Even by these calculations, wind and solar look look like the best long-term approaches for clean, sustainable energy. Scrap tar sands & oil shale and the pipelines that feed them.

The technologies that will be scrapped are the ones that don't return enough customer profit (or taxpayer subsidies) to make them attractive to industry. Nothing personal, it's jus' bidness...

But, I do agree it is just business--bad business.

disinvesting in wind. Sorry, it's jus' bidness . . .

It remains to be seen what that will do to the wind power business.

Coal is going to be around for quite a while yet, I'm afraid. Long enough to drive the last nail into the coffin of modern civilization.

402 ppm CO2 and climbing at a rate of 1.3 ppm a year is ridiculous. Global carbon tax.

The downside is that Mother Nature is going to implement it, and we aren't going to like it one bit. The good thing is, we won't have to actually do anything other than keep on keepin' on..

But, not all solutions work as anticipated. I don't think we can even competently annihilate ourselves.

More probable is a climate-induced bottleneck leaving maybe a million people alive around the world after a couple of hundred years, declining to zero over the following millennium or more.

Would that be a better outcome than rapid extinction? I don't know, but it seems to be the way Nature works.

We'll see pockets of highly-educated affluents in personal helos and sleek, electric cars speeding across bridges linking semi-submerged coastal cities while the unemployed masses are kept enthralled by spectacles of enormous cruelty. Kinda like the last days of the Roman Empire but wetter.

I can't imagine Peru looking like that, for example.

First, the obvious--the accompanying graph shows Solar with a EROEI of about 10. The article says Spain is getting 2.45. Which is correct? Are the Spanish not using solar correctly? Or is the graph wrong?

Second, the EROI concept doesn't include the very heavy societal costs of fossil fuels. For instance, a lot of the violence and war in the world is happening because of the scramble for oil. We are having wars on top of wars in the Middle East in large part because of the that region's bounty of oil. There would never be that problem over silicon. There is also the economic instability due to supply interruptions and variations. Again, with a solar infrastructure in place, variation and interruption of supply is not a problem.

There are other societal benefits to clean solar as well which I won't list. Trying to use an accounting number that omits key costs and benefits is a gimmick. It is attempting to put the aura of certainty on a topic without using all the variables.

There's one to everything.

and was based on earlier, more optimistic research.

Externalities (social costs) are not a factor in EROI research, just energy return on energy invested. That's what Charlie Hall does. The biggest issue this research is where to draw the system boundary - i.e. how much indirect energy use to include in the "investment" side of the equation. Social costs are outside that boundary.

And the simple fact that people don't like his conclusions about solar doesn't mean he's a FF shill. Google him - he started off his EROI career by warning that we're about to fall of the net energy cliff with fossil fuels too.

EROI doesn't include them, so it is a flawed approach.

We need EROI information, but the decision-making process needs additional information that energy researchers can't supply. Epidemiology, health care costs, social disruption costs - all that is needed in addition to good EROI data.

Complex systems present complex problems that require complex analysis to even understand, let alone to solve.

I have worked for a couple Spanish companies and I disagree with this analysis. But it's important to see what big oil will do to try to disparage renewables.

An organized effort will defeat an unorganized mess every time. The less time and money you have to waste to get everyone on your side thinking the same way, the more you can do in other areas. If you're trying to bring different people together, and having to waste time and energy in trying to convince them to listen to you, the easier it is to get caught up in the minutiae.

I read through the source posting, and I have a few problems with this analysis using it for any current comparisons.

First the authors uses some "odd" conversions for different non-energy inputs he converts to energy. For example he converts insurance costs into energy units? This type of conversion is pretty arbitrary and can really confuse the results.

I do think that they did a pretty good job of including all of the incidental costs of the solar installations such as roads, fencing, substations, and many other costs such as bureaucratic government paperwork. They did seem to throw in everything including the kitchen sink for site offices.

In this analysis, they also use PV equipment costs from 5 to 7 years ago. This equipment has dropped in cost by 80% since then which is why there has been such a shakeout of producers (solyndra) and the European producers closing.

It also looks like the government set prices for solar electricity subsidies were set very high nearly 50 cents per KWH, and these costs also severely skew the analysis, as well as causing some severe problems when a lot of high prices solar was installed based on these over inflated price points. Of course we do not know how much coal and oil Spain was having to import for their power plants so maybe these prices are not as out of line when compared to US average prices per KWH. What a surprise, a government paying too much for a project.

They did NOT do a though job of documenting the other fossil fuel energy inputs. I think that if you were doing a good apples to apples comparison with these other energy generating sources you should start as if you were going to build a new coal fired generating plant which would have most of these incidental costs plus many more in buildings boilers, turbines, generators, substations, control rooms, and the ongoing maintenance and purchasing of fuel, and dealing with waste products, and external costs such as global warming. Mining or drilling for fossil fuels, transportation, and geopolitical costs such as maintaining a navy to keep sea lanes opens should also be included. I also believe that Nuclear plants never have their long term nuclear waste and insurance costs fairly accounted for.

As Thom Hartmann says, Oil and coal are stored ancient sunlight. They are undeniably extremely energy dense fuels. But it may have taken several years of growing plants collecting the sunlight to make the hydrocarbons you burned going to the office this morning. But even refining gasoline is energy input intense, most refineries have their own electrical substation. The numbers I have seen are that it takes about 4.5 kilowatt-hours of electricity to refine a gallon of gasoline.

In summary, I do not think that this is an un-fair cost summary of some specific solar projects in Spain 5+ years ago. I do have problems with this being used as current relative costing in that PV cost have come down tremendously, and that the comparison cost of Fossil fuel or Nuclear electrical generating is seriously under-estimated.

Not counting the costs if we do manage to melt the polar glaciers in the next century NYC could actually look like the Spielberg still above.