But sustainable tech is transportable?
Australia’s motoring club the NRMA is building OFF-grid EV charging stations. Local solar fills a grid-sized battery pack, then little EV’s pull up for a little taste of all that power. Once a rural area embraces this model it means less stress on the local grid. (Cities will be part of huge super-grids anyway.) As the energy transition unfolds, we’ll install systems like this once for 25 years instead of having oil tankers driving down our highways every week. https://reneweconomy.com.au/the-driven-podcast-nrma-to-start-charging-for-its-chargers/ (Personally I’m a New urbanist and would prefer to see vastly less cars because we designed better neighbourhoods - but that’s not the conversation right now.)
Another idea that relieves stress on the grid by accident is more about convenient electric trucking. Tesla Semi can carry 36 tons further than most truckies are legally allowed to drive on a shift (as long as they charge the truck during their legally required half hour break.) And that’s with today’s batteries! There are dozens of new chemistries coming down the line as Big Battery replaces Big Oil.
But Australia has enormous road train trucks that carry 80 or 100 tons. They avoid trying to fast-charge or even carry such an enormous battery by doing something different - they swap the battery! A guy on a forklift does it in a minute. This means the batteries can take their time to charge. Solar on the warehouse roof can power at least 10 trucks. Gently charging means less strain on the grid and the batteries. Trucks also get the benefit of any new increase in battery tech over the life of the deal. In a country areas with cheap land, this model could also go off-grid - topping up the warehouse batteries with local solar farms. https://www.januselectric.com.au/
Aluminium is 8% of the earth’s crust and iron ore 5% - so there’s enough of those. I can only assume you’re asking about lithium?
LITHIUM RESERVES: Lithium hasn’t reached peak discovery, let alone peak production. We keep finding it faster than we’re using it. While global resource is estimated by the USGS to be 89 million tons, global economically recoverable reserves are at about 22 million tons. (Dr Hannah Ritchie - data scientist.) https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles
But this doesn’t include the 20 to 40 million tonnes found in the McDermitt caldera in Nevada in 2023 - nor the fact that new technologies like pumped filtration are doing away with evaporation ponds and could soon deliver lithium at double the speed and half the price. LFP batteries use NO cobalt, nickel, vanadium, copper, etc. Just lithium, iron and phosphate. Anyway - 22 million tons (aka 22 billion kg) divided by an average of 8kg lithium per car is 2.75 billion cars. The world has 1.4 billion vehicles. Personally - I’m a New Urbanist and many of my family are actively campaigning for more walkable suburbs based around the needs of people and community, not cars. But there’s enough lithium.
What about storage for a renewable grid? Easy. Sodium. Sea-salt. The cathodes for grid batteries can be basic ingredients too. I like Hard Carbon - as it can come from our tens of billions of tons of agri-waste - so there’s plenty of material for sodium batteries. BYD even has a little city car that runs on sodium batteries. It’s just scaling up - but they are building a 30 GWh factory. (About 1/3 of a Tesla gigafactory.) https://thedriven.io/2023/11/22/byd-to-build-first-sodium-based-battery-manufacturing-plant/
There’s 38 QUADRILLION tons of sodium in the ocean. We could build Godzilla sized super-batteries to store the entire world’s energy supply for a year and not scratch a ten thousandth of a percent! But in reality real energy experts plan to only use batteries for 2 hours. After then the pumped-hydro will take over. The world has 100 TIMES the off-river pumped hydro we need. http://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/ Professor Andrew Blakers world tour on Youtube here: http://youtu.be/_Lk3elu3zf4?t=986
RECYCLING: once we exhaust a lithium mine - we haven’t run out of that lithium. We still have all the lithium ever mined. It just needs to be recycled. And we are getting really good at that! http://youtu.be/Bpe8HalVXFU
LITHIUM FROM SEAWATER is nearly economical. There’s a million years of it in the ocean.
ALTERNATIVE CHEMISTRIES: There is so much R&D into new battery chemistries I really wonder if lithium will be king in a decade or so? These 2 youtubers are essential green tech gurus. I watch every episode. Just watching their energy storage playlists will keep you busy for a few weeks. 
