“The road to nowhere leads to me.” – Ozzy Osbourne
In 1905 Albert Einstein published four scientific papers that have no peer in terms of quality, quantity and brevity of delivery. They were all published in German in the Annalen der Physik, and so profound were they that a special nom de plume was given to them; the annus mirabilis papers. The scientific world was abuzz at the time with trying to discern what the fundamental constituents of light and matter were, and Einstein served up four stunners on the subject.
The first paper was on something called the photoelectric effect. When light of a minimum frequency hits certain materials it is able to knock an electron loose and cause a flow of current. Einstein proposed that light was quantized as photons and these photons had a primary energy content that was directly proportional to their frequency. Since Newton it had been thought by most that light was a wave but turns out light has a particle aspect as well and today’s solar panels operate directly on this phenomenon.
The second paper was on Brownian motion, which showed that matter existed as atoms that bounced off one another like some possessed billiard balls wielding the electromagnetic forces of Maxwell’s Equations and combining in ways that chemists continue to flush out to this day. The concept that the world was made of atoms was gaining traction at the time, but some would say Einstein’s Brownian motion paper in 1905 was the coup de grace. The atomic hypothesis is of such importance that the greatest physics textbook of all time addresses it in Volume I, Chapter I as follows:
If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. – Dick Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics
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The third paper was the beginning of the theory of special relativity. In 1864 James Clerk Maxwell published a theory of electromagnetism that implied that the speed of light in a vacuum was constant regardless of the observer. This contradicted directly the theory of relativity in use at the time that had been laid down by Galileo in 1632. In 1687 Sir Issac Newton published the Principia which explained Newton’s Three Laws of Motion and his Law of Universal Gravitation, an astounding mental achievement, especially for the time, and it rested on the foundation of Galilean relativity. In 1887 the Michelson-Morley experiment famously showed that indeed the speed of light was constant in a vacuum. So, all Einstein did was replace Galileo’s relativity with Einstein’s special relativity and Newton’s mechanics with Einstein’s mechanics. Not bad as rosters of accomplishments go.
The fourth paper Einstein published in 1905 was the one that yielded arguably the most famous physical concept of all time, namely that mass and energy are two different aspects of the same thing, and without doubt led to the most famous equation of all time.
Not bad for a year’s work; explain the photoelectric effect that had been a mystery since 1839, show that the world is made of atoms, completely revise the laws of mechanics and demonstrate that energy and mass are two aspects of the same thing. That’s enough to make one want to light up a smoke and crack open a roadie…annus mirabilis papers indeed.
It is worth mentioning that engineers with some modicum of mathematical aptitude can follow the math in the four papers mentioned above. In 1915 however, Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity, and it was truly a tour de force…gravity according to Einstein. It is rare to find the engineer with the intellectual horsepower to follow this theory and unfortunately, we here at Thermocon are not among them. Nor would it appear that the Nobel Prize committee of the time could either. However, in 1919 Sir Arthur Eddington measured the deflection of light by the Sun during a total solar eclipse and it agreed with Einstein, not Newton. So, by 1921 the Nobel Prize committee had figured out this guy named Einstein deserved a Nobel Prize, but they were not quite sure what for. His famous E = mc2 would not be proven until 1938, special relativity seemed a little odd, general relativity totally baffling, and sure, the world was probably made of atoms, but we’ve got this harmless little lark over here called the photoelectric effect, let’s go ahead and award him a Nobel Prize for that. It would prove to be a well-deserved award, albeit for a discovery which would have a bleak energy future leading many down the road to nowhere.
Every second of every day the Sun baths the Earth in life giving photons imparting a primary solar energy flux of 1.36 kW per square meter at the top of the atmosphere when the Earth is viewed as a disk from the Sun. If we’ve done the math right that works out to a constant heat flux of 173 million GW of primary energy from the Sun. According to the 2025 Statistical Review of World Energy human energy consumption in 2025 was 592 exajoules. That works out to a constant primary energy heat flux of 18,800 GW. Dividing the two yields 9,200. This matches well with the often tossed around figure that every day the Sun gives us ten thousand times as much energy as we need to power human civilization. If we just figure out how to harness that energy we can then dance through the tulips and daffodils and enjoy our newfound Shangri La as we play with the duckies and fuzzy bunnies.
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Not so grasshopper, we’ve made at least three boneheaded mistakes, the first being that only about half the energy in the Sun reaches the surface of the Earth. The second is that human energy needs fluctuate, so maybe our peak requirements are two to three times higher than our average. Depending on the factor used then the Sun only has our energy requirements covered by around 2,000 times. One may think ok, that’s not bad, we can still get there from here, but the trouble is we can’t. We haven’t accounted for our third and by far most costly mistake, namely not accounting for the 2nd Law, Murphy’s Law, other general haircuts, and finally the fact we must manufacture a machine of some type in the first place to drive that primary energy to applied energy. Then we may even need to manufacture another machine to shift that applied energy in space and time so we can accomplish some sort of desired task at hand. Sunlight is a very high entropy, low quality, energy source, it’s very diffuse and very close to random heat.
To power the modern world, solar energy requires a subsidy. If the exchange of money is just an overlay for the exchange of applied energy, a concept we got from the great Doomberg Substack, the subsidy is a cover for the fact that the imbedded applied energy in the capital expenditure is just too high. In the case of solar energy, the tax incentive used almost exclusively is the Investment Tax Credit (ITC). Using the solar energy generated in the United States, in MW-hrs, as published by the Statistical Review of World Energy (2025 version) and the ITC data as published by the Congressional Research Service Report IF10479 we get the average subsidy for solar energy of $33.62 from 2011 thru 2024. That number, like the rent, is just too damn high.
