As the blog post discusses, there are multiple ways to measure efficiency; energy density is one, and possibly the most important advantage of hydrocarbons. The first figure in the blog post describes another: quantity of mineral extraction per energy production. From that metric, renewables are much more efficient.
Personally, I’m not bothered by the blog post. The advantages of fossil fuels are well known - that’s why they continue to be widely used. Their main disadvantage, emissions, are also we’ll publicized. The perspective of the blog post is that there are other, less discussed metrics under which renewables have an advantage.
486@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
While it is true, that their energy density is high, often it is actually much less relevant due to the poor efficiency of the devices burning said fuel. With cars, you’ll notice that ICE cars have a pretty terrible efficieny themselves, which partly negates the effect of high energy density of fossil fuels. These days electric cars and ICE cars can have very similar driving ranges despite their differences in energy density.
rainwall@piefed.social 5 weeks ago
And to compound om these losses, while the energy source is dense, it is heavy. You have to move fuel around by spending fuel, lots and lots of it. We use an ungodly amount of fossil fuels moving fossil fuels somewhere to be used. Fuel and coal tankers are a huge amount of the energy we spend.
Electricity on the other hand can be locally produced nearly anywhere with wind/solar, and with infrastructure upgrades, be moved over wire with very little loss and no fossil fuel expenditure.