Thank you for your recent articles and the roadmap showing the inter-relationships between your articles. You make the case for the most economical and reliable grids being powered by dispatchable low-entropy energy sources. (You have not touched the power engineering construct of grid frequency stability requiring adequate synchronous grid inertia [SGI] to prevent blackouts. Solar, wind, and batteries are further disadvantaged by contributing neglibible SGI. See: https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important That's why I call their power, "Junk Power.") I appreciate your inclusion of my quote regarding the economic penalty of the high-entropy California power grid.
Thank you for the acknowledgement. Based on our experience as a California Public Utilities Commission intervenor, very few decisionmakers know about the essential role of synchronous grid inertia as a reliability service.
I also note Spain's work to minimize the actual cause (inadequate synchronous grid inertia) of the mid-day 28 April 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout. https://kilovar1959.substack.com/cp/200008271 At least eleven people who were expecting reliable power paid with their lives that day. The cost in lost productivity and damaged production equipment was measured in the equivalent of billions of U.S. dollars.
Brilliant and so simple. I am not in the league of the author or other commenters as I didn't do maths or science at school (a funny story not relevant here) but in my arguments to friends down here in Australia - where our standard of living is diminishing at a great rate, where we have a socialist government who are subsidizing Chinese-made (by coal) solar and wind turbines across vast swathes of our landscape yet ban nuclear (our uranium deposits are the worlds biggest and we're about the export it to India), and are closing coal fired plants, blocking gas and oil development but producing volumes of hot air and CO2 from their ivory tower in Canberra - I have long asked the inconvenient question: where did the energy come from to make your solar panels, your turbines, your Chinese EVs and their batteries not to mention your tv, refrigeration, computer, your steel trusses to build your shelter and their batteries glass and steel architectural icons in which your government department HQs reside, etc.? They tell me I'm stupid because I didn't go to university and don't know how to argue properly. I usually say something like 'whatever... who wants a short black, or a cappuccino' as I clear the table.
I'm now going to find all your other articles Thermocon. Great work.
Thanks for the great comment and slipping by. These concepts are yours by right as much as anyone's. A couple examples, Robert Bryce is a journalist who has figured this out and John Constable is a philosopher from Cambridge who later in life caught the thermodynamics bug, also has figured this out and explains the role of entropy in the Queen's English to an extent that it may have no peer.
Something didn't seem right with the argument. I was expecting to see some numbers; maybe I missed it. Only saw something about "entropy." So I did a search: https://search.brave.com/search?q=will+a+20kw+off+the+grid+solar+system+produce+enough+power+to+make+all+the+components . Apparently, it will. The prices for panels are so cheap now, they are being used for fencing material...that also produces power. I put together a small system, and calculated the cost of the components over a 10 year period. I was paying $25/month for electricity. Grid power would cost me about $100/month. You may argue that cheap oil and coal are enabling this. Great! I'll take it. BTW, my numbers work without any government welfare; all components were bought out of pocket, no subsidies.
Thanks for slipping by and the comment. We've done our homework and done posted our homework in taking our shot at quantifying the second law performance of these various sources of primary energy. Congratulations on your solar install, it likely means you're adroit and fairly well off - we have friends into the solar panel and electric car thing and they're intrepid dudes. The trouble is you're connected to the grid which absorbs what we estimate as 5.0 cents per kWhr of entropy and that is likely light, which is indicative of why it won't provide a modern standard of living if you go off-grid. That said, we don't begrudge you for it, we also act in our best interest.
Thank you for your response. Actually, I was completely off grid. The grid is awesome, but I like the idea of having more control over electricity, and the price doesn't go up. I know of others that live in "regular" houses, and a 10kw inverter, 10-20kw worth of panels, and 10-20kw battery takes care of all their needs. About $20k, if you do the work yourself, double if you have an installer do it. To be fair, you do need a backup genset if it's going to rain for a week. Also, this may not work as well in northern latitudes, although the panel still produce a surprising amount of power when it's overcast.
Comparing your post with Scott Grout's EROEI, I suggest a KISS approach. For any project, regardless of size (MW), all of the capex, not some of the capex, must be invested - 100%. Since wind, even in the best locations, is not available all of the time. Sunlight, even in the best daytime locations, is not the same during those hours. Result - 100% of the capex invested those tech options, which can only operate some of the time, means work only part of the time and, thus, erosion of value, i.e., a part time return on capex (energy) invested. The difference gets made up with subsidies - which is the only way that investors would ever make these kinds of decisions in the first place. Combined with all of the similar distortions for batteries and such, it's a pretty dumb way to live.
A drag on other investments happens when wind and/or solar are available, forcing nat gas (and sometimes coal) to curtail for "load following". We don't get the more efficient use of those options, adding to the overall loss in social welfare.
Thanks for slipping by and the comment. We agree. In addition to investing 100% of the capex, we'd add that 100% of the opex should get expensed as well, assuming they're analogous to the ITC and PTC respectively. Thanks again.
Somewhere along the line the siren songs of wind and solar beautifulness infected Chinese decision makers. The world has had the opportunity to view the disastrous debacles inflicted on Britain, Germany, Spain, California, etc. of the Green Delusion Syndrome. The mantras included: The world MUST decarbonize. There will be thousands of new Green Jobs created. Renewable energy from the wind and the sun are cheaper than hydrocarbons. Solar and wind costs are falling. Battery costs are falling. Batteries are the solution to wind and solar intermittency. Clean energy is the future.
The list does on and on.
At some point after the implosion of China's property boom, China's state directed investments and subsidies pivoted to wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and EV's.
Solar, batteries and EVs were growing 3x faster than China's economy – because the Chinese government had decided to subsidize these sectors of their economy.
"China’s solar manufacturers built new factories at a fever pitch between 2020 and 2023 as the state redirected resources from the sinking property sector to what it used to call the “new three” growth industries: solar panels, electric cars and batteries."
The industry lost a staggering $60 billion last year."
If you, as a centrally planned command economy, had built manufacturing capacity for solar panels which was 3x total world demand, if you had built manufacturing capacity for batteries which was 2x total world demand, if you had built manufacturing capacity for EV's that was 2x total world demand, if you had built wind turbine manufacturing capacity which was 2x total world demand...then
...you will try to move these goods in both domestic and international markets by any means available just to keep your factories open. But....the huge advantage that you have in your domestic (Chinese) market is the ability to "command" deployment--as state directed "investment".
Only a centrally planned economy like China's can conduct such monumentally huge mal-investments.
Expect ghost solar farms and ghost wind turbine farms and ghost battery manufacturing plants and ghost EV manufacturing plants to rival China's ghost cities.
There is no reason whatsoever that the disastrous energy debacles inflicted on Britain, Germany, Spain, California, etc. by Green Delusion Syndrome will not also impoverish China. given the path China has chosen. The only advantage China has is this regard is the "soft budget" accounting it has for anything state related.
"Here’s my bet: The entire idea of an energy system based on wind, solar and batteries will not work and will fail, probably over the course of the next ten years or so, if not sooner. All of the investment will be lost. All of the employees will be laid off."
That is how I see it...every single grid connected wind turbine and solar farm will be shown for what they truly are: impoverishment vehicles totally unfit for purpose.
Every single grid connected wind turbine and solar farm will become a stranded asset because they only survive on government subsidies.
"To add insult to injury the only thing worse than a solar panel is a solar panel with battery backup. The sunshine can’t make the panel in the first place, how’s it going to make the battery; another highly ordered low entropy device."
"When people wake up to the realities of energy this is going to go down in human history as one of the greatest departures from sound science of all time. There may be hell to pay. We hope not but we are a little surprised that it has gone this far."
Thanks for the great comment and sharing the Brawl Street Journal and Manhattan Contrarian material, both great sources. Also, as you note, China fell for it. Embracing wind & solar is a geopolitical weakness and simply a blight on their country to boot. They'll wake up, but it'll take a minute. Once folks get bitten by wind & solar it takes a good bit for that serum to wear off.
