http://www.ecn.nl/docs/library/report/2007/e07026-LCIdata-cSiPV-pubv2_0.xls

This seems like a very brief sketch, but it is a spreadsheet with calculations. I fear these calculations won’t be convincing, but this is a key link in the various estimates. This spreadsheet comes from ECN.

I don’t believe the spreadsheet is expected to stand on its own; it appears to have supporting documents somewhere to explain it, but I need to find those docs.

You put your finger on the primary reason I have such a deep cynicism on this issue. Couple the dearth of actual clear and reliable data with the rent-seeking behavior of the majority of the players in this field, and you really start to question their motives. There have been huge fortunes made, and a few lost on the side of the legacy industries, another set of facts I find troubling…

Agree about solar PV audit of input. It’s frustratingly difficult to get properly sourced calculations for PV and Wind EROEI and ROI; but it shouldn’t be hard to do! So yes, the lack of good, well detailed breakdowns in many “sources” is itself suspicious.

As far as output goes, I can only nod my head in agreement about real world degradation issues. I have a lot less experience in PV, but have a reasonable amount of experience in wind. Here, a typical factor of real world degradation is about ~30% down from the modelled baseplate at a specific site with 5-minute wind data. There was a good paper on this (which I might be able to dig) which came out with a 0.29 estimate which I got similar numbers to from multiple regressions on actual output of all the major wind farms in Scotland for the last 12 years.

It has to be said, one of the biggest sources of degradation is clearly due to number of turbines in field, and wake effects (something like 20% rating loss per 10x scaling). This is very unfortunate for anyone wanting a civilisation scale rollout of this tech; it has strong negative returns to scale.

I appreciate your efforts. It’s rare to find folks on either side of the debate with minds that are still open enough to entertain the potential that they might be either in error, or been given bad information.

The other area that needs to be addressed with these studies is the power production. You can’t simply go off of what the projected rating is, because inefficiencies creep in with regards to project-internal wiring, weather, and maintenance. PV is really vulnerable to this, because even a minor difference in efficiency of the cells can have major impact across entire installations, drastically changing the numbers which were projected.

One thing we’re all really bad about, across human engineering and design efforts, is that we don’t go back and look at how things actually did after we build them. I can only think of one auto manufacturer that made a habit of monitoring their vehicles out in the field after they were sold, and that was Saab. They had a program where they’d sell a car at a reduced price to a long-time customer, and then every so often, take it back in for a full analysis to see what parts were wearing, and why. This information was fed back into manufacturing, and created a much better feedback loop to the design team. It is unfortunate that more manufacturers don’t do similar things, especially in the construction industry. I know for a fact that we find stuff in remodeling and insurance work that was done in accordance with manufacturer’s installation instructions, and which simply has not worked out in terms of weatherproofing or structural strength. I think that a huge missing piece of our engineering process is that we need to start going back and looking at things we’ve already built, and then carefully analyze how that structure or piece of equipment worked out, in service. Even the military is horrible at this–I used to do a lot with small arms, and what struck me the most was all the lost opportunities we had to find out just how our equipment was working, in the field. They should have been doing longitudinal testing of equipment sets, baselining them in terms of wear and breakage, before deployment, tracking how much use they were actually seeing downrange, and then taking them in after the fact to evaluate the condition after deployment, in order to assess the effectiveness of lubrication, coatings, and overall design/materials.

Similar analysis needs to be done in about every field of endeavor. You can project all you like from lab testing, but until you’ve got that PV installation out in the middle of the Mojave or Gobi deserts, in service, you just don’t know how it’s going to work out, or what the actual numbers are going to be.

I think you have an excellent, scientific mindset. I am giving you this info not so much to change your mind; rather, I am learning from your real-world experience. Your criticisms of past experiences (such as your debunking of the solar scammer) and present thoughts (such as your criticisms of the paper) can improve my future projects. Your skepticism is showing me the points that need clarification!

You wrote:

“What are they considering as being a part of something like “Frame”? … Without a breakdown of what they’re including in those areas for that entire table, it’s bloody opaque. … Most of these papers and “researches” dead-end in things like this, where they don’t show their work…

Not to mention, with this specific paper: What are the odds that the numbers in Table 2 would be so… neat and rounded off? ”

In the case of this particular paper, the authors explained that they are making an estimate that seemed reasonable for their situation. They cited Alsema’s paper as [16] as follows:

Another factor is the transportation process, and assumptions have been made that the unit energy requirement for this was estimated to be 2-5 MJ/t/km, the average weight per m² of panel is 15kg [16], and the average transportation distance would be 300km in China.

It is reasonable to object to their estimation process. It is reasonable to also object to Alsema’s paper, which they assumed must be true.

So there’s some bad news and some good news. The bad news is, right now, I can only give you the papers that are easy to access, and they are of comparable quality to this Chinese paper. They are not going to impress you!

The good news is, now that I understand where you’re coming from a little bit better, I can find retrospective studies that provide a lot of accounting details. These are studies where someone went ahead and made the investment, then afterward published how much it cost and where the cost overruns occurred. That won’t be a complete answer, but I think it would address your criticisms better than this latest paper did.

Thank you for your feedback. Skepticism is very healthy and beneficial for science!

Have a look at Table 2 in that paper, “The life cycle energy requirement summary”.

The area I question, and term “unsupported” would be all the numbers in that entire table. What are they considering as being a part of something like “Frame”? Is that the entire support structure, including the concrete used in the foundation supports? Without a breakdown of what they’re including in those areas for that entire table, it’s bloody opaque. You put in a major PV installation, you’re going to be using significant amounts of concrete: What were the energy inputs to calcinate the lime? Haul the gravel for aggregate? All of that stuff has to be included, or you’ve done an inaccurate and dishonest job of calculating the net energy costs. Most of these papers and “researches” dead-end in things like this, where they don’t show their work–Which is where I really start to get suspicious about the quality of it all.

