Hi Jerome, I realize this is dredging up old work but I’m keen to be pointed in the direction that assuages concerns over mineral and metal intensity of renewables and potential bottlenecks or unwanted unforeseen externalities (DRC cobalt and uygher polysilicon come to mind). To be clear I’m an (optimistic) worrier and genuinely curious
Thanks for your message, it's a very relevant question - and I don't have a definitive answer.
Amongst things I do note:
- there's actually very little in terms of renewables technology that is durably dependent on a single resource or bottleneck. Some items have become visible, but they could be substituted by other materials or technologies is someone played "games" with them (for instance, rare earths have been mentioned in relation to the direct drive technology for wind turbines, and that is cornered by China, but: (i) you can still do magnets with other materials (just a little less good - but the loss is measured in small % of cost or performance, in an industry that moves every year anyway, not in the whole industry collapsing), (ii) you can still do geared wind turbines that don't need magnets.
- China has cornered a lot of the basic building blocs (like solar panels, a lot of the processing of metals and other raw materials), but that's a problem for every single industry, not just for renewables (check how most basic pharmaceutical compounds are now manufactured in China because it's cheaper - Europeans and others have kept the high value added industrial processes but do not control the low value added stuff, which is not a problem until China makes it one).
- renewables are a lot more decentralized and diversified in general - if something is missing, you just try another solution. I don't see any durable bottleneck yet. Batteries seems to be the issue of most focus - but that's because of the car batteries, not so much the electrical storage needs for the grid, which will be smaller.
It seems to not be a short term problem and not a long term one, but maybe it is a medium term one... Maybe that's just another wya to say "I don't know"
Thanks a lot for a great article again. One thing I don't really understand about the nuclear crowd is, if we assume it's actually a good solution, how do they see it working in practice?
* Looking at France, there are 56 of them with a population of 67 million, so about 1.2 million people per plant
* So a rough approximation for 8 billion people on the planet now would be over 6000 new plants
* of course, a plant is not a plant, depends on the capacity, and this influences price
* but is a ballpark number of 100 trillion $ right now an unreasonable estimate?
Who can afford to do that and wait 15 years to see the results? Could we physically accomplish that even? At best we can do it slowly over decades, so why invest first in the slowest and most expensive possible solution? Even if we can't do without it, you can always build it last.
one note: for developing and poor countries even renewables are expensive. they often use coal (if at all) because they can dig up the coal there so it comes out cheaper despite the extensive ecological damage and widespread health problems. in fact, access to cheap credit for developing countries so they could transition away from fossil fuels is one of the real problems countries are facing.
assuming that in developing countries they're magically going to find the money to invest in nuclear power plants as well as the necessary infrastructure and training of personnel is a pure pipe dream.
you can look at India and Pakistan for this -- they've had nuclear tech for 5-6 decades, yet they're heavily invested in fossil fuels.
Well, I would not want to make the error of the wind critics and look only at the end point to make it look worse than it sounds. 6000 nuclear plants seems scary (when there's only a few hundred operating on the planet) so looking at a reasonable build-up to replace existing aging plants and build new capacity would lead to (slightly) more realistic yearly numbers for GW and investment.
But as you say, it seems difficult these days to build a new nuclear plant in less than 10 or even 15 years in the West, and the cost is really hard to narrow down, so most of it will come very late anyway. As the French and UK experience proves, you're not going to order tens of new plants if you can't built the first one.
The reality is that very few new plants will get built and the question is largely irrelevant anyway.
This is interesting, and gets to some of the central psychological points.
Myself I'm a worrier. Vigorously in favor of all low carbon technologies, but recognizing we haven't been through the lifecycle of most technologies, we don't fully understand the impacts of wind, solar, etc, as much as we do with "traditional" tech, and should tread carefully because the grid is the literal lifeblood of civilization and five minutes without circulation kills you forever. I'd derive a certain pride from being told I think like a utility engineer. I am, after all, an engineer of very large systems where most cost is fixed.
I'm however willing to consider that I play useful idiot for the utilities whose arguments do ring true to my predilections and experiences. What's a good place to read about why their system arguments may not be valid?
I'd say it's never wrong to ask the questions, as long as you actually look for the answers! I would not be as pessimistic as you about our 5-mn survival are without electricity, but agreed that we need to be careful that the grid remains resilient.
