Overcoming Power Overshoot
- xav031
- Apr 3, 2015
- 6 min read
Of course, it remains to be seen how far the global situation has to degrade before enough people realise that we have no longer any other option but to overcome cognitive failure, realise that avenues remain open to us and take matters in our own hands. We will come back to this matter in the concluding post of this series.
At the present stage though, some readers may object dismissively that what Figure 13 depicts is “just a model”. Let’s recall the series of actual cases reviewed in the posting on Peering behind the thick veil of paper money. They all show a slow growth towards a peak followed by an abrupt fall taking place right now. If anything Figure 13 is just slightly lagging behind reality. We may recall Jean Baudrillard’s quip: “the future was yesterday”. Still, to highlight that this is no “just a model”, we may go a little further in order to clarify present peaking and fall dynamics.
Figure 14 – Power maximising and overshooting – the French case

An amount of energy used per unit of time defines an amount of power, in a thermodynamic sense – a Watt is a Joule per second. It ensues that a wealth creation capacity valued in Boev per head of population per year in fact expresses a level of power that can be converted, for example, in kWv. Let’s stress though that we are not considering here direct physical power actual installed in places like power stations or in transport means and instead use the kilowatt as a standard of value, a standard that is meaningful because it is in direct relation with the central challenge of our time: the thermodynamic decline observed through the rapid decrease of EROIs. This approach will enable us to link present analyses with the works of Joseph Tainter, Alfred Lotka and Howard Odum and substantiate further what Figure 13 already highlights.
With this in mind and by way of example, Figure 14 revisits the French case. It shows that the power per head generated by French society peaked towards the end of the 1990s (around 350kWv/head). However the dynamic put into play to reach this peak (and in the mind of decision-makers to keep reaching ever higher – a growth fantasy disconnected from reality) resulted in a very rapid decline that could well soon become irreversible.
In fact, as in all other industrialised countries we have examined, the passing through a peak happened in two steps. A first smaller peak happened in the early 1970s when the USA reached their oil peak and OPEC seized the opportunity to rebalance somewhat terms of trade in favour of their member countries (thus generating a first large influx of “petrodollars”). Then as shown on Figure 14 a renewed increase in power happened during the 1980s and 90s, on the one hand thanks to the relative abundance of oil supplies and on the other hand thanks to a wave of problem-solving new technologies that in the main came from the USA (notably IBM introduced the PC in 1981, ARPANET, the ancestor of the Internet was developed in the US during the 1970-80 period, formally decommissioned on 28 February 1990 and replaced by the Internet through the National Information Infrastructure under Al Gore’s impulse in 1991).
It is clear that during this whole period, and specifically in response to the two oil shocks, French society became increasingly complex. Let’s recall the motto bandied by the French Government at the time: “we do not have oil but we do have ideas”… Those of us who became adult in France in the late 1960s and early 1970s can easily take stock and observe the enormous increase in social complexity that took place in the 80s and 90s. Back in the 1970s there was no PC, no Internet, no smart phone, very few motorways, no fast trains yet; there was some bureaucracy but nothing like what French people experience nowadays… Without getting into complex statistical analyses, it is clear that each of the changes that took place during this period entailed a substantial net energy cost and that it is during the 1990s that increases in complexity accelerated, in particular, in response to the growing challenges of globalisation and of the negative consequences of “growth” (ecological impacts, de-industrialisation, chronic unemployment, immigration, and son on).
Recall, for example, that it is during the 1990s that the Internet took off (Internet understood in the broadest sense, including email, World Wide Web, SMS, e-Commerce, e-Finance, music, film, and video streaming, on line gaming and a huge influx of spam). Presently the global energy demand of the Internet is overtaking that of air traffic and its growth rate is one of the highest.
The accumulation of all the energy costs resulting from increased complexity ended up by becoming counter productive as it translated into rapidly declining end-user EROIs. It ended up overwhelming the country’s ability to keep increasing its power.
The pattern manifest in the French case is found in the entire industrialised world. This pattern of power peaking followed by an abrupt decline is precisely what Joseph Tainter analysed during the 1980s concerning a large number of past societies and civilisations.
Before Tainter, Lotka and Odum had shown that self-organised living systems operating far from the thermodynamic equilibrium, such as human societies, tend to evolve in such a way as to maximise the power that they can develop on the basis of the resources that they can access. [1] This, in effect, is a more refined formulation of what we have already stressed concerning wealth creation. The latter’s sole irreplaceable source is the amount of power a country can muster, that is, the amount of energy flowing through it per unit of time in regard of its population.
Lotka’s and Odum’s work constitute the background to Tainter’s own analyses in that while industrialised societies are indeed engaged in a dynamic of power maximisation, they constantly must solve the problems that they encounter along the way. Tainter’s key contribution to understanding the challenges of our time is to have pointed out that societies’ problem-solving takes place mostly through ongoing increases in complexity under the constraints of the largely erroneous beliefs they are holding at the time and that this problem-solving through increased complexity activity results in net additional energy costs. Under the sway of erroneous beliefs each specific solving engenders more issues whose solving entails more energy costs and that in turn engender more problems in an endless chain that can easily turn into an avalanche, a SOC. As societies progress along such trajectories they unavoidably end up by overshooting the maximum power point and, overwhelmed by excess energy costs, fall into thermodynamic decline.
It is in these problem-solving processes and their ceaseless increases in energy costs that EROI dynamics are fully at play. The only ways one can return sustainably to a maximum power position and thus to the viability of a given society is through the rapid re-establishment of high, sustainable EROIs. However, such a return to high EROIs cannot take place without a paradigm change that entails completely dropping all the beliefs and myths that were involved the growing complexity that precipitated that society’s thermodynamic decline or even collapse. In all cases this kind of paradigm change requires a radical simplification of energy supply processes and of all the modes of social organisation in private as well as public spheres (for example, concerning governance, democracy, legislation, business practices, social welfare, as well as concerning energy, transport and communications infrastructures).
Unfortunately, world wide, the endless growth in complexity attached to problem-solving in response to the Four Challenges remains unchecked. The various, extremely costly and largely ineffective, attempts at “energy transitions” promoted by elites trapped in cognitive failure are a case in point. In contrast, with reference to the two trajectories depicted on Figure 13, we have seen that technically the Four Energy and Ecological Challenges can be addressed, certainly no longer in time, but as the expression goes, “better late than never”.
So, for all of us right now the choice is indeed ours to let matters follow the BAU course or to take the initiative and ensure our future. The core challenges are to overcome global and overwhelming cognitive failure, to simplify radically all modes of operation and to focus on simple, extremely low cost, 100% solar and sustainable emerging technology.
At SynGeni we have found how to meet these challenges with our nGeni Technology and how by creating the Internet of Energy, it is possible to leverage a pool of some 510TW of solar power available at the Earth’s surface versus the 17TW presently installed based on fossil fuels, to ensure an extremely bright future for humankind.
[1] Odum, Howard T, 1995, “Self-Organization and Maximum Empower'” in C.A.S. Hall [ed.] Maximum Power: The Ideas and Applications of H.T.Odum, Colorado University Press, Colorado; Lotka, A.J., 1922a, “Contribution to the energetics of evolution” in Proc Natl Acad Sci, 8: pp. 147–51. Numerous researchers have come to consider power maximisation in disequilibrium complex systems as a 4th principle of thermodynamics.
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