“Undecided” with Matt Ferrell http://www.youtube.com/@UndecidedMF “Just have a think”: http://www.youtube.com/@JustHaveaThink
Hey Eclipse, thank you for your elaborate reply. Interesting facts about the lithium, but the issue is the infrastructure, the mines, the fuel that is used to mine other materials, the workers. I am not saying its impossible, but I dont see the sufficient effort to make sure that each citizen can drive an EV car (at least in Europe). And these are the issues that are discussed in Chris’ video. Also, we dont have the infrustructure for the battery charging (at least in Europe). In my capital city, Bratislava (Slovakia), most people live in flats/apartments, not in houses and we dont have enough public chargers. Hence, the charging is complicated. And if there were more EV cars on our roads, some people would be standing in a queues to charge for days/weeks. So this is my issue.
But as I’ve shared elsewhere on this thread, the peer-reviewed energy sources all call for “geographic aggregation” across a massive area, smoothing out the intermittency of wind and solar (which often complement each other nicely). Just the electricity grid might get overbuilt 2 or 3 times in certain regions. Industrial heat and transport can be even more - another 3 times. Why? One reason - to greatly increase reliability and reduce storage!
Then pumped hydro can supply a few days of storage - the world has 100 times the potential sites. The rest can be sodium grid batteries.
And as the price of rare earths and Critical Minerals has gone up, there are brands of solar and wind and batteries that use NO Critical Minerals. They CAN all use fancy minerals, but as the price rises, they’re choosing not to. They can all made from super-abundant materials. Everything you heard in the presentation above is incorrect.
Good reads out this month to begin the New Year from Berman & Tverberg:
And Western leadership in it’s entirety speaks with the “Forked Tongue” the continual contradictions are mind boggling, totally obvious their priorities are the surveillance state over humanity’s welfare. On one hand we have this again Bill to ban natural gas revived, passes in Washington House - MyNorthwest.com. While the priority of their thought is this https://spacenews.com/spacex-providing-starlink-services-to-dod-under-unique-terms-and-conditions/
Absolutely! It’s also called “Overbuild” and has been in the literature forever. Back in 2004 when I became a peak oil activist our group used to worry that solar only had a 15% capacity factor and wind was about 33%. Sure - we knew even back then that wind often ran overnight, complementing solar. But papers back then still showed we would need to Overbuild the national demand by about 3 times with renewables to provide enough power - and that was just for the electricity sector - and NOT costing storage! It was absolutely economically IMPOSSIBLE! But now after 20 years of subsidies and scaling up, costs have come down. Solar uses 1/3 the silicon it did back then and yet is 22% efficient - giving more power per unit lifetime. Wind turbines are ENORMOUS and vastly more efficient and cost effective than they used to be. The costs have plummeted to about 1/4 the cost of nuclear (Lazard 2023) - giving PLENTY of economic room to Overbuild for firming. Overbuilding RADICALLY cuts storage requirements. It’s just the plan. It’s just happening! Solar is doubling every 4 years, wind not far behind, and the last few years of EV sales show they are growing as a percent of all new cars: 2020: 5%, 2021: 9%, 2022: 14%. Oil demand will peak and decline in by 2026. There will be an oil GLUT by 2028!
Renewables are now 1/4 the cost of nuclear (Lazard 2023). That is HUGE! I used to think Australia might get away with a half nuclear, half renewables grid. But that was because I had all the sceptical arguments from 20 years ago - when renewables were impossibly expensive. Now they’re so cheap we CAN afford to Overbuild them - and all the old papers modelling Overbuild are suddenly not just economical - but downright cheap!
There have been think tanks all over the world planning and modelling this stuff for decades:
the University of Delaware in 2012
Scientific American 2015 - putting this engineering science in popular culture. With enough Overbuild 1 GW of wind only needs 1.2 MW storage.
Professor Andrew Blakers - recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for engineering - calculated an Overbuilt continent-wide Australian grid would be cheaper than coal in 2017 prices! Imagine today?
To Delaware May 2019
ARENA boss - October 2019
Study from Wartsila - Finland - May 2020.
All of these before Michaux published in August 2021 - he SHOULD have known this basic rule of reducing storage before publishing a paper hypothetically about storage! I mean - did he even check wikipedia? The wikis show there is an old history of various super-grids.
