Our troubled energy transition

SUBHEAD: Too little, too late. No longer are we faced with prevention so much as mitigation and management.

By Kurt Cob  on 18 March 2018 in Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-03-18/troubling-realities-original article.


Image above: In original article. Cartoon by Gerhard Mester (2013)  showing a race between renewable energy and fossil fuels. Speach bubble translation from German says "You are cheating by using an energy storage device". As if coal were not just a dirtier battery. From (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Energiewende-Rallye-Stromspeicher-Gerhard-Mester.gif).

I recently asked a group gathered to hear me speak what percentage of the world’s energy is provided by these six renewable sources: solar, wind, geothermal, wave, tidal, and ocean energy.

Then came the guesses: To my left, 25 percent; straight ahead, 30 percent; on my right, 20 percent and 15 percent; a pessimist sitting to the far right, 7 percent.

The group was astonished when I related the actual figure: 1.5 percent. The figure comes from the Paris-based International Energy Agency, a consortium of 30 countries that monitors energy developments worldwide.

The audience that evening had been under the gravely mistaken impression that human society was much further along in its transition to renewable energy. Even the pessimist in the audience was off by more than a factor of four.

I hadn’t included hydroelectricity in my list, I told the group, which would add another 2.5 percent to the renewable energy category. But hydro, I explained, would be growing only very slowly since most of the world’s best dam sites have been taken.

The category “Biofuels and waste,” which makes up 9.7 percent of the world total, includes small slivers of what we Americans call biofuels (ethanol and biodiesel), I said, but mostly represents the deforestation of the planet through the use of wood for daily fuel in many poor countries, hardly a sustainable practice that warrants vast expansion.

This percentage has been roughly the same since 1973 though the absolute consumption has more than doubled as population has climbed sharply.

The burden for renewable energy expansion, I concluded, would therefore remain on the six categories I mentioned at the outset of my presentation.

As if to underline this worrisome state of affairs, the MIT Technology Review just days later published a piece with a rather longish title: “At this rate, it’s going to take nearly 400 years to transform the energy system.”

In my presentation I had explained to my listeners that renewable energy is not currently displacing fossil fuel capacity, but rather supplementing it.

In fact, I related, the U.S. government’s own Department of Energy with no sense of alarm whatsoever projects that world fossil fuel consumption will actually rise through 2050. This would represent a climate catastrophe, I told my audience, and cannot be allowed to happen.

And yet, the MIT piece affirms that this is our destination on our current trajectory. The author writes that “even after decades of warnings, policy debates, and clean-energy campaigns—the world has barely even begun to confront the problem.”

All this merely serves to elicit the question: What would it take to do what scientists think we need to do to reduce greenhouse gases?

The MIT piece suggests that a total mobilization of society akin to what happened in World War II would have to occur and be maintained for decades to accomplish the energy transition we need to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Few people alive today were alive back then.

A somewhat larger group has parents who lived through World War II and so have some inkling of what such a mobilization would involve.

It’s hard enough to imagine this group agreeing that their household consumption should be curtailed significantly for decades (through taxes, higher prices and perhaps even rationing) to make way for huge societal investments in vast new wind and solar deployments; electricity storage for all that renewable electricity; mass transit; deep energy retrofits for buildings; energy-efficient vehicles; and even revised diets that are less meat-intensive and thereby less energy-intensive.

Even harder to image is the much larger group with a more tenuous or nonexistent connection to the World War II experience embracing such a path.

The trouble with waiting, of course, is that climate change does not wait for us, and also that it shows up with multi-decadal lags. The effects of greenhouse gases emitted decades ago are only now registering on the world’s thermometers.

That means that when climate conditions finally become so destructive as to move the public and the politicians to do something big enough to make a difference, it will likely be too late to avoid catastrophic climate change.

One scientist cited by the MIT piece believes that a rise of more than 2 degrees C in global temperature is all but inevitable and that human society would be “lucky” to avoid a rise of 4 degrees by 2100.

But since each increment of temperature rise will inflict more damage, the scientist says, we would be wise to seek to limit temperature rise as much as we are able (even though the odds are now overwhelmingly against staying below a 2 degree rise).

No longer are we faced with prevention so much as mitigation and management. That’s still something, and it provides a way forward that doesn’t rely on an increasingly unrealistic goal.

Image: Cartoon showing a race between renewable energy and fossil fuels. Text is in German. Gerhard Mester (2013). “Karikatur von Gerhard Mester zum Thema Energiespeicher und Konkurrenzbedingungen Erneuerbarer Energien.”  Via Wikimedia Commons.

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Renewable Revolution

SUBHEAD: Renewables to capture 3/4 of the $10 trillion world spends on new generation through 2040.

