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Garbage comment from an uninformed SW engineer: How, in the current economic and geopolitical environment, can they project that production costs will continue

Garbage comment from an uninformed SW engineer: How, in the current economic and geopolitical environment, can they project that production costs will continue to decline? Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. I would add at least 5 years to any timeline given because of the recalibrating global energy and materials supply chains will be undergoing over time. We're probably short of copper. Is anyone figuring out a way to use aluminum as a substitute in many applications? We can work around several of the other critical shortages(nickel, cobalt, not-so-rare rare earths, lithium) in time, either with alternatives or increased extraction, but copper seems like a tough one. There is a lot of wishful thinking or naivete in the political class driving these transitions. I agree that we need to move rapidly to decarbonize but there seems to be a lack of appreciation for the actual work involved in the transition. There is also a parasite-class of folks whispering deceitful tales in the ears of politicians(ahem, hydrogen, ahem) which really only cares about getting their cut. Politicians need to understand you don't just order solar panels and batteries off Amazon. Someone needs to make them, and that someone better be a country you're not in a proxy war or a hot war with. We need to invest in practical measures not just fairy tales that leave us in the dark for a decade or more while we figure out hard lessons.

joshe 4y ago
The quick answer is that we are not short of any of those materials. We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively. Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year. There might be a 5-10 period when profits are high for miners, but eventually the profits will be competed away by new entrants. (Except if you have a mine that produces very cheaply because it is so rich or easy to operate, these people will stay high profit. The most expensive mines will just make back they're capital costs + return). You can see this with fracking which is horribly unprofitable. Hedge funds have lost billions over building fracking wells.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Right. Reserves are really just a measure of "things people bothered to look for at the current price." High prices can and do induce more searching. Part of the whole hullabaloo about "peak oil" is that people stopped looking for oil reserves in an environment with low oil prices. Once prices started rising you saw fracking come into play that regenerated areas previously thought dead for oil production.
  - RobertoG 4y ago
    That's not the argument of peak oil. It's not about price or quantity of oil available in the planet. It's an argument about thermodynamics. The argument is that in order to extract oil, you need to spend energy, and, logically, the most easier oil to extract is extracted first. That means that oil extraction is every year more expensive (energetically not financially). Because technology can make extraction more efficient but not indefinitely, at some point, in order to extract oil, it will be necessary to spend the same energy than burning it creates. I suppose we could say that it's kind of an inversion of what's going on with fusion research. Some commenters say that we already pass that point and that's the reason oil companies CaPex have fall in the last years. I don't know if that's the case, but I can't avoid to ask myself about solar. Is the energy that a solar panel generate in its life enough for its normal use, plus extracting the minerals that it's made of, plus push the panel, through the ocean all the way from China? or are we fooling ourselves using oil for all that? I would like to see some numbers and expert discussion about that.
    - Yoric 4y ago
      If you can read French, this guy https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc_Jancovici https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc_Jancovici has published a lot of vulgarization on the topic - with numbers. If my memory of reading one of his books serves, fracking now costs 50% of the energy it produces (in addition to non-energy environmental impact, which is pretty large), up from ~10% for the easy oil we had ~50 years ago. Current-tech solar panels are in the same order of magnitude (again, not counting non-energy environmental impact). Nuclear energy has the highest yield. I seem to remember that coal is the worst, unless it's burnt at the point of extraction.
alexose 4y ago
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. This may be true for certain products, but it's not broadly true. There's nothing intrinsic that requires solar panels, lithium ion batteries, or wind turbines to be manufactured using dirty energy.
- 01100011 4y ago
  In most cases no(remember, hydrocarbons and the hydrogen produced by them are often industrial/chemical feedstocks for Si, lubricants, adhesives and polymers used in green mfg) so you're right. The problem is right now these things do indeed depend on dirty energy. You're basically making the same fallacious argument as politicians do now. In the long run, everything will be green. That's not the point. The point is how we get there. You can't ignore the present or the engineering involved to get to the future.
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production and use as we ramp up manufacturing and deployment of the systems needed for clean energy production, and then see a tapering off of the current production methods as the new ones come online. How did we get the first railroads built? By a combination of horses dragging materials so humans could lay the rail lines and then trains dragging materials as the initial lines were built. There was almost certainly an initial increase in horse power consumption, and then a decline as the new system came online. This isn't a new thing, this is how many replacement transitions that depend on the previous system play out.
    - 01100011 4y ago
