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A warning from Kunstler: beware of installing solar-lec gear in your house

Technology
#1

Jim touches on both problems with home solar installations: cost and difficulties of maintenance; and the (wholly unforeseen, though it could have been) negative effect that they have when feeding sol-leccy into the grid (Gail - the Actuary - Tverberg has also explained this in detail; it’s really screwed up Germany’s efforts to go wholly-solar; a real clusterfeck).

I’ve always steered clear of solar panels, regarding them, like leccy-cars, as fashionable greeny-bourgeois fads which will prove to be a useless blind alley; quite irrelevant to really preparing for the Interesting Times; just an illusory sop to the idea that we can go on running hitech industrial-civ on 100% electricity. I’ve never bothered with leccy-assist for my pedal bikes either. And now these techietechie fashion accessories are duly proving their irrelevance to our real challenges. :pensive:

Solar and wind find their true value in what they’ve always done brilliantly, since long before humans even appeared: powering the creation of crucial green biomass of all kinds; and delivering rain. (“Now the river is rich/ A deep choir/ It is the lofty clouds, that work in heaven/ Going on their holidays to the sea.” Ted Hughes: ‘Season Songs’)

Serious preppers practice at living without electricity entirely; plenty of people still do; many more are going to in the nearish future:

It's Not Working - Kunstler’

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#2

The problems he bitches about are mostly solvable with application and willingness on the part of authorities to support individual (and collective), solar-energy projects…“passive” solar isn’t mentioned either…certainly the problem of “trickle -supply” could be solved with a more integrated system…large scale investment is required but such investment will be in sustainable energy and though expensive initially will pay dividends in the long-term…I know Kunstler bitches about crypto-currencies too and if you include ridiculous “arse-end” tech like HARDON colliders and WiFi more generally we certainly could make much better use of energy…I think this is the issue…inefficiency of all kinds within a system geared up to exploit rather than harmonise…

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#3

Problems mostly solvable isn’t the same as entirely solvable, G. The ones that aren’t floor the whole enterprise; exactly as Gail Tverberg analyses, with the debacle of the German test case: They haven’t solved the cripplingly-expensive issue of having to run constantly-idling coal/gas/oil-fired back-up generator sets: essential to handle the intermittency/storage problem. That intractable puzzle has brought their solar-Germany hopes to an impasse.

Here’s a useful analysis by Gail, that lays out the basic problem (all emblematically encapsulated in the central issue of EROEI: energy returned on energy invested):

Tim Morgan’s ‘Surplus Energy Economics’ website is worth some study too (intro. essay linked below). Both he and Gail see solar, wind, and even adding in available hydro, never offering more than about a quarter of current energy demand, even in best case reckonings.

My intuition - because essentially we’re dealing with an imponderable rational calculation here - is that ‘renewables’ will never amount to more than a boutique energy source, for as long as we’re still trying to run the present simply non-sustainable energy splurge. Not for much longer, it’s now becoming clear; blame that - air-headedly - on Putin, if it tickles your prejudices; it’s not his fault, of course; it’s The Limits, making themselves unignorably known.

And that’s to leave out the further crucial discussion that none of the ‘renewables’ are actually renewable, since none of them can be constructed, run, maintained and replaced periodically without constant energy subsidies from fossil-hydrocarbons. Try going into the woods with axe, saw and knife, and building a solar panel there, with only human muscle power, using only the materials you can find there. Doable for a Cretan windmill, or for a water-wheel, but not for a solar panel; some (earlier) technologies are bootstrappable from the ground up, as we did in previous centuries; present day ones, not so much. (And even with the hand-crafted devices, there’s still the question of where are you going to find - or make by hand, in the woods - the generators for them to drive…?)

We really need to get off this empty fashion fad around ‘renewable’ wind and solar techietechie, as Jim Kunstler is realising sardonically. Wind/solar are not going to ‘save’ us - except in their real, ancient, function which have been working faultlessly for millennia, and which I described at the start of this thread as using sun energy to drive both the yearly manufacture of a great global weight of biomass, through photosynthesis; and, of course, the delivery of rain and snowmelt to all the landward places which rely on them.

Control of the rain is beyond us, of course, despite all our ‘weather management’ fantasies;* and the best way to assist with the biomass creation is through permaculture. That’s what we’re going to have to rely on, once we’ve got over our startrekkytechietechie myth-fantasies:

*The only weather steering - I won’t call it management - that I know to be workable, and that only very occasionally, is in conjuring up winds and thunder-storm downpours, which is sometimes done by gifted shamans. Not a technology to run a modern hitech industrial society on, I wouldn’t imagine… :wink: :slight_smile:

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#4

PS: Passive solar remains a good idea, of course. And it’s doable with just the hand-crafts and local materials; has been so done for centuries, in fact. Can’t fault that idea. We should certainly be developing many inventive uses for it. Much still to invent there! :slight_smile:

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#5

25% sounds do-able to me…don’t assume I don’t believe we need to run a truly economic system Rhis…but energy efficiency will depend on diversity of supply…current attempts by governments formerly steeped in the old-paradigm have desperate problems coping with the infrastructural changes we need… but emergence can be taught, it can be demonstrated… “save us”? Nothing can except ourselves…just think how great it would be to be able to see the stars (from terra-firma), again…

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#6

Oh I’d be a bit more optimistic about the near future if we were living on a quarter of the energy splurge that we’re doing now, G.

