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Lumifer comments on Open thread, Apr. 01 - Apr. 05, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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The observation that the manufacture, delivery, installation, and maintenance of "clean" energy devices can, and on a regular basis does, cost more energy than the device is expected to return over its lifetime is not new and regularly features in sources which you probably do not read.
It's a well-known problem that people of a particular ideological persuasion tend to studiously ignore.
That may be true, but it also isn't at all the problem being discussed by the article JoshuaZ linked to.
(So the article is both more optimistic than you, because it doesn't consider the possibility that "clean" energy sources might have negative net energy return; and more pessimistic, because it observes that even then introducing these energy sources may be a big problem because doing so may use more energy than we have available, or more than we are willing to use.)
Your assertion is of independent interest, though I think it would have been better without the my-team-is-better-than-yours element. My impression is that "people of a particular ideological persuasion" might not so much "studiously ignore" the problem as claim that in fact it isn't real[1]. Can you suggest a somewhat-apolitical source of information on this that might allow people of any political persuasion to determine how real and how severe the problem is?
[1] Meaning not that they would claim it never happens, but that they would claim that if you make sensible choices of "clean" energy sources, and make appropriate allowances for economies of scale -- e.g., 10 years ago there were a lot fewer solar panels being made than there are now -- there are plenty of "clean" energy sources around that can reasonably be expected to return substantially more energy than is used in getting them running.
The claim here is not that the energy use won't make return over its lifetime is not the claim being made here. (And that's incidentally false: the EROEI for wind and solar and nuclear are all much greater than 1. See e.g. the table here). What's being argued here is much more interesting and subtle, namely that there's a separate problem because the energy return is occurring over a long period of time.
Is this then what you are talking about?
I've also tried to follow three links from the Wikipedia on EROEI for solar panel and couldn't find anything accessible. You don't happen to have a link handy for the calculations and underlying assumptions?
What he's talking about here is a little different than energy cannibalism but they are definitely related. Energy cannibalism occurs due to rapid growth. The observation here is that the problem of this nature occurs even with slow growth of the solar, wind and nuclear.
Not off the top of my head. Heinberg's "Searching for a Miracle: ‘Net Energy’ Limits and the Fate of Industrial Society" has some calculations and references- he gets a slightly more pessimistic numbers but still well over 1 for both photovoltaic solar and wind question. I'd also point to this source. There's disagreement over what the EROEI of most of these is, but there's no serious argument that they aren't greater than 1.