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We Might Not Have Enough Materials for All the Solar Panels and Wind Turbines We Need, an Analysis Finds (popularmechanics.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Plenty of high-tech electronic components, like solar panels, rechargeable batteries, and complex circuits require specific rare metals. These can include magnetic neodymium, electronic indium, and silver, along with lesser-known metals like praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. These metals are mined in large quantities in countries around the world, and they make their way into the supply chains of all sorts of electronics and renewables companies.
A group of researchers from the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure determined how many of these important metals will be required by 2050 in order to make enough solar panels and wind turbines to effectively combat climate change. With plenty of countries, states, cities, and companies pledging to go 100 percent renewable by 2050, the number of both solar panels and wind turbines is expected to skyrocket. According to the analysis, turbines and solar panels might be skyrocketing a bit too much. Demand for some metals like neodymium and indium could grow by more than a dozen times by 2050, and there simply might not be enough supply to power the green revolution.
A group of researchers from the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure determined how many of these important metals will be required by 2050 in order to make enough solar panels and wind turbines to effectively combat climate change. With plenty of countries, states, cities, and companies pledging to go 100 percent renewable by 2050, the number of both solar panels and wind turbines is expected to skyrocket. According to the analysis, turbines and solar panels might be skyrocketing a bit too much. Demand for some metals like neodymium and indium could grow by more than a dozen times by 2050, and there simply might not be enough supply to power the green revolution.
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Because there will definitely be no breakthroughs in materials science or anything like that in the next 30 years and we're definitely going to be making bearings and motors and magnets and coils using the same stuff as today for sure./
Popular Mechanics? Idiots.
Solar panels don't use "rare earth" elements (and rare earth elements are not rare).
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Solar panels don't use "rare earth" elements
Not all renewable energy is photovoltaic. The dynamo in a wind turbine uses rare earth magnets.
I guess we should just call off all the green initiative stuff (hippy liberal anyway) and fire up more coal plants.
100% is not possible. Best estimate is renewables hit a wall at 20% of max capacity. We will still be using natural gas by 2050 that is a guarantee. Nuclear sure, hopefully we get over the psychology of it. Coal is DOA except of course in third world countries and China/India. Youth have been fed a pack of lies about this. By the time they are in their 40s and 50s they will wonder why they were lied to about the fake green revolution.
Details on the Evening news.
Note, as time goes on, we find better ways to build this kind of stuff. By 2050, it's likely we'll have more efficient systems, and we'll find ways to build this stuff with less rare-earth materials.
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
I've been saying this for a decade. The conclusion didn't require a team of overpaid researchers to deduce.
I can't hear you! LALALA!
FFS.
Nice to know "Doomsday is nigh!" pearl-clutching fools weren't created by Twitter.
Hubbert's prediction was that if things did not change and continued to follow the same pattern, oil production would peak and continue to decline.
Of course, things did change. New extraction technologies came into play. So he was not wrong.
They stopped teaching alchemy in schools ages ago, and now look where we are.
If you post it, they will read.
Yes, you are right â" mankind doesnâ(TM)t have the means to develop to materials to serve as analogs to other more expensive material or create new alloys or composites that outperform their more expensive counterparts. We are simply fucked. You should go kill your self so you donâ(TM)t have to endure the hell that lays ahead
There are so many different ways of building wind turbines. Neodymium and indium is used today because it's readily available. When it becomes scarce, we will come up with different designs. Or maybe we will just find new places to dig neodymium and indium out of the earth. This is not a real problem.
the oil or coal industry?
the crust of the earth is 20 miles thick.
the elements in use in fiber optics and magnets are not rare at all.
we've "barely scratched the surface"
there will be no shortages, it's impossible
Countries (and economies) who wish to stay strong in the "long term" will move to secure a strong supply chain and put in place sustainable energy initiatives.
Countries who wish to stay strong in the "short term" will focus on resources available today (or until the next election).
When you vote, make purchasing decisions, share political and social views etc, consider if you are interested in your countries long or short term?
It's always your choice.
