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.

Comments

FUD

[mspohr]

Popular Mechanics? Idiots.
Solar panels don't use "rare earth" elements (and rare earth elements are not rare).

Re:FUD

[whoever57]

Indeed:
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1...

Re:FUD

[MobyDisk]

RTFA before trying to debunk it. The article and linked research explains what rare earth elements are, their respective rarities, which things use them, how much is used, and what they cost. Your comment adds nothing meaningful.

Re:FUD

[Zorpheus]

Does it talk about alternaives though?
Indium is used in the transparent conductor Indium Tin Oxide. There are alternatives, such as Aluminium tin Oxide. Not as good, but it will be used if we are running out of Indium.
And others already wrote that Neodymium is not needed for wind turbines. It is just a generator in there, it can be built in many different ways.

The dynamo in a wind turbine

[tepples]

Solar panels don't use "rare earth" elements

Not all renewable energy is photovoltaic. The dynamo in a wind turbine uses rare earth magnets.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[mspohr]

There’s a persistent myth about wind turbines that just won’t seem to go away despite reality running to the contrary: they need rare earth materials to generate electricity.
For those not acquainted with rare earths like neodymium and dysprosium, they’re used in products from your iPhone and computer to flat screen TVs and certain types of batteries.
While they can be difficult to mine, rare is a misnomer: they exist in abundance throughout the earth’s crust.
Many people think rare earths are also a necessary component of wind turbines, but the facts find otherwise: only about two percent of the U.S. wind turbine fleet uses them, and that number shouldn’t change much in the years to come.

https://www.aweablog.org/rare-...

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[jeff4747]

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.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[Shaitan]

You do realize this article is in fact an analysis of these materials and their accessible quantities and the determination that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH OF THEM for the demand required through 2050. Rare is a subjective term this is quantative analysis of what is actually there not guesswork based on the word "rare" which you are battling. Abundant within the Earth's crust isn't particularly meaningful, we can't get to all the earths crust by a long shot and not all of what we can get to is easily accessible or cheaply accessible and even if we can get to it easily and cheaply we can still only pull it out so fast.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[Shaitan]

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.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[PPH]

California has some 'rare earth' deposits worth considering. Seeing how they are pushing alternative energy so hard, lets bring on the strip mining.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[ProzacPatient]

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.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[mspohr]

Probably didn't consider this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/1...

Researchers have found hundreds of years' worth of rare-earth materials underneath Japanese waters — enough to supply to the world on a "semi-infinite basis," according to a study published in Nature Publishing Group's Scientific Reports.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[jeff4747]

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.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[thomst]

Shaitan remonstrated:

You do realize this article is in fact an analysis of these materials and their accessible quantities and the determination that THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH OF THEM for the demand required through 2050. Abundant within the Earth's crust isn't particularly meaningful, we can't get to all the earths crust by a long shot and not all of what we can get to is easily accessible or cheaply accessible and even if we can get to it easily and cheaply we can still only pull it out so fast.

The major problems with the supply of rare earths are:

1. Their ores most commonly occur intermixed with uranite, so refining them entails the production of radioactive waste, and
2. They are not yet commonly recycled.

There's no real getting around the radioactive waste issue (although, if widespread support for licensing and constructing new nuclear power plants develops over the coming decades, I expect that REE separation and refining operations will become a routine feature of any new uranite refining and processing plants). However, as demand ramps up, there are plenty of existing piles of uranite tailings that have not thus far been seen as economically viable sources of REE that I expect will eventually be processed for them, as prices continue to rise.

There're also bound to be large-scale efforts to extract REE ores from undersea deposits, the mining of which has thus far been considered unaffordable. Again, as scarcity (particularly of praseodymium and neodymium) drives their price up, it's inevitable that seabottom mines will become important new sources. Likewise, recycling REE from discarded tech devices will eventually become viable - and very likely mandatory.

And it's not as though the Dutch study's conclusions are exactly news. People who follow that sector are well aware that demand is already outstripping the available supply - and that disparity is swiftly growing.

The thing is, there's plenty of REE, especially in the deep crust and upper mantle. It's just expensive and difficult to extract. Increasing demand will take care of the former roadblock, and experience in deep mining eventually will reduce the latter to a manageable level.

But, yes. It's going to get expensive in here, RSN. Will that stop either the development of ever newer and more powerful consumer tech or that of green energy sources to replace fossil fuels?

Signs point to "No" ...

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[q_e_t]

Yes, everything at the bottom of the sea is absolutely trivial to get.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[Dragonslicer]

Yes, something that exists as 0.0033% of the crust isn't rare. We won't even get into the tiny fractions of a percent of that fraction of a percent that are actually in a position where mining is either economically or technologically possible. Or that governments wouldn't hold out and go to war over the resources when they even are able to be mined in an area.

"But, but, my non science based website says these elements aren't rare, even though the site owner probably cant spell Geologist or even mineral without resorting to a dictionary!"

The surface area of the Earth is 5*10^8 km^2. The USGS says the thickness of the crust is 30 km, so the volume is 1.5*10^10 km^3. At your percentage, that would be 5*10^5 km^3 of whichever rare earth metal you're talking about. Let's take neodymium as an example, with a density of 7 g/cm^3, or 7*10^12 kg/km^3. That would be a total of 3.5*10^18 kg of neodymium in the Earth's crust. If only one millionth of that is accessible, that would still be enough for every person on Earth to have their own MW-scale wind turbine.