I mean, five minutes without circulation kills a human. It probably takes a bit longer for a grid failure to kill a civilization (five weeks?) And of course various circulatory problems short of a heart stoppage will kill you over time too, to stretch the analogy.
Thank you! Of course, you write brilliantly and are most persuasive!
I don't "hate" renewable generators but to be fair to many of those that do, they are really not truly sustainable because of their weather dependence, short life times and difficulty to recycle economically.
PV panels in particular use rare and poisonous minerals, last a maximum of 30 years and to my knowledge are impossible to recycle.
By now, I hope you have dug more deeply into the recent publications authored by Simon Michaux of Finland's Geological Survey whose Managing Director and Chief scientists support the scary case broadcasted during their Webinar on 18th November.
Simon's case, as you know very well, is that the "net zero by 2050" case designed by the International Energy Agency and the UNFCC, adopted almost without any disagreement, is impossible to implement globally because its requirement for minerals and metals is, in many cases, thousands of times beyond the ability of our very finite World to deliver these, let alone "ESG-compliantly".
Fossil fuels delivered 82.2% of Primary Energy Demand in 2021 and frighteningly, oil production post Covid in 2021 was no greater than it was in 2012.
We need your wit and brains to develop a truly sustainable global energy solution in the face of a rising global population that quite understandably, needs and wants all the energy intensive goodies that we enjoy in the post-industrialized West, where mining and refining of the metals and other minerals deemed essential for our future competitiveness have been sub-contracted to the World's least developed nations and China.
I look forward to your review of Simon's horrific analysis!
"PV panels in particular use rare and poisonous minerals, last a maximum of 30 years and to my knowledge are impossible to recycle."
Nothing in this statement is true:
1. PV panels, especially polisilicon use very abundant minerals (some of which is poisonous, but are used in microamounts). They are mineral intensive as compared to for example wind, but the main minerals is silicon. Enough said that the market is easily expanding to 500 GW+ production capacity per year. Same of the more problematic materials like silver are being replaced by 100 times cheaper minerals.
2. PV panels last 40-50 years with some saying they may last 100 years. The question is the degradation rate. Best panels have degradation rates of 0,2-0,5 per year, so after 40 years they should produce 80-92% as much energy (80% is the assumed decommisiong point, but the panels can still be used if you want). Average project life time of solar farms is 32,5 years, so investors obviously think panels last on average more than 30 years.
3. They are very much possible to recycle. A French utility recycles 95% of materials: it's mostly silicon, glass and copper/aluminium. For comparison your washing machine is on average 60% recyclable.
Simon's analysis is horrific. Is is horrifically bad! Read several takedowns on Twitter. Note how totally absurd some of his assumptions are. The numbers are off by a factor of 40 or 50... This is the worst analysis I have ever seen and some of what you can find there is absurd, like a month of lithium-ion batteries (no one suggests that!!!). Michaux is fearmongering. Just compare his analysis to that of IEA (with more realistic assumptions). The difference is staggeringly bad for Michaux's crediility. 1. Prof. Auke Hoekstra: https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1594084381748256769 2. Dr Visa Siekkinen: https://twitter.com/visaskn/status/1593944033218502657
Thank you for the as always incisive commentary - but you kind of make my point about the worriers, which dismiss renewables by using a simple multiplication of the current situation "as is" to identify a supposed end point.
Your link says that:
"an extra 221,594 new non-fossil fuel power plants of average size (based on 2018 performance metrics) will be needed to be financed, constructed, commissioned then managed."
Such absurd precision (together with the wording for an "average size") suggests that the authors are more interested in being precisely wrong than roughly right, and do not have any understanding of orders of magnitude, a rather problematic sin for scientists.
20 years ago, we did not know how to integrate 20% of wind into the grid (Denmark, which had reached that number early, was seen as a special case given its extensive links to both Norway and Germany)
20 years ago, we did not know how to integrate 20% of wind into the grid (Denmark, which had actually reached that number already, was seen as a special case given its extensive links to both Norway and Germany). Now we know how to do 40-50% in semi-isolated systems like Ireland and Iberia, and the grid people are confident that we can do more.
Our needs for metals and other commodities are certainly changing, and will adapt. There will be bottlenecks and price rises (which will encourage innovation to manufacture differently or use electricity differently) just like in any fast growing industry - but think of all the knowledge and experience we have in the oil&gas sector that can and will be put to better use.
