The Reverse Green Energy Cargo Cult

I couldn’t help but notice a most curious phenomenon that has recently gripped Western Europe, which very much looks like a cargo cult, but in reverse.

In a classic cargo cult, native tribes that have become inured to the indignity of regular airlifts providing them with humanitarian relief in the form of, say, beer and pizza, when deprived of this affront to their native dignity, take to building fake airstrips with fake control towers and bonfires for runway lights in the hopes of luring more transport planes laden with aforementioned beer and pizza.

In a reverse cargo cult, native tribes, that have become inured to the indignity of regular airlifts providing humanitarian relief in the form of, say, beer and pizza, having suddenly become cognizant of the deleterious effect of beer and pizza on public health, Arctic permafrost or planetary alignment, take to barricading the landing strips and dismantling the control towers in the hopes of preventing the landing of more transport planes laden with aforementioned beer and pizza. The natives then remain hungry and sober until sanity returns and air traffic is restored.

The latter scenario is what seems to be unfolding in the European Union of late, where the native tribes have made strenuous efforts to limit their access to Russian-supplied beer and pizza, instead switching to eating grass and drinking swamp water—figuratively speaking: by beer and pizza I mean natural gas and coal and by grass and swamp water I mean wind turbines and solar panels. And by blocking runways and dismantling control towers I mean blocking or delaying the construction of South Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, gambling with their own energy security by tying the pricing of long-term natural gas contracts to casino-like futures markets, and playing political games with pipelines that run through Poland and the Ukraine. Lastly, the assumed deleterious effect of beer and pizza on public health, Arctic permafrost or planetary alignment is analogous to the assumed planet-destroying effects of CO2 emissions from burning hydrocarbons.

If you find such analogies outlandish, please let me explain.

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The Green Energy Cargo Cult

Are wind generators and solar panels a replacement for fossil fuels? A lot of people still seem to believe that, even after the recent flood of bad news on this front, but a few people are already beginning to suspect something.

Although some people claim that wind and solar farms have an EROEI (Energy Returned on Energy Invested) of 5 or even 7, it is trivial to prove that this just isn’t so. If, for each 1 kWh of energy invested in their design, marketing, production, installation, maintenance, removal and safe disposal, they were to return 5 or even 7 kWh over their useful lifetime of, optimistically, 20 years, and assuming a constant (inflation-adjusted) cost of energy, they would produce at least 400% of pure profit! Compare that to a bank deposit or a guaranteed income investment yielding 3% over inflation (if you can find one!). Over the same 20 years it would produce a mere 80% profit, which is equivalent to an EROEI of just 1.8. If wind and solar installations were so lucrative, their promoters would not be asking for government subsidies; they would be running away from frenzied mobs of investors shouting “Shut up and take my money!” Such a huge, and guaranteed, rate of return, is something to die (or at least risk going to jail) for.

Instead, the wind and solar energy sectors have turned into gigantic state subsidy sponges. Not only have they squandered money and natural resources, but they have become a major headache for grid operators because they have managed to force through regulations requiring grid operators to take whatever electricity they produce regardless of demand. However, there is generally little risk of them ever producing too much electricity; for instance, wind farms for all of 2021, for all of Germany, have produced just 20% of their rated capacity and solar farms barely over 10%. In any case, all they have to show for several trillion dollars of squandered public funds, and huge swaths of land and sea blighted by their installations, are much higher electricity rates. In Russia, which has so far avoided this green plague and has instead concentrated on developing hydroelectric and nuclear generation capacity, electricity rates are 10 (ten!) times lower than in the West. Thus, the real EROEI of wind and solar is not 5 or even 7 but much less than zero: they are a net waste of energy.