"As state-owned grid operators plan to invest over 1 trillion yuan ($146 billion) annually over the next five years in high-voltage transmission lines and pumped-hydro storage systems, China is laying the physical foundation to support its next massive wave of clean energy growth successfully."
At $146 billion a year for 5 years, that totals $730 billion of state-owned, state directed, state supported, "investments".
Not a single dollar would need to be "invested" were it not for China's insane pursuit of weather dependent wind and solar energies.
Not a single dollar of that $730 billion "invested" in the grid will be added to the costs of China's wind and solar "investments".
Not a single dollar of the backup costs imposed upon China's dispatchable generators will be added to the costs of China's wind and solar "investments".
Not a single dollar of the impairment costs imposed upon China's dispatchable generators will be added to the costs of China's wind and solar "investments".
Only the Chinese government could produce such mal-investment.
Expect ghost solar farms and ghost wind farms to rival China's ghost cities.
Expect China to manifest the electricity cost increases and increasing grid instability as Britain and Germany are experiencing.
To advance further evidence of the "Green Energy Debacle" in China:
"Between 2021 and 2024, state-driven subsidies encouraged solar manufacturers to build massive factories, pushing China’s annual solar manufacturing capacity to an estimated 1,200 GW in 2025."
"Total installed solar capacity soared 31.3% to reach 1.24 billion kilowatts, while wind power reached 660 million kilowatts."
Imagine the challenges forced upon China's grid operators...potentially 1.24 billion kilowatts (about 1.66 billion hp) feeding into and out of the grid every day…all totally blind to demand, all totally dispersed across China. And add to that challenge, potentially 660 million kilowatts (about 884 million hp) of wind power feeding into and out of the grid, inalterably determined by the fickle, fickle wind, and all totally dispersed across China.
Only government could produce such mal-investment.
Expect ghost solar farms and ghost wind farms to rival China's ghost cities.
I'm not fully assured that you have taken the lifetime energy production of solar and wind infrastructure into your calculations, rather than just a years' worth. According to quick Gemini searches, one 60-cell solar panel lasts for 25 years, on the low end, and produces 400 kwh/year, on the low end, for a total of 10,000 kwh. Also according to Gemini, it takes 1,200 kwh, on the high end, to make one 60-cell solar panel. This ought to mean that one solar panel can generate enough energy to produce 8.33 solar panels, no?
I'd concede this point, as my research was obviously lazy and it is less pertinent to my main question. That is, assuming we take all of your calculations at face value, what is the solution? How do we get around the fact that over the course of a couple centuries we have taken several hundred million years' worth of sequestered carbon and put it into the atmosphere, where it is largely transparent to ultraviolet light (coming from the sun) but largely opaque to infared light (coming from the earth)?
It does not take reviewing decades of climate science or even 20 years of weather observations to come to a conclusion that reorganizing the earth's carbon in this way may lead to an increase in overall world temperatures that is unsurviveable for most organisms and human infrastructures. The obvious conclusion to me, therefore, is that a forward-thinking society should work to gradually wean itself off of its reliance on energy production methods that continue to put carbon into the atmosphere (which, as established, increases the proportion of infared light that is trapped against the earth and therefore accelerates the increase of global temperatures).
Even if you dispute that, surely you agree that the coal, oil, and gas available to humans is finite, and sooner or later, we must diversify our energy production somehow?
To me it seems that rather than optimizing for the lowest-entropy energy sources, our imperative is the following: To stave off the collapse of biodiversity (which very probably will lead to the collapse of agriculture, and famine); to stave off the changing of temperature and precipitation norms faster than humanity can adapt or bioengineer our food crops to compensate for it (which very probably will lead to the collapse of agriculture, and famine); and to stave off the increased frequency of catastrophic weather events (which in addition to acute loss of life and destruction of infrastructure, cause disruption of food production and distribution, and can locally collapse agriculture- at scale this causes? Yes, famine).
Obviously, solar and wind are imperfect energy sources. But, critically, after manufacturing, transportation, and installation, they produce no carbon emissions. And until policy makers can wake the f up to nuclear, what other scaleable energy source do we have?
(Also, while I haven't read your other pieces, I think you have given geothermal short shrift in this one. After all, it generates electricity the same as coal and petroleum products: spin a turbine with steam.)
Thanks for the comment, lot of thoughtful stuff in there. Everything we’ve seen, calculated or estimated ourselves indicates that wind blows and solar is even worse. It’s decades of data or years of data depending on which piece and we’ve stated our sources. We’re not the only folks who calculate these $/MW-hr figures and posit things, and none of our figures match exactly but the pattern repeats without fail. Solar PV is terrible.
We definitely agree that the only person who believes in exponential growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist, and have published a piece, Peak Cheap Oil Already Happened, along those lines. Putting CO2 in the atmosphere is so energetically advantaged that it’s real tough to beat. There’s one thing that can though and that’s nuclear fission as you allude to in your comment. Thanks again.
Even if the EROEI of a solar panel is greater than one, it’s not a 24/7 energy source. Some form of energy storage is required. Energy storage systems, like rechargeable batteries, have an EROEI of zero, not to mention less than 100% efficiency. That’s going to reduce the system EROEI, possibly to less than one.
Agreed, thanks for slipping by and the great comment, particularly "Energy storage systems, like rechargeable batteries, have an EROEI of zero, not to mention less than 100% efficiency" we think you're spot on and had never thought of it quite like that. It's an observable fact that wind could be harnessed by ancient and medieval folks to lower the entropy of their surroundings and improve their standard of living...they built windmills sans subsidy after all. We've now driven the entropy of our society down low enough that wind will no longer suffice. Solar PV is worse than wind, of that there is no doubt, there is no way a solar panel could have been made prior to the invention of the blast furnace, fueled by coal. Is Solar's EROEI less than one? Yes, we suspect so, and will posit that, but maybe we're wrong in an academic sense, we're estimating things that can't be calculated from first principles after all. Scott Grout on this platform did a great piece called The Energy Cost of Energy and the EROEI's posted there don't go below 1 for a solar panel with battery backup but the pattern just jumps off the page in kind with your comment Thanks again.
If I search energy return on investment (EROI) I find values way over 1. If it is lower than one, solar panel output is indeed belated release of fossil fuel energy such as coal. If it is higher, you will see electricity gains greater than all the energy required to produce, transport, install and maintain the solar panel.
I do not understand the whole entropy concern presented here. If I’m getting more energy out of my panel than was originally used to create it, and if my electrical bills are reduced more than the price of getting me panels and having them installed with all the setup required (which it really is, even when discounting for the subsidy I got for it), then what remains the problem?
Should I have put an LNG plant on my roof instead? I suppose the gods of entropy would be pleased but my wallet wouldn’t, and my wife would hate me.
Thanks for slipping by and posting the great comment. The Sun is very seductive, we suspect it's simply imbedded in the human condition, we feel it as well. Solar panels pass the first law test, the trouble is they don't pass the second law test. It's not like your solar panel is destroying any turf as it's mounted on your house and the government is driving these outcomes, good on ya. Near as we can figure the subsidy works out to 4 cents per kW-hr or so and the connection to the grid another 5 cents per kW-hr to cancel out the intermittency and it could be much higher. That's the key indicator. The best way to get a comprehensive understanding of the entropy would be to disconnect from the grid, shut off any natural gas line and empty out any heating oil tank, and try to live off those solar panels alone, but don't do that, it would certainly destroy any goodwill on the home front. Thanks again.
That's absurd, because if the subsidy totally ended tomorrow you'd still need to burn gas in turbines, but the installed solar panels would be continuing to make power. The subsidy is to accelerate adoption, not subsidize power. Would you mind redoing your calculations to reflect the lifetime of panels?