I'm not saying that physical constraints on some metals don't exist - I'm saying we'll find ways around them, in multiple differentiated ways.
The biggest change is that we are moving from a system where supply (of electricity) adapts to demand to one where demand will adapt to available supply - and that does not mean living in the dark or reducing our standards of living, it mostly means being smarter about our energy use - soothing we see happening every day. And physical constraints are actually the best way to bring that about.
Jerome: Michaux's analysis is terrible and totally unscientific. Read this for example: https://twitter.com/visaskn/status/1593944033218502657. He for example assumed 30 days of lithium ion batteries or a 1:1 replacement of oil for wind electricity. When compared with IEA's report the difference is shocking. It is most likely an industry hit piece at renewables which is exactly what you article is about. They made a staggeringly bad report and are now making the rounds with it. There are bottlenecks but nothing close to the magnitude of Michaux's hit piece.
Excellent as always! It is funny that renewables are seen as woke rent seeking and attracts libertarian ire in favor of nuclear, when in reality nuclear has never existed anywhere without massive state effort, and is totally incompatible with free markets.
It's even funnier. Socialists that are antirenewable claim solar and wind is too market oriented and not socialist enough and that it benefits the rich over the poor. So basically whoever you are you will find a logic to hate it.
It is funny but also sad as it ends up delaying the energy transition (even if it is actually happening faster than doubters réalisé)
Germany built a new LNG terminal in a few months when an emergency was called. Pity we don't put the same effort into a massive rollout of renewables- but part of it is that renewables are still not seen as a real solution, because of all that noise.
Hi Jerome, I realize this is dredging up old work but I’m keen to be pointed in the direction that assuages concerns over mineral and metal intensity of renewables and potential bottlenecks or unwanted unforeseen externalities (DRC cobalt and uygher polysilicon come to mind). To be clear I’m an (optimistic) worrier and genuinely curious
Thanks for your message, it's a very relevant question - and I don't have a definitive answer.
Amongst things I do note:
- there's actually very little in terms of renewables technology that is durably dependent on a single resource or bottleneck. Some items have become visible, but they could be substituted by other materials or technologies is someone played "games" with them (for instance, rare earths have been mentioned in relation to the direct drive technology for wind turbines, and that is cornered by China, but: (i) you can still do magnets with other materials (just a little less good - but the loss is measured in small % of cost or performance, in an industry that moves every year anyway, not in the whole industry collapsing), (ii) you can still do geared wind turbines that don't need magnets.
- China has cornered a lot of the basic building blocs (like solar panels, a lot of the processing of metals and other raw materials), but that's a problem for every single industry, not just for renewables (check how most basic pharmaceutical compounds are now manufactured in China because it's cheaper - Europeans and others have kept the high value added industrial processes but do not control the low value added stuff, which is not a problem until China makes it one).
- renewables are a lot more decentralized and diversified in general - if something is missing, you just try another solution. I don't see any durable bottleneck yet. Batteries seems to be the issue of most focus - but that's because of the car batteries, not so much the electrical storage needs for the grid, which will be smaller.
Appreciate this response it’s helpful for my thinking ! Do you think the battery aspect is a significant burden for EU based EV manufacturing?
It seems to not be a short term problem and not a long term one, but maybe it is a medium term one... Maybe that's just another wya to say "I don't know"
Thanks a lot for a great article again. One thing I don't really understand about the nuclear crowd is, if we assume it's actually a good solution, how do they see it working in practice?
* Looking at France, there are 56 of them with a population of 67 million, so about 1.2 million people per plant
* So a rough approximation for 8 billion people on the planet now would be over 6000 new plants
* of course, a plant is not a plant, depends on the capacity, and this influences price
* but is a ballpark number of 100 trillion $ right now an unreasonable estimate?
Who can afford to do that and wait 15 years to see the results? Could we physically accomplish that even? At best we can do it slowly over decades, so why invest first in the slowest and most expensive possible solution? Even if we can't do without it, you can always build it last.
one note: for developing and poor countries even renewables are expensive. they often use coal (if at all) because they can dig up the coal there so it comes out cheaper despite the extensive ecological damage and widespread health problems. in fact, access to cheap credit for developing countries so they could transition away from fossil fuels is one of the real problems countries are facing.
assuming that in developing countries they're magically going to find the money to invest in nuclear power plants as well as the necessary infrastructure and training of personnel is a pure pipe dream.
you can look at India and Pakistan for this -- they've had nuclear tech for 5-6 decades, yet they're heavily invested in fossil fuels.