While such very simple analysis is sufficient to demonstrate that wind and solar farms are not just unprofitable but a net waste of energy, a more in-depth look would reveal that they also impose exorbitant costs on the rest of the electric grid. That is, if wind and solar installations were entirely free, connecting them to the electric grid imposes costs on other energy producers because their output fluctuates randomly, depending, as it does, on the availability of wind and sunlight, instead of being matched to real-time electricity demand. This forces other electricity producers to waste fuel, whether by spinning idly or by rapidly ramping up and down, in order to compensate. In turn, this causes energy rates to fluctuate wildly (in some cases going negative on cool, sunny, windy days while shooting up into the stratosphere on cold or hot, overcast and windless ones), making it impossible for energy-intensive businesses to plan their production so as to avoid financial losses.

The problem of ragged energy generation from wind and solar, which is unmatched to real-time energy demand, could be remedied by the introduction of mass energy storage, but electricity storage doesn’t exist except for a few boutique applications, and scaling it up would only compound the overall waste of energy. There are just a few locations on Earth that could reasonably be used for mass electric storage: that is where there is a lake at a high elevation in close proximity to a lake at a lower elevation that could be connected together using pipelines, pumps and turbines; all other mass electricity storage ideas have so far turned out to be duds and, given the physics of the problem, are likely to remain so. Thus, it would be far more cost-effective and energy-efficient, overall, to keep wind and solar farms disconnected from the electric grid; not as good as never building them at all, but a major step in the right direction. As far as building any more of them, here is an interesting datapoint: spot prices for polycrystalline silicon, a major ingredient in solar panels, having reached an all-time low of $6.30/kg in mid-2020 have since gone up 600% to $36/kg and are now predicted to continue to increase over time.

Thus, the effective EROEI of wind and solar farms is comparable to that of a classic cargo cult, in which native tribes that have become inured to the indignity of regular airlifts providing them with humanitarian relief in the form of, say, beer and pizza, when suddenly deprived of this affront to their native dignity, take to building fake airstrips with fake control towers, and burning bonfires in place of runway lights, in the hopes of luring more transport planes laden with aforementioned beer and pizza. The natives then sit around and wait for some transport planes to land, remaining hungry and sober. Eventually, sanity returns and they wander off into the jungle in search of something to eat. With regard to renewable energy, we are not quite there yet, but it may be time to try to move things along because with any more of this nonsense a lot of people will end up very cold and very hungry—and very angry as well.

Noosphere, Part V: Dualistic mythologies

“In Chinese cosmology, the universe creates itself out of a primary chaos of material energy, organized into the cycles of Yin and Yang and formed into objects and lives. Yin is the receptive and Yang the active principle, seen in all forms of change and difference such as the annual cycle (winter and summer), the landscape (north-facing shade and south-facing brightness), sexual coupling (female and male), the formation of both men and women as characters and sociopolitical history (disorder and order).” [Feuchtwang, Stephan (2016). Religions in the Modern World: Traditions and Transformations.]

Yin-yang dualities are numerous, but one of the most easily observable ones is the feminine-masculine distinction: the essential sexual dimorphism of the Homo sapiens. Members of our species are unable to function—be it as bands, tribes, nations or civilizations—without maintaining distinct gender roles and a dynamic equilibrium between masculine and feminine ways of being. The history of collapsed cultures and civilizations, which often go through a period of sexual deviance and decadence as their end nears, offers a never-ending stream of object lessons in the validity of this cosmological model. All previous cultures that denied human sexual dimorphism, including the current bout of sexual dysphoria gripping the West, are telltale signs of a failing culture and can reasonably be expected to go biologically extinct before too long.

This is the world’s most important and prevalent dualistic mythology apart from the Jesus and Mary cult, which we will discuss later. It is a highly nuanced cosmology that towers above NULL, 0 and 1-type religious mythologies because on the one hand it gathers in the whole universe and on the other it is based on specific, observable distinctions, tying it all together into a single sacred whole. It does not attempt to rule out or to compete with gods, godlings and godlike thingies but relegates them to their proper place as cultural artifacts, elements of tradition and outlets for people’s superstitious natures. Most importantly, it introduces the notion of dynamic equilibrium of complementary rather than opposing principles, embracing the concept of endless change as central to the entire cosmology—not as progress but as oscillation and flux. Thus, the pseudo-arithmetic expression for it is 1+1=1: out of duality comes unity.

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