In our last piece called For Whom the Wind Blows, we published a similar calculation for the wind energy subsidy and we arrived at an estimate of $10.65 per MW-hr. This time around we’ve included the annual average price of natural gas at Henry Hub converted to power at a 7,000 BTU/kW-hr heat rate as a way to wrap some physical intuition around the numbers. In the case of solar, the subsidy is greater than the entire cost of natural gas used at an easily achievable level of efficiency. This is a bit alarming.
It is a historical fact that medieval humans were able to get enough applied energy grouped together in one spot at a given time to manufacture a windmill. In this case, the amount of applied energy required to manufacture the machine was less than the amount of applied energy the machine could generate over its lifetime to perform standard of living increasing tasks as well as provide for its own maintenance, also known as beating back the relentless forces of entropy. However, the entropy of wind is too high to power modern society. We have already driven the entropy of our society to well below that which wind can provide. Therefore, wind energy requires a parasitic subsidy of roughly ten dollars per megawatt hour in order to play in our modern low entropy energy mix.
Solar energy is even worse, to the point that we will postulate that medieval humans would not have been able to get enough applied energy grouped together in one spot at one time to manufacture a solar panel. Its entropy is too low; it is too highly ordered. This subsidy level for solar photovoltaic energy is indicative of a technology that is fully parasitic and is a net drain of applied energy upon society. We’re afraid that we have moronically determined the civilization destroying level of energy subsidy and it’s around ten to thirty dollars per megawatt hour.
We will concede that the Sun is very seductive, and for some reason even those seasoned in thermodynamics are not immune. From time to time, we here at Thermocon have gone down rabbit holes chasing the Sun’s sirens song. So, it’s worth reminding that anytime you find yourself being seduced by the potential of the raw power emanating from the Sun, take your dominant hand, make a fist with it and punch yourself in the face as you’ve experienced a momentary lapse of reason in which your logic has dispensed with the 2nd Law. Wind turbines are a well disguised reduced standard of living, solar panels are flat out death.
It becomes interesting to ask the question why the constant drumbeat about how the costs of solar photovoltaics are coming down, it’s the cheapest source of electricity, all that type nonsense. The answer is that it simply isn’t true, solar photovoltaics are the most expensive source of electricity as evidenced by the data, years of data no less. The cost of solar energy was, is, and remains beyond the pale. But this exercise in stupidity isn’t the worst of it, there is a larger strategic issue at play here. This has all been made possible by cheap Chinese coal. Coal is a very low entropy, high quality, energy source and it can be burned cleanly if you’re willing to post the added capital expenditure and operations & maintenance budget. If not, all that can be skipped if it is practiced in an unbridled capitalistic lowest cost manner, which presupposes you’re cool with choking on some fumes and dumping ash in the river.
Returning to the physical concept, by taking that low entropy coal and driving it to high entropy, also known as burning it, one can drive the entropy of silicon and aluminum to a low level that we call a solar panel. The electricity generated by solar photovoltaics is not coming from the Sun, it’s coming from Chinese coal. The subsidy is then more like a self-tariff. All the solar panels are made in China, so the money in effect flows through to the Chinese solar panel suppliers in the form of a higher price. We are paying China to use their low entropy energy to manufacture a high entropy harvesting energy device that we then let folks plug into our grid and further hollow out our high quality, low entropy base. It’s hard to overstate just how thoroughly we are being pantsed here. Or perhaps we aren’t being pantsed at all and are just scoring energy own goals but, either way the net effect is the same…reduced standard of living and less ability to defend ourselves from those wielding low entropy energy sources.
We’ve discussed the concept of Energy’s Ladder in a previous piece. The key takeaway is that primary energy is a requirement, but it is not sufficient. A machine is required to force that primary energy through a cycle to yield Gibbs Free Energy out the other side, also known as taking the 2nd Law haircut. Solar photovoltaic panels thermodynamically bump up against something called the Shockley-Queisser limit. Physically, many of the photons that make their way through the Earth’s atmosphere no longer have a sufficiently high amount of primary energy to produce any Gibbs Free Energy. They’re great for keeping the Earth warm but not for getting anything done. The Shockley-Queisser is basically one third, a nice round easily retained number. So, for every 1,000 BTU in solar radiation as primary energy only 333 BTU are available to accomplish something. This is even worse than wind which, with the Betz limit, clocks in at 593 BTU theoretically available and methane which is far superior to at 918 BTU.
We should note that this analysis may be somewhat unfair to solar in that with an infinite number of poles, the theoretical limit on efficiency is more like 86% provided we’re understanding things correctly, we’re not Einstein’s around here after all. The Gibbs Free Energy of methane is based on the concept of forcing it through the Carnot Cycle with an infinitely large heat exchanger, so these types of infinite theoretical concepts are not unique to solar. That said, the level of subsidy indicates that solar is demonstrably inferior to wind and that is commensurate with the 333 BTU of Gibbs Free Energy estimate, so we’ll roll with that for now.
In the case that money has a thermodynamic character, we strongly suspect that anything from primary energy on through to dispatchable power cannot be subsidized as they are the basis of literally everything else. It also means that any energy business based on solar panels or wind turbines will by definition end up in bankruptcy. Their entropy is too high, so they consume applied energy, and if money is really applied energy, they simply consume it until it’s gone.
Our view is that those who advocate the concept of money being an overlay for the exchange of applied energy in the form of services and capital expenditure are correct. Alternatively, if money has no relation to thermodynamics and we can just print as much as we like, then the preceding analysis is moot in its entirety, just be mindful that people die in the cold, and the cold mostly comes at night…as the Sun also sets.
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“♡ Like” this piece as the Sun also sets. – TC