In his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Mark Mills makes a point I have made here from time to time:
The IEA assembled a large body of data about a central, and until now largely ignored, aspect of the energy transition: It requires mining industries and infrastructure that don’t exist. Wind, solar and battery technologies are built from an array of “energy transition minerals,†or ETMs, that must be mined and processed. The IEA finds that with a global energy transition like the one President Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040.
The world doesn’t have the capacity to meet such demand. As the IEA observes, albeit in cautious bureaucratese, there are no plans to fund and build the necessary mines and refineries. The supply of ETMs is entirely aspirational. And if it were pursued at the quantities dictated by the goals of the energy transition, the world would face daunting environmental, economic and social challenges, along with geopolitical risks.
The IEA stipulates up front one underlying fact that advocates of a transition never mention: Green-energy machines use far more critical minerals than conventional-energy machines do. “A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an onshore wind plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired power plant,†the report says. “Since 2010, the average amount of minerals needed for a new unit of power generation capacity has increased by 50% as the share of renewables has risen.†That was merely to bring wind and solar to a 10% share of the world’s electricity.
If you genuinely intend to accomplish a goal, you’ve got to start thinking longitudinally and, importantly, logistically. Thinking tactically isn’t enough.
There are many reasons that going 100% to solar and wind power is impractical but something that’s rarely mentioned are the materials necessary to do it, the processes necessary to produce them, and the total lifetime costs involved. For the most part solar cells and blades for wind turbines aren’t recyclable and the disposal costs should be accounted for.
When all of the complexities are taken into consideration I think you’ll reach the conclusion I have which is that if you genuinely want to achieve the objective of greatly reducing or eliminating the use of all fossil fuels we’ll need to produce orders of magnitude more than we currently do to accomplish it. That means sources other than wind, solar, hydroelectric, coal, oil, and natural gas.
It is time to put this renewable fantasy away with the stuffed animals and Play-Doh. Electric vehicles will be a niche market, ahead of the flying car market. Elon Musk’s 3 hour rockets from LA to NYC are just as silly as terraforming Mars.
Has any CO2 Malthusian read a physics book?
I think there are some who think that physics is a social construct. Or racist. Or both.
On your first observation it will take more tan 3% of vehicle sales for EVs to have any measurable effect. I suspect that the main effect of California’s ban on internal combustion engine vehicle sales will be to boost the sale of used cars which will have a perverse result if it has any measurable result at all.
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-supersized-turbines-energyand-physics.html
Recycling wind turbine blades.
Solar cells and wind turbine blades are consumables. They don’t last forever. One of the implications is that the mining, processing, and fabrication do go on forever. It’s not one and done.
“In order for wind energy to be useful—and accepted—researchers need to design systems that are both efficient and inexpensive, Naughton said.”
Gee. Let me write that down. Given that the mu number of air is pretty constant, expect high Reynolds numbers (read: difficult to model) to create a very long term engineering problem. Going from 1 to 7% took twenty years. Probably low hanging fruit. I’d expect developments to slow, and cheap and efficient to be an increasingly tough taskmaster. As Tasty likes to say, you can’t change the physics.
And as we all know, in 12 years we are cooked…………..
A lot of physicists are involved in clean energy and also climate science. What experience has shown is the cost of clean energy keeps dropping and that the efficiencies keep increasing. The physics says that we could still have a ways to go.
Steve