Well, I would not want to make the error of the wind critics and look only at the end point to make it look worse than it sounds. 6000 nuclear plants seems scary (when there's only a few hundred operating on the planet) so looking at a reasonable build-up to replace existing aging plants and build new capacity would lead to (slightly) more realistic yearly numbers for GW and investment.
But as you say, it seems difficult these days to build a new nuclear plant in less than 10 or even 15 years in the West, and the cost is really hard to narrow down, so most of it will come very late anyway. As the French and UK experience proves, you're not going to order tens of new plants if you can't built the first one.
The reality is that very few new plants will get built and the question is largely irrelevant anyway.
This is interesting, and gets to some of the central psychological points.
Myself I'm a worrier. Vigorously in favor of all low carbon technologies, but recognizing we haven't been through the lifecycle of most technologies, we don't fully understand the impacts of wind, solar, etc, as much as we do with "traditional" tech, and should tread carefully because the grid is the literal lifeblood of civilization and five minutes without circulation kills you forever. I'd derive a certain pride from being told I think like a utility engineer. I am, after all, an engineer of very large systems where most cost is fixed.
I'm however willing to consider that I play useful idiot for the utilities whose arguments do ring true to my predilections and experiences. What's a good place to read about why their system arguments may not be valid?
Hi Tomas
I'd say it's never wrong to ask the questions, as long as you actually look for the answers! I would not be as pessimistic as you about our 5-mn survival are without electricity, but agreed that we need to be careful that the grid remains resilient.
The best place for some answer are actually the grid operators, who have asked themselves how to manage a lot more renewables. There have been good studies from Elia (this one comes recommended: https://www.eliagroup.eu/en/news/press-releases/2021/11/20211119_elia-group-publishes-roadmap-to-net-zero) RTE (mostly in French), the IEA, and I think recently the Australian grid operator just published a similar story.
Thank you, I'll give those a read.
I mean, five minutes without circulation kills a human. It probably takes a bit longer for a grid failure to kill a civilization (five weeks?) And of course various circulatory problems short of a heart stoppage will kill you over time too, to stretch the analogy.
Here's the Australia link:
https://www.aemo.com.au/-/media/files/initiatives/engineering-framework/2022/engineering-roadmap-to-100-per-cent-renewables.pdf
And the IEA: https://www.iea.org/reports/world-energy-outlook-2022/an-updated-roadmap-to-net-zero-emissions-by-2050
And another for the UK
https://www.nationalgrideso.com/news/zero-carbon-operation-great-britains-electricity-system-2025
Jérôme,
Thank you! Of course, you write brilliantly and are most persuasive!
I don't "hate" renewable generators but to be fair to many of those that do, they are really not truly sustainable because of their weather dependence, short life times and difficulty to recycle economically.
PV panels in particular use rare and poisonous minerals, last a maximum of 30 years and to my knowledge are impossible to recycle.
By now, I hope you have dug more deeply into the recent publications authored by Simon Michaux of Finland's Geological Survey whose Managing Director and Chief scientists support the scary case broadcasted during their Webinar on 18th November.
https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/
Simon's case, as you know very well, is that the "net zero by 2050" case designed by the International Energy Agency and the UNFCC, adopted almost without any disagreement, is impossible to implement globally because its requirement for minerals and metals is, in many cases, thousands of times beyond the ability of our very finite World to deliver these, let alone "ESG-compliantly".
Fossil fuels delivered 82.2% of Primary Energy Demand in 2021 and frighteningly, oil production post Covid in 2021 was no greater than it was in 2012.
We need your wit and brains to develop a truly sustainable global energy solution in the face of a rising global population that quite understandably, needs and wants all the energy intensive goodies that we enjoy in the post-industrialized West, where mining and refining of the metals and other minerals deemed essential for our future competitiveness have been sub-contracted to the World's least developed nations and China.
I look forward to your review of Simon's horrific analysis!
"PV panels in particular use rare and poisonous minerals, last a maximum of 30 years and to my knowledge are impossible to recycle."
Nothing in this statement is true:
1. PV panels, especially polisilicon use very abundant minerals (some of which is poisonous, but are used in microamounts). They are mineral intensive as compared to for example wind, but the main minerals is silicon. Enough said that the market is easily expanding to 500 GW+ production capacity per year. Same of the more problematic materials like silver are being replaced by 100 times cheaper minerals.
