Will we be able to meet our current and future energy demands using renewable energy sources?

Photovoltaics, as a semiconductor technology, follows its own equivalent of Moore's Law. The relentless trend is toward reasonable-efficiency PV surfaces that cost no more than ordinary shingles, siding, or paint. PV collectors can be made from an extraordinary variety of materials, so nothing scarce is required.

Solar is our most potent energy source. All the wind, all the distillation of surface water into rain, all activity of life is driven by sunlight. More energy falls on the Earth from sunlight every day than has been released by burning all the fossil fuels we have ever pulled out of the ground, and all we have staked out as "reserves". The fraction of the Earth's surface we need to cover in solar panels to meet our power needs is miniscule.

Sunlight illuminates every piece of land on Earth. It's not a scarce resource. Nobody can corner the market or form a cartel. Power-hungry elites can't capture it, anti-civilization fanatics can't throttle it, there are no side-effects to fear. Nothing will restrain our consumption of it.

Setting aside considerations of load-following and portability, solar in its best (sunny, cloudless) locations is already joule-for-joule the cheapest source of electricity. This is a recent development. It's not going to stop there. It'll become the cheapest in poor locations, then it'll become so much cheaper than the next best thing that it can also cover the cost of storage. Cheap solar electricity is spurring progress in low-cost batteries and fuel synthesis, so the solar cost curve doesn't have to reach down to meet the storage cost alone, that'll rise to meet it halfway.

>Wind and solar do not provide constant baseload power.
Grid electricity isn't most of our energy consumption. Obviously, to use opportunistic energy harvesting to meet variable and mobile demand, storage is required.

If you want to talk about the storage problem, talk about the storage problem, don't just stupidly quack out mindless garbage like this.

>Will we be able to meet our current and future energy demands using renewable energy sources?
Probably.
>If so, which ones are our most viable?
All of them together, why put all of your eggs in one basket, or limit yourself to one source?
>Or are we going to need nuclear power?
Who knows?
>If so, how promising is the field of fusion energy
It's been '20 years away' for the last 60 years.
>and is fission sufficient to meet current demands safety, timely and in a cost-effective manner?
Safely, no; timely, yes; cost effective, depends on the number of accidents and the accumulation of waste storage problems.

>Grid electricity isn't most of our energy consumption.
Non sequitur. Wind and solar cannot provide baseload.

>Obviously, to use opportunistic energy harvesting to meet variable and mobile demand, storage is required.
Nuclear is required, non-existent technology is not required.

>>Grid electricity isn't most of our energy consumption.
>Non sequitur.
We're talking about "current and future energy demands", not just grid electricity. Dumping wind and solar on the grid for immediate consumption is about the least reasonable and interesting thing to do with it.

>Wind and solar cannot provide baseload.
They can with storage, of course.

>Nuclear is required
It is obviously not.

>non-existent technology is not required.
Energy storage exists.

I hate to repeat myself, but:
>>don't just stupidly quack out mindless garbage like this

>>>don't just stupidly quack out mindless garbage like this
Please don't bully. He has to make a living somehow.

thorium.
wind power is not doing half as poor a job as people say, either. Most windmills out there today are terribly old and new ones are much more effective, which screws with statistics on windpower

china is buying all the patents so,soon you will know

>We're talking about "current and future energy demands", not just grid electricity. Dumping wind and solar on the grid for immediate consumption is about the least reasonable and interesting thing to do with it.
Current and future energy demands includes grid electricity, which requires baseload power, which wind and energy cannot provide. Other power demands are irrelevant to this critical failure.

>They can with storage, of course.
What storage? There is no feasible way to do this. It's like saying that if magic were real, wind and solar could provide all our energy needs.

>It is obviously not.
It obviously is. If you want to replace fossil fuels, nuclear is the only way to create the baseload. Non-existent technology can't replace anything.

Fission is not feasible from a political standpoint (thanks to greenpeace and other braindead leftists.)

Fusion is not technically feasible in a timeframe that would make a difference in time (thanks to laughably poor investments into fusion research post-Reagan.)

Wind, water, solar can theoretically meet all demand but doing so is so laughably expensive that it will not ever happen before significant changes happen to the economics. I remember someone did the math on how much it would cost to store latent energy worldwide in Tesla batteries and it was something like $60 trillion. Hydroelectric is also by FAR the most environmentally damaging of all electricity sources.