I predict that when the coming resource crunch comes, if ever, the rising price of such-and-such raw material will rise enough that an alternative will emerge. Neodymium too costly? You can make a perfectly good electric generator using other magnets or inductance. Indium too expensive? Well, perhaps we won't use as many CIGS solar panels, and instead stick with silicon.
And, who knows, we'll probably be prospecting asteroids by 2050. If the cost for certain materials on earth is high enough, there may be a business case for it. Indium costs about $5/gram presently, or $5M/tonne. If there's a resource crunch and the cost goes up, say, 5-fold, perhaps someone will have enough incentive to mine asteroid indium for $25M/tonne.
I'm pretty sure if we can mill grain and pump out seawater using canvas, wood, hemp and stone, we'll figure something out. These materials are not required for alternative energy production. They're required for efficient alternative energy production. What we lose is efficiency. OK, build more. Or even better, stop making babies.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I think Nuclear still is a very good option. So far, there've been very few casualties due to nuclear energy, whereas the ,current means of power generation do a lot of pollution, and killing many, many people everyday.
The most obvious alternative would be uranium reactors, but uranium is scarce with many people being exploited over that scarcity. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1ym46pnSK0 )
2. The known techniques and cost for extracting them today, will be the same till 2050
3. Similar study done in 1868 would have concluded there is not enough oil in Pottsville, PA to replace coal as a major source of fuel
4. Similar study done in 1750 would have concluded there is not enough coal to replace whale oil as a fuel for lighting
5. Similar study done in 1550 would have concluded the known reserves of whales and the cost of extracting oil from their blubber would be prohibitive and wax candles will be used forever for lighting.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
We were supposed to reach that 25 years ago or so. So I'm not holding my breath. Besides: what about recycling? Do that correctly, including taxes for electronics that go faulty too fast and you've fixed some of the problems with resources.
We did hit a "peak oil" in that it became increasingly more expensive to extract oil- but then new technologies pushed the slide back a little. We will probably see several mini-peaks where what's available becomes harder to extract and more expensive, and then new technology comes along that will make it cheaper again.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I'm certainly not going to start shorting my oil picks any time soon.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
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Surprise?
In this capitalist economy, with lobby-ensured low energy prices (all real cost having been pushed to externalities) -- what happens? We just waste energy. Because insulation, efficiency, less transport, all that *costs money* (the other just costs lives, but hey -- what's other's lives worth?).
For a real change we'll either (a) have to kill capitalism or (b) raise the energy prices noticeably.
I'd be with (a), but would take (b) before nothing.
Last time I checked digging a hole in the ground didn't require any rare Earth metals. There are places where you don't even have to dig down very far to be able to create steam. I know that not all areas are suitable (swamp might be tough for example), but it seems like the real miracle technology we need right now isn't just some cheap form of producing energy it's more that we need a cheap way to *store* it and *move* it. Liquid fuels provide tremendous energy density and are pretty ideal other than their CO2 issues. So, I wish that the efficiency of tech to convert CO2 to wood alcohol (running a fuel cell "backwards") would improve or something like that would emerge. Imagine building a solar farm in the desert but then using trucks, trains, or pipelines to move liquid fuels anywhere they are needed. Tidal power also seems like an easy win, but I'm no energy scientist or mechanical engineer; so I realize I'm just wishing and speculating.
The stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones.
The oil age will not end because we run out of oil.
The oil age will end because we have better, cheaper sources of energy and we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Does anybody really NEED solar panels and wind turbines?
I thought we got to this point in history after millennia of world events without either.
Relax. We will be fine.
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All perfectly doable if we can just stop fighting among ourselves and spending 1/3 of our entire civilization's output on war and war profiteering.
Also, human population is in decline where ever you find significant technical civilization. Assuming we don't regress (which, don't get me wrong, a not insignificant portion of humanity wants to) then it's a problem that will solve itself. People don't actually breed uncontrollably if they've got options. Japan, Singapore and now the US with their declining birthrates prove that.
