Bitcoin And Nuclear Can Save The World Crypto-News

Much has been written about how intermittent renewables like wind and solar negatively affect grid stability and often need government subsidies to produce positive financial returns on investment (ROI). Less well understood, but even more important, is the fact these intermittent renewables reduce our global net energy surplus when compared to the coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear energy sources they replace. In other words, our current technologies generate a higher energy output on their energy inputs versus wind and solar.

The world’s current standard of living is a direct result of power-generation technologies producing a high energy surplus. Research suggests electricity from wind and solar is unable to achieve break-even levels relative to the existing energy surplus economic threshold, suggesting they will diminish our future standard of living.

Understanding why energy surplus matters is key to understanding human progress. It is also the key to understanding how the Bitcoin network’s energy-reliant proof-of-work consensus mechanism can be a tool that expands society’s energy surplus well into the 21st century.

What Is Energy Surplus?

Having an energy surplus is fundamental to survival.

Take a cheetah, for example. A cheetah consumes a tremendous amount of energy pursuing its prey. Many of these chases are unsuccessful. For the few that result in a kill, the energy provided by eating its prey must be greater than all the energy consumed in prior chases (and be enough for the next chase).

However, beyond the maintenance energy required just to live and hunt, the energy surplus must also be large enough to allow a mother cheetah to give birth, nurse her cubs and devote time and energy to raising them. For a cheetah to live normally, its energy surplus must be well above a break-even level.

The same can be said of a fish, an insect, a tree or any organism or system that requires energy, including humans and human economies. The larger the energy surplus within a system, the more diverse, robust and resilient the system is because it can easily meet its basic needs with surplus energy for reproduction, experimentation, innovation and growth.

Energy surplus, or net energy, is measured by energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). EROEI is the ratio of the energy gathered by a system — numerator or the caloric energy of the prey — to the energy expended in the process of gathering that energy — denominator or the energy expended on the hunt. To be accurate, the calculation should use energy units, preferably joules, the international standard for measuring the energy content of heat and work.

Like a financial ROI, an EROEI > 1 shows that a system gathers more energy than it expends to gather that energy, e.g., the cheetah eats more calories than it needs for basic functions. The result is surplus energy that allows a mother cheetah to give birth and raise her cubs. When EROEI = 1 the energy received equals the energy spent (breakeven) and the cheetah barely survives and cannot reproduce. An EROEI < 1 indicates that the system requires more energy than it is able to gather, e.g., the cheetah cannot survive.

In the human world, an EROEI < 1 is also a recipe for death and extinction. An EROEI = 1 is a tenuous balance between life and death with no surplus energy for societal growth and advancement. However, a large and increasing energy surplus produced from high EROEI technologies has allowed human civilization to expand and flourish creatively, technically and culturally.

Energy Is Real Wealth

Simply put, energy is our real wealth and our growth depends on how efficiently we convert primary energy into useful energy that enables us to do useful work. As humans evolved over millennia we developed better and better technology to find and convert increasingly dense sources of primary energy into useful energy.

For example, crude oil contains about 44 MJ/kg (megajoule per kilogram) of heat energy, black coal about 25MJ/kg, dry wood about 16MJ/kg and peats and grasses 6-7MJ/kg. When combusted, their stored chemical energy produces heat. Additional technology converts some of that heat to a more useful secondary energy like electricity. Human technology continued to advance to be able to harness oil’s higher energy density versus the peats and grasses that our distant ancestors used for fuel. From this denser energy came exponential growth in society’s energy surplus that also unleashed massive gains in technological innovation and standards of living.

While we often focus on a technology’s energy efficiency of converting fuel into work (e.g., an internal combustion engine has an operating thermal efficiency of +/- 25%), EROEI analysis takes a more holistic approach. It accounts for the additional energy costs of the materials and processes needed to build the engine along with operating it. This is where EROEI analysis can shed light on the energy surplus of different power plant technologies.

For a power plant, the EROEI equals the energy produced over the life of the plant divided by the energy that was required to build, operate and decommission the plant. After including the energy costs of its components like steel and concrete and the energy costs of its fuel, a fossil fuel power plant needs to produce at least the same amount of energy over its lifespan to break even on an energy basis. Same goes for renewables and nuclear.

However, running an energy break-even power plant would be pointless, since all the energy produced in the plant’s lifetime operation would be offset by an equal amount of energy consumed to build and operate the plant. There would be no energy surplus for all the other things we need (food production, schools and hospitals, etc) and want (museums, travel, sports, scientific research, etc).

Recall that a cheetah requires an energy surplus just to live a normal life. So do humans in the 21st century, but to a much greater degree.

What’s EROEI Got To Do With It?

One of the most comprehensive and rigorous analyses of different power plants’ EROEIs is a pair of papers by Weißbach et al¹. The authors applied a uniform bottom-up methodology to calculate the energy costs (in terajoules) adjusted to exergy (the utilized/useful energy) embedded in the materials, labor and fuel supplies required to build, operate and decommission various electricity-generating technologies. This utilized energy investment was divided into the utilized energy returned — the electricity generated over the lifespan of each type of power plant — to calculate individual EROEIs.

The authors also compared the representative plant EROEIs to an economic EROEI, termed the “economical threshold.” This is approximated by the ratio of an economy’s GDP to its unweighted final energy consumption. In practice it is GDP divided by total end energy consumption for the same time period divided by the average cost of that end energy consumption. The resulting quotient captures the economic value of the “energy dividend” that the energy-producing part of an economy pays to the non-energy-producing parts of the economy.

A high and growing economic threshold describes a world with highly efficient energy-gathering processes that produce a large energy dividend allowing an economy to diversify, grow and flourish. A declining economic threshold indicates a system in contraction with less efficient energy-gathering processes that crowd out other non-energy sectors leading to a decline in levels of economic prosperity.

This news is republished from another source. You can check the original article here

Bitcoin And Nuclear Can Save The World

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