Thanks for slipping by and the comment. We disagree on the solar subsidies thing. What we did in The Sun Also Sets is find a source of Investment Tax Credits by year and then divide by the amount of MW-hrs produced in that year. Sources stated in the piece. For this piece all the data was tidied up in the data source we referenced. It's because solar panel lifetimes are so short that folks choose the ITC to get their money up front. Their lifetime is insufficient.
We started here with thermodynamics calculations, and ended up with the conclusion that solar and wind are not merely inadequate, but subtractive. That’s a question of political economy. Physics shapes reality, but it can’t tell you what you to do about it.
If the goal is to maintain civilization exactly as it exists in 2026, then I think I understand your argument, that wind and solar technologies are subtractive. But from studying the physics of global energy, it should be apparent that it is not possible to maintain this civilization indefinitely. We will ultimately face subtraction. In fact, the age of subtraction may well be upon us already.
So, I don’t think you can hold up Gibbs free energy and then make it say that solar is useless. Making that leap requires first defining “useful” as “capable of reproducing and operating civilization exactly as it currently exists.” But that’s an impossible threshold for usefulness: nothing can reproduce our present civilization indefinitely, because it is powered by an enormous inheritance of fossil energy that accumulated over millions of years and that we have been consuming over the course of a few centuries.
And before I’m accused of being a merchant of the renewable energy virtue-signaling-industrial complex, consider the thought experiment. If all fossil fuels disappeared from this planet overnight, would you prefer a world that has solar and wind energy infrastructure built out already? Or one that doesn’t?
I think subtraction is already baked into the cake. Physics puts a bound on our capacity, but it gives no guidance on what to do with it. You can disagree with energy policy, but let’s not pretend there’s One True Thermodynamic Way forward. For that, you need to have a conversation about what’s important and what’s valuable: what do we keep reproducing, and what do we discard? Physics tells you what is possible and what it costs, but it cannot tell you what is worth doing. And though I do love me some thermodynamics, it’s not what I find most interesting about this subject, and I don’t think it can do what you’re trying to make it do.
Wow, thoughtful comment man, thanks much for posting. The argument that we've already driven our civilization to a lower entropy state than can be maintained due to insufficient long term availability of Gibbs Free Energy, Xergy, dispatchable megawatt hours, whatever you want to call it, to beat back the relentless force of entropy has a lot of merit in our view. We disagree with it, but it is a sound concern. Without sufficient Gibbs Free Energy, we will all be very adroit and intelligent inhabitants of our caves.
Thermodynamically, solar PV is terrible and we have quantified terrible as being less than 1 EROEI, and we certainly could be wrong. Maybe it's 2 or 3 and our civilization needs something so much higher that it renders it indistinguishable from 1. Wind is definitively better, but our society at too low entropy already for wind to help.
When we calculate the amount of natural uranium required by a CANDU reactor at $100 per pound we get roughly $2 per MW-hr. (No one has popped up and told us we're idiots but we wouldn't mind someone else checking that number or pointing us to a reference.) We'd posit that over millions of years it is that number that will place a cap on human standard of living, so we would say subtraction is not yet baked in the cake but agree our minimum maintainable entropy state or highest average standard of living is within sight. The 2-hour workweek and flying cars have somehow eluded us.
We wouldn't say you're a merchant of anything besides thoughtful concern, and to close on this we use first principles where we can but then resort to monetary measures for the aspects not amenable to analysis from first principles, and we'd agree it's a tad messy and theoretically unsatisfying.
I love this article. So many scientific concepts thrown around and shifted when they stop being convenient. In 20 years the world's biggest manufacturers will run entirely off of renewables after they've outcompeted everything else and you'll still be running around screaming that it's all wrong, all fake, all a myth perpetuated by Big Entropy to accelerate the end of the universe.
P.S. do you have any contacts that can get me into the hydrocarbon shilling business? It seems to pay well
Thanks for slipping by and taking the time to read the article. We would fade your prediction, that said polite disagreement always a good thing. Lifetime oil & gas indeed, so we face an insurmountable branding problem, but it doesn't change the physics of it near as we can calculate them.
I have no issue with those working in O&G who are reasonable, I think it was an extremely important field in the 20th century (arguably the most important) and it will remain relevant even as its focus shifts from natural gas and gasoline production towards plastics and valuable chemical feedstocks. Lord knows we won't be making ammonia sustainably anytime soon.
I take issue with those employed by petrochemical companies who believe that the product they made is the only viable option, that nothing could ever replace it and that any attempt to do so is an organized effort by nebulous forces who are all acting against their own interests and burning their own dollars to do so. And this is assuming they aren't an outright climate change denier, which is its own discussion. In general if you're looking for a branding problem, I suggest starting here.
As for your calculations on the physics, I don't know that they are anything approaching a calculation.
"A solar panel is a very low entropy device. It is highly ordered. Sunshine is very diffuse; its entropy is very high. So high in fact that sunshine captured by a solar photovoltaic panel cannot provide the energy to manufacture itself"
Is neither correct nor a calculation, so you don't even get partial credit. Do you truly believe that a solar panel will not produce enough energy across its lifespan to manufacture another solar panel? Really? I respect the boldness of the claim but you gotta back it up with something, you can't vaguely gesture at Entropy and say it's proof.
Your prediction that the world’s biggest manufacturers will be running entirely off renewables is an excellent one. Can you please provide us with data to confirm progress towards this inevitable conclusion?
A good chart I must say, it’s unique way to falsify the data. Measure primary energy and convert it to TWh so it looks like it’s talking about electricity generated. Props for creativity!
Primary energy measures the embodied energy in a material, but that energy is not all usable. In fact, for fossil fuels, about 2/3rds of it is lost as waste heat, quite a lot. Renewables, by virtue of generating electricity directly, don’t have any penalties beyond the transmission losses, usually around 10%.
So if coal and Renewables were both providing 10 TWh of usable electricity, the chart would show a split of 70/30 for coal as far as primary energy is concerned
The actual numbers show that China is at around 30% of final energy generated by renewables, about 2.5 times what your chart would imply
Show me a solar panel or wind turbine that has been created without fossil energy dominating the entire supply chain. There isn’t one. The same is true for transmission infrastructure. Synchronous condensers? Same story.
Once in service, solar and wind convert only 25–35 % of the available energy. That is entropy at work, and it cannot be defeated.
The waste-heat argument rests on the idea that swapping fuel cost for system cost somehow removes entropy’s role across the whole energy system. It does not. Low power density and intermittency are themselves expressions of entropy; both drive system costs higher by more than the fuel savings. That is the thermodynamic outcome written into the energy system.
You must be a massive advocate for nuclear power then, Mel?
Why in the world would it matter if a wind turbine was created in a supply chain that runs on fossil fuels. You think the only option is starting over from stone age tools and working our way back up every time we invent something new?
Solar and Wind being intermittent has NOTHING to do with primary energy and your misleading charts. When renewables produce energy they produce pure electricity, a valuable and useful form of work. When coal is burned it produces some valuable electricity and a lot of useless heat. Any data you show must account for this and not pretend like that heat is being put to use. This is not about price (though renewables usually win there too) but about claiming that fossil energy is a bigger player than it really is.
As for nuclear, I support keeping existing plants open for as long as feasibly possible and not building many new nuclear plants as they cost a ludicrous amount of money and I like my electricity bill lower rather than higher.
All of your cope about entropy is just talk, you provide no meaningful arguments and will continue to bury your head in sources that agree with you while ignoring the changing world around you. It is a bad habit, and it will not serve you well.
Ok, plenty of happy talk with zero data to back it up. Your turn - data please.
And I hope the following helps too, you’re obviously not too familiar with embodied energy versus units of power produced. Note the comment regarding electricity.
1. Watt-hour A watt-hour is the energy one watt of power delivers for one hour. Since one watt equals one joule per second, a watt-hour equals
3600 joules of energy.
2. Total energy supply Total energy supply is a measure of primary energy: the energy available to a country or region before it is converted into electricity or fuels for final use.