Not to mention, with this specific paper: What are the odds that the numbers in Table 2 would be so… neat and rounded off? The values in honest real-world calculations I’ve seen done on this are nearly always things like “337.58″, not conveniently even values like “400″, “500″, and so forth. That neatness of figure really makes me want to see the basis, because while I can buy one factor coming out an even “550″, the fact that the rest of the ones in that table are things like “400″, “100″, and so forth really makes me question the validity of it all. And, it’s not like we haven’t seen a huge problem with Chinese science being reproducible, or accurate, either.

With due respect, and I do thank you for taking the time, I can’t look at this paper and say “Yeah, my mind is changed…”. If anything, the flavor of this particular paper makes my skeptic’s bump swell even more…

Most importantly, the scientists presenting data often do have conflicts of interest with solar panel manufacturers!

But let me focus on getting you as much data as possible. For starters, I hosted one of the relevant files at:

https://vultureofcritique.files.wordpress.com/2018/03/forkirksolar.pdf

I hope that you can download that PDF successfully and I hope it motivates you to keep fact-checking. Science definitely requires skeptical fact-checking!

See, here’s the problem: I go to those links, and there are no source numbers at all, just the bare assertion. The paper your extract is linked to returns nothing but empty pages from Elsevier, so I can’t look at and verify the assumptions they make to attain those numbers.

I’ve yet to been able to find anywhere that these “trustworthy” types make the basis for their assertions available and clear. Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but if I can’t get into the weeds enough to find one or two of their sources, verify them independently, and then run the numbers myself to see if their calcs are correct…? Yeah; I’m assuming it’s voodoo science, not real work.

The paper you cite may be perfectly valid. Problem is, I can’t tell–Elsevier returns crap to my at my computer. And, when you look at the folks doing the research, by name…? They’re all Chinese, and working for the Chinese PV industry or academia engaged in that trade. Independent and trustworthy…? Not.

I’ll look for that hard drive, and try to find the spreadsheet he built. I vaguely remember that he had a website, or had published it on one–I want to say it was something like “Energy Skeptic”, or something. Might have been on something like Geocities or MySpace, too.

My point does remain, though–If you can’t see the basic numbers, and they’ve made everything opaque to the reader/researcher, then that’s the moment you start to go “Yeah, sure… Whatever.”, and move on to someone who does. We had a salescreature out to the house a few years, trying to sell photovoltaic to us. The poor bastard had an Excel spreadsheet that his company gave him, and which he used to make his presentation on rates of return, and so forth. However, when you looked at the cell formulas and everything else in that spreadsheet, there were some really interesting issues, like the formulas assumed 24/7 sunlight, no seasonal differences in sun intensity, and on and on. The poor bastard left in tears, when I got done with him. And, while the advertised “ROI” was supposed to be something like 4 years, the one installation that I know he sold someone still hasn’t paid itself off after nearly six years, with about two-thirds of the installation cost yet to be recouped. And, the photovoltaics aren’t producing what they were rated to produce anymore, either. The owner had a tech out to look at his system, and the tech opined that his equipment was not going to meet its rated lifespan due to the performance drop.

Original installation company is nowhere to be found, these days, BTW. That’s a real-world example, and one of the many reasons I am highly dubious of the whole “alternative energy” schema–People have wrapped the whole thing in this aura of sanctified, unquestioning virtue, and that’s another good warning sign that all ain’t as it seems. Wind power is another example–All you need to do is go wandering through all the abandoned sites, look at the now-useless equipment, and wonder at how odd it is that they’re no longer in use, once the subsidies that helped pay for them are over with. Most “alternative energy” schemes are not actually about energy, when you dig into them: It’s more like they’re mining the government budget. Do witness that Germany, for all of its vaunted Energiewende, has some of the highest electricity prices in Europe, and that they’re still importing power from countries like France and Czechoslovakia. If the “alternative” sources were so damn good, why is that? Shouldn’t the power be cheaper than conventional, on the macro scale? Why aren’t the subsidies resulting in cheaper power for industry and the public?

The linked sources did indeed provide their arguments and assumptions. The data was a little bit shallow, compared to what one might find in a journal with good “supplementary data” sections. From my perspective, you seem to be arguing from a false premise.

I’m not sure whether you examined the evidence and arguments in detail. If you are not willing to accept peer-reviewed data from any kind of scholarly journal, I can’t do anything to argue my case.

I’m not sure what sort of peer-reviewed journals you typically read to get data and calculations from. In my experience, few scientists publish all of their data in their articles. A typical example of scientific disclosure is the following:

Specifically speaking, the total energy input, including the energy input of the module manufacturing and the energy input of balance of system (BOS) is 19.5548 x106
MJ, while the annual energy output is calculated to be 8.328 x 106 MJ. Thus the energy payback time (EPBT) is 2.3 years, revealing the conclusion that the establishment of the solar power station would contribute to a clean usage for more than 27 years, given the assumption of a 30-year operation period.

doi: 10.1016/j.egypro.2017.03.281

Also, I note that one of the files I linked — the original is here — has a list of five peer-reviewed publications. However, the citations are old and you would probably prefer more current research.

However, perhaps you are not willing to accept peer-reviewed journals as evidence. I’m not sure how much evidence I would have to submit. Also, the “no data, no credibility” argument also applies to the analyst from Boeing. Until I see his data and his calculations, I should not regard his argument as having any credibility.