Folks mostly have a ton of kids as a kind of makeshift retirement program and between automation and productivity increases we just aren't going to need the vast labor pool we used to. We are going to need a way to distribute the wealth from the bots an A.I.s. Either that or we're going have have a dystopia where the 1% have everything and the rest of the world looks like a mix of Ethiopia, Somalia and the worst years of the American Indian Reservations.
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We were supposed to reach that 25 years ago or so. So I'm not holding my breath. Besides: what about recycling? Do that correctly, including taxes for electronics that go faulty too fast and you've fixed some of the problems with resources.
We did hit a "peak oil" in that it became increasingly more expensive to extract oil- but then new technologies pushed the slide back a little. We will probably see several mini-peaks where what's available becomes harder to extract and more expensive, and then new technology comes along that will make it cheaper again.
So, in other words, we didn't hit peak.
Well, the submission's position was related to skyrocketing. The future is organic! Organic solar panels, organic wind turbines..
I remember when they were predicting lithium shortages for EVs. Didn't happen. It may be that environmentalists have to decide which of their loathed pollutions to live with: byproduct of magnet materials or carbon, but the materials can be obtained if not outlawed.
... unobtainium.
Quantity was most certainly implied by pointing out the long list of cheap man made materials that are produced in vast quantaties that have replaced and/or surpassed their more expensive natural counterparts. Or was that just too huge a stretch for your pointy little head to make? And I take no blame for slashdot being too incapable of properly dealing with the text being sent by millions of modern devices. Thatâ(TM)s their failing
I think they mean "Environmental Revolution."
The Green Revolution, or Third Agricultural Revolution, is a set of research and technology transfer initiatives occurring between 1950 and the late 1960s, that increased agricultural production worldwide, particularly in the developing world, beginning most markedly in the late 1960s
There countries actually working on the problem.
https://spaceresources.public....
whats next, clean coal ? lmao. Sure it works its safe. its when it breaks or something goes wrong. You get another Chernobyl
If we can make mirrors we can make solar plants that use molten salt (which can work for baseline as it continues to produce energy after the sun sets).
And they look awesome!
https://gbtimes.com/asias-firs...
BlameBillCosby.com
There will be high levels of innovation to drive down cost/find more efficient ways to design said solar panels and wind turbines.
2050 is in 32 years. Enough said.
I tend to rant.
Silicon Dioxide is all over the place! Most abundant stuff on earth. We also have a lot of aluminum which is easy to recycle.
Lithium might be an issue for a while until we adapt... as we did in history. Recycling will eventually be the future. Rare magnets are NOT at all required for generators; or electric motors for that matter; it's not the end... maybe of cheap Chinese neodymium which might even be found as cheaply elsewhere.
Besides, all these matters are usually about CHEAP easy sources running out taking us away from the peak low price -- possibly forever but it doesn't prohibit the use of it until it becomes crazy expensive... which usually creates a stronger market drive to deliver it (with proper competition, bringing prices down.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I'm pretty sure people have been pointing this out for quite a while, and also pointing out the environmental impact of mining for this stuff.
This is something I've been aware of for years, how is this possibly news?
Or has the idiocy of the stock market which demands impossible and unsustainable growth spilled over into reality?
Of course we're resource constrained, there's only so much on this planet before we run out, that's kind of the point.
See? Donald Trump knew this all along and that's why he's opening up the way for more coal production. I would even go so far as to say that he's a very stable genius. Randy thinks so too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, because not all plants are equivalent to Chernobyl.
Modern, safer reactor designs are absolutely an integral part of combating climate change and divesting ourselves of fossil fuels.
I don't think design is the problem so much as regulatory and public resistance. The US navy uses two reactors rated at ~500MW on each Nimitz class carrier. Setting one of these up near a large body of water for cooling would be a trivial matter; these are already mounted in a ship. The Navy has plenty of retired personnel quite knowledgeable in the operation and maintenance of these and thus far their operational history is without incident. I don't think widespread nuclear adoption is a difficult task from an implementation standpoint.
Whoosh!