The ever-increasing share of renewables in China is pretty solid data to me. The CCP regime doesn't strike me as the type to sabotage their own country to placate Western virtue signalers, so the fact that they are installing renewables at a stupid fast pace should tell you something
Interesting article although I am not sure I follow the argument - there are many different aspects being bundled under “high entropy”. Given that life/organisms are the paradigm of highly ordered substances that must consume exergy to maintain that order - and that exergy comes from the sun, it follows then that solar is an exergy source, if not the master exergy source. Hydrocarbons themselves, under the assumption that they are fossils, are products of solar energy as well. One could say they are non rechargeable batteries.
When you say solar energy cannot produce energy needed to produce a solar PV what do you mean? The EROI is negative? Or do you mean that because it is intermittent it can never produce dispatchable power - which is what is required for producing panels on an industrial scale?
Thanks for slipping by, the great comments, and bringing up the term exergy. We use Gibbs Free Energy, but near as we can figure it's the same thing, namely exergy is the portion of any primary energy source that can be used to power a force in a defined location at a time, location and rate of our choosing. The required thermodynamic cycle is amenable to theoretical analysis from first principles, but the capex, opex and intermittency are not so we resorted to a monetary measure for the last three in our series of pieces.
We do mean the EROI of solar panels is negative. Wind has been harnessed in the past to provide net exergy, but no longer can because we've forced our society to a low enough entropy that wind cannot provide. That said, what you say about the Sun is basically true, but it is so seductive that it is an exergetically deadly siren, the entropy of sunshine is too high, and as with another great comment just posted, it's almost as if you've anticipated our next piece. Thanks again.
Many thanks for the article...and your explicit statement that weather dependent wind and solar junk energies have no place on a modern grid. I have explicitly stated that many times, to wit:
Kill grid wind and grid solar.
Not a single kW of these impoverishment vehicles belongs on a modern grid.
Wind and solar only go, wherever they go, by government subsidies, government mandates and government requirements.
Every single one of these grid wind and solar pestilences will eventually become stranded assets because people will finally realize they are NOT economically viable.
End the government subsidies, the government mandates and the government requirements, and the wind and solar industries start dying the next day.
The grid wind and grid solar industries are built solely upon the police power of the State.
There is no natural market demand for chaotic, indeterminant quantity; chaotic, indeterminant quality; chaotic, indeterminant duration; weather dependent wind and solar electricity energy production any more than there is no natural market demand for chaotic, indeterminant quantity; chaotic, indeterminant quality; chaotic, indeterminant duration; weather dependent screwdriver production.
Kill grid wind and grid solar.
They are impoverishment vehicles.
Not a single kW of weather dependent electricity generation belongs on a modern grid.
End the government subsidies, end the government mandates, end the government requirements, and grid wind and grid solar industries start dying the next day.
To the intermittency problem with wind and solar junk energies stated in your article, you need to add: demand blindness, chaotic outputs, and capacity impairment.
Wind and solar junk energies are inherently, totally, and inalterably, blind to demand, which makes them utterly unfit to serve human needs and utterly unfit for powering modern societies.
No demand, no amount of urgency, no amount of supplication, no amount of treasure, can cause the wind to blow or the sun to shine.
The ONLY way that these inalterably blind to demand energies can enter a modern grid is by the reverse utilization of the dispatchable energies which can respond to demand...i.e. the hydrocarbons and, where applicable, hydro. The dispatchable generation responds to the coming and goings of wind and solar junk by varying production. It is capacity impairment of the reliable generation.
By any measure, this government bestowed privilege given to wind and solar of "first to market" is modern day government sanctioned plundering and pillaging of the ratepayers, taxpayers, and the legacy generators of dispatchable power. When the investment decisions were made for the dispatchable generation, the owners would never have thought they would be forced by the police power of the state to curtail their production for no compensation, provide backup to wind and solar and battery installations for no compensation, and provide balancing for the hopelessly chaotic, random output of wind and solar for no compensation.
Dispatchable generation is being forced off the grid by idiotic, immoral, corrupt government policies. No dispatchable generator would enter today's market under such rigged conditions--which is now why capacity auctions are taking place to ensure that the lights stay on.
That insane duck curve bulge of solar idiocy is pure impoverishment and capacity impairment. Not a single kW of solar would be generated if solar wasn't given first to market privilege and subsidies.
The intermittent nature of wind and solar output means that their chaotic output must be reverse mirrored by dispatchable generation, primarily gas thermal generation, to keep the grid stable, minute by minute, second by second..
The public is sorely uninformed and misinformed about the massive costs to the grid system of incorporating the "free energy" of weather dependent wind and solar junk energies. Not only are wind and solar junk energies hopelessly, inherently, and inalterably, blind to demand, they are totally, hopelessly, inherently, and inalterably, chaotic in occurrence, chaotic in intensity, chaotic in voltage, and chaotic in duration.
Whenever the wind and solar parasites do produce, their chaotic energy must be converted to something useable which is compatible with the grid. The direct output from wind and solar junk energies would destroy modern appliances, electrical devices, and is totally unfit for the grid. The chaotic output must be transformed into the ordered, usable energies needed on the grid to power societies. This transformation comes at huge costs.
I repeat...
Kill grid wind and grid solar. Not a single kW of these pestilences beings on a modern grid.
They are impoverishment vehicles.
They are deindustrialization vehicles.
They are government corruption vehicles because they only survive by government subsidies, government mandates, and government requirements.
They are public corrupting vehicles because the public support can only be maintained by lies, fraud, disingenuous narratives, the hiding of real costs, the hiding of real risks, and endless streams of shrill fear mongering.
Get the consumers into the act so they can see for themselves the danger of wind droughts when the sun is off duty. Then they can lean on their local lawmakers and demand the end of subsidies and mandates for wind and solar.
Especially challenge blue state lawmakers and the Republicans who have been captured by the wind and solar lobbies. THIS IS URGENT.
Thank you for your recent articles and the roadmap showing the inter-relationships between your articles. You make the case for the most economical and reliable grids being powered by dispatchable low-entropy energy sources. (You have not touched the power engineering construct of grid frequency stability requiring adequate synchronous grid inertia [SGI] to prevent blackouts. Solar, wind, and batteries are further disadvantaged by contributing neglibible SGI. See: https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important That's why I call their power, "Junk Power.") I appreciate your inclusion of my quote regarding the economic penalty of the high-entropy California power grid.
Yeah, we haven't touched on inertia as it's been covered thoroughly and better in other places, such as here: https://greennuke.substack.com/p/why-is-grid-inertia-important
Thank you for the acknowledgement. Based on our experience as a California Public Utilities Commission intervenor, very few decisionmakers know about the essential role of synchronous grid inertia as a reliability service.
I also note Spain's work to minimize the actual cause (inadequate synchronous grid inertia) of the mid-day 28 April 2025 Iberian Peninsula blackout. https://kilovar1959.substack.com/cp/200008271 At least eleven people who were expecting reliable power paid with their lives that day. The cost in lost productivity and damaged production equipment was measured in the equivalent of billions of U.S. dollars.
Brilliant and so simple. I am not in the league of the author or other commenters as I didn't do maths or science at school (a funny story not relevant here) but in my arguments to friends down here in Australia - where our standard of living is diminishing at a great rate, where we have a socialist government who are subsidizing Chinese-made (by coal) solar and wind turbines across vast swathes of our landscape yet ban nuclear (our uranium deposits are the worlds biggest and we're about the export it to India), and are closing coal fired plants, blocking gas and oil development but producing volumes of hot air and CO2 from their ivory tower in Canberra - I have long asked the inconvenient question: where did the energy come from to make your solar panels, your turbines, your Chinese EVs and their batteries not to mention your tv, refrigeration, computer, your steel trusses to build your shelter and their batteries glass and steel architectural icons in which your government department HQs reside, etc.? They tell me I'm stupid because I didn't go to university and don't know how to argue properly. I usually say something like 'whatever... who wants a short black, or a cappuccino' as I clear the table.