Re:The dynamo in a wind turbine

[burni2]

Please, don't call it a dynamo :) call it a generator - dynamo reminds me too much of a bicycle.

• generators using rare earth magnets

But you are "mostly" wrong on the rare earth magnets, some wind turbines use them in so called permanent excited generators, were the permanent excitation comes from rare earth magnets. Those generators are also synchronous generators, all their electrical power output needs to be channeled through a frequency converter to make it grid compatible.

Rare earth magnets have a very high flux density making it possible to build very small and light generators -> saving on other materials.

• generators not using rare earth magnets

externally excited synchronous generators
For example wind power company Enercon is famous for using direct drive turbines with a huge multipole synchronous generator - but stator and rotor coils - as the name implies are made from copper and dynamo sheets

Also smaller generator designs are possible when using a gearbox to transform torque and rpm.

DFIG - no permanent excitation
The doubly fed induction generator is also generator type that uses no rare earths and it is the widely used(work horse of the wind power industry), stator and rotor are built from copper and "âZdynamo sheets"

In contrast to the synchronous generator the excitation is done externally by a frequency converter, thus only about 1/3 of the electrical power is channeled through the converter (it can be built smaller compared to the syn. gen case). However this type of generator cannot "jump start"(black boot) a grid as the frequency converter needs power to excite the generator.

And due to new developments in converter technology DFIGs are getting much attention again as this improved converter control makes it possible again that newer DFIG installations are compliant with newer grid codes (grid code specific requirement on grid connected power plants how to "behave" during grid faults and also normal operation)

squirrel cage - no permanent excitation
Newer concepts use a simple asynchronous generator with squirrel cage (short-circuited rotor) as this generator is really "simple simple".

All the electrical power is fed into a frequency converter that transforms it to grid compatible electrical power.

For such a generator to produce energy the stator needs to be connected to a "grid" provided by the frequency converter.

Well that settles it

[AlanObject]

I guess we should just call off all the green initiative stuff (hippy liberal anyway) and fire up more coal plants.

Re:Well that settles it

[Oswald McWeany]

I guess we should just call off all the green initiative stuff (hippy liberal anyway) and fire up more coal plants.

I'm buying all the beachfront property in Oregon for when it becomes the new tropical tourist hot-spot.

Re:Well that settles it

[mspohr]

Unfortunately, you beachfront property will be under water.

THE SKY IS FALLING

[wizkid]

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.

Of course

[jlowery]

They stopped teaching alchemy in schools ages ago, and now look where we are.

Have we run out of imagination as well?

[munch117]

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.

And there's a solution for this

[necro81]

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 not worried

[Dunbal]

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.

Basic assumption.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

1. The known reserves of these elements today, will be the same reserves we will have till 2050

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.

Re:You mean like peak oil?

[Oswald McWeany]

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.

Re:Duh!

[hublan]

I've been saying this for a decade. The conclusion didn't require a team of overpaid researchers to deduce.

And you can keep saying it for another decade and still be wrong. Up until recently there was no incentive to open up more rare earth mines because the Chinese were supplying everyone cheaply. But then they stopped and now rare earth mines are opening up, thus solving the supply issue. Amazing, eh?

Stop ignoring tidal and geothermal FTW

[Seven Spirals]

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.

Re:You mean like peak oil?

[mspohr]

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.

Nuclear, alternatives or space mining

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:You mean like peak oil?

[cascadingstylesheet]

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.

Re:100%

[mspohr]

Multiple studies have shown that 100% of energy needs can be met by renewables. We don't need fossil fuels.
Here's a few... try Google for more...
https://interestingengineering...
https://physicsworld.com/a/100...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

Re:Wow yes

[AvitarX]

It wasn't new and shiny. It was cheap.

It was known to be inferior, but thought to be good enough (it wasn't).

Re:Wow yes

[PPH]

aluminum - didn't work out too well.

It works just fine. Look up some time. All that stuff strung between the poles and transmission towers ... aluminum. So is the stuff underground. Even the larger service lines into your house are made of aluminum. Pretty much the only copper left is small wire (branch circuits from your panel) due to the higher cost of terminating aluminum properly.

Re:But this is impossible!

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.

Re:Wow yes

[Areyoukiddingme]

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.

Re:100%

[Areyoukiddingme]

Multiple studies have shown that 100% of energy needs can be met by renewables.

Then how come we aren't?

Because of rich guys in top hats smoking cigars, cackling with glee as the planet burns?

Inertia. The aforementioned rich guys in top hats, wearing monocles and smoking cigars, spent a ton of capital on coal plants. They want a return on their investment, and they're in a position to see to it that they get one.

You can expect 30 to 40 years of heavy resistance while they do everything in their considerable power to protect their investments. As the existing fleet of coal plants rust out and fail, resistance will decline. Also a good many of those rich guys are old. Resistance will decline as they literally die off. When their rich children take over the family business, they'll be building wind turbines, because it's cheaper and faster than building new coal plants to replace the old ones. Those rich children won't resist, since they won't need to.

Never underestimate the power of vast amounts of money. A fault these researchers indulged in as well, as others have pointed out.

Re:Wow yes

[thegarbz]

He already did, go out and look up your citation is there.

Aluminium wire has to be 1.5x the cross section of copper to carry the same current. At that size it is less than half the weight and it is why this metal is commonly used in power transmission and is exclusively used in high voltage overhead transmission.

We CAN do it.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

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.