      > We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production Right. But right now we're incentivizing the opposite. We're telling fossil fuel companies we don't need them anymore long before we've actually figured out a way to live without them. Do you see the problem yet?
cesarb 4y ago
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. Is that exclusive to green tech, or is it common to both green tech and non-green tech? If both need dirty energy, what matters is not green tech needing dirty energy, but only how much dirty energy it needs compared to non-green tech, both to produce and over its lifetime.
- 01100011 4y ago
  It matters if you disrupt the dirty energy pipeline well before you've secured enough green energy to self-sustain a green energy future.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Every way to secure green energy requires some use of dirty energy. So the only choice is between dirty forever, and dirty decreasing. If the latter, the faster it decreases, the less dirty energy you use on the transition.
    - 01100011 4y ago
      Dirty forever isn't an option. Dirty is not renewable. We could decrease dirty energy usage to 0% right now. People would starve, quality of life would plummet, and we could direct our available green energy(hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, etc) to building out more green tech. Is that what you're advocating? I don't think so. So let us talk like engineers who need to make trade-offs to best achieve our goals. Cutting off dirty energy too soon hampers our green transition while needlessly killing people and lowering quality of life for those who don't starve or freeze to death.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        You very, very evidently did not read what you replied to. That appears to be a pattern. You could learn just by paying attention to what people took time out to explain to you. Go ahead, I can wait.
ip26 4y ago
It's perhaps naive and over-simplistic, but the s-curve is so well-established you can probably fit the production cost curve over time to the s-curve and get a useful prediction. There's lots of hard work that goes into making it happen, of course.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  The s-curve has two important parameters, but looking at any amount of history before the first inflection you can only ever deduce one of them. So, how exactly to you intent to fit the renewables (that are pre-inflection) production curves into it?
  - ip26 4y ago
    You are certainly right about renewables that are pre-inflection. I was thinking of solar and wind, which I understand are both in the steep part of the S curve.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      > steep part of the S curve What part again? Are you claiming that their growth is linear?
FunnyBadger 4y ago
You are absolutely correct. Supply Chains are primarily fossil based and can NOT be substituted with low density sources like Green Energy or even electricity at all. For example, you can't efficiently make steel or most other metals with electricity alone. Even primarily electrically refined metals like copper or aluminum REQUIRE inputs that can not be made or refined or extracted with electricity. Often this is about chemical reductions that required carbon or other reductants that can't be effectively or efficiently made with electricity. The most obvious one is silicon - carbon reduction of SiO2 is the only and best efficient refining method (1st stage only - you need further far more energy intensive refining to make semiconductor-grade silicon). Recently brought up in Congress was questions of how petrochemicals are to be produced if the Green goal of eliminating oil is accomplished. Stuff like plastics. All sorts of things depend upon plastics and plastics require petrochemicals. The most obvious one is plastic sterilization aids and sterile materials like syringes, packaging for needles, etc. ALL 20th century medicine is largely destroyed without petrochemicals. Also all pharmaceuticals deeply depend upon petrochemicals. The respondent had no answer and she simply tried to resort to high-intensity angry BS. Clearly she'd never thought ANY of this through and didn't care because she was living off the anger of hating oil but knew nothing about how oil is used or how dependent all supply chains are on oil. You are underestimating the good faith of the political class. In fact, they are borderline psychopathic with high levels Dunning-Kruger delusion about the correctness of their decisions/beliefs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHk7S6prF6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHk7S6prF6M The additional issue: PVs have finite lifespan. Lithium batteries have extremely finite lifespans. So you have to replace them and have ALL the supply chains to do that forever. Which are fossil fuel dependent at fundamental chemical/physical levels. So most of those supply chains can NEVER be made green. Green Energy is primarily a Cargo-Cult Religion not based on facts. That is a major problem because if you shutdown fossil fuels, we will end up with nothing - we will not even manage to have the levels of civilization and technology seen in the last 300-500 years. Basically a dark age.
- 01100011 4y ago
  Jesus it's nice to read an informed comment on here. Yes, it's difficult to try to get these facts across to folks without them thinking you're a shill for big oil. It's especially sad/frustrating when people who claim to be engineers don't understand the engineering involved in the process of transitioning to green energy.
marcosdumay 4y ago
> It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. You mean countries applying tariffs to things? Or are you talking about the Russian aggression? Or is it about that speculation that reduced spending on the US navy will make other countries helpless against naval crime? Because the first two seem to have had no effect at all on solar panels production, and the third is a huge attention seeking non-sequitur.
dqpb 4y ago
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce In theory, bootstrapping will eventually be complete.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The stronger statement is true: as green energy becomes increasingly cheaper than dirty, industries will transition to clean wherever they can. New industry will start out using cheaper green, and green generation capacity is almost all new.
- 01100011 4y ago
  Saying things like "Eventually" and "In 10 to 20 years" bypasses the important question of how to manage the transition while minimizing suffering, whether via starvation, economic disruptions, or continued negative climate effects. Personally, I'm not doubting that we will achieve a decarbonized and sustainable energy infrastructure. But that's not the point. The point is how will we get there, and are we being realistic about the challenges and requirements to effectively make the transition? Are we being realistic about the energy and materials needed to build our sustainable power generation and delivery network?
lancewiggs 4y ago
This is the approach that all the other forecasters have fallen into and that this article is trying to address. Just as many people thought the irrepressible growth of Internet data, processing power and memory would slow or cease, so is the case that continued investment into renewable power will continue to reduce costs. We don’t have to be the ones that say what technology or materials will be used, just to say that that industry, like ours, has it covered.
pfdietz 4y ago
The argument that this cannot work is making the argument that NO storage technologies will be good enough, not that just Li-ion batteries won't be good enough. There are thousands of different battery chemistries. It's an extremely strong claim that all will fail. And there are approaches beyond batteries that use only very common materials. For example, pumped thermal storage, where a reversible heat engine is used to separate heat and cold, then regenerate the work consumed by running off that temperature difference.
tuatoru 4y ago
> We're probably short of copper. While copper water pipes still have a market, I don't think we can claim to be short of copper.
- 01100011 4y ago
  Copper prices are actually down quite a bit right now, but that may be due to previous hoarding in China coupled with economic slowdown and/or disruptions in their metals markets(see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-18/tycoon-running-a-quarter-of-china-s-copper-trade-is-on-the-ropes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-18/tycoon-ru...). There are quite a lot of analysts claiming we will be short on copper once the green revolution gets under way(remember, you're talking billions of new EVs, generators, increases in electrical distribution, etc). Think about it this way: all the energy currently delivered by fossil fuels(more or less, due to some efficiency gains) will need to be delivered by the electrical network. We're also busy giving improved living standards to the half of the earth that still lives in less-than-modern conditions. We're going to need to use more aluminum(4th most common element in the crust?) or we're going to run out of copper.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    If copper price is down, that means we have too much copper, not too little.
    - tricky777 4y ago
      reading the post is essential. here is the bit adressing this: > that may be due to previous hoarding in China coupled with economic slowdown and/or disruptions in their metals markets
      - 01100011 4y ago
        If you look at the copper futures chart the current price is below a few peaks but it is still quite high, historically speaking. That is in the face of a real estate crash in China and impending global economic slowdown(a significant portion of which is due to energy malinvestment). On a related note, the majority of new home construction does not use copper these days(both for cost reasons and performance reasons).
opportune 4y ago
Green energy requires massive amounts of energy to produce. The more we electrify vehicles and the more green energy in the grid, the greener it becomes to produce green energy. I agree we need more manufacturing outside of Asia/developing countries, but the solution is definitely not to maintain the status quo of dirty energy just because we can’t make green energy under 100% ideal circumstances
legulere 4y ago
> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. The energy payback time for photovoltaics is 1.2 years in north and less than 1 year in the south with such systems typically lasting longer than 20 years. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Photovoltaics-Report.pdf https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... That is in line with energy return on investment of fossil fuels.
leetnewb 4y ago
I'd argue there are multiple concurrent paths to decarbonization, and the combination of continuing research plus market dynamics could lead us to different energy mix than this study attempts to estimate. Besides, I think the world is waking up to the importance of domestic supply chains. The U.S. blends a lot of ethanol into gasoline, but where does that feedstock go as the ongoing EV transition cuts away traditional consumption? Lot of energy potential there that can be used to synthesize carbon neutral fuels including kerosene, natural gas, and gasoline. Corn->carbon neutral natural gas seems like a reasonably agreeable process with the distribution network and consumers already in place. Meanwhile, solar thermal / concentrated solar is out of the limelight while research continues. Lots of interesting options when you can generate supercritical steam and provide battery-less storage, especially from materials that are essentially domestically sourced. State of that research: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/generation-3-concentrating-solar-power-systems-gen3-csp-phase-3-project-selection https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/generation-3-concentrating... Baseload from natural gas derived from feedstock + PV + solar thermal with 12h storage + wind + massive transmission investment + corn->gasoline. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat.

