Buzzwordslop fossil fuel apologia.
One of the main points of this article seems to be about distinguishing wind turbines as 'power amplifiers' rather than energy sources.
"Consider a bicycle. A bicycle does not create energy. The energy comes entirely from the metabolic calories of the cyclist (which came from the sun via agriculture). What the bicycle does is amplify power. It allows the human to convert that caloric energy into mechanical work at a much higher and more efficient rate than walking.
A wind turbine operates on the exact same principle. It does not create energy; it intercepts the diffuse kinetic energy of the wind. It is an exquisite machine for amplifying power, allowing us to extract that kinetic energy at highly useful rates to do mechanical or electrical work.
But a power amplifier is not a net exergy source."
Nothing creates energy
Energy is neither created not destroyed. For all the rambling about thermodynamic impossibilities, the author never acknowledges this. Drawing some arbitrary line between energy sources and 'power amplifiers' is a distinction without a practical difference.
Then there's some fossil fuel apologia with some token anticapitalist buzzwords.
"The reigning narrative claims that wind and solar are net exergy sources. It claims that they can fully replace the dense, high-ERoEI (Energy Return on Energy Invested) fossil fuels that built the modern world, while simultaneously powering the civilisation that manufactures them, plus economic growth.1
This is thermodynamically false."
"To transition to renewables, we are injecting a massive pulse of critically scarce fossil exergy into the system to build new infrastructural mass (MM). Because this infrastructure is diffuse and intermittent, it requires a colossal increase in logistical and grid-management complexity (S).3 And because it is financed through our existing debt-based architecture, it concentrates wealth and accelerates financialisation (αf).
We are cannibalising our dwindling lifeblood to build a fleet of power amplifiers, under the delusion that they are energy sources. The thermodynamic result is a severe net decrease in Effective Circulating Power (Peff). The ‘Green Transition’ does not halt our orbital decay towards the Resource Entropy Singularity; it actively accelerates it by starving the real economy of circulating surplus at the exact moment we face a global supply shock."
And finally wraps up by saying that powering civilization with renewables would mean scheduling running your kettle around the weather outside.
Cool stuff.