First off Hornsdale is a terrible way to store power. EV(sometimes) need batteries because they are moving but there are much better and cheaper way to store energy like filling hydroelectric reservoirs for grid-scale systems.
There is an easy answer, Space mining. Right now moving anything into orbit costs a fuck-tone. But when we are set up and start building things in orbit with minerals from astroids the costs drop down a lot.
After that we have near infant amounts of every metal that we can just process in orbit and drop down.
Other solutions are of course nuclear and more public infructuous like electric trains/trams that don’t need batteries and also are more efficient than cars/trucks
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.
one generation of renewable technology
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.
Space mining is simply not a technology that exists currently
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,
4.5 billion
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
We are talking 12 digits numbers in cost but if you grab say Hebe it has 1.39 x 10^12 tonnes of copper,
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.
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.
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.
There are legal things/goals we could try for like reducing current planned obsolesce and enshrine right to repair laws and similar, that would save us on materials and energy in general. Ideally, reducing costs of recycling and becoming more effective at it would be another way to get more metals (might help with the toxic e-dump sites around the world too).
This shows that the whole capitalist growth ideology is fundamentally incompatible with our civilization surviving long term. It’s kind of amazing how all these economists can’t imagine our society running any other way than it is now.
