An analysis of the economic and ecologic profitability of the renewable energy sources

Antoni Stasch

Abstract

Growth of the energy demand in China and India exerts great pressure on energy supply and environment. How to secure the energy supply in next 10–15 years is one from the most important issues for the world ecology and economy. Our analysis shown that the only acceptable future vision for solving this problem, based on renewal energy resources, only. The best and the worst scenario of greenhouse gas emission was presented. The results from quantitative analysis show that energy demand in China could be as high as 2.9 billion toe in 2030, which could exceed the available supply from traditional sources. For this reason, the next chapters of the paper are devoted to analysis of aspects of the management of new ideas of development and application of technologies on the production of electrical energy using renewable energy sources. It is shown that the most profitable and very promising applications are: Concentrated Solar Thermal Dish/Stirling Plants, biomass and biogas power plants burning of grain [4], potatoes [5], white beets [6] and wood [1] Considering the income tax, it is already nowmore profitable to use own grain as fuel in heating own premises, than to sell the said grain, pay income tax and buy heating oil with the earned money. It means burning of grain is a very attractive option, however unethical it may sound. This ethical problem doesn’t exist in the case of burning of white beets, potatoes or woods, which are even much cheaper sources of renewable energy [6] with production costs of 0,12€ [5], 0,14€ [5] and 0,11 € [1] respectively. Using some examples, we discuss also the pseudo ecological policy of the European Community, supporting financially the most ineffective technologies like rapeseed biodiesel or wind farms. In this case, we show that the worst problem isn’t thinking wrongly, it is thinking wrongly and believing thinking correctly. Our econometric analysis of EROEI shows that, the country governments pay extremely high incentives for rapeseed, biodiesel and photovoltaic technology under the illusion that this will help the environment, or to solve the renewable energy problems of the world. When incentives are stopped, all this technologies tends to decline (like the California wind rush of 1981-5); everywhere. The reason for it is that the supported by European community technologies are inefficient, and, as such, does only little if anything to reduce global warming and pollutant emissions. It will never close a conventional power plant; and the fossil fuels will be only very little (2-3%) saved.