Reddit reviews Spain’s Photovoltaic Revolution: The Energy Return on Investment (SpringerBriefs in Energy)

No problem at all. A lot of people disagree with this and fight it, because the implication is that the only real solution to our problem is to force everyone to move towards the equator so they consume less energy for heating/cooling, have less kids, quit driving, basically accept a sort of 2nd-world lifestyle. Obviously this will never happen, I suspect humans will basically keep going down this path until their demise.

Here are a few things I'd recommend on the subject:

http://energy-reality.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/09_Energy-Return-on-Investment_R1_012913.pdf

https://www.amazon.com/Environment-Power-Society-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0231128878/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=XQGQEPWX5X3VJY0B5S63

This professor writes a lot of good stuff on the subject:

http://www.esf.edu/EFB/hall/#publications

I guess the key concept in what you are asking about, is energy return on energy invested (EROEI). This is imo one of the most important concepts all people need to understand about energy generation. Something is only a resource, if you get more energy out of it, than what you have to put in to extract it. So for example, if it takes a gallon of oil in energy to pump one gallon of oil out of the ground, then that oil in the ground is no longer a resource.

There is a lot of debate about the true EROEI of these different types of energy production. For example this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Spains-Photovoltaic-Revolution-Investment-SpringerBriefs/dp/144199436X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1358872742&sr=1-2

In which the authors do a complex analysis on the true EROEI of solar and come up with a much lower return on energy invested than others often claim. They find that in amazingly sunny areas like Spain, the EROEI is only around 2, where in less sunny countries like Germany, it is between 1-1.5, which is absolutely abysmal.

You can see this is already becoming a problem with nuclear, in particular. There have been a few nuclear plants recently that were abandoned halfway through the project, because they blew so far over the budget, and the energy/money they were putting in to build the plant to modern standards, with all of the safety regulations, etc, made it a net loss to finish the plant. So it would never generate anywhere near the energy that it would take society to build it to spec. This will likely be a trend we see as technology gets more and more complex - things just require too much of societies resources to build, to the point that it is a net loss.

Another book on this subject is from Joseph Tainter:

https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Complex-Societies-Studies-Archaeology/dp/052138673X

...who argues that the reason all societies eventually collapse, is because increasing complexity provides diminishing returns. Eventually things get so complex, that society doesn't have the energy and resources to maintain everything and to keep solving the harder and harder problems that complexity inevitably creates.

A recent study done in Spain over 50.000 solar stations with real data not estimates, showed that solar has an EROEI of 2.45:1, which is catastrophic to say the least because Spain is quite a sunny place. Here's a blog post about that study if you don't want to buy the book.

Sure, Oil is not as good as it used to be in terms of EROEI, but it's still a lot better than 2.45. Wind is a lot better in terms of EROEI than solar, but as we all know you can't rely on wind alone.

Sadly, today fossil fuels are still the most reliable and cost effective energy sources. People don't want to pay more to protect the environment, nor they want to change their lifestyle to consume less energy.

> How does the DOD generate the vast amount of weapons grade plutonium

Dedicated plutonium production reactors. See: https://www.amazon.com/Megawatts-Megatons-Future-Nuclear-Power/dp/0226284271

Wind and solar create nothing but drag in every industrialized economy in which they exist: https://stopthesethings.com/

https://www.amazon.com/Spains-Photovoltaic-Revolution-Investment-SpringerBriefs/dp/144199436X

https://bravenewclimate.com/2014/08/22/catch-22-of-energy-storage/

The Sun doesn't break even considering the energy "overhead" required for industrial civilization, rumoured to be around EROEI 10~12:1, at least in the context of our current technology. Solar photovoltaic EROEI isn't very good even with the fossil fuel subsidy for producing the panels. As for the battery "bottleneck", I'm not smart enough to say for sure but it looks like it's not budging much. Think about it, a single 5L canister full of gasoline contains as much energy as 1 ton of fully charged car batteries (Graphics to scale).

As this quest unfolds, people will adapt to the outcomes out of necessity. It may very well be better if fusion and battery tech don't fully work, because adapting to less energy sooner is smarter than getting into the whole mess of exponential population, environmental destruction and resource depletion even deeper than we are now.