Certainly not on the fact that Germany, Switzerland and Belgium have decided to close their nuclear plants as soon as possible.

Certainly not on the fact that no other European country has announced plans to build any new nuclear. Not even to replace those plants which are nearing the end of their lifetime.

Certainly not on the fact that Europe is installing a lot of wind and solar generation. Even France is pouring their efforts into renewables.

What could possibly lead you to decide that Europe is abandoning renewables and turning to nuclear?

I get the distinct impression that they are dropping renewable technologies for Nuclear, just another industry which we are handing over to another country (France) rather than doing it ourselves.

We are going to be a nation dependant on others for our power.

Do you think that the IPCC, (which is composed of the highest authorities on climate science) hasn’t taken your NASA satellite report into account?

Eco terrorist? Uh.

Either you are pushing some fossil-industry agenda here or you are simply an idiot.

At the same time real science, real data, observations and reality caught up with these extremists. None of the catastrophes that they have predicted have come to pass. The earth’s temperature, as measured by NASA’s Aqua satellite clearly shows stable to declining temperatures for at least the last 15 years.

One might suspect that the end is near for these eco-terrorists and might even hope that the most egregious of them would be held accountable for the harm they have done to the earth’s peoples and economies. But I am afraid that this will never happen.

Within the next year or two, the world’s elitist environmental police, led by the UN, will seamlessly slide into a new meme, still proclaiming the same dire consequences and demanding the same draconian sacrifices this time not in the name of global warming but now in the name of sustainability.

That’s a 40% increase in 2.6 decades, nothing like a doubling every decade.
Is our EROEI ratio dropping for oil? Certainly.

Does it make sense to switch from oil to renewable energy? Certainly.
Are we going to run out of oil in the next decade? Certainly not.

I suggest you take a look at the exponential growth curve for Oil consumption which has been steady for the past 100 years. With a doubling period of approximately 10 years.

With every doubling period we consume as much as all the previous years combined. That means that when we hit peak oil in 2006 we also hit the last doubling period and from now on the only option is sliding down the oily, violent and blood soaked slope of rapidly declining reserves as the big players attempt to steal what’s left from their neighbours.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand the exponential growth curve.

Ask any true oil expert who is not paid by the oil industry to cover up the story and they will tell you it’s crunch time. Energy positive oil has been depleted. It doesn’t matter how much hyper inflated cash you print to throw at the problem as it still requires more energy to get it out of the ground than it provides once out which means we consume more energy every day to get access to the remaining reserves. All the Oil producing nations are aware of this rapid escalation in their internal consumption. They just don’t like to talk about it in the media very often.

The rent-a-roof models where massive companies install solar panels for free on homeowner’s houses and then take the tariff themselves, providing the homeowner with free electricity, have indeed probably had a very harmful impact – it means companies with a massive amount of capital are now making incredibly large profits, so it’s not really sustainable as a long-term scheme. Even at the new, lower, rate in the UK, there are companies still willing to install solar for free because they estimate they’ll manage a return of about 5%, which is still a good, stable, investment. The problem is that once homeowners have read about all the changes, without doing as much research, they get scared off and so the market is likely to drop in volume over the next year by a very large amount.

It is a good point that the ongoing costs of such a scheme are just going to increase and increase. I think the hope is that in the long run, if there is enough demand created, the technologies will improve to the point where solar is equal in price per kWh terms to non-renewables, but it will take a lot of fudning to get there. If every country had put in the effort that Germany have, alongside the same stability and predictability of policy, then imagine what the world market for solar would be like. I just hope this doesn’t turn out to be a dream!

Hopefully some common sense will sprinkle in

Have two extra FIT rates – one for the rent-a-roof business and another for local authorities. It is these two groups that have distorted the figures leaving the homeowner without a viable system and the collapse in the Solar industry.
A 30% drop on panel prices is only a small portion of the system cost and the cuts are disproportionate to the real system cost.

Common sense – which of course is a rare sense in Government…

1- Yes, looks like he used different data (from iSuppli) for total new EU capacity — I switched out that number and link to use EPIA’s info instead. 2- The charts are actually of total cumulative installed capacity (not new capacity) — i tried to clarify int he text.

Peak (cheap) oil almost certainly happened some years back when we no longer were able to find new supplies as quickly as we used up known supplies. But that does not mean that we’re going to fall off an “oil cliff” in the near future.

What it means is that oil will get more expensive. The oil we burn will require us going further/deeper and refining some low quality stuff rather than sweet crude.

That, in turn, will lead to greater efficiency, seeking alternatives (such as the crappy sand tar stuff now coming out of Canada and biofuels) and total replacements such as EVs.

We need to quit using oil and coal for environmental reasons, but we’ll continue to use both until they are replaced by cheaper/cleaner renewable energy. Ocean shipping and air flight are likely to be the last things to give up oil. It will get more expensive to ship and fly, but it will also get cheaper to drive.

The window is not closing in the real world. This decade is not crunch time. Someone has sold you a boatload of “stuff”….

The problem is that the clear Majority of Solar PV comes from China and they are using mostly Australian coal for their energy supply and US silicon for their base material. So even though a lot of the EU might be able to ramp up installation of Chinese manufactured PV when the oil becomes completely energy negative how are they going to transport it from China? Currently they do not have enough local manufacturing infrastructure to take up the slack. The window is closing and this decade is crunch time. It’s simple arithmetic…