A key issue for the accomplishment of renewables is power storage because of the impact of wind and solar intermittency, both of which are highly intermittent. Most studies assume gas will be the buffer for intermittency. Other than using fossil fuel such as gas as a buffer, an adequate power storage system to handle intermittency will require 30 times more material than what electric vehicles require with current plans, meaning the scope is much larger than the current paradigm allows.
Space mining was one of my first thoughts. I don’t know how far off the technologies are, but there are planets worth of material out there that we can mine, including some materials that have long since sunk into the Earth’s core due to their density.
Space mining is simply not a technology that exists currently. It’s certainly possible technologically, but we’re nowhere near being able to do it at the scale needed. The article says we’d need 4.5 billion tons of copper are required just to manufacture one generation of renewable technology. That is a phenomenal number.
first off, if you build one generation that’s all you really need. metal is not like plastic or oil, you can always just melt it down and forge it again and again.
It almost exists, I mean if you had a stupid amount of money you could right now hire space on a shuttle to move a tone of rocket fuel into orbit, with engines, robots and some parachutes send them out to an asteroid attached and just drop it into your backyard.
We are talking 12 digits numbers in cost but if you grab say Hebe it has 1.39 x 10^12 tonnes of copper,
Also I am not totally convinced of this number and want to find a better source to verify it. A lot of that article sounded like someone finding all the worst cases and adding them together.
Sure, but bootstrapping that first generation is clearly a hard problem, and as things stand right now there aren’t enough resources to do that.
Except that these kinds of things take a long time to go to market in practice. Just look at SpaceX as an example. It’s going to take at least a decade before there are even attempts at mining asteroids. Meanwhile, we’re talking about needing to mine over 4 billion tons of copper alone. Do you realize the sheer scale of this?
And how are you going to bring this down to Earth exactly? You can’t just ram an asteroid into the planet. You’d have to take it apart somehow, and then send small payloads down from orbit, and that means a shitload of logistics, fuel, and infrastructure.
The article sounded like a pretty sober assessment to me, and it linked to the actual study that explains where these numbers come from. Just because you don’t like what the numbers say is not a reason to discard the study.
NASA Has been working on it since 2012 and is working on 3 crafts to do it named Mini Bee, Honey Bee and Queen Bee.
Here is a page about it from their website