable power sources are wind and solar PV, …
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