2. PV panels last 40-50 years with some saying they may last 100 years. The question is the degradation rate. Best panels have degradation rates of 0,2-0,5 per year, so after 40 years they should produce 80-92% as much energy (80% is the assumed decommisiong point, but the panels can still be used if you want). Average project life time of solar farms is 32,5 years, so investors obviously think panels last on average more than 30 years.
3. They are very much possible to recycle. A French utility recycles 95% of materials: it's mostly silicon, glass and copper/aluminium. For comparison your washing machine is on average 60% recyclable.
Thanks Jon!
Simon's analysis is horrific. Is is horrifically bad! Read several takedowns on Twitter. Note how totally absurd some of his assumptions are. The numbers are off by a factor of 40 or 50... This is the worst analysis I have ever seen and some of what you can find there is absurd, like a month of lithium-ion batteries (no one suggests that!!!). Michaux is fearmongering. Just compare his analysis to that of IEA (with more realistic assumptions). The difference is staggeringly bad for Michaux's crediility. 1. Prof. Auke Hoekstra: https://twitter.com/AukeHoekstra/status/1594084381748256769 2. Dr Visa Siekkinen: https://twitter.com/visaskn/status/1593944033218502657
Thank you for the as always incisive commentary - but you kind of make my point about the worriers, which dismiss renewables by using a simple multiplication of the current situation "as is" to identify a supposed end point.
Your link says that:
"an extra 221,594 new non-fossil fuel power plants of average size (based on 2018 performance metrics) will be needed to be financed, constructed, commissioned then managed."
Such absurd precision (together with the wording for an "average size") suggests that the authors are more interested in being precisely wrong than roughly right, and do not have any understanding of orders of magnitude, a rather problematic sin for scientists.
20 years ago, we did not know how to integrate 20% of wind into the grid (Denmark, which had reached that number early, was seen as a special case given its extensive links to both Norway and Germany)
Sorry, message got posted before I finished:
20 years ago, we did not know how to integrate 20% of wind into the grid (Denmark, which had actually reached that number already, was seen as a special case given its extensive links to both Norway and Germany). Now we know how to do 40-50% in semi-isolated systems like Ireland and Iberia, and the grid people are confident that we can do more.
Our needs for metals and other commodities are certainly changing, and will adapt. There will be bottlenecks and price rises (which will encourage innovation to manufacture differently or use electricity differently) just like in any fast growing industry - but think of all the knowledge and experience we have in the oil&gas sector that can and will be put to better use.
I'm not saying that physical constraints on some metals don't exist - I'm saying we'll find ways around them, in multiple differentiated ways.
The biggest change is that we are moving from a system where supply (of electricity) adapts to demand to one where demand will adapt to available supply - and that does not mean living in the dark or reducing our standards of living, it mostly means being smarter about our energy use - soothing we see happening every day. And physical constraints are actually the best way to bring that about.
So yes: you are too pessimistic :)
Jerome: Michaux's analysis is terrible and totally unscientific. Read this for example: https://twitter.com/visaskn/status/1593944033218502657. He for example assumed 30 days of lithium ion batteries or a 1:1 replacement of oil for wind electricity. When compared with IEA's report the difference is shocking. It is most likely an industry hit piece at renewables which is exactly what you article is about. They made a staggeringly bad report and are now making the rounds with it. There are bottlenecks but nothing close to the magnitude of Michaux's hit piece.
Excellent as always! It is funny that renewables are seen as woke rent seeking and attracts libertarian ire in favor of nuclear, when in reality nuclear has never existed anywhere without massive state effort, and is totally incompatible with free markets.
It's even funnier. Socialists that are antirenewable claim solar and wind is too market oriented and not socialist enough and that it benefits the rich over the poor. So basically whoever you are you will find a logic to hate it.
It is funny but also sad as it ends up delaying the energy transition (even if it is actually happening faster than doubters réalisé)
Germany built a new LNG terminal in a few months when an emergency was called. Pity we don't put the same effort into a massive rollout of renewables- but part of it is that renewables are still not seen as a real solution, because of all that noise.
So true! Thanks for this excellent article.
Thanks! I like your name, I might use it 😉
Excellent as usual, Jerome! Will be using!