By Joe Romm on 15 June 2017 for Think Progress -
(https://thinkprogress.org/renewables-projected-to-crush-fossil-fuels-f6670e3792df)


Image above: Last year, solar in Chile saw lowest global price for unsubsidized electricity by any technology. Source Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Credit BNEF New Energy Outlook 2017. From original article.

The staggering drop in the cost of clean energy has already upended the global power market over the past two decades — and that trend will only continue for the next two decades, according to new analysis from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF).

As a result, renewables will capture the lion’s share of the $10.2 trillion the world will invest in new power generation by 2040, BNEF projects in its annual New Energy Outlook 2017 report.


Image above: Charts of Investment by Technology 2017-2040. Source: Bllomberg New energy Finance. Credit: BNEF New Energy Outlook 2017 From original article. Click to enlarge.


Despite years of plummeting prices for renewables, BNEF projects that over the next two decades, the cost of solar power will still drop another two-thirds, onshore wind costs will be cut nearly in half, and offshore wind costs will drop a stunning 71 percent.

Here’s how this will profoundly transform power markets in the years ahead:

• By 2023, solar and onshore wind will be competitive with new U.S. gas plants.
• By 2028, solar will beat existing gas generation.
• Solar and wind will make up nearly a half of installed capacity and over a third of global power generation by 2040. That’s a four-fold jump in wind capacity and a 14-fold jump in solar from today.

Image above: Charts of global cumulative installed capacity 2016 and 2040. Source: Bloomberg New energy Finance. Credit: BNEF New Energy Outlook 2017 From original article.


Deep penetration of renewables will be assisted by continued price drops in lithium-ion batteries and explosive growth in electric cars: “This will help renewable energy reach 74 percent penetration in Germany, 38 percent in the U.S., 55 percent in China, and 49 percent in India by 2040.”

BNEF concludes that despite President Donald Trump’s vocal support for the coal industry, “economic realities over the next two decades” work against it, and U.S. coal power generation is “forecast to see a 51 percent reduction in generation by 2040.”

Here’s another key conclusion: “Gas is a transition fuel, but not in the way most people think.” Other than in the Americas, where cheap gas is plentiful, gas plants won’t act as a replacement for “baseload coal,” but will “increasingly act as one of the flexible technologies needed to help meet peaks and provide system stability in an age of rising renewable generation,” BNEF predicts.

With total renewable investment over the next two decades projected to be $7.2 trillion versus $1.5 trillion for fossil fuel power, it’s clear where the biggest high wage job growth will come from.

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No Degrowth without Climate Justice

SUBHEAD: To develop meaningful strategies for political change, degrowth should become more confrontational.

By Matthias Schmelzer on 10 February 2017 for Uneven Earth -
(http://www.unevenearth.org/2017/02/no-degrowth-without-climate-justice/)


Image above: Degrowth Graffiti stating "The Only Sustainable Growth is Degrowth" . From (https://newint.org/blog/2015/05/14/degrowth-federico-demaria/).

Since the 2014 Leipzig Degrowth Conference, the argument that climate justice cannot exist without degrowth has repeatedly been made.

In a keynote at the Degrowth conference in Budapest, in September 2016, I developed this line of thinking further and argued that the opposite is equally important: There is no degrowth without climate justice.

My argument, which I presented as someone involved not only at the theoretical level, but also in concrete efforts to bring degrowth and climate justice together in terms of practices and people, is presented here in a concise way.

After the degrowth conference in Leipzig two years ago, people in the organizational committee were considering next steps that would allow the degrowth community to move forward.

Our analysis was that if we want degrowth to leave the ivory towers of academia and lecture halls, we need to enter into alliances with other social movements; and if we want degrowth to move beyond lofty visions for future societies and towards intervention and action, we need to enter into a conflictual political arena, thus forcing degrowth to take clear stances.

Even though a vision of transformation and a good life for all is important, if degrowth is worth anything, it should make a difference by intervening in political struggles.

Based on this analyses we decided to organize a degrowth summer school in 2015 in cooperation with the Rhineland climate camp. We thus entered a political field, in which concrete opponents – coal companies and their lobbies on the one hand and local communities and climate justice activists on the other – were struggling about the future of coal in the coming years.

The summer school drew 500 people from around Germany and Europe who discussed degrowth and its relations to climate change, extractivism, justice, power, and capitalism.

After the summer school, many participants took part in one of the hitherto largest actions of civil disobedience against lignite coal mining, in which more than 1000 people entered an open cast coal mine and blocked the operation of the huge diggers in Europe’s largest CO2 emitter.

In 2016, Ende Gelände was repeated in Lusatia, and the 3000-participant strong blockade lasted two days. There was again a degrowth summer school under the title “Skills for System Change.”