I expect that in the 32 years prior to 2050, if our supply of "rare earths" becomes an issue then we'll either find a way to create them artificially or find alternative elements or methods that don't require them.
But there will be plenty of SJWs we can recycle for energy.
This is asinine. Like explaining why we would never get to the moon. It was once stated we would never get there because the most powerful product by mass many years ago was dynamite. So if you could control the explosion of dynamite, the energy produced would not be enough to get to the moon because of the mass of the fuel itself.
Ya, stupid. We can also move to mass transit. Make computers that are more powerful per watt, etc.
:"A group of researchers from the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure determined how many of these important metals will be required ..." I'll bet just as many as are "required" today. I speek a good english, two.
Even if the oil age ends, hydrocarbons will still likely rule, as the safe, simple and efficient and cost effective fuel for decades to come. We'll just figure out more and more ways to make it cleaner and carbon neutral.
Solar -> electricity + co2 + h2o -> metane or Biomass -> biodiesel are good methods of putting reducing the CO2 load on the atmosphere by closing the cycle.
Yeah, it would be terrifying to have a Chernobyl happening every day, wouldn't it? I mean, that would mean that nuclear power would produce almost as many fatalities as New York City traffic does....
Assuming a Chernobyl every day, of course. If we had TWO Chernobyls daily, we'd have almost as many nuclear-related fatalities as New York City AND Los Angeles traffic deaths produce.
Note, by the by, that the New York City traffic deaths produce more fatalities every decade produce more fatalities then nuclear power has in all of history, even if you include Hiroshima and Nagasaki as "nuclear power related deaths".....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
There was an episode where the characters started getting scurvy. The Professor said they needed to eat more citrus fruits to get enough vitamin C. Hilarity ensues when they realize there's an orange shortage on the island. Later, they find lemons and grapefruit on the island, so all ends well.
We have been promised perpetual growth.
And we shall have it! It's a big universe out there. At a critical point we can expand our biomass outward faster than the speed of light.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Check.
Stop worrying.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Can't we send a 3D printer to the Asteroid Belt or the center of the Earth to make solar panels and send them to us?
Can't we just make solar panels out of coal . . . ?
We seem to have enough of that now, that nobody wants.
And think of the brilliant irony, of former coal miners now producing solar panels.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The oil age will end because we have better, cheaper sources of energy and we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
Ideally, yes. Running out of oil is not an impossibility in the end.
Who cares. We're going to go extinct regardless and sooner is always better than later. Stop procrastinating!
Hubbert talked about oil production basins, and was pretty accurate in his analysis.
And that's the problem with all of these "the sky is falling and there's not enough" studies - they assume that status quo technologies and manufacturing will continue even as the economic realities around them change. Few of these materials are the *only* way to build PV or wind generators. They're just the best balance at the moment given prices and engineering goals. If you move the prices around (higher), the engineers may move on to a different way of doing things, or more mining capacity may be developed, or recycling materials that previously were junked may become feasible, etc.
Worried? Not at all. We'll figure this out.
Progress is inevitable. My first computer had only 64kb. If you don't believe me think of this: people once said that humans would never fly.
"The current global supply of several critical metals is insufficient to transition to a renewable energy system." So, demand for rare earth minerals will go up, increasing the odds that mining for such minerals will increase. "The list of environmental concerns that can be connected with rare earth elements is not a brief one." So... is the huge push for 'green' energy going to end up being as big of a problem for the environment as global oil production has been? (Consider that there are, already in nature, creatures that break down oil, but there are none that consume and render inert, rare earth metals.) https://www.metabolic.nl/publi... http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/...
Just like many things, "peak oil" is right around the corner. Better make your bets now before you are too late!
Progress is inevitable. My first computer had only 64kb. If you don't believe me think of this: people once said that humans would never fly.
I can't fly.
Yep. What was not accurate was the folks who took his work and tried to predict the end of the world.
The stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones.
The oil age will not end because we run out of oil.
The oil age will end because we have better, cheaper sources of energy and we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
Peak Oil wasn't about running out of oil though- the theory said we would hit a point where we could no longer get oil cheaply and it would become increasingly expensive.