Hi Rikaja,
Good points on apartment dwellers. Look - I’m not saying this Energy Transition is going to go smoothly. It’s like we’re calmly floating down an oil river in a bunch of rafts built for that oil river - and we look ahead and down the hill a bit - and there’s a clean fresh water river. But we’re going to have to tinker with our rafts for that new river, and then there’s the rapids ahead! Rocks and all sorts of things. Many businesses are not going to make it - turbulent times ahead. Also - consider the geopolitics! The more EV’s we have and wind and solar that charges them - the less oil Petro-tyrants get. Putin is NOT going to be happy as their new main oil customers China and India start to move to EV.
But you raised mining? Sure - I grant mining is way behind EV’s. But EV’s are growing so fast there will be an oil GLUT by 2028!
ELECTRIFYING EVERYTHING MAKES INDUSTRIAL CIVILISATION MUCH MORE EFFICIENT
Burning stuff like cavemen isn’t efficient. It fights the second law of thermodynamics. We burn oil when what we want is forward motion, or burn coal when what we want is electricity. But burning gasoline only turns 20% of the oil energy into forward motion., It wastes MOST of it - 80%! Electric Vehicles only waste 20% of the wind or solar, and USE 80%. Look at all the vast amount of thermal fossil fuel energy on on the left of this graph, and how it shrinks into actual energy services on the right. Energy in the United States - Wikipedia
SUPPLY SYSTEMS MORE EFFICIENT: Australia’s NRMA plan to install off-grid EV charging stations. A large solar roof charges a big grid battery, and tiny little EV’s sip at it. This off-grid station gets installed once and lasts maybe 20 years. But compare that to oil which must be trucked in down the highway every week! Also, the oil must be mined and refined and shipped around the globe. Moving all fossil fuels around is 40% of all shipping - about 22,000 massive steel cargo ships! Installing the OFF-GRID EV charging station is vastly more efficient. Sticking solar panels on your roof to charge your EV in the driveway is another example. There are so many savings like this across transport and industry that when we Electrify Everything we will only need 40% of the original thermal value of fossil fuels! The world will need less energy after the energy transition
MINING AND INDUSTRY ARE GOING ELECTRIC: Watch this mostly electric 240 tonne mining truck drive up hill TWICE the speed of the diesel truck! It’s charging from hydropower on catenary lines in Canada. Does this going twice the speed mean mines will need less trucks to move the same amount of ore? Watch 60 seconds here: https://youtu.be/6TxMeHRq1mk?t=213
SMELTING: Rondo heat blocks store heat at 1500 C, and only lose 1% per day. A distant mine and smelter could have their own wind and solar farms dumping extra energy into a bunch of Rondo blocks which would get them through a rainy week. Then there’s the future roles of hydrogen as an extra heat boost above 1500 C, but also being used as replacement for coking coal when smelting iron ore. How It Works — Rondo Energy Thermal energy storage - Wikipedia
There’s much more to say about greener construction materials and methods and greener concrete - but industry is getting serious now. Australia’s industrial giants - big names like BHP, Bluescope steel, etc, worth a full THIRD of our entire stock-market - have a plan to Electrify Everything. They’re going to Overbuild renewables to run all the electric mining trucks and industrial heat they need! They want to build their own energy supplies to be immune from future energy shocks. Get this. They plan to build 3 TIMES Australia’s 2020 electricity grid in capacity just for the domestic market (by 2050) - and another 3 TIMES that amount of electricity for all the green exports! 6 TIMES the grid! All possible now renewables are 1/4 nuclear’s LCOE (Lazard) and still falling. From p 45 of their Feb 2023 PDF https://energytransitionsinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Pathways-to-Industrial-Decarbonisation-report-Updated-August-2023-Australian-Industry-ETI.pdf
Exactly. Technology actually can be adapted to work without many of these materials. The whole argument is a strawman if you just play the “Substitution Game” and google “Can you build X without Y?” That is - “Can you build solar cells without silver?” The progress through all Simon Michaux’s claims. You’ll soon realise that all you have to do is substitute sodium batteries for a few hours of storage, off-river pumped hydro for a few days of storage - and we get cold dark countries like Germany down to just 2 days storage by having them connect up to the European super-grid which will stretch from Finland down to Spain and maybe even Africa. Once you get into the “Sunshine Belt” there IS NO WINTER! With HVDC now only losing 1.6% - the equator can power a base at the North Pole for only 16% loss! Michaux’s not being honest with what is possible in renewable technology.
Because… technology often DOES and CAN adapt!
