Bitcoin And Nuclear: The World’s Most Feared Technologies Can Actually Save It

Much has actually been discussed how intermittent renewables like wind and solar adversely affect grid stability and typically require government subsidies to produce positive financial rois (ROI). Less well understood, but much more crucial, is the truth these periodic renewables minimize our global net energy surplus when compared to the coal, oil, gas and atomic energy sources they replace. Simply put, our current technologies create a higher energy output on their energy inputs versus wind and solar. The worlds present requirement of living is a direct result of power-generation innovations producing a high energy surplus. Research recommends electrical energy from wind and solar is unable to achieve break-even levels relative to the existing energy surplus economic threshold, suggesting they will lessen our future standard of living.Understanding why energy surplus matters is key to understanding human development. It is also the essential to comprehending how the Bitcoin networks energy-reliant proof-of-work agreement mechanism can be a tool that expands societys energy surplus well into the 21st century.What Is Energy Surplus? Having an energy surplus is basic to survival. Take a cheetah, for instance. A cheetah takes in a tremendous amount of energy pursuing its victim. A number of these goes after are not successful. For the few that result in a kill, the energy offered by eating its victim should be greater than all the energy consumed in previous chases after (and suffice for the next chase). Beyond the upkeep energy required simply to live and hunt, the energy surplus must likewise be big enough to permit a mom cheetah to provide birth, nurse her cubs and devote time and energy to raising them. For a cheetah to live generally, its energy surplus need to be well above a break-even level.The same can be stated of a fish, a tree, a bug or any organism or system that requires energy, including human beings and human economies. The larger the energy surplus within a system, the more varied, robust and resistant the system is because it can easily fulfill its standard needs with surplus energy for recreation, experimentation, development and growth.Energy surplus, or net energy, is measured by energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). EROEI is the ratio of the energy collected by a system– numerator or the caloric energy of the prey– to the energy expended in the process of event that energy– denominator or the energy expended on the hunt. To be precise, the calculation must utilize energy systems, ideally joules, the worldwide requirement for determining the energy content of heat and work.Like a financial ROI, an EROEI > > 1 reveals that a system collects more energy than it expends to gather that energy, e.g., the cheetah eats more calories than it requires for fundamental functions. The outcome is surplus energy that allows a mother cheetah to offer birth and raise her cubs. When EROEI = 1 the energy got equals the energy invested (breakeven) and the cheetah barely makes it through and can not reproduce. An EROEI < < 1 indicates that the system requires more energy than it is able to gather, e.g., the cheetah can not survive.In the human world, an EROEI < < 1 is likewise a recipe for death and extinction. An EROEI = 1 is a tenuous balance in between life and death without any surplus energy for societal development and improvement. A big and increasing energy surplus produced from high EROEI innovations has permitted human civilization to expand and flourish artistically, technically and culturally. Energy Is Real WealthSimply put, energy is our real wealth and our growth depends on how efficiently we convert primary energy into beneficial energy that enables us to do useful work. As people evolved over centuries we developed better and better innovation to find and convert progressively thick sources of main energy into useful energy. For example, petroleum contains about 44 MJ/kg (megajoule per kg) of heat, black coal about 25MJ/kg, dry wood about 16MJ/kg and peats and lawns 6-7MJ/ kg. When combusted, their stored chemical energy produces heat. Extra technology converts a few of that heat to a more helpful secondary energy like electrical power. Human innovation continued to advance to be able to harness oils greater energy density versus the peats and yards that our distant forefathers used for fuel. From this denser energy came rapid development in societys energy surplus that also unleashed enormous gains in technological development and standards of living.While we frequently concentrate on an innovations energy efficiency of converting fuel into work (e.g., an internal combustion engine has an operating thermal performance of +/- 25%), EROEI analysis takes a more holistic approach. It represents the extra energy costs of the products and procedures needed to build the engine in addition to running it. This is where EROEI analysis can shed light on the energy surplus of various power plant technologies.For a power plant, the EROEI equals the energy produced over the life of the plant divided by the energy that was required to develop, decommission the plant and operate. After including the energy expenses of its elements like steel and concrete and the energy costs of its fuel, a nonrenewable fuel source power plant requires to produce a minimum of the exact same amount of energy over its lifespan to recover cost on an energy basis. Very same opts for renewables and nuclear. Nevertheless, running an energy break-even power plant would be pointless, since all the energy produced in the plants life time operation would be offset by an equivalent amount of energy taken in to develop and run the plant. There would be no energy surplus for all the other things we require (food production, schools and health centers, etc) and desire (museums, travel, sports, clinical research, etc). Remember that a cheetah requires an energy surplus just to live a regular life. Do human beings in the 21st century, however to a much greater degree.Whats EROEI Got To Do With It?One of the most extensive and extensive analyses of various power plants EROEIs is a set of documents by Weißbach et al1. The authors applied an uniform bottom-up approach to compute the energy costs (in terajoules) gotten used to exergy (the utilized/useful energy) embedded