The only hope we have is to phase out all hydrocarbon sources with new natural gas plants as quickly as possible and to install wind and solar where it makes economic sense. All ground transportation should be shifted to electric as well. Just doing those things would reduce CO2 emissions by 70%.

>The only hope we have is to phase out all hydrocarbon sources with new natural gas plants
Yes, folks, people this retarded actually post on Veeky Forums.

There are more than 500 coal power plants in the US today and far more worldwide. Just replacing those with natural gas plants (which produce less than half the CO2) would reduce worldwide CO2 emissions by 15-20%, and 30-40% if they were built to power electric vehicles.

What other "brilliant" solution do you propose?

jesus fucking christ i hope you're trolling

?

You never took Chemistry 101, did you, Ivan?

>Ivan
back to with you

>Doesn't know that natural gases are hydrocarbons.
>Posts chart showing that natural gas is much morse than renewable energy, even colored in red for emphasis.
>>>Back to /tard/

Where did I imply that natural gas is not a hydrocarbon?

Is reading comprehension not one of your strengths?

>Being this stupid, even when it was already pointed out to you...

You're just digging the hole deeper, Tardo.

Thanks for proving my point bro

You literally cannot read

...

...

You obviously need a shill-school refresher class. Allow me...

When you've hopelessly lost an argument on both factual and emotional grounds, and are actively being ridiculed, you should take an evasive action:

- Change the subject.
- Let the thread die and hope no one reads it.
- Immediately write a whole series of unrelated messages so your embarrassment scrolls up a long way.

Just trying to help.

What are you doing? You were clearly wrong; anyone who knows anything about this topic saw that immediately.

For whatever reason you're trying to throw around arguments about concepts you don't understand. Don't get this angry when you realize you're in over your head.

Fear of nuclear power is retard, and solar and wind aren't viable power sources on a large scale.
Unfortunately it's better for the energy industry to use coal or oil, or even pushing solar/wind as viable sources via propaganda because nuclear energy is just that much better that it would kill their profits.

You're going to get fired if you can't shill any better than this, son. Another rule you forgot: Never get frustrated and start spinning your wheels. That last message was disgraceful.

>If you want to replace fossil fuels, nuclear is the only way to create the baseload. Non-existent technology can't replace anything.
Okay, so we're replacing fossil fuels, what replaces all the gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel? How about all the energetic chemical feedstocks for stuff like plastics and fertilizer?

We need much more stored, portable energy than grid "baseload", so in the scenario that we're giving up fossil fuels, why can't we just use whatever we're using to replace them in non-powerplant applications for grid baseload and load-following?

Reminder, we're not talking about a scenario where we only provide grid power without fossil fuels, but one where we completely cease extracting fossil fuels for all purposes.

Hint: this is where you start saying, "Well, we can synthesize fuels using nucl..." and catch yourself, realizing you'd be admitting that energy storage can obviously be done and that your argument was always bullshit. Then you'll try and back off to a different argument for nuclear, like cost, but then you'd have to get into the cost trends of solar vs. nuclear, and that doesn't do your position any good. So you've got to come up with some wild redirection to avoid facing reality, or start spluttering incoherently.

You don't seem to understand. Let me clarify a little. This is a Veeky Forums thread. A lot of the people here have actual backgrounds or training in science and technology. The biolerplate double-talk or just plain fictitious talking points are not effective here. You would do better in /b/ or /tard/ or talk radio, where people are dumb enough to swallow that kind of nonsense. The people here will just laugh at you, make fun of you, or completely ignore you. ;^)

/thread

Yes, but we don't have the option of excluding nuclear power at this point.
>> Fusion
Fusion works, it's just 8 minutes away

We're going to use fossil fuels until it becomes cheaper to use nuclear. The political climate will not allow anything to compete with fossil fuels. Most of the big energy companies actively suppress renewable energy research. I suspect that we'll run out of oil and revert to some sort of dark age for a few hundred years.

>Most of the big energy companies actively suppress renewable energy research.
retarded assertion

most of the big energy companies are the ones DOING the renewable research and implementation

>We need much more stored, portable energy than grid "baseload", so in the scenario that we're giving up fossil fuels, why can't we just use whatever we're using to replace them in non-powerplant applications for grid baseload and load-following?
You seem to have an issue with basic logic. The fact that I am saying we need nuclear for baseload does not mean I am saying we should not use batteries for jobs in which they are efficient. They are not efficient when you try to scale them up and use them for a long time, which is why no technology currently exists that can do it. Why would you go out of your way to use them when you can simply use already available technology that solves the problem?

