How much mined material will we need to build a 100-per-cent renewable world? Danny Chivers works it out.
The problem with wind turbines, solar panels, ground-source heat pumps and electric cars is that they’re all made of stuff. When people like me make grand announcements (and interactive infographics) explaining how we don’t need to burn fossil fuels because fairly shared renewable energy could give everyone on the planet a good quality of life, this is the bit of the story that often gets missed out. We can’t just pull all this sustainable technology out of the air – it’s made from annoyingly solid materials that need to come from somewhere.
So how much material would we need to transition to a 100-per-cent renewable world? For my new NoNonsense book, Renewable Energy: cleaner, fairer ways to power the planet, I realized I needed to find an answer to this question. It’s irresponsible to advocate a renewably powered planet without being open and honest about what the real-world impacts of such a transition might be.
In this online article, I make a stab at coming up with an answer – but first I need to lay down a quick proviso. All the numbers in this piece are rough, ball-park figures, that simply aim to give us a sense of the scale of materials we’re talking about. Nothing in this piece is meant to be a vision of the ‘correct’ way to build a 100-per-cent renewably powered world. There is no single path to a clean-energy future; we need a democratic energy transition led by a mass global movement creating solutions to suit people’s specific communities and situations, not some kind of top-down model imposed from above. This article just presents one scenario, with the sole aim of helping us to understand the challenge.
Note he does not explicitly address pollution side effects of refining the mined material, but it's still a better resource then I've seen elsewhere.
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Hard-rock metal mining for aluminum and copper is a lot more environmentally destructive than oil drilling, and arguably more so than coal mining on anything like a ton for ton basis. Because with copper, in particular, you smelt the ore, and there are highly toxic tailings piles. Coal tailings are less toxic. Not sure how much less, though.
I'm not sure his estimate that storage facilities for electrical power have the same cost in materials per kilowatt-hour as a gas-fired power plant...
It is an interesting read, though the last section is somewhat optimistic. Of course those countries are going to exploit their resource if they have the ability to, regardless of who gets trampled in the process. That is the whole point of capitalism.
His transportation estimates are also optimistic, especially for a nation like the US. Buses don't work when only 20% of the population live in cities with more than 200,000 people. Especially with the culture of automobiles in America being what it is.
Simon_Jester wrote:I'm not sure his estimate that storage facilities for electrical power have the same cost in materials per kilowatt-hour as a gas-fired power plant...
Yeah, a large hydroelectric power plant or existing pumped storage facility would be better suited for comparison. Gas powered generators are among the least resource intensive to build.
Power grid also would require massive capacity upgrade that would need large amounts of copper. With 100% renewable grid there often would be situations when dozens of GW of power has to be moved from areas with massive overproduction to areas with low power production.