We stopped using whale blubber for lighting our lamps long before we ran out of whales. If we do indeed hit a point where oil starts becoming more expensive for a long period of time- that would make alternatives that are too expensive now, suddenly look cheaper by comparison.
We're probably at least a couple of decades away from oil no longer being dominant- (I'm only stopping at a couple of decades because anything longer than that is impossible to predict- who knows what technology will be discovered).
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
The world will only be able to ignore the elephant in the room for so long. But, eventually, as the world gets to the point where most people die wallowing in their own excrement like bacteria, it will finally click that we are OVERPOPULATED.
We need to reduce the world population by 80% in order to sustain ourselves, but nobody has the political will to do it.
Mandatory sterilization after one child. That's what we need. But, nobody will do it.
I found the #MAGAtard.
The stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones.
The oil age will not end because we run out of oil.
The oil age will end because we have better, cheaper sources of energy and we need to stop burning fossil fuels.
You forget that oil is not just fuel. It is a very versatile raw material we can't do without.
Dr. Tim Ball has the solution bruh! Duh bruh! Like duh! Look him up, bruh! Duh bruh!
Then get the nuclear reactors going. There's time.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Your computer probably still has 64kb too.
Part of the green revolution has to be an understanding that we don't replace one widget in the whole system. Solar panels are obviously not an in-place solution for fossil fuels everywhere they're used. This shouldn't deter us from making changes, because there's plenty of opportunity for other solutions.
For example, I'm often cooking my meals on a solar oven lately. Like the GoSun ovens out there, this thing reflects sunlight from a parabolic trough, onto a vacuum-insulated glass tube which has heat-absorbing elements behind the glass and vacuum. It's quite effective. It easily hits 280 degrees on a typical sunny day in the southern US. Let's break that down -> sunlight, concentrated, stored, directly used, without conversion. Because there's no flame, I just load it up and walk away for a half-hour. It's as convenient as a microwave, with just a bit of patience, and the food tastes great.
Friends of mine ask if it wouldn't be better to use solar panels to drive an electric slow cooker. Well, in that case, the energy conversions are radiant light -> electricity -> heat, via induction. The costs mount up pretty quickly. It's far more expensive, hardly more convenient, and way more impactful.
Most of our energy usage is in heating or cooling something. When we get more direct and sensible with how to do that in an environmental setting, it can be as simple as controlling the flow of sunlight, reflecting or absorbing passive heat, controlling shades and ventilation. You can get really far with just a soil berm like on the north side of an Earthship built in the northern hemisphere - just a pile of dirt moved into the right place.
So no, there's not enough rare earth to do things in a specifically wasteful and narrow way, but there's plenty of opportunity to use more appropriate technology, primitive or advanced, to solve our problems.
what do you want? no carbon? build fission. build lots of fission. by the time they need refueling fusion will be online. problem solved.
Or just plant trees. Gad! What a lot of nervous Nancy's.
Why? Is there a price ceiling on these metals that prevents the market from reaching equilibrium? Or does the shortage have some other cause?
I have a strong suspicion that the author doesn't understand economics well enough to read a demand curve.
Why is this important? Maybe there are alternative designs which aren't currently used much because they are more expensive, and if demand for the traditional metals pushes the price up, suddenly the alternatives become economical.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
The problem with a daily Chernobyl is that an area of 30 Manhattans would be made uninhabitable each day. In 57,000 days there'd be no land left to live on.
Enough iron has already been produced to put an arrowhead through the heart of every person now living. And that's just as relevant to humanity as the danger of future Chernobyls are.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
We did not have enough coal to power industrial revolution - and somehow we kept digging.
I get (sort of) why solar panels require exotic materials. There's some complex stuff going on to change light into electricity. But why do windmills need anything fancy? Aren't they basically just giant hand cranks, powered by the wind instead of by a human hand?
The population is going to be severely reduced in the future, we don't need that many energy sources. You do not seriously think that 8 billion air breathers deserve to keep on existing, do you?