But ask yourself what we have to go through to make a three-quarter reduction in our current demand. It’s going to need a serious natural die-back of our present overshoot before that’s even remotely feasible; assuming the we’re able collectively to raise the necessary unwavering species-wide determination to make it happen. And we’re not going to do that, are we.

I imagine that if pigs had wings, and the required big extra muscles, they’d fly. But they haven’t, and they don’t. Any species can only be expected to do what’s it’s capable of doing. Pigs can’t fly; humans can’t muster that demi-god-like level of worldwide, intelligent cooperation. Not seen any sign of it in history yet, anyway. Pigs and humans dree their weirds; endure their fates. We can only do what we can do.

I’m also intrigued by why you think emergence is going to make any substantive difference. How would that work? I’m not well up on the idea, and would appreciate being pointed at a good intro to the topic.

#7

Mitigating the obvious problems of resource depletion is the sane way to go. For about five years I was the tenant of a flat in an Ecohouse: thick walls, solar panels, and a mechanical ventilation system. I would guess that maybe a third of electricity was generated by the panels. The bit I especially liked was that combined costs for fuel and water were < £40 pcm (usually around <£33, a bit more in winter).

However, none of the costs of maintaining the panels or the ventilation system were passed on to me. Things seemed to go wrong once or twice a year. As we were out in the sticks it was quite common to lose grid power for hours as well, occasionally a day or more. Most commonly a tree branch would creep ever nearer to power line, then some wind came along, and snap, there she goes. This meant that the various gizmos controlling the panels etc had to be reset. Whether the fixed costs would ever be recouped I don’t know. Having a tenant’s rent will have helped I’m quite sure.

Several of my family members live in and around Johannesburg and regularly experience scheduled rolling blackouts. They can at least cook, shower, charge devices, etc before their downtime comes along. This is not uncommon in other parts of the world and voluntarily going dark for a few hours or more, as a way of practising, seems sensible to me. Flasks for hot water, to give a petty example, and cooking in batches. I use the oven for <2 hours a week, making several meals at a time. Gas hob and an air fryer for the finishing touches. I really wish we had a log burner or similar but we’ve been told the flue is not suitable (or the folks giving the estimates can’t be bothered to price up a full conversion…?)

None of the above will save the world, and @Rhys is correct that there are some baked-in factors that simply aren’t going away, but these sorts of actions can help to make the wrench, when the grid goes down, a bit less traumatic. Hoping that it will never happen ain’t gonna cut it.

(By the way Gerard I got the Graham Phillips Moses book)

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#8

I consider that I have every bit as much of the fat life of the Pampered Twenty Percent (us!) as I have any desire at all for; yet my electricity bill is currently around £20 a quarter (less in Winter, when I cook on my combined space-heater and cooking wood-stove; more in Summer, when I use an electric hotplate for cooking). The latest bill has upticked to £25, because of the overall inflation of prices, I suppose. Food prices are showing the same steady creep-up.

My point is, though, that life aboard my vessel is great; I seem to have - literally - everything I need to keep happy, and the electricity demand for that is minimal: one energy-saving light bulb, one mains-radio, one mains-powered laptop, one electric kettle; a little blender (mainly used for turning cannabis foliage into a traditional herbalist’s preserve in alcohol - cheapo whisky, actually, with added honey!), and an electric hair clipper used now and then; nothing much else at all.

I achieved final liberation from car-keeping about fifteen years ago; and believe me, that is a real liberation! That’s why - simply from a state pension - I have so much spare cash to give to my grand-daughter and her dear bairns. Meanwhile, non-leccy-assisted bike pedalling to the local shops gives me a substantial portion of my necessary regular daily physical effort - to keep it all working… :slight_smile:

I guess I’m a somewhat atypical, hermit-like case. But the underlying point that I make here is that an entirely comfortable and satisfactory life can be had with a small fraction of the energy consumption that we’ve all been steered into expecting; it’s not necessary; nor is its absence a guarantee of misery, quite the reverse, in fact: it makes for improved serenity.

Collapse early, and avoid the rush! :slight_smile:

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#9

The only way is for people to be frightened out of their complacency Rhis…Mother Nature knows her stuff and she’s done it before many times…but nothing is certain…we have no right to evolve only the choice…

“Pigs can’t fly; humans can’t muster that demi-god-like level of worldwide, intelligent cooperation. Not seen any sign of it in history yet, anyway” Teilhard de Chardin would disagree… https://www.teilhard.org.uk/teilhard-de-chardin/introduction/

#10

Ha …tell me what you think once you’ve read it…

#11

Just read the intro. so far, G. Can’t see much to disagree with, though I would say that consciousness, far from ‘emerging’ from matter’s increasing complexification, is in fact the originating source of all that we interpret as matter; and that the material universe is more likely a virtual holodeck: an emanation from primary Big Mind/the Great Spirit/God: something that is likely to be seen eventually as a virtual reality deliberately created by Big Mind, to further its own larger purposes.

But the long-term trajectory that life - and humankind - are on certainly seems to me to be something like Teilhard outlines. I can seem depressingly long-term at times like these, when we’re up to our oxters in dissension and general shit and corruption. But nonetheless, that’s where we’re heading evolutionarily, I suspect. It keeps your spirits up to think so… :slight_smile:

#12

Ahh…I was talking to Karen…but yeah read some Theilhard…his “Noosphere” idea was (although “known” by other names by many of our forebears), radical both to the post Enlightenment mind and the Vatican…yes “words matter” not “matter words”, however, the simplest notion often seems, to this observer, only to develop from an appreciation of complexity…