I'm now going to find all your other articles Thermocon. Great work.
Thanks for the great comment and slipping by. These concepts are yours by right as much as anyone's. A couple examples, Robert Bryce is a journalist who has figured this out and John Constable is a philosopher from Cambridge who later in life caught the thermodynamics bug, also has figured this out and explains the role of entropy in the Queen's English to an extent that it may have no peer.
Excellent article, easy to grasp.
"We can only be more efficient"
You bet, thanks for slipping by. If we try to get too much more efficient, we'll all be efficiently dead...
Something didn't seem right with the argument. I was expecting to see some numbers; maybe I missed it. Only saw something about "entropy." So I did a search: https://search.brave.com/search?q=will+a+20kw+off+the+grid+solar+system+produce+enough+power+to+make+all+the+components . Apparently, it will. The prices for panels are so cheap now, they are being used for fencing material...that also produces power. I put together a small system, and calculated the cost of the components over a 10 year period. I was paying $25/month for electricity. Grid power would cost me about $100/month. You may argue that cheap oil and coal are enabling this. Great! I'll take it. BTW, my numbers work without any government welfare; all components were bought out of pocket, no subsidies.
Thanks for slipping by and the comment. We've done our homework and done posted our homework in taking our shot at quantifying the second law performance of these various sources of primary energy. Congratulations on your solar install, it likely means you're adroit and fairly well off - we have friends into the solar panel and electric car thing and they're intrepid dudes. The trouble is you're connected to the grid which absorbs what we estimate as 5.0 cents per kWhr of entropy and that is likely light, which is indicative of why it won't provide a modern standard of living if you go off-grid. That said, we don't begrudge you for it, we also act in our best interest.
Thank you for your response. Actually, I was completely off grid. The grid is awesome, but I like the idea of having more control over electricity, and the price doesn't go up. I know of others that live in "regular" houses, and a 10kw inverter, 10-20kw worth of panels, and 10-20kw battery takes care of all their needs. About $20k, if you do the work yourself, double if you have an installer do it. To be fair, you do need a backup genset if it's going to rain for a week. Also, this may not work as well in northern latitudes, although the panel still produce a surprising amount of power when it's overcast.
Comparing your post with Scott Grout's EROEI, I suggest a KISS approach. For any project, regardless of size (MW), all of the capex, not some of the capex, must be invested - 100%. Since wind, even in the best locations, is not available all of the time. Sunlight, even in the best daytime locations, is not the same during those hours. Result - 100% of the capex invested those tech options, which can only operate some of the time, means work only part of the time and, thus, erosion of value, i.e., a part time return on capex (energy) invested. The difference gets made up with subsidies - which is the only way that investors would ever make these kinds of decisions in the first place. Combined with all of the similar distortions for batteries and such, it's a pretty dumb way to live.
A drag on other investments happens when wind and/or solar are available, forcing nat gas (and sometimes coal) to curtail for "load following". We don't get the more efficient use of those options, adding to the overall loss in social welfare.
Thanks for slipping by and the comment. We agree. In addition to investing 100% of the capex, we'd add that 100% of the opex should get expensed as well, assuming they're analogous to the ITC and PTC respectively. Thanks again.
Terrific article! I linked your article in a comment I made to a Brawl Street Journal article.
https://brawlstreetjournal.substack.com/p/absorbed-anomalies
The comment reads:
Somewhere along the line the siren songs of wind and solar beautifulness infected Chinese decision makers. The world has had the opportunity to view the disastrous debacles inflicted on Britain, Germany, Spain, California, etc. of the Green Delusion Syndrome. The mantras included: The world MUST decarbonize. There will be thousands of new Green Jobs created. Renewable energy from the wind and the sun are cheaper than hydrocarbons. Solar and wind costs are falling. Battery costs are falling. Batteries are the solution to wind and solar intermittency. Clean energy is the future.
The list does on and on.
At some point after the implosion of China's property boom, China's state directed investments and subsidies pivoted to wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and EV's.
Solar, batteries and EVs were growing 3x faster than China's economy – because the Chinese government had decided to subsidize these sectors of their economy.
"China’s solar manufacturers built new factories at a fever pitch between 2020 and 2023 as the state redirected resources from the sinking property sector to what it used to call the “new three” growth industries: solar panels, electric cars and batteries."
The industry lost a staggering $60 billion last year."
https://t.co/FUaYL0PmpE
If you, as a centrally planned command economy, had built manufacturing capacity for solar panels which was 3x total world demand, if you had built manufacturing capacity for batteries which was 2x total world demand, if you had built manufacturing capacity for EV's that was 2x total world demand, if you had built wind turbine manufacturing capacity which was 2x total world demand...then
...you will try to move these goods in both domestic and international markets by any means available just to keep your factories open. But....the huge advantage that you have in your domestic (Chinese) market is the ability to "command" deployment--as state directed "investment".
Only a centrally planned economy like China's can conduct such monumentally huge mal-investments.
Expect ghost solar farms and ghost wind turbine farms and ghost battery manufacturing plants and ghost EV manufacturing plants to rival China's ghost cities.
There is no reason whatsoever that the disastrous energy debacles inflicted on Britain, Germany, Spain, California, etc. by Green Delusion Syndrome will not also impoverish China. given the path China has chosen. The only advantage China has is this regard is the "soft budget" accounting it has for anything state related.
Two good reads:
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2025-9-28-place-your-bet-on-the-future-of-energy-us-or-china
The author claims:
"Here’s my bet: The entire idea of an energy system based on wind, solar and batteries will not work and will fail, probably over the course of the next ten years or so, if not sooner. All of the investment will be lost. All of the employees will be laid off."
That is how I see it...every single grid connected wind turbine and solar farm will be shown for what they truly are: impoverishment vehicles totally unfit for purpose.
Every single grid connected wind turbine and solar farm will become a stranded asset because they only survive on government subsidies.
https://thermocon.substack.com/p/its-the-entropy-stupid
The author writes:
"To add insult to injury the only thing worse than a solar panel is a solar panel with battery backup. The sunshine can’t make the panel in the first place, how’s it going to make the battery; another highly ordered low entropy device."
"When people wake up to the realities of energy this is going to go down in human history as one of the greatest departures from sound science of all time. There may be hell to pay. We hope not but we are a little surprised that it has gone this far."
Thanks for the great comment and sharing the Brawl Street Journal and Manhattan Contrarian material, both great sources. Also, as you note, China fell for it. Embracing wind & solar is a geopolitical weakness and simply a blight on their country to boot. They'll wake up, but it'll take a minute. Once folks get bitten by wind & solar it takes a good bit for that serum to wear off.
And yet more evidence...
"As state-owned grid operators plan to invest over 1 trillion yuan ($146 billion) annually over the next five years in high-voltage transmission lines and pumped-hydro storage systems, China is laying the physical foundation to support its next massive wave of clean energy growth successfully."
At $146 billion a year for 5 years, that totals $730 billion of state-owned, state directed, state supported, "investments".
Not a single dollar would need to be "invested" were it not for China's insane pursuit of weather dependent wind and solar energies.
Not a single dollar of that $730 billion "invested" in the grid will be added to the costs of China's wind and solar "investments".
Not a single dollar of the backup costs imposed upon China's dispatchable generators will be added to the costs of China's wind and solar "investments".
Not a single dollar of the impairment costs imposed upon China's dispatchable generators will be added to the costs of China's wind and solar "investments".
Only the Chinese government could produce such mal-investment.
Expect ghost solar farms and ghost wind farms to rival China's ghost cities.
Expect China to manifest the electricity cost increases and increasing grid instability as Britain and Germany are experiencing.
https://techgolly.com/chinas-domestic-solar-installations-fall-for-fourth-straight-month-amid-major-energy-policy-pivot
https://x.com/sash_tom/status/2090177024035815499
To advance further evidence of the "Green Energy Debacle" in China:
"Between 2021 and 2024, state-driven subsidies encouraged solar manufacturers to build massive factories, pushing China’s annual solar manufacturing capacity to an estimated 1,200 GW in 2025."