>Reminder, we're not talking about a scenario where we only provide grid power without fossil fuels, but one where we completely cease extracting fossil fuels for all purposes.
How does this have anything to do with my position that we should use nuclear?

>It's been '20 years away' for the last 60 years.
that's because literally no funding has gone into it
they've been dealing with having less funding than liberal arts programs for decades now, and they're still making progress despite this

>not efficient
>Why would you go out of your way
So now it's turned from "nuclear is the only option, we absolutely need it, solar can't do it" to "nuclear can work, let's not go out of our way here making new things".

>batteries
Batteries aren't the only storage tech, and can't do many of the things I listed. If we're going to quit fossil fuels, we need chemical fuel synthesis, so that's the baseline option you should measure against.

Let's look at hydrogen, for instance. Hydrogen electrolysis is 50-80% efficient at converting electrical energy to chemical energy. Hydrogen is easily storable on a scale of years in the same kinds of naturally-occurring underground spaces we get natural gas from, with no problems of capacity or duration. The return trip, converting hydrogen to electricity on a power-plant scale will range from 50%-85% (from a relatively simple gas turbine to a fuel cell with waste heat driving steam turbine generation).

So round-trip efficiency is going to be 25-65%. I think we can reasonably assume 33-50% would be achieved in practice, so to provide for this, we need to generate two to three times as much electricity with solar and wind as we'll consume when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and our modest house and grid batteries are depleted. That's not prohibitive, especially when you consider how much chemical fuel synthesis we'll need to do for other purposes.

You keep saying "baseload" like it's a good thing, but baseload isn't what you want to partner with solar and wind. Nuclear is a really shitty partner for either, because it's baseload: it's best at putting out a constant amount of power, regardless of demand, you don't really save anything by dialing it down or turning it off on sunny days and windy nights. What you want to partner with opportunistic power (if not storage) is load-following power, like natural gas turbines or hydroelectric.

>literally no funding
>hundreds of millions of dollars every year for decades
It's not really plausible that guys who can't produce a net power device with billions of dollars worth of research spent over entire careers could make a cost-competitive option if we just threw more money at them.

...

>So now it's turned from "nuclear is the only option, we absolutely need it, solar can't do it" to "nuclear can work, let's not go out of our way here making new things".
If you actually believed your position you wouldn't need to misrepresent mine to argue against it. Better batteries will be invented but no one thinks that storage technology good enough to efficiently provide grid electricity to everyone is coming anytime soon. Therefore the only way to provide baseload without fossil fuels is nuclear. It's what I said from the beginning.

>The return trip, converting hydrogen to electricity on a power-plant scale will range from 50%-85% (from a relatively simple gas turbine to a fuel cell with waste heat driving steam turbine generation).
The round trip efficiency of hydrogen is its main flaw. It's about 30%. It essentially all evens out and has the same overall efficiency as batteries.

>we need to generate two to three times as much electricity with solar and wind as we'll consume when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and our modest house and grid batteries are depleted. That's not prohibitive, especially when you consider how much chemical fuel synthesis we'll need to do for other purposes.
Of course it's prohibitive. It's much worse that you *need* to create such massive amounts of power just to have constant power than it is to create more power than you need normally. The only question that matters is, can you save money by substituting renewables plus storage with nuclear up to a certain point determined by demand? The answer is yes until much more efficient storage is invented. Do you agree or disagree?

>The round trip efficiency of hydrogen is its main flaw. It's about 30%. It essentially all evens out and has the same overall efficiency as batteries.
No, it doesn't fucking even out. The problem with using batteries alone is the cost for capacity, plus self-discharge. That's why they're fundamentally unsuitable for seasonal energy storage.

Overnight house batteries, and a battery to cover the typical variation over the course of a week, are fine. It's easier than a decent car battery. We can pretty much do that now, and are just building the factories. Lithium-ion's good enough to make work even though it was developed for the portable market, and with the stationary market heating up the next-generation chemistry should provide an order-of-magnitude cost improvement.