joshe 4y ago

The quick answer is that we are not short of any of those materials. We might not be producing enough right now, but there's far more than enough that can be mined or recycled inexpensively. Increased prices will cause more mining and recycling, eventually the price will settle at the cost of production + something for profit. The something for profit is quite small, the coast for low risk capital is ~5% a year. There might be a 5-10 period when profits are high for miners, but eventually the profits will be competed away by new entrants. (Except if you have a mine that produces very cheaply because it is so rich or easy to operate, these people will stay high profit. The most expensive mines will just make back they're capital costs + return). You can see this with fracking which is horribly unprofitable. Hedge funds have lost billions over building fracking wells.

bobthepanda 4y ago
Right. Reserves are really just a measure of "things people bothered to look for at the current price." High prices can and do induce more searching. Part of the whole hullabaloo about "peak oil" is that people stopped looking for oil reserves in an environment with low oil prices. Once prices started rising you saw fracking come into play that regenerated areas previously thought dead for oil production.
- RobertoG 4y ago
  That's not the argument of peak oil. It's not about price or quantity of oil available in the planet. It's an argument about thermodynamics. The argument is that in order to extract oil, you need to spend energy, and, logically, the most easier oil to extract is extracted first. That means that oil extraction is every year more expensive (energetically not financially). Because technology can make extraction more efficient but not indefinitely, at some point, in order to extract oil, it will be necessary to spend the same energy than burning it creates. I suppose we could say that it's kind of an inversion of what's going on with fusion research. Some commenters say that we already pass that point and that's the reason oil companies CaPex have fall in the last years. I don't know if that's the case, but I can't avoid to ask myself about solar. Is the energy that a solar panel generate in its life enough for its normal use, plus extracting the minerals that it's made of, plus push the panel, through the ocean all the way from China? or are we fooling ourselves using oil for all that? I would like to see some numbers and expert discussion about that.
  - Yoric 4y ago
    If you can read French, this guy https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc_Jancovici https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Marc_Jancovici has published a lot of vulgarization on the topic - with numbers. If my memory of reading one of his books serves, fracking now costs 50% of the energy it produces (in addition to non-energy environmental impact, which is pretty large), up from ~10% for the easy oil we had ~50 years ago. Current-tech solar panels are in the same order of magnitude (again, not counting non-energy environmental impact). Nuclear energy has the highest yield. I seem to remember that coal is the worst, unless it's burnt at the point of extraction.

alexose 4y ago

> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. This may be true for certain products, but it's not broadly true. There's nothing intrinsic that requires solar panels, lithium ion batteries, or wind turbines to be manufactured using dirty energy.

01100011 4y ago
In most cases no(remember, hydrocarbons and the hydrogen produced by them are often industrial/chemical feedstocks for Si, lubricants, adhesives and polymers used in green mfg) so you're right. The problem is right now these things do indeed depend on dirty energy. You're basically making the same fallacious argument as politicians do now. In the long run, everything will be green. That's not the point. The point is how we get there. You can't ignore the present or the engineering involved to get to the future.
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production and use as we ramp up manufacturing and deployment of the systems needed for clean energy production, and then see a tapering off of the current production methods as the new ones come online. How did we get the first railroads built? By a combination of horses dragging materials so humans could lay the rail lines and then trains dragging materials as the initial lines were built. There was almost certainly an initial increase in horse power consumption, and then a decline as the new system came online. This isn't a new thing, this is how many replacement transitions that depend on the previous system play out.
  - 01100011 4y ago
    > We get there by a (very likely) short-term increase in current energy production Right. But right now we're incentivizing the opposite. We're telling fossil fuel companies we don't need them anymore long before we've actually figured out a way to live without them. Do you see the problem yet?

cesarb 4y ago

> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. Is that exclusive to green tech, or is it common to both green tech and non-green tech? If both need dirty energy, what matters is not green tech needing dirty energy, but only how much dirty energy it needs compared to non-green tech, both to produce and over its lifetime.