ThatÃ(TMNT)s sexist
Crystalline silicon solar panels are by far the most common type. They require no rare elements. They are made out of silicon and boron as a dopant. Silicate rock is about 80% of the earth's crust. The amount of boron needed in such a solar cell is about 1 part per 10,000, which is lower than its abundance in undifferentiated crust. At present, silver is used for electrical contacts in solar cells, but it could easily be substituted with aluminum with only a very minor loss of efficiency. Aluminum is approximately 8% of the earth's crust. The supposedly "rare earth" elements are about as common as copper. Except we have been mining copper at about 100x the rate of rare earths, and have been mining copper on a massive scale for more than a century, and we haven't hit peak copper yet and are nowhere near it. Many wind turbines do not use any rare earth elements anyway, but use induction magnets instead. We have enough material to cover the terrestrial surface of the Earth in a miles-deep layer of solar panels, which obviously would be useless because only the top layer could generate electricity. Furthermore, the silicon, boron and aluminum used to make those panels are not being "used up" at any rate. The elements do not disappear after being used, and could be re-mined even if they had not been recycled. There may be temporary shortfalls of some rare earth minerals in the future. It will be accompanied by opening new mines and using obvious substitutes which are only slightly worse.
Either you're not fapping hard enough, or not jumping off a tall enough building first.
If you only had 64k, you'd have to work harder at it.
"not fapping hard enough"
Paging Dr. Freud...
Can't we just make solar panels out of coal . . .
Out of carbon? Yes we can. A company has, for several years, been making them of carbon nanotubes and non-rare, not-particularly-toxic, not-silicon, nanodiode arrays.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Weâ(TM)ll probably bollocks the planet in the quest for said materials.
... there have been many recent developments finding replacements for rare earth metals in solar panels and other technologies.
Besides that, there's this:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/12/japan-rare-earths-huge-deposit-of-metals-found-in-pacific.html
Solar panels don't need anything but silicon, glass, and dopants. Sure ITO makes the panels "better" but you don't "need" it for the basic function.
Silicon is dirt cheap, as it's a main constituent of dirt, we aren't gonna run out. Sure, purifying it is a bit expensive, but that's not because the resource is expensive (it's dirt!).
I tried to tell people. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
If you assume that you need to cover all current demand for electricity (and more due to growth), then you're massively over-complicating things. Renewables can often be used directly. Renewables and fossil fuels lead to very different usage patterns as well.
For instance, instead of installing excess solar capacity for heating we can get most of our heating from direct solar flux, and use insulation and building materials that absorb heat to make the most of the available energy. For cooling, we can vent hot air as it conveniently separates from cooler air automatically. Obviously, this doesn't cover 100% of our energy needs, since we may be run out of solar energy after many cold, cloudy days, and these problems get worse at latitudes that get less sunlight. That said, the energy required to cover this gap is far lower than replicating our current fossil fuel system using renewables. All the energy generated through direct use is energy that doesn't have to be generated through solar panels and wind turbines, and direct use definitely doesn't require any rare earth metals.
All high energy household applications can be replaced with direct solar when it's available. Heating water with solar is well-trodden territory. Dryers can be replaced by hanging clothes on clotheslines. The sun can light the indoors during the day, and with modern LED lighting the remaining time doesn't really require that much energy. If energy really needs to be cut down, then solar cooking can take over for gas and electric, but at this point we're hitting diminishing returns.
Of course, this isn't quite as helpful in extremely northern climes, and we'll need to stop building such terribly inefficient homes and living such terribly inefficient lifestyles. However, most people live close enough to the equator for this to cover most of our energy needs, and the colder countries can import solar, use geothermal and hydropower, or build local wind and nuclear to cover the difference. They also still benefit, just less so.
In terms of industry, there's a lot more industries that are harder to make renewable. Insanely high temperatures, electricity being consumed directly, warm up and cool down cycles and chemical reactions that take a long time, carefully controlled environments, high labor and capital costs that need to be made the most of, etc. That said, industry can adapt to renewables (ideally using energy sources directly), and at least in manufacturing the finished products themselves are a form of energy storage (the energy you used to produce them doesn't need to be spent when energy is scarce).
