SCIENCE
The law of diminishing returns
irrigation
I first learned about this natural law when reading about the watering and fertilizing of crops. At first, the more water and fertilizer you add, the better and bigger the crop. But after a certain point, extra water and fertilizer becomes ineffective – in fact, if you really overdo it, it becomes toxic.
genetics
I remember reading about an experiment to increase the sugar content of sugar beet crops. Each year, the seeds from the beets with the highest sugar content were saved and planted the following season. This went on for quite a few years, always selecting seeds from the sweetest beets. Sure enough, the sugar beet crops kept getting higher in average sugar content. But then a limit was reached. From that point on, there was no increase. The whole crop had ‘maxed out’. This reminds me of Genesis 1:12 “The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.” I emphasized after their kind because I think that means each kind (not as narrow as the man-made ‘species’ category) will only produce more of its own kind; not evolve into another kind. There is plenty of room for variety within a kind, but there are limits. Anyway, my point today is that there are diminishing returns to our efforts to improve crops.
eating
Yes, even eating. Food and water intake and good nutrition is necessary for our survival. If you’re burning more calories than you’re taking in, you lose weight. Increasing food and water intake will keep you going. But there are diminishing returns when you eat too much - at some point it can just about kill you!
Renewable energy
The same principle is at work with solar and wind farms. Naturally, the best locations are the first to be built out. The Columbia Gorge, one of the consistently windiest spots on earth, received wind turbines on leased ranchland years ago. They weren’t as profitable as hoped, and they’re aging to the point of not being worth the maintenance. But surely they would be more profitable than locations where the windy days were much less frequent. Once the locations with the most frequent winds are built up, less optimum locations will have diminishing profitability.
Another factor illustrating diminishing returns on wind farms is the blade length. The power produced from a wind turbine is proportional to almost the square of the blade length. If the blade length is doubled, the power is almost quadrupled. But there’s a limit. Longer blades require higher towers to support them, and the weight of the blade increases exponentially in proportion to length, approximately to the 2.5 power.
Ironically, the amount of concrete needed to support such a monstrosity also increases, partially diminishing the goal of reducing CO2 emissions with renewables, because the production of cement is one of the biggest CO2 emitters!
At first, it’s nice to have a little more power production. But there comes a point where adding more renewables is counterproductive. As more and more of the power grid becomes unreliable because of having to depend on sunny, windy weather, there is a toxic effect building up that will eventually become a catastrophe, taking the whole grid down during the next major weather event, whether too hot or too cold. Without a corresponding increase in dependable power 24/7, like from fossil fuels or nuclear, the effect of adding more renewables becomes less and less helpful; even extremely harmful.
Rooftop solar gives another example of diminishing returns. The first installations were on ideal locations – full day sun, no shade, on a roof sloping to the south. But to expand the concept of rooftop solar to less ideal locations – partial shade, roofs sloping north, the installations of course became less economically feasible, thus with diminishing returns.
Since renewables cannot be depended on during unusual weather patterns, like long stretches of cloudy, rainy weather or long stretches of windless days, the only way they could ever come close to being a reliable source of energy is if they have huge battery backup storage. I wrote about one type storage battery being built for this purpose here - (scroll down to the part about ESS) and since then, I contacted a company spokesman in Oregon at ESS (Energy Storage Systems) and found out each battery package weighs about 42 tons and they’re so expensive it’s almost prohibitive. One of these units can only store “400 kWh. It can be configured to provide storage durations of 4 to 12 hours.” But wait - in order to back up a whole wind or solar farm for even just a few hours, it would take, for example, 450 units for a 300 MW farm!* Does this sound like an efficient way to produce reliable electric power? I don’t think any government could print enough money to ever make wind or solar a reliable, constant 24/7 source of electric power.
* I’m not the greatest mathematicion, so check out my assumptions and calculations and let me know if I made a mistake. Here’s my figuring, from that earlier post:
“Let’s do some math - consider a 300 MW (MegaWatt) wind or solar farm. A MW is 1000 KW. Let’s be generous and assume the wind or solar farm sees enough sunny and windy days to put out 50% of its maximum rating, or 150 MW. Let’s also assume that output is generated for 6 hours per day, giving us 150MW X 6 hours =900MWh. So according to my calculations (correct me if I’m wrong), to provide just 4 hours of battery storage backup, it would take 2.5 400kWh units to backup 1 MWh, so it would take 2.5X900 = 450 units to backup the whole farm.”
Because of diminishing returns, many of the wind and solar projects would never have gotten off the ground if it weren’t for massive subsidies. No sensible investor would have touched them.
FINANCE
Investors in the stock market are subject to the law of diminishing returns also. Look at it this way – when the general market valuations are high, there is less incentive to buy into it. The potential returns will obviously be less than if the same stocks had been bought at a lower price.
FAITH
Even spiritual growth is affected by the same law. When I first became a believer (see “How I Became Convinced the Bible is True”) I spent a lot of time reading the scriptures. I was soaking it up like a sponge. But one day I got thinking about where to draw the line between bible reading and actually doing what Jesus tells us to do.
“Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress,…” James 1:27
I came to the realization that there can be diminishing returns even to bible reading. Like watering the crops, a certain amount is needed and greatly beneficial, but there comes a point at which any additional daily input becomes less effective. The extreme is obvious – if the whole day was spent reading the bible, how would you ever get around to doing it? A sensible balance is needed for true spiritual growth.
next week (or sooner) - my journal during a 4 day power outage; and the increasingly shaky future of renewables and EVs.