Renewable vs non-renewable resources

New technologies

New technologies typically "take off" (grow exponentially) for a while before market saturation kicks in (everyone's got one).

Renewable resources

Renewable resources follow the same shape for consumption vs time: An S-curve or logistic curve.

Hydroelectric power

U.S. Hydroelectric capacity (USGS)

More recently...Wikipedia graph of EIA data. [What do you think accounts for all that recent variation?]

Non-renewable resources

Resources that are not being replenished do not have a long-term "plateau" at which they can be eternally exploited.

Oil production

What have you heard about "peak oil"? What is that?

Oil rig

More recently...EIA data 1860-present.

But the real situation is more complex

Here's a graphic showing the natural gas production of Gazprom, Russia's national gas company:
[Well, eventually]

Making comparisons

  • Levelized cost of operation (LCO) - A utility has to borrow money to build a plant, and then pays salaries to workers to maintain and operate the plant for a finite lifetime. It may have to pay to have the plant decommissioned (certainly for a nuclear power plant). It may receive subsidies from the government that partially offset some of these expenses. The LCO is an attempt to gather all these expenses together, and then divide by the total amount of energy produced during the lifetime of operation. Typical units are dollars / MW.
  • eROeI - energy Return On energy Investment. This is the total amount energy from some source (for example gasoline) divided by the energe needed to extract it and make it available. In the case of gasoline: the energy needed to drill wells and refine crude oil.
  • embodied energy

More resources

For comparison a large coal power plant might have a capacity of 1500 MW, and the Three Gorges Dam plans on 22,500 MW.

 

 

Image credits

S. Foucher, Al, Mike Baird, W.G.Simon