My original analysis above did not include tax credits; simply the cost to install a turbine and the cost to sell the electricity on the wholesale market.

And you achieve an ERoEI of unity only if everyone is involved in the production of energy.

This type of study can tell us if a particular build out rate is technically feasible or not. Your approach can't do that.

So, money as a proxy for calculating all inputs to making something is not a technically valid approach to calculating ROI because... why? Because government interferes with the results? Or because the results are not to your liking? Isn't either answer essentially political, rather than economic or resource-based?

Now I believe it's valid if the government wants to distort the analysis (as it currently does) to tilt the playing field in favor of renewables, if as a society we believe there is long term value in gaining experience and ultimately easing the transition to a more socially acceptable energy source. But to ignore one of the best ways to estimate up-stream resource utilization because you don't like the results or worse, because you think that somehow involving something as base as money (ick! all that greed, all that concentrated wealth!) into the calculations makes the analysis base as well just strikes me as pretty silly, no matter how well you wrap it in high-minded intellectual language.

Actually I did a financial analysis of the payback time based on publicly available sources for the cost to install a 2MW turbine and the wholesale price you can fetch selling the generated electricity to the grid--and I've pointed out that money is a better metric because it captures all upstream costs, including upstream energy costs.

But you didn't get to read it because I got down voted. Guess the results were not politically acceptable to the group.

The problem is when you ignore money and use a different metric, you're ignoring all the upstream inputs which also consume energy in their own right. Ignore worker salaries--and you ignore the energy they took to drive to work, the energy they use to power their homes, the energy used to make the truck they drove to work, the clothes on their back, the food on their tables. All energy resources you indirectly consume when you hire them to build the turbine, as it is work that is not being provided elsewhere.

Ignore material costs and you ignore the upstream energy required to extract the material from the ground, the energy required to smelt the material, the energy used to transport the material to the worksite for assembly.

The beauty of money is that it accounts for all of these upstream costs, including hidden ways in which energy is being consumed to provide you the inputs (labor and material) used to create a turbine--and you only need to look at the balance sheet.

And by ignoring that balance sheet you are deliberately ignoring many of the inputs (which have their own hidden energy costs) that went into making a turbine--and to what purpose? So you can feel better by pretending something consumed less energy than it did in its construction?

I"m fascinated at how this was rated "overrated" and "offtopic".

Were my numbers wrong? Was my conclusion incorrect? Or were my conclusions simply undesirable--and this was a communal effort to put fingers in your ears and shout "lalalalalalala!"

The trouble I have, and I've noted it elsewhere, is when you use a different metric other than money, you are selectively ignoring many of the upstream inputs that went into constructing a turbine--upstream inputs that use energy in their own right. Ignore worker salaries and you ignore the energy they expend driving to work and the energy they expend powering their homes at night--energy paid for in the salary you pay them. (I'm not suggesting you pay them less, but suggesting if you could use fewer workers you'd be using less upstream energy--hidden from this analysis--in the production of your units. And they'd cost less money to manufacture, natch.)

Ignore the raw costs of materials, and you ignore the high energy costs of material extraction and purification. Ignore the IP costs, and you ignore the material and labor costs that went into designing the turbine, from the energy consumed in running the computers used to design the turbines (and the fraction of the manufacturing costs of those computers apportioned to designing the turbines, which all have non-negligable energy costs of their own), to the salaries of the workers who designed them, to the test turbines constructed to verify the design--all with their own energy costs.

Money is fantastic because it allows for you to account for all upstream energy, material and human capital costs without having to do more than look at your balance sheet. It allows you to account for all upstream manufacturing costs of a pencil without ever knowing that the graphite came from South America, the eraser from Malaya, the glue which holds the wood together from some other location, without knowing the apportioned energy costs to run the cargo ship which brought those materials together or the cost to construct the manufacturing plant (including the heavy machinery and the fuel they consumed)--you only need to know the pencil cost $1.69 for a box of a dozen.

But continue to hold your fingers in your ears and shout "lalalala", and listen to reports that deliberately ignore a large number of upstream inputs in order to allow others to sell you a pig in a poke. It does no-one any good, because it pretends that what we have is good enough--and when others who pay attention to all of the inputs decide the investment isn't worth it, you can go around pretending that the problem is a conspiracy or a political problem rather than one where the inputs just don't make sense when compared to the outputs.

... and everything except electricity have negligible cost.

And, more importantly, consume negligible energy.

Meaning if you ignore human capital, you ignore the resources they consume with the money you pay them--resources which also consume energy in their own right. If you ignore the cost to extract raw materials from the ground, you ignore the rather high costs of smelting the ore and extracting the ore from the ground.

In this case money is a far better metric because it counts for all upstream costs, including all of the energy costs consumed upstream.

Actually, fairly substantial improvements have been made to boilers in order to allow them to be cycled up and down quickly, and if your wind farm aggregates energy over a substantial area of land, you don't need to have a hot standby running to cover 100% of the energy produced by that wind farm.

Further, if you're willing to accept a certain degree of "dirtiness" to the energy--that is, if you are willing to accept perhaps a 5% swing in voltage, you can reduce the hot standbys further.

But still you do need to have a amount of generating capacity on 'spinning standby' where you're burning coal or natural gas to have a hot boiler ready to spin a turbine--energy which is just wasted as heat until the turbine is engaged and energy generated.