01100011 4y ago
It matters if you disrupt the dirty energy pipeline well before you've secured enough green energy to self-sustain a green energy future.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Every way to secure green energy requires some use of dirty energy. So the only choice is between dirty forever, and dirty decreasing. If the latter, the faster it decreases, the less dirty energy you use on the transition.
  - 01100011 4y ago
    Dirty forever isn't an option. Dirty is not renewable. We could decrease dirty energy usage to 0% right now. People would starve, quality of life would plummet, and we could direct our available green energy(hydro, nuclear, wind, solar, tidal, etc) to building out more green tech. Is that what you're advocating? I don't think so. So let us talk like engineers who need to make trade-offs to best achieve our goals. Cutting off dirty energy too soon hampers our green transition while needlessly killing people and lowering quality of life for those who don't starve or freeze to death.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      You very, very evidently did not read what you replied to. That appears to be a pattern. You could learn just by paying attention to what people took time out to explain to you. Go ahead, I can wait.

ip26 4y ago

It's perhaps naive and over-simplistic, but the s-curve is so well-established you can probably fit the production cost curve over time to the s-curve and get a useful prediction. There's lots of hard work that goes into making it happen, of course.

marcosdumay 4y ago
The s-curve has two important parameters, but looking at any amount of history before the first inflection you can only ever deduce one of them. So, how exactly to you intent to fit the renewables (that are pre-inflection) production curves into it?
- ip26 4y ago
  You are certainly right about renewables that are pre-inflection. I was thinking of solar and wind, which I understand are both in the steep part of the S curve.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > steep part of the S curve What part again? Are you claiming that their growth is linear?

FunnyBadger 4y ago

You are absolutely correct. Supply Chains are primarily fossil based and can NOT be substituted with low density sources like Green Energy or even electricity at all. For example, you can't efficiently make steel or most other metals with electricity alone. Even primarily electrically refined metals like copper or aluminum REQUIRE inputs that can not be made or refined or extracted with electricity. Often this is about chemical reductions that required carbon or other reductants that can't be effectively or efficiently made with electricity. The most obvious one is silicon - carbon reduction of SiO2 is the only and best efficient refining method (1st stage only - you need further far more energy intensive refining to make semiconductor-grade silicon). Recently brought up in Congress was questions of how petrochemicals are to be produced if the Green goal of eliminating oil is accomplished. Stuff like plastics. All sorts of things depend upon plastics and plastics require petrochemicals. The most obvious one is plastic sterilization aids and sterile materials like syringes, packaging for needles, etc. ALL 20th century medicine is largely destroyed without petrochemicals. Also all pharmaceuticals deeply depend upon petrochemicals. The respondent had no answer and she simply tried to resort to high-intensity angry BS. Clearly she'd never thought ANY of this through and didn't care because she was living off the anger of hating oil but knew nothing about how oil is used or how dependent all supply chains are on oil. You are underestimating the good faith of the political class. In fact, they are borderline psychopathic with high levels Dunning-Kruger delusion about the correctness of their decisions/beliefs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHk7S6prF6M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHk7S6prF6M The additional issue: PVs have finite lifespan. Lithium batteries have extremely finite lifespans. So you have to replace them and have ALL the supply chains to do that forever. Which are fossil fuel dependent at fundamental chemical/physical levels. So most of those supply chains can NEVER be made green. Green Energy is primarily a Cargo-Cult Religion not based on facts. That is a major problem because if you shutdown fossil fuels, we will end up with nothing - we will not even manage to have the levels of civilization and technology seen in the last 300-500 years. Basically a dark age.

01100011 4y ago
Jesus it's nice to read an informed comment on here. Yes, it's difficult to try to get these facts across to folks without them thinking you're a shill for big oil. It's especially sad/frustrating when people who claim to be engineers don't understand the engineering involved in the process of transitioning to green energy.

marcosdumay 4y ago

> It also has been benefiting from globalization which is now going in reverse. You mean countries applying tariffs to things? Or are you talking about the Russian aggression? Or is it about that speculation that reduced spending on the US navy will make other countries helpless against naval crime? Because the first two seem to have had no effect at all on solar panels production, and the third is a huge attention seeking non-sequitur.

dqpb 4y ago

> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce In theory, bootstrapping will eventually be complete.