"Total installed solar capacity soared 31.3% to reach 1.24 billion kilowatts, while wind power reached 660 million kilowatts."
Imagine the challenges forced upon China's grid operators...potentially 1.24 billion kilowatts (about 1.66 billion hp) feeding into and out of the grid every day…all totally blind to demand, all totally dispersed across China. And add to that challenge, potentially 660 million kilowatts (about 884 million hp) of wind power feeding into and out of the grid, inalterably determined by the fickle, fickle wind, and all totally dispersed across China.
Only government could produce such mal-investment.
Expect ghost solar farms and ghost wind farms to rival China's ghost cities.
https://techgolly.com/chinas-domestic-solar-installations-fall-for-fourth-straight-month-amid-major-energy-policy-pivot
https://x.com/sash_tom/status/2090172482707972584
Thanks for the great posts and comments. Good to see there's a community of folks on here who understand the physics of it.
I appreciate your thought-provoking writing!
I'm not fully assured that you have taken the lifetime energy production of solar and wind infrastructure into your calculations, rather than just a years' worth. According to quick Gemini searches, one 60-cell solar panel lasts for 25 years, on the low end, and produces 400 kwh/year, on the low end, for a total of 10,000 kwh. Also according to Gemini, it takes 1,200 kwh, on the high end, to make one 60-cell solar panel. This ought to mean that one solar panel can generate enough energy to produce 8.33 solar panels, no?
I'd concede this point, as my research was obviously lazy and it is less pertinent to my main question. That is, assuming we take all of your calculations at face value, what is the solution? How do we get around the fact that over the course of a couple centuries we have taken several hundred million years' worth of sequestered carbon and put it into the atmosphere, where it is largely transparent to ultraviolet light (coming from the sun) but largely opaque to infared light (coming from the earth)?
It does not take reviewing decades of climate science or even 20 years of weather observations to come to a conclusion that reorganizing the earth's carbon in this way may lead to an increase in overall world temperatures that is unsurviveable for most organisms and human infrastructures. The obvious conclusion to me, therefore, is that a forward-thinking society should work to gradually wean itself off of its reliance on energy production methods that continue to put carbon into the atmosphere (which, as established, increases the proportion of infared light that is trapped against the earth and therefore accelerates the increase of global temperatures).
Even if you dispute that, surely you agree that the coal, oil, and gas available to humans is finite, and sooner or later, we must diversify our energy production somehow?
To me it seems that rather than optimizing for the lowest-entropy energy sources, our imperative is the following: To stave off the collapse of biodiversity (which very probably will lead to the collapse of agriculture, and famine); to stave off the changing of temperature and precipitation norms faster than humanity can adapt or bioengineer our food crops to compensate for it (which very probably will lead to the collapse of agriculture, and famine); and to stave off the increased frequency of catastrophic weather events (which in addition to acute loss of life and destruction of infrastructure, cause disruption of food production and distribution, and can locally collapse agriculture- at scale this causes? Yes, famine).
Obviously, solar and wind are imperfect energy sources. But, critically, after manufacturing, transportation, and installation, they produce no carbon emissions. And until policy makers can wake the f up to nuclear, what other scaleable energy source do we have?
(Also, while I haven't read your other pieces, I think you have given geothermal short shrift in this one. After all, it generates electricity the same as coal and petroleum products: spin a turbine with steam.)
Thanks for the comment, lot of thoughtful stuff in there. Everything we’ve seen, calculated or estimated ourselves indicates that wind blows and solar is even worse. It’s decades of data or years of data depending on which piece and we’ve stated our sources. We’re not the only folks who calculate these $/MW-hr figures and posit things, and none of our figures match exactly but the pattern repeats without fail. Solar PV is terrible.
We definitely agree that the only person who believes in exponential growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist, and have published a piece, Peak Cheap Oil Already Happened, along those lines. Putting CO2 in the atmosphere is so energetically advantaged that it’s real tough to beat. There’s one thing that can though and that’s nuclear fission as you allude to in your comment. Thanks again.
Even if the EROEI of a solar panel is greater than one, it’s not a 24/7 energy source. Some form of energy storage is required. Energy storage systems, like rechargeable batteries, have an EROEI of zero, not to mention less than 100% efficiency. That’s going to reduce the system EROEI, possibly to less than one.
Agreed, thanks for slipping by and the great comment, particularly "Energy storage systems, like rechargeable batteries, have an EROEI of zero, not to mention less than 100% efficiency" we think you're spot on and had never thought of it quite like that. It's an observable fact that wind could be harnessed by ancient and medieval folks to lower the entropy of their surroundings and improve their standard of living...they built windmills sans subsidy after all. We've now driven the entropy of our society down low enough that wind will no longer suffice. Solar PV is worse than wind, of that there is no doubt, there is no way a solar panel could have been made prior to the invention of the blast furnace, fueled by coal. Is Solar's EROEI less than one? Yes, we suspect so, and will posit that, but maybe we're wrong in an academic sense, we're estimating things that can't be calculated from first principles after all. Scott Grout on this platform did a great piece called The Energy Cost of Energy and the EROEI's posted there don't go below 1 for a solar panel with battery backup but the pattern just jumps off the page in kind with your comment Thanks again.
If I search energy return on investment (EROI) I find values way over 1. If it is lower than one, solar panel output is indeed belated release of fossil fuel energy such as coal. If it is higher, you will see electricity gains greater than all the energy required to produce, transport, install and maintain the solar panel.
I do not understand the whole entropy concern presented here. If I’m getting more energy out of my panel than was originally used to create it, and if my electrical bills are reduced more than the price of getting me panels and having them installed with all the setup required (which it really is, even when discounting for the subsidy I got for it), then what remains the problem?
Should I have put an LNG plant on my roof instead? I suppose the gods of entropy would be pleased but my wallet wouldn’t, and my wife would hate me.
Thanks for slipping by and posting the great comment. The Sun is very seductive, we suspect it's simply imbedded in the human condition, we feel it as well. Solar panels pass the first law test, the trouble is they don't pass the second law test. It's not like your solar panel is destroying any turf as it's mounted on your house and the government is driving these outcomes, good on ya. Near as we can figure the subsidy works out to 4 cents per kW-hr or so and the connection to the grid another 5 cents per kW-hr to cancel out the intermittency and it could be much higher. That's the key indicator. The best way to get a comprehensive understanding of the entropy would be to disconnect from the grid, shut off any natural gas line and empty out any heating oil tank, and try to live off those solar panels alone, but don't do that, it would certainly destroy any goodwill on the home front. Thanks again.
You're treating solar subsidies like fuel costs.
That's absurd, because if the subsidy totally ended tomorrow you'd still need to burn gas in turbines, but the installed solar panels would be continuing to make power. The subsidy is to accelerate adoption, not subsidize power. Would you mind redoing your calculations to reflect the lifetime of panels?
Thanks for slipping by and the comment. We disagree on the solar subsidies thing. What we did in The Sun Also Sets is find a source of Investment Tax Credits by year and then divide by the amount of MW-hrs produced in that year. Sources stated in the piece. For this piece all the data was tidied up in the data source we referenced. It's because solar panel lifetimes are so short that folks choose the ITC to get their money up front. Their lifetime is insufficient.
The thing you need to divide the subsidies by is the amount of solar capacity installed that year multiplied by its expected lifetime.
The amount produced that year is completely irrelevant
Because if the subsidies ended tomorrow the solar panels would still generate power.
How do you justify your decision?
We started here with thermodynamics calculations, and ended up with the conclusion that solar and wind are not merely inadequate, but subtractive. That’s a question of political economy. Physics shapes reality, but it can’t tell you what you to do about it.