For instance, why run a factory 24/7 if you only have energy 12/7? Running 24/7 makes sense in a fossil fuel world because you get more use out of your capital investments, and there's no need to warm-up and cool-down the factory if it's running continuously, but it's not the end of the world to have to do these things in most industries. This situation will continue to improve as computers and software improves, as we can use computer control to cope better with the complexities of manufacturing using intermittent power (with buffers and forecasts). We can also turn off many factories completely for several days in very low energy situations, such as multiple cloudy days in a row, so we can ensure that energy is available to homes.
Of course, much like homes this doesn't cover every possible industry. Some domain-specific high energy processes cannot be reasonably halted or require extremely precise environmental control over a long time, or the costs of halting may be extremely high or safety critical for a variety of reasons. These specific cases require a lot less energy to cover than all industry, and in some cases they may want to shut down for the winter if they're especially likely to run into issues. For critical industries that need to be 24/7/365, they can use base load or stored energy.
As we move more towards service and information oriented industries, the situation gets even better, as peopl
He's stupid anyway. It's Helium 3 that's supposedly on the moon and it's already being mined by nazis. Tritium is at the bottom of the ocean which you already said is a piece of cake.
Just go to the hardware store and buy the parts that are needed. Stupid dumbasses
You get asked because you're playing the Cheerleader. So if you don't want everyone to ask you questions, shut the fuck up. Otherwise cheerlead harder, shill. Sell your product.
Which negates the problems of mining them up, as well as their scarcity. Fudders whine that the renewables have a short shelf life then in other studies pretend they last forever...
Either it is used to heat the sidewalk and we need to produce 100W of energy elsewhere which then turns into 100W of extra heat OR we use that 100W that was heating the sidewalk to then do work that then goes back into 100 of heat.
100+0=100
100+100=200
Remember, 200 is HIGHER than 100.
If gold is 8% of the mass, then surely 92%, or thereabouts, of the cost of mining is in mining the rocks, yes? It MUST be by YOUR accounting. So I guess rock is hella expensive, then, yes?
Fucking moron.
No, if you were mining gold anyway, then the cost of the silver extraction is the marginal cost of sifting the silver out. That isn't free, but it's not the cost of mining.
No, we did hit peak oil. Texas hit it in the late 70s. UK (North Sea) hit it in the 2000s. Remember all the whining winging and bitching about the price of petrol? Peak oil, fuckwit.
Just testing - how should mister be bothered to use ASCII characters, and how should one know it should use them, whatever they are. Can I not just type with my keyboard the characters I need? Is there some magiq needed?
Testing: Donâ(TM)t / Wonâ(TM)t / Canâ(TM)t / Donât / Won`t
When oil is burned, you don't have oil any more. It's gone. When you make a turbine out of rare earths, you still get to keep the rare earths.
ASCII? WTF century is this??
News flash: it's a WORLD-Wide Web; the 'A' in ASCII stands for 'American'
*sigh* And the moderators prove that they are retarded cunts!
"One possible solution is if we start learning to recycle. Many electronic devices today aren’t recycled in any way; instead, they show up in landfills nearly untouched. If we started recycling more high-tech components, perhaps we could actually have enough rare metals to go around by 2050."
-or- them devices could be upgradable morely. example: instead of making batteries non-removable, make it a component on a frame that can be replaced (recycled) independently, etc. the "ugly phone" paradigm.
-or- mandate that manufacturers that increment new features capitalistically have to take back the obsoleted device (for recycling) without penalizing the buyer for it.
So, in other words, we didn't hit peak.
On other words: we are at peak already. Or do you see an increase in oil production?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima caused each about half a million death. ... it is 10 years). NY has what? 12 million inhabitants?
You want to tell us you have half a million or more people dying in NY traffic over a decade (perhaps you don't know what a decade is?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I was wondering why all the funny looks when I dressed up as a ghost for my last two weeks of work...
"I'lllll beeee leeaving sooooon! Boo!"