ncmncm 4y ago
The stronger statement is true: as green energy becomes increasingly cheaper than dirty, industries will transition to clean wherever they can. New industry will start out using cheaper green, and green generation capacity is almost all new.
01100011 4y ago
Saying things like "Eventually" and "In 10 to 20 years" bypasses the important question of how to manage the transition while minimizing suffering, whether via starvation, economic disruptions, or continued negative climate effects. Personally, I'm not doubting that we will achieve a decarbonized and sustainable energy infrastructure. But that's not the point. The point is how will we get there, and are we being realistic about the challenges and requirements to effectively make the transition? Are we being realistic about the energy and materials needed to build our sustainable power generation and delivery network?

lancewiggs 4y ago

This is the approach that all the other forecasters have fallen into and that this article is trying to address. Just as many people thought the irrepressible growth of Internet data, processing power and memory would slow or cease, so is the case that continued investment into renewable power will continue to reduce costs. We don’t have to be the ones that say what technology or materials will be used, just to say that that industry, like ours, has it covered.

pfdietz 4y ago

The argument that this cannot work is making the argument that NO storage technologies will be good enough, not that just Li-ion batteries won't be good enough. There are thousands of different battery chemistries. It's an extremely strong claim that all will fail. And there are approaches beyond batteries that use only very common materials. For example, pumped thermal storage, where a reversible heat engine is used to separate heat and cold, then regenerate the work consumed by running off that temperature difference.

tuatoru 4y ago

> We're probably short of copper. While copper water pipes still have a market, I don't think we can claim to be short of copper.

01100011 4y ago
Copper prices are actually down quite a bit right now, but that may be due to previous hoarding in China coupled with economic slowdown and/or disruptions in their metals markets(see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-18/tycoon-running-a-quarter-of-china-s-copper-trade-is-on-the-ropes https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-18/tycoon-ru...). There are quite a lot of analysts claiming we will be short on copper once the green revolution gets under way(remember, you're talking billions of new EVs, generators, increases in electrical distribution, etc). Think about it this way: all the energy currently delivered by fossil fuels(more or less, due to some efficiency gains) will need to be delivered by the electrical network. We're also busy giving improved living standards to the half of the earth that still lives in less-than-modern conditions. We're going to need to use more aluminum(4th most common element in the crust?) or we're going to run out of copper.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  If copper price is down, that means we have too much copper, not too little.
  - tricky777 4y ago
    reading the post is essential. here is the bit adressing this: > that may be due to previous hoarding in China coupled with economic slowdown and/or disruptions in their metals markets
    - 01100011 4y ago
      If you look at the copper futures chart the current price is below a few peaks but it is still quite high, historically speaking. That is in the face of a real estate crash in China and impending global economic slowdown(a significant portion of which is due to energy malinvestment). On a related note, the majority of new home construction does not use copper these days(both for cost reasons and performance reasons).

opportune 4y ago

Green energy requires massive amounts of energy to produce. The more we electrify vehicles and the more green energy in the grid, the greener it becomes to produce green energy. I agree we need more manufacturing outside of Asia/developing countries, but the solution is definitely not to maintain the status quo of dirty energy just because we can’t make green energy under 100% ideal circumstances

legulere 4y ago

> Green tech requires massive amounts of dirty energy to produce. The energy payback time for photovoltaics is 1.2 years in north and less than 1 year in the south with such systems typically lasting longer than 20 years. https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/publications/studies/Photovoltaics-Report.pdf https://www.ise.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ise/de/documents/p... That is in line with energy return on investment of fossil fuels.

leetnewb 4y ago

I'd argue there are multiple concurrent paths to decarbonization, and the combination of continuing research plus market dynamics could lead us to different energy mix than this study attempts to estimate. Besides, I think the world is waking up to the importance of domestic supply chains. The U.S. blends a lot of ethanol into gasoline, but where does that feedstock go as the ongoing EV transition cuts away traditional consumption? Lot of energy potential there that can be used to synthesize carbon neutral fuels including kerosene, natural gas, and gasoline. Corn->carbon neutral natural gas seems like a reasonably agreeable process with the distribution network and consumers already in place. Meanwhile, solar thermal / concentrated solar is out of the limelight while research continues. Lots of interesting options when you can generate supercritical steam and provide battery-less storage, especially from materials that are essentially domestically sourced. State of that research: https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/generation-3-concentrating-solar-power-systems-gen3-csp-phase-3-project-selection https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/generation-3-concentrating... Baseload from natural gas derived from feedstock + PV + solar thermal with 12h storage + wind + massive transmission investment + corn->gasoline. There are a lot of ways to skin the cat.