If the goal is to maintain civilization exactly as it exists in 2026, then I think I understand your argument, that wind and solar technologies are subtractive. But from studying the physics of global energy, it should be apparent that it is not possible to maintain this civilization indefinitely. We will ultimately face subtraction. In fact, the age of subtraction may well be upon us already.
So, I don’t think you can hold up Gibbs free energy and then make it say that solar is useless. Making that leap requires first defining “useful” as “capable of reproducing and operating civilization exactly as it currently exists.” But that’s an impossible threshold for usefulness: nothing can reproduce our present civilization indefinitely, because it is powered by an enormous inheritance of fossil energy that accumulated over millions of years and that we have been consuming over the course of a few centuries.
And before I’m accused of being a merchant of the renewable energy virtue-signaling-industrial complex, consider the thought experiment. If all fossil fuels disappeared from this planet overnight, would you prefer a world that has solar and wind energy infrastructure built out already? Or one that doesn’t?
I think subtraction is already baked into the cake. Physics puts a bound on our capacity, but it gives no guidance on what to do with it. You can disagree with energy policy, but let’s not pretend there’s One True Thermodynamic Way forward. For that, you need to have a conversation about what’s important and what’s valuable: what do we keep reproducing, and what do we discard? Physics tells you what is possible and what it costs, but it cannot tell you what is worth doing. And though I do love me some thermodynamics, it’s not what I find most interesting about this subject, and I don’t think it can do what you’re trying to make it do.
Wow, thoughtful comment man, thanks much for posting. The argument that we've already driven our civilization to a lower entropy state than can be maintained due to insufficient long term availability of Gibbs Free Energy, Xergy, dispatchable megawatt hours, whatever you want to call it, to beat back the relentless force of entropy has a lot of merit in our view. We disagree with it, but it is a sound concern. Without sufficient Gibbs Free Energy, we will all be very adroit and intelligent inhabitants of our caves.
Thermodynamically, solar PV is terrible and we have quantified terrible as being less than 1 EROEI, and we certainly could be wrong. Maybe it's 2 or 3 and our civilization needs something so much higher that it renders it indistinguishable from 1. Wind is definitively better, but our society at too low entropy already for wind to help.
When we calculate the amount of natural uranium required by a CANDU reactor at $100 per pound we get roughly $2 per MW-hr. (No one has popped up and told us we're idiots but we wouldn't mind someone else checking that number or pointing us to a reference.) We'd posit that over millions of years it is that number that will place a cap on human standard of living, so we would say subtraction is not yet baked in the cake but agree our minimum maintainable entropy state or highest average standard of living is within sight. The 2-hour workweek and flying cars have somehow eluded us.
We wouldn't say you're a merchant of anything besides thoughtful concern, and to close on this we use first principles where we can but then resort to monetary measures for the aspects not amenable to analysis from first principles, and we'd agree it's a tad messy and theoretically unsatisfying.
I love this article. So many scientific concepts thrown around and shifted when they stop being convenient. In 20 years the world's biggest manufacturers will run entirely off of renewables after they've outcompeted everything else and you'll still be running around screaming that it's all wrong, all fake, all a myth perpetuated by Big Entropy to accelerate the end of the universe.
P.S. do you have any contacts that can get me into the hydrocarbon shilling business? It seems to pay well
Thanks for slipping by and taking the time to read the article. We would fade your prediction, that said polite disagreement always a good thing. Lifetime oil & gas indeed, so we face an insurmountable branding problem, but it doesn't change the physics of it near as we can calculate them.
I have no issue with those working in O&G who are reasonable, I think it was an extremely important field in the 20th century (arguably the most important) and it will remain relevant even as its focus shifts from natural gas and gasoline production towards plastics and valuable chemical feedstocks. Lord knows we won't be making ammonia sustainably anytime soon.
I take issue with those employed by petrochemical companies who believe that the product they made is the only viable option, that nothing could ever replace it and that any attempt to do so is an organized effort by nebulous forces who are all acting against their own interests and burning their own dollars to do so. And this is assuming they aren't an outright climate change denier, which is its own discussion. In general if you're looking for a branding problem, I suggest starting here.
As for your calculations on the physics, I don't know that they are anything approaching a calculation.
"A solar panel is a very low entropy device. It is highly ordered. Sunshine is very diffuse; its entropy is very high. So high in fact that sunshine captured by a solar photovoltaic panel cannot provide the energy to manufacture itself"
Is neither correct nor a calculation, so you don't even get partial credit. Do you truly believe that a solar panel will not produce enough energy across its lifespan to manufacture another solar panel? Really? I respect the boldness of the claim but you gotta back it up with something, you can't vaguely gesture at Entropy and say it's proof.
Reasonable comments on chemicals and ammonia for sure. We would disagree with the rest, the piece explains the reason - entropy.
Your prediction that the world’s biggest manufacturers will be running entirely off renewables is an excellent one. Can you please provide us with data to confirm progress towards this inevitable conclusion?
I see. Here is some data which shows us progress towards the inevitable dominance of renewables in China. I’m sure it’ll be any day now.
A good chart I must say, it’s unique way to falsify the data. Measure primary energy and convert it to TWh so it looks like it’s talking about electricity generated. Props for creativity!
Primary energy measures the embodied energy in a material, but that energy is not all usable. In fact, for fossil fuels, about 2/3rds of it is lost as waste heat, quite a lot. Renewables, by virtue of generating electricity directly, don’t have any penalties beyond the transmission losses, usually around 10%.
So if coal and Renewables were both providing 10 TWh of usable electricity, the chart would show a split of 70/30 for coal as far as primary energy is concerned
The actual numbers show that China is at around 30% of final energy generated by renewables, about 2.5 times what your chart would imply
Ah yes, of course — the waste heat fallacy.
Show me a solar panel or wind turbine that has been created without fossil energy dominating the entire supply chain. There isn’t one. The same is true for transmission infrastructure. Synchronous condensers? Same story.
Once in service, solar and wind convert only 25–35 % of the available energy. That is entropy at work, and it cannot be defeated.
The waste-heat argument rests on the idea that swapping fuel cost for system cost somehow removes entropy’s role across the whole energy system. It does not. Low power density and intermittency are themselves expressions of entropy; both drive system costs higher by more than the fuel savings. That is the thermodynamic outcome written into the energy system.
You must be a massive advocate for nuclear power then, Mel?
Why in the world would it matter if a wind turbine was created in a supply chain that runs on fossil fuels. You think the only option is starting over from stone age tools and working our way back up every time we invent something new?
Solar and Wind being intermittent has NOTHING to do with primary energy and your misleading charts. When renewables produce energy they produce pure electricity, a valuable and useful form of work. When coal is burned it produces some valuable electricity and a lot of useless heat. Any data you show must account for this and not pretend like that heat is being put to use. This is not about price (though renewables usually win there too) but about claiming that fossil energy is a bigger player than it really is.
As for nuclear, I support keeping existing plants open for as long as feasibly possible and not building many new nuclear plants as they cost a ludicrous amount of money and I like my electricity bill lower rather than higher.
All of your cope about entropy is just talk, you provide no meaningful arguments and will continue to bury your head in sources that agree with you while ignoring the changing world around you. It is a bad habit, and it will not serve you well.
Ok, plenty of happy talk with zero data to back it up. Your turn - data please.
And I hope the following helps too, you’re obviously not too familiar with embodied energy versus units of power produced. Note the comment regarding electricity.
1. Watt-hour A watt-hour is the energy one watt of power delivers for one hour. Since one watt equals one joule per second, a watt-hour equals
3600 joules of energy.
2. Total energy supply Total energy supply is a measure of primary energy: the energy available to a country or region before it is converted into electricity or fuels for final use.
Couldn't agree more, well stated and succinct too. That free fuel can get awful expensive. You in the energy business?
The total ergs from power generation are nearly five orders of magnitude under solar radiation received from the sun.
