I like the no-nonsense way you've analysed things here, all good, thanks for posting.
Anyone investing in hydrogen is good news imho, it all helps in the end towards what my own Systems Engineering analyses indicate is a golden global use-case of replacing fossil fuels with hydrogen. I am sure we will do this.
On "Renewables", we have to separate out solar from the others, because the effect it has on global economy is physically different than any others. That this is still not being made clear, or taken into account really muddies the waters of any analysis of sustainability. I don't know why not more scientists are pointing it out.
To see it, we can visualise the inputs and outputs of the energy conversions in terms of hydrogen, and what the end result is in the economy, in terms of how much product is added to world capital by the hydrogen produced, when input is also taken into account, in terms of hydrogen.
In the case of wind, imagine the consumable energy in wind is already hydrogen.
So a wind generator removes a quantity of hydrogen from the wind, equal to the calorific content of the energy converted.
Lets say the energy conversion process is 50% for this example, and that we get half as much hydrogen coming back out, in terms of hydrogen, when the energy is converted back to hydrogen via say electrolysis.
( It would be much less than this in an actual definitive analysis, this exercise is just to show the principals of the visualisation).
So the net result of the effect on energy capital, of the theoretical wind generator, is to reduce the amount of energy capital on Earth, when the input and output energies are expressed in terms of physical capital, like hydrogen.
Doing the same analysis with solar gives us the opposite result.
With solar, a quantity of hydrogen is added to the energy capital of Earth, because the source of the energy put in, is not on Earth, it came from externally to Earth, so any put to use by either nature or humanity is a positive addition to energy capital, regardless of efficiency.
See the difference?
The implications of that manifest in global economy, and the issue of money, but also in terms of sustainability, and damage done to Earth.
Before solar, we could only see damage, a constant reduction of the capital of Earth.
That damage is the opposite of the creative work of nature, which we usially just take for granted.
Nature creates at rate x, whilst humans decreate at at rate dx, where d is proportional to population.
Of course dx overtook x, about 150 years ago, and has risen exponentially since, to what we see now, driven by many billions of people.
But conventional economics, for thousands of years considers all capital as C, a constant, because we always just took the creation rate of nature for granted.
Whilst the effect of dx was much smaller than x, the assumption of C more or less held, it worked well enough.
But now dx is reaching the limits of survivability, we are seeing the effects of dx increasing exponentially, hence many species going extinct, a third of Pakistan underwater, millions of humans dead in two world wars and two pandemics, and more other misery than we can shake a stick at, we are nearing what looks like an extinction event, with nothing changed.
But solar changes this, by introducing another factor to the equation, representing human creation, rather than destruction, the destruction/creation equation in terms of energy and economic capital becomes C+x-dx+sx, where sx is the creation rate of solar powered humanity.
It turns out that sx, like dx, is vastly more powerful than just x, again proportional to population, but this time it is working in tandem with nature, the total potential creation rate is x+dx.
In effect, we’ve ran up an energy deficit to our planet, which has to be paid back. I call the process of running up the energy deficit “The Grand Energy Ponzi”.
But it can be paid back very quickly, even quicker than we ran it up. Though we can’t directly replace lost species, new ones spring up pretty quickly to take the former place of their ancestors in the environment, when we make the needed changes, as demonstrated by the issue of 4Tn per month in the US, we saw it for the first time just there, when oil prices went negative.
I don’t really see Wind Turbines doing much to pay back our energy deficit to Earth, only more damage, making it worse, unfortunately, though the the turbines might be working for Denmark, the raw materials and energies put into their creation have to come from somewhere at global energy cost which has to outweigh the benefits Danes might currently be getting from them. I know this would be politically unpalatable for the Danes to have to accept, after all they have to survive too somehow, perhaps wind power is a useful technology to keep them going until the world goes solar-hydrogen, and free money / free energy with hydrogen for all, who knows.
This reply might already look like war and peace, but it covers only a small portion of the ground I’ve covered in the past five years. I hope it might help give you a slightly different lens to look through, in your analyses.
I wrote a story trying to communicate the concepts here by itself, using different letters to represent the factors, but basically saying the same thing, I just wish we could drop the “Renewables” terminology, which hides the existentially important difference between solar, and all others:
