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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.
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?
The dynamo in a wind turbine currently uses rare earth magnets.
FTFY.
Neodymium magnets are used to make the generators smaller and a little more efficient. We already have other materials that will do the job, it will just be larger or a little less efficient. And if neodymium ends up being the bottleneck, well we'll get to figure out more about magnetism since we'll have a huge incentive for an alternative.
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.
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
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?
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.
Or we could just... build nuclear. Wind kills birds and disrupts air currents in the same manner that harvesting tidal energy or damming falls does. These technologies significant impact existing natural energy flows with consequences that in some cases we likely don't even know about yet. The same is probably true of suddenly sucking up all that light energy which should be reflecting around and warming things over a huge portion of the Earth's surface.
Nuclear on the other hand isn't harnessing and disrupting any energy flow the natural landscape has spent the last few billion years evolving around. Maybe instead of sucking up and getting over the reductions in convenience a reduced energy lifestyle brings we need to suck up and get over "not in my backyard" syndrome.
whats next, clean coal ? lmao. Sure it works its safe. its when it breaks or something goes wrong. You get another Chernobyl
California has some 'rare earth' deposits worth considering. Seeing how they are pushing alternative energy so hard, lets bring on the strip mining.
Have gnu, will travel.
I always felt nuclear was the true green energy. Unfortunately since enthusiasm about nuclear has cooled down and the paranoia created by Chernobyl and three mile island it seems like we'll never get to the next generation of reactors that can use all the "spent" rods we've been piling up. Even if there was no hope of ever being able to re-use the spent rods then at least they could be buried deep inside the Yucca mountain range underground where.. y'know.. the uranium came from to begin with; underground.
They fail to recognize the fact that there are constantly new sources of these elements being discovered and there are good substitutions for all of them.
Oh goodness. I'm sure they didn't think of that at all.
LOL. Uh, no. You'll have to provide some pretty hefty citations and facts to back up that ludicrous bunch of baloney.
Really? You're that lazy? And also ignorant? So... you're stupid. From fucking Wikipedia:
The bare wire conductors on the line are generally made of aluminum (either plain or reinforced with steel, or composite materials such as carbon and glass fiber)..
Or you could just look at the fucking pictures, since you're too stupid to read:Sample cross section Carbon Core.
Idiot.
it seems like we'll never get to the next generation of reactors
Good.
Take a look at the history of the "next generation of reactors". They never quite live up to the hype. For example, pebble beds didn't turn out so good when they were actually built. And that pattern repeats itself over and over again.
Also, you're kinda glossing over the teeny-tiny problem of nuclear weapons proliferation if we're all supposed to start using breeder reactors.