in the products, labor and fuel supplies needed to construct, run and decommission various electricity-generating technologies. This utilized energy investment was divided into the utilized energy returned-- the electrical power generated over the lifespan of each kind of power plant-- to calculate individual EROEIs.The authors likewise compared the representative plant EROEIs to an economic EROEI, termed the "economical limit." This is estimated by the ratio of an economys GDP to its unweighted final energy usage. In practice it is GDP divided by total end energy usage for the exact same period divided by the average expense of that end energy usage. The resulting ratio records the economic worth of the "energy dividend" that the energy-producing part of an economy pays to the non-energy-producing parts of the economy. A high and growing economic threshold explains a world with highly effective energy-gathering processes that produce a big energy dividend allowing an economy to diversify, grow and grow. A decreasing economic threshold indicates a system in contraction with less efficient energy-gathering processes that crowd out other non-energy sectors resulting in a decrease in levels of financial prosperity. The results of the papers analysis are revealed in the chart below. Notes: Exergy expenses in terajoules. Energy storage (buffering/load-following) costs used evenly as a pump-storage system; battery energy costs are much higher. Solar PV is photovoltaic solar cells common to rooftop setup, 1,000 peak hours yearly. Solar CSP is focused solar (thermal). Biomass is corn (maize), 55 ton/ha gathered (damp). Wind assumes 2,000 full load-hours each year. Gas CCGT is combined cycle gas turbine. Coal is a mix of hard (underground) and brown (open pit), transport excluded. Nuclear is standard pressurized water reactors, enrichment: 83% centrifuge, 17% diffusion. Financial threshold representative of OECD-type countries. See note 3 for some preventative measures when computing EROEI.It is clear that wind and solar have EROEIs that are orders of magnitude listed below established electricity-production innovations. They consistently underperform those of hydro, nuclear and fossil fuel power plants, and when energy storage is consisted of, their EROEIs further deteriorate.Except for hydro, many renewables cant accomplish the break-even economic limit. To put it simply, they cant stand on their own, energetically speaking. They would fail if they needed to provide the energy for their decommissioning, building and operation and depend on the existing energy surplus from fossil fuels and nuclear. Moreover, placing them into our present energy mix as replacements for existing nonrenewable fuel source and nuclear technologies will dilute our present economic wealth.There are 4 primary reasons periodic renewables do not determine up: Wind and solar innovations require large amounts of pricey high-energy materials (steel, copper, pv and concrete panels) relative to their lifecycle energy output.Wind and solar have much shorter life process (20-30 years) than plants that run on nonrenewable fuel sources, hydro or nuclear(50-70), which recover their preliminary energy expenses rapidly and have longer operating durations to generate surpluses.Wind and solar intermittency leads to lower capacity factors (actual energy output with time vs potential energy output) than hydro, thermal and nuclear. This normally leads to overbuilding by 2-4x, which needs more products and greater energy financial investment costs.Intermittent wind and solar need the addition of buffering by means of batteries to make their electrical power helpful to the grid. Energy storage is not brand-new energy, simply a time shift of electricity use. Batteries are extremely energy extensive to manufacture and constantly have an EROEI < < 1. As an outcome, any electricity-producing innovation requiring batteries will have a lower combined EROEI than the generation component itself, as Weißbachs outcomes show. When we remove high-EROEI innovations and change them with low-EROEI technologies we decrease the total energy surplus that supports every day life as we understand it. More of an economy ends up being devoted to energy-gathering activities at the cost of other economic sectors. Its not the direction mankind wishes to pursue decades of benefiting from high energy surpluses directly attributable to fossil fuels.Time To Go NuclearSo what can meet our growing need for electrical power with the greatest EROEIs? Nuclear. Nuclear produces incredible surplus energy as seen by its EROEI of 75. It produces more than two times as much surplus energy as natural gas and coal. Nuclear advantages from three crucial elements: it uses an energy-dense fuel (3.5% enriched uranium has 3,900 GJ/kg) relative to the fuels energy costs of production; it runs at the highest capacity aspects of all available electricity-producing technologies; and it has the longest useful life cycles. Nuclear plants developed nearly sixty years ago are still operating today at capability aspects that wind and solar advocates can only dream about. The bulk of nuclear plants still use the very same reactor design (pressurized water) from the 1950s, however this recommends that existing R&D into new nuclear innovations might cause even higher EROEI plants. As the highest energy surplus innovation to transform primary energy (atomic) to beneficial energy (electrical power), nuclear power must be the go-to innovation for most of our brand-new electrical energy production. Politics aside, by linking Bitcoin mining, the worlds most portable and flexible source of massive electricity demand to nuclear, humanity can push its energy surplus to even greater levels. Instead of overbuilding low-EROEI, intermittent renewables like wind and solar, our goal needs to be to encourage development of high EROEI nuclear generation using Bitcoin minings special qualities as a reward. Nuclear power plants need stable and big demand loads given their necessary high capability aspects. Bitcoin mining provides precisely this type of load profile. Utilizing their scale and stability, Bitcoin miners can co-locate with brand-new nuclear tasks in order to absorb their electricity production prior to the plants dispatch is totally required on the grid. Then, provided their inherent flexibility and mobility, the supportive miners can disconnect from one plant and relocate to the next brand-new job. As societys energy needs continue to grow, we can ensure that this pre-built high-EROEI electrical power supply is prepared and waiting.Energy Is The Real Currency"Energy is the only universal currency: among its lots of kinds should be transformed to get anything done."2 - Vaclav Smil, author of "Energy And Civilization: A History."Money is simply a claim on energy. The problem with fiat cash is that it is detached from energy due to no support by a limited and energy-based asset, and by continuous government control. