On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 06:18:34PM +0530, Udhay Shankar N wrote: > On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Eugen Leitl <[email protected]> wrote: > > > CdTe has EROEI of of 43:1, and rising (and of course it's > > recyclable, CIGS has about the same energy density as > > enrichened uranium over lifetime, and of course it is > > also fully recyclabe), while in its heyday oil > > had 100:1 and is now down to 25:1 in best locations, and > > much lower (below 10:1) in others. > > You have recent cites for these? My searches are throwing up various > posts by you. :)
There is http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5573 and references mention "Life cycle assessment and energy pay-back time of advanced photovoltaic modules: CdTe and CIS compared to poly-Si", by Marco Raugei, Silvia Bargiglia and Sergio Ulgiati at Energy Volume 32, Issue 8, August 2007, Pages 1310-1318 "Update of PV energy payback times and life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions" V. Fthenakis, H.C. Kim, M. Held, M. Raugei and J. Krones, 24th European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference, 21-25 September 2009, Hamburg, Germany I think there's a considerable headroom in thin-film PV which could bring us to 100:1. Even more importantly, we need self-reproducing self-reparing systems, very like biology. For these even relatively modest EROEI doesn't matter, since their lifetimes are very long, and they auto-deploy. Your only issue is harvesting the energy, hopefully conveniently packaged.
