it's what i'm saying. the materials essentially are *releasing* the energy that was put into their production. similar to how it takes heat to produce nichrome wire for resistive heat, what is actually happening is that the electricity is releasing that energy by damaging the structure of the metal. the alloying eventually breaks down and there is no more current and no more heat output.

it really is effectively a battery. the nichrome is a battery for heat. the PV cells are a battery for electricity that is activated by light. the wind generators are a mechanical battery that takes wind and the strain on it is precisely what allows it to return energy, and of course, there is no such thing as a battery that returns all of the power. the battery breaks down, in the process of moving electrons back and forth. eventually the integrity of the structure breaks and the battery doesn't work anymore.

in all of these cases the common principle applies: the cost of energy to produce the device is more than the energy that the device can ever release, because releasing the energy destroys the structure, and once enough of the structure has failed, the device will stop working altogether. usually at 80-90% of the level of energy input.

only carbon and uranium dug out of the ground cost less energy than they release. usually by orders of 2-10 times depending on the amount of distance you have to transport it. gas is the worst for transport, because of the cost of the storage devices, and the sparse availability of it, although i think biomethane is probably quite practical to do anywhere, you still have the problem of storage, because it requires expensive metallic, pressure resistant containers.

coal is a problem because you can't use it on an ICE, you have to use an ECE. this is a problem of scale, it's not practical to run a steam engine at less than the scale of a train, small ones just have a progressive decline in power to weight ratio. liquid fuel is the best, it's liquid at room temperature, so the container only needs to be airtight and carry the weight. uranium has the exact same problem as coal, although there is a lot of progress lately in producing devices that take the radiation and directly release electrons in solid state materials.

liquid petroleum fuel is the dominant form of energy because it is the most transportable, for the energy content, and the storage and usage requirements. batteries and electricity are nice and have benefits in that the motors torque graphs are practically flat at all speeds, but they cost a lot in materials, the copper, the rare earth magnets, and the batteries are only just at the point where they are good enough to give you enough range for urban commuting and light cargo transport. don't forget about the line transmission losses, the battery heat and lifespan losses, and all that. it's a poison pill, wrapped in sugar.

for the time being, absent any breakthroughs in fission, fusion or antimatter energy devices, really, diesel fuel is the king, and it's been the king since Herr Diesel invented it. and as well, if it weren't for the fact that making the diesel out of seeds raised the price of food, it could be entirely "green" it's much greener, in fact, than any of this other bullshit. coal for the metals to manufacture the devices, and bio oils for the fuel, made using potassium hydroxide and methanol synthesised from natural gas.

and that leads to the last point, which is that if there was a free market, instead of government control over every detail of trade, what would need transporting would primarily be materials, the knowledge and tools would be everywhere for producing everything we need, and we wouldn't even have these huge amounts of shipping and rail and highway cargo transit to move stuff when actually, in any given place, they just need a few raw materials, and the rest are weightless, intangible assets like knowledge, and light materials that can be combined with locally available materials, reducing the amount of fuel we even need.

i'd say if that last point were addressed properly, firstly, you have to abolish government and return to polycentric law, and then, probably you can shift all of the energy consumption to Green biodiesel, because you aren't making such absurdly large amounts of cargo transport of goods that could be adequately produced locally with a fraction of the material shipped in.