The problem with that is that if you choose (for example) to omit what you pay the workers to do the work in making the steel and assembling the turbine, then you necessarily omit the energy they expend in getting to work as well as the resources they will eventually consume with the money they were paid in salary on things like housing and food and clothing--all which consume energy in their own right. If you omit the profits to the company making the turbine, you omit the energy and resources that were consumed designing the turbine, including the percentage of the R&D that went into building test turbines. And if you omit the energy consumed in producing the raw resources (and only count the cost of taking those raw resources and forming them into a turbine) you omit the (rather energy intensive) process of extracting the raw materials (steel, copper, nickel, etc) from the ground and smelting them from raw ore.

Money is a better metric in this case than simply using some arbitrary subset of costs (such as energy used in smelting the ore for the steel, while ignoring the energy used by the workers to drive to work), because it encompasses all of the resources--energy, material, human capital--required to assemble a turbine. And it is a more realistic metric as to the actual sustainability of a wind turbine, as money measures the overall materials, energy and human costs that are diverted from other pursuits in order to generate a resource that is currently fetching $50/MWh on the wholesale market.

A payback analysis can be done very easily: how much does it cost to buy and install a 2MW turbine, how much does it cost to maintain a 2MW turbine each year, and what is the value of the resulting generated electricity?

One source has the cost at around $3 to $4 million to install a 2MW turbine. source

In one year, assuming 20% capacity--which is not atypical in the real world--such a turbine would generate 3,504 mWh. (2mW * 365 * 24 * .2)

Using $50/mWh for the wholesale price of electricity (which I got from scanning the current wholesale prices listed here, with $50/mWh eyeballed from column 'G'), I get a gross profit of $175,200/year for the generated power.

So just with my back-of-the-envelop calculations based on about 5 minutes with Google, the report seems to be bullshit.

Even if the numbers were off by a factor of two--remember, I only spent 5 minutes with Google--I don't see how you can make $116,800 (8 months of generated power) into $3 million (the installation cost quoted above), for large values of $116,800 and for small values of $3 million.

And notice what is missing from my admittedly stupid and simplistic analysis: the cost to run a standby generator, the cost of power storage, or the maintenance cost of the turbine, which I assume like any complex machine requires periodic maintenance.

The problem with research reports like this is that they do their hardest to not talk about the actual costs involved, and instead focus on a very small subset of the costs of construction. In this case it looks like we focused strictly on the power used to construct the turbine, and not the overall material costs, or labor costs. It's the only way I can explain a greater than one order of magnitude gap.

Quote: "The American public has been trained to think about white versus minority, urban versus suburban, rich versus poor."

Skimming the actual Harvard report, I see no data nor any claims talking about the performance of students in the United States broken down by minority group, socio-economic status or if they live in an urban or suburban setting.

How can we draw a conclusion when there is no data presented?

And I haven't even touched the apparent inverse correlation between those who go off and become successful starting new businesses and their grade point average. How many million-dollar and billion-dollar American corporations were founded by college drop-outs?

More than once I've seen the existing functionality of an IDE's automatic (or semi-automatic) compile, run and debug loop sabotaged by some (sometimes mandated) third party plugin which is supposed to make things "easier." I've watched as people poorly integrate Java Spring into a project and render it impossible to use Eclipse's debug button because of badly constructed project dependencies. ("Oh, if you want to run the project, just drop into the command-line terminal and type 'ant someobscurebuildproduct run'; it's pretty easy, why are you complaining?") I've seen people integrate Maven into a build process in ways which guarantee the project will stop compiling at some unspecified time in the future by improperly scoping the range of libraries that will be accepted. (And I'm not a fan of Maven or CocoaPods or other external dependency resolution tools anyway, as in part it presumes the external libraries we link against that are hosted outside of our source kits will honor their public interface contracts as minor revisions roll out, something which isn't always true.)

I've seen refactoring which adds code bloat (rather than simplifies the code). I've seen home-rolled configuration files which make code discovery functions break code discovery functions in Eclipse useless (do you really need to home-roll you own class loader, and specify Java classes in JSON?). I've seen plenty of 'voodoo stick waving' standing in for good coding practices. I've seen the lava flow anti-pattern obscure a simple Java RTL call in 20 discrete layers of classes, each added on by another refactoring that did nothing but make things more obscure.

I've seen weird blends of ant and makefile build processes which took a product that should have taken perhaps 5 minutes to build take over an hour, and build processes so broken that it was impossible to shoe-horn into an IDE without rewriting the entire project. ("Real programmers use 'vi.'" *shakes head*)

In fact, I have a working theory about programmers--and that is this: Most programmers think something should be a certain level of difficulty. And when a project turns out to be easier than they think it should be, they add artificial complexity until it reaches the expected level of difficulty. At some point, the project then needs to grow, making things organically more difficult--but the artificial difficulty added by the programmer who thought things were too easy before then simply sabotage the project. This is why quite a few projects I've worked on over the past 25 years have failed.

This is why I have no hope for any project that attempts to fix the problem. That's because the problem is cultural, not technological. We've had IDEs which had integrated debugging and one-button build + run processes going back to the 1980's--yet somehow we always glom to the next big thing, oh, and sorry about breaking your IDE--but this next big thing is SO important it'll totally compensate for the fact that we broke your edit/run/debug cycle.

Meaning I guarantee you the moment someone builds a fool-proof IDE which makes it brain-dead simple to edit, compile, run and debug an application, some damned brain-dead fool will come along, worried that things shouldn't be harder, and break the system.