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is the purest monetary personification of energy to date. It is a clear, direct and unmanipulated claim on energys financial worth. Bitcoins proof-of-work consensus system makes this possible. Being the most decentralized network worldwide will ensure it remains this way well into the future. We are just now starting to understand simply how effective proof-of-work will remain in reorienting human effort towards extremely positive net energy-producing technologies.Intermittent energy, as currently pursued by its advocates, will only reduce the worlds present energy surplus, leading to uncomfortable declines in standard of lives. It is clear that some electricity-production innovations transcend to others on a net energy basis and without understanding this, our choices will produce extreme unexpected effects. The 2022 energy crisis in Europe revealed a more vulnerable system than we had formerly comprehended and could indicate what future conditions will look like-- increasing expenses and periodic supply.Thankfully, Bitcoin can fix this. Bitcoin mining coupled with advancement of brand-new nuclear projects can help reverse this course and broaden the worlds energy surplus to power the 21st century.Notes1 Weißbach et al., Energy 52 (2013 )https://festkoerper-kernphysik.de/Weissbach_EROI_preprint.pdfWeißbach et al., EPJ Web of Conferences 189 (2018) https://www.epj-conferences.org/articles/epjconf/pdf/2018/24/epjconf_eps-sif2018_00016.pdfRaw information for chart: http://tinyurl.com/z7329lh2 "Energy and Civilization: A History," Vaclav Smil (2017 ).3 Some care is suggested when thinking about EROEI computations: First, approach matters. Is the method top-down (energy expenses stemmed from fiat costs) or bottom up (energy expenses stemmed from product quantities and manufacturing processes)? The former can quickly confuse fiat with energy units offering useless outcomes. The latter, while requiring more effort, is more accurate.Second, while EROEI is a basic ratio to determine, there is not yet a basic meaning of system boundaries to utilize when identifying the numerator and denominator. Some analysts consider just the fuel costs. Others consist of the expenses of the plant. While still others consist of the costs of the plant and extra upstream costs sustained to be able to build the plant. Weißbach et al. applied an uniform border definition over a full life cycle evaluation for each type of power plant. The overall energy was also adapted to made use of energy (exergy) returned and invested for each type of plant. This leads to among the cleanest analyses available.Third, EROEI is area dependent. Windier places have greater energy returned on the exact same energy invested. The exact same chooses sunnier areas for solar. Nonrenewable fuel source plants will likewise have differing EROEIs depending upon their distance to fuel products and the quality of fuel available.Even the EROEIs of nonrenewable fuel sources like coal and oil generally decrease over time. While the embedded energy in the chemical composition of comparable grades of coal and oil are the very same in between different stocks, the energy needed to collect those stocks has traditionally increased. Newer discoveries are usually further away from end intake and require more energy to extract. When the field was young, todays deep-water drilling is far more expensive in energy terms than drilling was in the East Texas Oil Field during the 1940s. Like a lot of information analysis, EROEI can be subject to manipulation in order to validate personal predispositions and political goals. Nevertheless, EROEI has value for relative energy surplus analysis. With consistent system borders and a specified calculation approach it offers a standardized method to compare the net energy produced by different power plant innovations without regard to their frequently distorted fiat ROIs. This is a visitor post by John Thompson. Viewpoints revealed are completely their own and do not always reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine. The larger the energy surplus within a system, the more varied, robust and resilient the system is since it can quickly fulfill its fundamental requirements with surplus energy for reproduction, experimentation, innovation and growth.Energy surplus, or net energy, is measured by energy returned on energy invested (EROEI). EROEI is the ratio of the energy gathered by a system-- numerator or the calorie energy of the victim-- to the energy expended in the process of gathering that energy-- denominator or the energy expended on the hunt. Energy Is Real WealthSimply put, energy is our genuine wealth and our growth depends on how efficiently we transform primary energy into beneficial energy that allows us to do useful work. After including the energy expenses of its parts like steel and concrete and the energy expenses of its fuel, a fossil fuel power plant needs to produce at least the exact same amount of energy over its lifespan to break even on an energy basis. Placing them into our present energy mix as replacements for existing fossil fuel and nuclear innovations will dilute our existing financial wealth.There are 4 primary reasons intermittent renewables do not measure up: Wind and solar innovations need big amounts of costly high-energy materials (steel, pv, concrete and copper panels) relative to their lifecycle energy output.Wind and solar have shorter life cycles (20-30 years) than plants that run on fossil fuels, hydro or nuclear(50-70), which recover their initial energy expenses quickly and have longer operating durations to create surpluses.Wind and solar intermittency results in lower capacity elements (actual energy output over time vs potential energy output) than hydro, nuclear and thermal.