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I'm just paraphrasing (likely poorly) Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux. He wrote a ~1000 page report on this. I assume he understands tho

• Schroedingersat 4y ago
  A report which contains delightfully scientific assumptions such as: - All solar panels are thin film or polysilicon from the late 2000s - All wind and solar stations are the same size as an average pulled from a single report and "number of power stations" is a metric that matters. - You need to put energy in a 4 week buffer of 6 year old NMC811 batteries which use double the lithium of a new one (along with nickel and cobalt even though noone would pay more for a battery that is worse at grid storage than LFP, and other chemistries have been scaling since before he started writing this) before putting it in a car battery, and this is more likely than just convincing most EV owners to leave their cars plugged in when parked by offering a discount. - You need to put energy in the same battery before electrolysing hydrogen with it for transport or feed stock. - Air conditioning must be able to run during cloudy days in the middle of the night in hot regions backed by the same obsolete NMC battery storage. - All heating must be backed by batteries and not thermal storage. - It's impossible to build pantographs, rail, or LEVs. - That all EVs and Electric motorbikes in india, africa, and southeast asia will be long range US/EU style with built in batteries rather than the already popular battery swap systems for bikes and LEVs. - Some incoherent mess where km/kWh is used interchangeably with kWh/km and then drivetrain and motor losses were added to get battery capacity for EVs when that was already based on their range for some reason and then multiplied by distance travelled and then thrown away. - All shipping can only run on NMC batteries or fuel cells, and refuelling or recharging at a floating platform near one of the many areas with world class solar or wind resource you pass is less likely than giving up 75% of your cargo space for battery on short trips just in case you need to do a 25000km trip. - Meeting demand during off season can be achieved with chemical storage alone, and not by curtailing loads that are added for that purpose such as electrolysers and multi-month thermal storage. - Improving electrolysers or using CSP to run them or running them in good climates and transporting ammonia is impossoble. - Burning any amount of that ammonia you made or any amount of fossil fuel gas in the turbines you already have as a last resort is impossible, even if only for a few tens of hours a year. - All storage must be battery, and using the existing hydro production for dispatch or any of the 1000s of TWh of undeveloped PHES sites is impossible. - 0% of variability in demand can be met with long distance transmission. - The 50% of the planet that lives within transmission distance of cloudless deserts cannot tap them for CSP+thermal storage that is available 8000 hours a year. And on top of that, the report completely rejects the idea that a nuclear fleet could meet the required power in any reasonable timescale on similarly shaky grounds. So even if we believe it, you're still completely wrong. Unless, of course the conclusion you're trying to push is to delay the transition for a century on the faulty premise that adding renewables achieves nothing.
• defrost 4y ago
  FWiW and just as a note, I'm ~60, have written several million SLOC of exploration geophysics code, first worked in a mine at 16, have an engineering ( and math and Comp Sci ) degree, and put together that global registry of mineral resources with a few others I know, most of whom are mining engineers, geologists, etc. In the course of tracking resources we'd find ourselves dealing with four to five 300 - 2,000 page technical reports for each resource across several thousand companies spanning the globe. Come Annual report and quarterly report filing times we'd also have to deal with each company dropping several hundred pages of report and finnacials. Prior to onselling that business to S&P some 15+ years ago we sold mineral intelligence to most of the large players in the mineral exploration and production game, from Rio Tinto and BHP down. While I still have a large contact list I must say I've never spoken to or heard of Associate Professor of Mining Engineering Simon Michaux in Finland ... although I did visit Finland several decades back and was given a nice SAKO rifle system for efficiently finding a target drum of nuclear waste in a forest from 80m altitude in a two second window at 70m/sec. Still, a great many people have written about and modelled the boom | bust dynamics of mineral exploration and production and time to life of mining operations and their retirement, etc ... specially those large organisations do this on daily basis.