Responding to Jonathan’s reply to my comment:
Your reply, based on your anonymous colleagues’ comments, is nitpicking and avoids my principal points. Although our latest paper* is not explicitly about EROI, it uses a mix of renewable energy sources of which the vast majority (wind, solar PV, existing hydro) have high EROI, very high in the case of existing hydro. So the whole system must have quite high EROI . We may publish an EROI analysis in due course, however time is of the essence and the carbon inputs and carbon savings addressed in the present paper are much more important.
The second comment by your anonymous colleagues, claiming that our results are only relevant to Australia, is incorrect and also nitpicking. Until recently Australia and China have had similar energy intensities of electricity generation and so they are still the among the global worst cases in terms of net energy and net carbon emissions for electricity generation. For example, wind turbines manufactured in Denmark, where the majority of electricity generation comes from renewable energy, will have a much higher EROI.
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*Hamilton N, Howard B, Diesendorf M, Wiedmann T 2017. Computing life-cycle emissions from transitioning the electricity sector using a discrete numerical approach. Energy 137:314–324.