More on Wind’s Energy Return on Energy Investment

In response to my post on wind’s energy return on energy investment (EROI), the same reader writes:

I am very, very skeptical about numbers you quoted for wind (15:1 to 30:1).   Lots of really bright people are wrong about some things. 

I need more than that to convince me.   If it was done on a spreadsheet, it would help if it was simple enough for me to check out and you could send it.  By the way, thanks for the definition of EROI.  That could help me get to talk about this when I get to the bottom of it.

I appreciate your honest skepticism.  I’m certainly not going to try to reduplicate what the scientific community has been compiling for decades.  Since you appear sincerely interested, I would recommend that you simply read a few of the 1.7 million articles on the subject.  Many of these contain spreadsheets.

Also, think about this for a second.  An EROI under 1.0 means that whoever’s building such a machine is a) helping to move us away from fossil fuels, but b) deliberately ruining our planet.  Do you really think that General Electric, the largest turbine manufacturer on Earth, one of Newsweek’s Top 100 Green Companies, is engaged in this?

Or maybe you think that they just don’t know?  Then you have to wonder how this somehow got past their executive team, their directors, and their 307,000 employees, including many tens of thousands of the world’s top engineers.

I don’t think you’re on very solid ground here.