The issues with hydrogen are completely different. If you want to be a complete walloping retard, you can assume that we go entirely with hydrogen or we go entirely with batteries, and conclude that each looks about equally bad, but they're complementary technologies and should be considered together. Batteries are high efficiency, but expensive for capacity. Hydrogen is moderate efficiency, but cheap for capacity. Use batteries to smooth out short-term variation, and hydrogen for the long term.

Anyway, like I was saying before, we're going to need a lot of synthetic fuel. That means we're going to need a lot more power than we consume on the grid to make hydrogen for non-grid purposes. That means even during the cloudiest day in the dimmest part of the year, we're likely to just cut back on hydrogen production, rather than go into reverse and burn it for grid power.

>It's much worse that you *need* to create such massive amounts of power just to have constant power than it is to create more power than you need normally.
The specifics matter. Solar electricity is likely to end up one tenth the cost of nuclear, joule for joule.

>The only question that matters is, can you save money by substituting renewables plus storage with nuclear up to a certain point determined by demand?
First of all, that's not the only question that matters. You seem to be assuming that nuclear is 100% safe and clean. Normal people don't do that, only people with a vested interest and a few crazy fanboys. Nuclear means weapon proliferation. It means leaks. It means meltdowns and abandoned cities. Other questions matter.

Secondly, I think the answer is going to be "no". As we gain experience with nuclear, we keep learning that it needs to be more expensive to be kept safe, clean, and secure. It's not getting cheaper, it's getting more expensive. That trend is likely to continue.

The basic problem is that nuclear, by its inherent properties as opposed to its record, is the dirtiest and most dangerous source of power. If we put half the effort into making each coal plant clean that we do into each nuclear plant, coal would be a zero-emission power source too. Nuclear's only made clean and safe by heroic efforts, and nothing less than perfection is acceptable, yet perfection is fundamentally incompatible with human nature. There can only be total rejection after outragous incidents, or spiraling standards and costs to go with them.

Solar and batteries, on the other hand, keep getting cheaper with no limit in sight. People are free to experiment with them. Kids make photovoltaic cells and batteries out of everyday materials for science projects. Bright grad students invent and prototype new kinds working alone with pocket money funding. That makes for fast progress.

The main problem is what energy production is the most green right?

> Solar Panel
Not really recyclabe (one time, no more). They need batteries to work properly because the sun doesn't shine all the time. Those batterie are actually not 100% recycled (Lithium part). So this system is not really "green". Also, their lifespan is limited.

Plus, you can't set them everywhere, the actual claims of the manufacturers (for France) atm is that they can provide at max 50% of the needs of 4 persons. So you need another energy source. Maybe sunny countries could give it a shot.

You could run your home with some panels at the moment, it would be worthy I guess, but not eco friendly.

> Fusion
Saw a talk from the MIT, they might get somewhere with ITER and the SPARK. But it will definitly not hit the market anytime soon so we gotta deal without it.

It looks promising tho, and it would be the greenest of all electricity prod.

> Wind Power

Like... really...? Just do the Math
At the moment, there are flaws in every tech, and we can't predict what is going to happen in 5 years. I guess we got to stuck with fission for the moment, and try to improve fusion very fast. But who knows, may be a new kind of battery is going to it the market?

Although, I don't really know much about hydroelectricity, but someone told me about using the movements of sea waves to produce electricity. Looks cool, but don't know how it works.

shut the fuck up, you don't know shit about this topic and no one cares about what you decided to pull out of your ass today

>No, it doesn't fucking even out.
Yes it does. Did you look at any research before opening your mouth?

pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/ee/c4ee04041d

>If you want to be a complete walloping retard, you can assume that we go entirely with hydrogen or we go entirely with batteries, and conclude that each looks about equally bad
And again you make up a complete straw man. I'm taking about grid storage, not your house. They are equally bad for different reasons.

>The specifics matter. Solar electricity is likely to end up one tenth the cost of nuclear, joule for joule.
We're not comparing nuclear to solar, we're comparing nuclear to solar + storage. They have to produce the same product for us to compare their costs.

>You seem to be assuming that nuclear is 100% safe and clean.
Oh not at all, but it is safer and cleaner than renewables.

>Nuclear means weapon proliferation.
Bullshit. Now we see your true colors, you're anti-nuclear and won't even consider the cost benefit analysis. Increased nuclear power has no effect on proliferation. Rogue states that want nuclear will attempt to get them regardless and developed nations will stop them regardless. This is a pathetic criticism.

