Author Archives: energyskeptic

Electricity, fuel, and other interdependencies

Freight trucks, trains, ships, airplanes all stop when the electricity is out because the pumps depend on it.  Related: Why you should love trucks and When Trucks Stop CR. September 4 & 23, 2003. Implications of power blackouts for the … Continue reading

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Solar Photovoltaics (PV) limited by raw materials

This paper (excerpts below) shows that there are limits to growth — there simply aren’t enough minerals in the world that can be produced physically and/or at a reasonable cost for the many of the most common kinds of PV … Continue reading

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Limits to Growth

Preface. What follows are a bunch of articles on limits to growth, sometimes just a link, sometimes excerpts. Today Wall Street Journal and other neocapitalists scorn the idea, insisting that human ingenuity and substitution can overcome all obstacles, and they … Continue reading

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Inage: calculate storage for short-term wind variation

Inage, S. 2009. Prospects for Large-Scale Energy Storage in Decarbonized Power Grid. International Energy Agency. This paper limits itself to the issue of frequency stability in systems with increasing shares of variable renewable generation assets (wind power in Western Europe … Continue reading

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ASPO: Top Ten 2014 News Stories Regarding Oil and the Economy

Andrews, S., Whipple, T. January 6, 2015. Top Ten 2014 News Stories Regarding Oil and the Economy. January 6, 2015. 1. Oil Price Crash The great price crash of 2014 could well turn out to be one of the defining … Continue reading

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What is the life span of a vehicle Lithium-ion Battery?

How long a lithium-ion battery will last depends on many factors Lithium-ion battery life is defined in studies as beyond its useful life when its capacity falls by 20 percent or more. Lithium-ion batteries start to degrade as soon as … Continue reading

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1177 B.C. The year civilization collapsed

[ These are my notes that are disjointed but can give you an idea of how fast our fossil-fueled civilization could collapse.  We are far more interdependent on much longer global supply chains (a wind turbine has 8,000 parts). We … Continue reading

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Shale “fracked” natural gas peak by 2020: Mason Inman’s “Natural gas, the fracking fallacy”

[ In 2005 the U.S. was making desperate plans to build dozens of Liquefied Natural Gas plants for importing gas. Fracked gas changed that for the past 10 years, indeed, now the U.S. is talking about exporting natural gas.  But … Continue reading

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Natural Gas-to-Liquids (GTL) as a Drop-in Diesel fuel

[The reason GTL is a big deal is that it can substitute for diesel without having to modify a diesel engine to do so — therefore, it’s a “drop-in fuel” substitute. However, GTL isn’t likely to be the answer, since … Continue reading

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Population posts on the internet

[Below are posts I’ve run across on population. It will be left to Mother Nature to cut our numbers back to what the earth can support after fossil fuels decline.  In the brief 100 years or so the oil-boom lasted, … Continue reading

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