It's just not an important forcing
The ever-increasing share of renewables in China is pretty solid data to me. The CCP regime doesn't strike me as the type to sabotage their own country to placate Western virtue signalers, so the fact that they are installing renewables at a stupid fast pace should tell you something
Interesting article although I am not sure I follow the argument - there are many different aspects being bundled under “high entropy”. Given that life/organisms are the paradigm of highly ordered substances that must consume exergy to maintain that order - and that exergy comes from the sun, it follows then that solar is an exergy source, if not the master exergy source. Hydrocarbons themselves, under the assumption that they are fossils, are products of solar energy as well. One could say they are non rechargeable batteries.
When you say solar energy cannot produce energy needed to produce a solar PV what do you mean? The EROI is negative? Or do you mean that because it is intermittent it can never produce dispatchable power - which is what is required for producing panels on an industrial scale?
Thanks for slipping by, the great comments, and bringing up the term exergy. We use Gibbs Free Energy, but near as we can figure it's the same thing, namely exergy is the portion of any primary energy source that can be used to power a force in a defined location at a time, location and rate of our choosing. The required thermodynamic cycle is amenable to theoretical analysis from first principles, but the capex, opex and intermittency are not so we resorted to a monetary measure for the last three in our series of pieces.
We do mean the EROI of solar panels is negative. Wind has been harnessed in the past to provide net exergy, but no longer can because we've forced our society to a low enough entropy that wind cannot provide. That said, what you say about the Sun is basically true, but it is so seductive that it is an exergetically deadly siren, the entropy of sunshine is too high, and as with another great comment just posted, it's almost as if you've anticipated our next piece. Thanks again.
Many thanks for the article...and your explicit statement that weather dependent wind and solar junk energies have no place on a modern grid. I have explicitly stated that many times, to wit:
Kill grid wind and grid solar.
Not a single kW of these impoverishment vehicles belongs on a modern grid.
Wind and solar only go, wherever they go, by government subsidies, government mandates and government requirements.
Every single one of these grid wind and solar pestilences will eventually become stranded assets because people will finally realize they are NOT economically viable.
End the government subsidies, the government mandates and the government requirements, and the wind and solar industries start dying the next day.
https://x.com/sash_tom/status/2084705796005195870
The grid wind and grid solar industries are built solely upon the police power of the State.
There is no natural market demand for chaotic, indeterminant quantity; chaotic, indeterminant quality; chaotic, indeterminant duration; weather dependent wind and solar electricity energy production any more than there is no natural market demand for chaotic, indeterminant quantity; chaotic, indeterminant quality; chaotic, indeterminant duration; weather dependent screwdriver production.
Kill grid wind and grid solar.
They are impoverishment vehicles.
Not a single kW of weather dependent electricity generation belongs on a modern grid.
End the government subsidies, end the government mandates, end the government requirements, and grid wind and grid solar industries start dying the next day.
https://x.com/sash_tom/status/2068566832236179549
To the intermittency problem with wind and solar junk energies stated in your article, you need to add: demand blindness, chaotic outputs, and capacity impairment.
Wind and solar junk energies are inherently, totally, and inalterably, blind to demand, which makes them utterly unfit to serve human needs and utterly unfit for powering modern societies.
No demand, no amount of urgency, no amount of supplication, no amount of treasure, can cause the wind to blow or the sun to shine.
The ONLY way that these inalterably blind to demand energies can enter a modern grid is by the reverse utilization of the dispatchable energies which can respond to demand...i.e. the hydrocarbons and, where applicable, hydro. The dispatchable generation responds to the coming and goings of wind and solar junk by varying production. It is capacity impairment of the reliable generation.
By any measure, this government bestowed privilege given to wind and solar of "first to market" is modern day government sanctioned plundering and pillaging of the ratepayers, taxpayers, and the legacy generators of dispatchable power. When the investment decisions were made for the dispatchable generation, the owners would never have thought they would be forced by the police power of the state to curtail their production for no compensation, provide backup to wind and solar and battery installations for no compensation, and provide balancing for the hopelessly chaotic, random output of wind and solar for no compensation.
Dispatchable generation is being forced off the grid by idiotic, immoral, corrupt government policies. No dispatchable generator would enter today's market under such rigged conditions--which is now why capacity auctions are taking place to ensure that the lights stay on.
That insane duck curve bulge of solar idiocy is pure impoverishment and capacity impairment. Not a single kW of solar would be generated if solar wasn't given first to market privilege and subsidies.
The intermittent nature of wind and solar output means that their chaotic output must be reverse mirrored by dispatchable generation, primarily gas thermal generation, to keep the grid stable, minute by minute, second by second..
The public is sorely uninformed and misinformed about the massive costs to the grid system of incorporating the "free energy" of weather dependent wind and solar junk energies. Not only are wind and solar junk energies hopelessly, inherently, and inalterably, blind to demand, they are totally, hopelessly, inherently, and inalterably, chaotic in occurrence, chaotic in intensity, chaotic in voltage, and chaotic in duration.
Whenever the wind and solar parasites do produce, their chaotic energy must be converted to something useable which is compatible with the grid. The direct output from wind and solar junk energies would destroy modern appliances, electrical devices, and is totally unfit for the grid. The chaotic output must be transformed into the ordered, usable energies needed on the grid to power societies. This transformation comes at huge costs.
I repeat...
Kill grid wind and grid solar. Not a single kW of these pestilences beings on a modern grid.
They are impoverishment vehicles.
They are deindustrialization vehicles.
They are government corruption vehicles because they only survive by government subsidies, government mandates, and government requirements.
They are public corrupting vehicles because the public support can only be maintained by lies, fraud, disingenuous narratives, the hiding of real costs, the hiding of real risks, and endless streams of shrill fear mongering.
Now that's quite some rant (and it is spot on, of course).
Thanks for slipping by and the absolutely great comments, it's almost as if you've anticipated our next piece.
Talking about ERCOT.
STORM DEFEATS WIND, SOLAR & BATTERIES IN TEXAS STORM JAN 2026
This year, Texas rode through a severe storm on the back of gas, coal, and nuclear power while wind, solar, and batteries failed.
This is a day-by-day account of the ‘natural experiment’ in Texas.
https://kclapp.substack.com/p/the-texas-freeze-an-early-update
Get the consumers into the act so they can see for themselves the danger of wind droughts when the sun is off duty. Then they can lean on their local lawmakers and demand the end of subsidies and mandates for wind and solar.
Especially challenge blue state lawmakers and the Republicans who have been captured by the wind and solar lobbies. THIS IS URGENT.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/will-windpower-heat-your-breakfast
Thanks for the comment. We enjoy all the good work.
THERE IS MORE ON POPPER AND BARZUN
ON KARL POPPER https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/can-science-be-saved
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-systemic-problem-with-science
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-two-faces-of-karl-popper
ALL OF THE POPPER SECTION ON THE SITE
https://rafechampion.substack.com/publish/posts?sections=210466
ON JACQUES BARZUN https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/teaching-science-as-a-humanities
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/jacques-barzuns-monumental-contribution
ALL OF THE BARZUN AND CULTURAL ISSUES SECTION ON THE SITE
https://rafechampion.substack.com/publish/posts?sections=210467
THE NET ZERO NIGHTMARE
IS THERE A MORE DISASTROUS PUBLIC POLICY BLUNDER ON RECORD?
What comes second?
Wind and solar capacity are not real capacity because they ain’t there on windless nights.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/wind-and-solar-aint-capacity
Batteries are not the answer. Just ask Bill Gates😊
https://youtu.be/VjgDvG13Hgs
Besides, wind and solar don’t generate enough energy to reproduce themselves. That means they are a net drain on the energy economy of the world.
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/wind-and-solar-are-parasites-on-the
WHAT IS THE COST/BENEFIT RATIO OF NET ZERO?
How much has net zero cost up to date, including the cost of the programs and the damage?
What are the benefits?
Thanks for the great comment. In answer to your question above: THE NET ZERO NIGHTMARE. IS THERE A MORE DISASTROUS PUBLIC POLICY BLUNDER ON RECORD?
No.