>It means leaks. It means meltdowns and abandoned cities.
Leaks are generally not dangerous and meltdowns have only occurred in obsolete technology. Nuclear is the safest method of power generation per kilowatt hour. If you dismiss nuclear because it's dangerous you must first dismiss wind and solar.

>Secondly, I think the answer is going to be "no". As we gain experience with nuclear, we keep learning that it needs to be more expensive to be kept safe
Its getting more expensive because of people like you misrepresenting everything. Nuclear technology has never been safer or cheaper, it's the political obstruction that is making it more expensive. But even with that obstruction, there's no question that it costs less than renewables + storage for what were talking about.

>The basic problem is that nuclear, by its inherent properties as opposed to its record,
Ah so we should just take your assessment of its "inherent properties" aka, your fervent imagination, rather than the data in the real world. I think this cop-out speaks for itself.

>If we put half the effort into making each coal plant clean that we do into each nuclear plant, coal would be a zero-emission power source too.
If that were true, coal plants would be better than renewables too.

You seem very emotional about this when it's a simple cost benefit analysis. Tell me renewables and storage are better than nuclear when they actually are. Until then, shut the fuck up.

Just use less energy. People are so fucking stupid about how they waste endless amounts of energy, it is mind boggling. Then some dipshit comes along and says, "you can't just use less energy!!!" like he's paid exclusively by Big Oil.

>>>>we need to generate two to three times as much electricity with solar and wind as we'll consume when the sun doesn't shine, the wind doesn't blow, and our modest house and grid batteries are depleted. That's not prohibitive
>>>Of course it's prohibitive. It's much worse that you *need* to create such massive amounts of power just to have constant power than it is to create more power than you need normally.
>>The specifics matter. Solar electricity is likely to end up one tenth the cost of nuclear, joule for joule.
>We're not comparing nuclear to solar, we're comparing nuclear to solar + storage.
Holy fuck, what's wrong with you, taking this out of the context where your response makes no sense? Where in this is the indication that I didn't know we were comparing nuclear to solar + storage?

If you need to generate two or three times as much solar power, for a relatively small fraction of your grid power needs, and solar is one tenth the cost of nuclear on a joule-by-joule basis, it's very unlikely that nuclear is cheaper than solar+storage.

>Ah so we should just take your assessment of its "inherent properties" aka, your fervent imagination, rather than the data in the real world.
How fucking stupid do you have to be to not recognize that nuclear power's inherent properties include extraordinary dangerousness and dirtiness? Think for a minute: why don't we let just anyone build a nuclear reactor? Why can't you buy uranium fuel rods on ebay? How come nuclear reactors don't just dump their waste out through a pipe? If nuclear power is *inherently* safe and clean, why is any of this necessary?

It's not inherently safe or clean, it's inherently dirty and dangerous in the extreme. It's so dirty and dangerous that we require it to be surrounded with systems to make it clean and safe. Even then, sometimes those systems go wrong, and we lose a city.

>If you need to generate two or three times as much solar power, for a relatively small fraction of your grid power needs, and solar is one tenth the cost of nuclear on a joule-by-joule basis
But it's not 1/10 the cost. That's the entire point of this.

>How fucking stupid do you have to be to not recognize that nuclear power's inherent properties include extraordinary dangerousness and dirtiness?
How stupid do you have to be to claim nuclear is dangerous when the actual data says otherwise? Your feelings are not evidence.

>Think for a minute: why don't we let just anyone build a nuclear reactor?
The only people who can actually make nuclear power plants, that are being stopped from doing so because of political obstruction, should be allowed to.

>Why can't you buy uranium fuel rods on ebay? How come nuclear reactors don't just dump their waste out through a pipe? If nuclear power is *inherently* safe and clean, why is any of this necessary?
Nuclear power in reality is safe and clean, your imagination is irrelevant.

B-b-but what if he wants to phase out the old natural gas plants with new ones too? Think of the jobs tearing down and rebuilding power plants would create.

>Increased nuclear power has no effect on proliferation. Rogue states that want nuclear will attempt to get them regardless
The claim of a nuclear power program serves as cover for a weapons development program. They can acquire and do 90+% of what they need to make a nuclear weapon by running a nuclear power program. India, for example, got nuclear weapons this way, and Iran is currently attempting to do the same.

>pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2015/ee/c4ee04041d
Oh my god, you absolute monkey. This doesn't support your position at all. It's an analysis of the EROEI of a combined system of wind turbines and two (2014 technology) options of energy storage. That specific figure comes out roughly equal in that specific case. Their assumptions about the storage requirements are arbitrary, they simply say that 25% of the power generated is stored and released to the grid later.

Furthermore, they make rather unfavorable design choices, like storing the hydrogen in steel bottles rather than geological storage, and using short-lived fuel cells despite them having no higher efficiency than long-lived gas turbines.

Anyway, look at their final conclusion:
"As with other storage technologies, energy storage in hydrogen coupled to wind generation provides an overall EROI that is well above the EROI of fossil electricity generation."
By the same reasoning that they conclude that hydrogen and battery storage are equivalent, they also conclude that these 2014-tech wind farms with either storage option are 66% better than coal or natural gas power plants.

They're obviously not taking all considerations into account here. There's not one mention of labor or monetary cost.

This is your source? Did you read it?

Think for a minute: why don't we let just anyone build a nuclear reactor? Why can't you buy uranium fuel rods on ebay?

A heavy water reactor can use natural uranium. I can buy heavy water on ebay. I can buy uranium

amazon.com/Images-SI-Uranium-Ore/dp/B000796XXM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1511409623&sr=8-1&keywords=uranium

ebay.com/itm/Deuterium-Oxide-D2O-Heavy-Water-10-grams/112635307935?hash=item1a3996679f:g:fV0AAOSwDuJW0UAJ

ebay.com/itm/LOT-URANIUM-ROCKS-ORE-FOUND-AT-NM-UT-CO-GEIGER-6-LBS-30-00-s-h/322649890971?hash=item4b1f6ea09b:g:cJsAAOSwM6NZquba

Neither of those things are uranium fuel rods.

You can buy *samples* of heavy water and uranium ore. If you start trying to buy either one in industrial quantities, you'll get vanned.

Good thing I live in Utah and know how to make/acquire both myself. Isotropically enriching uranium seems like such a pain so heavy water it is. Or maybe a graphite moderated design?

Have you tried doing the math on just how much you'd need? The critical mass of a natural uranium reactor, and consequent amount of moderator around it, is quite large.

The Chicago Pile, with its 56 tons of fuel and 400 tons of graphite, wasn't like that because they were excited about making a big one.

You know that "Radioactive Boy Scout" story? How they said he built a "breeder reactor"? That's not what he made. He made a feeble radioisotope neutron source, and pointed it at uranium ore, so it would technically have made microscopic amounts of plutonium. That's it.

Have fun fantasizing about it, but don't delude yourself that you'd actually succeed in making one.

>The claim of a nuclear power program serves as cover for a weapons development program.
No, the claim of a nuclear power program actually does the opposite, it attracts international regulators.

>Their assumptions about the storage requirements are arbitrary, they simply say that 25% of the power generated is stored and released to the grid later.
False, they only give 25% as an example.

>hydrogen and battery storage are equivalent, they also conclude that these 2014-tech wind farms with either storage option are 66% better than coal or natural gas power plants.
So what?

>They're obviously not taking all considerations into account here. There's not one mention of labor or monetary cost.
Why would they? I said they have the same energy efficiency.

>I said they have the same energy efficiency.
They obviously don't, though. Certain examples of each produce the same EROI in a total system where the energy source without storage has a certain EROI. If they had chosen an energy source with much lower EROI, their example batteries would have made a complete power+storage system with higher EROI. With a higher EROI energy source, their example hydrogen system would have made a higher EROI system than batteries.

EROI isn't the same as energy efficiency. It's not a sensible basis for comparison at all, without some additional constraints. It's a very popular tool of well-dressed kooks, who dot all of their i's, cross all of their t's, have credentials and relevant job titles and get published, but speak absolute nonsense.

For instance, how about you invest your energy, take your return, and invest that in more energy? If natural gas has an EROI of 30, then double-down natural gas has an EROI of 870. Or take a solar panel that has very low conversion efficiency (0.1%), but lasts a billion years: extremely EROI, though you'd never want to make the stupid things. EROI comparisons only make sense when you look at processes with similar non-energy costs, delays, and side-effects per unit of invested energy.

When you look at a paper that's about EROI, your first thought should be that it's almost certainly meaningless bullshit.