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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?
I guess we should just call off all the green initiative stuff (hippy liberal anyway) and fire up more coal plants.
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-...
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.
They stopped teaching alchemy in schools ages ago, and now look where we are.
If you post it, they will read.
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.
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.
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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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.
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/...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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.
It wasn't new and shiny. It was cheap.
It was known to be inferior, but thought to be good enough (it wasn't).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
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.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
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!
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.
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.