The summer of 2017 will see another degrowth-inspired summer school and a set of actions in the Rhineland that includes Ende Gelände, but will be much broader and possibly even bigger.

The climate summit Truman show

This decision to enter into alliances with the climate justice movement and into the conflicts around coal already illustrates much of our stance on the Paris Agreement reached at the COP in Paris in 2015.

First, that it proved a disaster precisely because it did not address the real problems, mainly that fossil fuels must largely stay underground and that we need a deep socio-ecological transformation.

Second, that the Paris Agreement could not address these issues, because it largely stayed within the framework of economic growth, extractivism, and accumulation – albeit in a new form.

And finally, that real change must come from stopping the drivers of climate change through concrete policies, public opposition, the building of alternatives, and direct action.

From the perspective of degrowth and climate justice movements, the Paris Agreement was a deceitful spectacle with potentially disastrous effects. What actually happened in Paris in November last year has been adequately described as the climate summit Truman Show: around the world, media headlines were enthusiastically celebrating the deal as ‘historic’ and ‘successful’, as the miracle of Paris, or even as  “31 pages of a recipe for revolution.”

Cameras were showing the chief negotiator French foreign minister Laurent Fabius in tears, the climate advocate Al Gore enthusiastically clapping, and the room of delegates seemed to be in a collective delirium – and with it the entire media circus.

Even many larger NGOs did not want to disturb this picture with their gentle statements, and the online campaigning platform avaaz described it as a “massive turning point in human history.”

Through the technocratic prism of the framework laid out by the UN climate convention, the summit achieved much more than has otherwise been accomplished during the last 20 years and far more than most observers had expected: 195 states actually achieved an agreement; and to the surprise of many in the last minute the 1,5 degree target was included in the final text.

However, this enthusiasm is highly misleading. It only makes sense from a narrow perspective that only focuses on the UN framework of negotiations and not on the broader political and economic context.

One can ignore reality, but this does not make it disappear. Diplomacy and a perfectly staged show do not save the climate – this can only be done by leaving the greater part of fossil fuel reserves in the ground, stopping deforestation, and ending industrialized agriculture. And all of this needs to happen quickly, which requires a set of effective measures and policies.

But the Paris Agreement does not include mechanisms and measures to ensure that this target is met. In fact, the Paris Agreement cements and strengthens the illusion of decoupling growth and emission and of green growth through a new level of utopian technocratic optimism – negative emissions.

In fact, the agreement willingly accepts missing the 1.5-degree target, and it contains many recipes for a new wave of neo-colonialism in the name of green capitalism.

Instead of redefining and changing the economy and the mode of production and consumption that cause climate change, it redefines nature by turning it into a tradable commodity.


Image above: Graph of how many "Earth's" humanity will need for resources if we continue with moderate growth or attempt a rapid reduction in consumption. Note, the last time we were living within the budget of needing only one Earth was back in 1970. From (https://newint.org/features/2015/12/01/alternatives-to-growth/).

The market mechanisms embedded in the agreement serve to enable the continuation of high consumption lifestyles in rich countries, while offsetting this overconsumption in the Global South and thus continuing colonial exploitation.

Beyond green capitalism

Degrowth stands in stark opposition not just to the continuation of a “brown” – fossil fuels-based and extractivist – capitalism, but also to the institutionalization of what seems the most likely alternative – a “green” capitalism based on the massive investment in renewable energies, global carbon trading regimes, and the economization of nature.

For many of us, the belief that there is “no climate justice without degrowth” is a fundamental motivation to engage in the degrowth community or movement. The climate justice perspective can inspire an understanding of degrowth that might be more appealing to some – an understanding of degrowth  as the democratically-led transformation to societies that are not based on the extraction or import of disproportionate amounts of resources and on the disproportionate use of sinks.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that this is only one side of the coin, since it stipulates that degrowth is more fundamental and the necessary precondition to achieve climate justice.

Of course, there is great potential for cooperation and alliances between the two movements.

But in the spirit of what was termed “alliances without subordination” at the Budapest conference in 2016, I want to turn this around and argue that the other side is equally important: There is no degrowth without climate justice, or – more comprehensively – ecological justice or even global justice.

If degrowth is not built on a comprehensive vision for global justice and fails to incorporate key elements that are clearer and more prominent in the climate justice movement than in degrowth discourses, it will not be the emancipatory project many wish it to be. What can the degrowth community learn from the climate justice movement? I want to highlight three key lessons.

Changing structures

First lesson, the focus on deep structural transformations, transformations in the economic, political, mental, and social structures of our societies. Of course, much has been written and said on this in the degrowth discussion – but it could move further. Beatrice Rodriguez Labajos said that activists in the global South generally think that degrowth is not radical enough, because it is not anti-capitalist and mainly focuses on individual lifestyle-change.

Based on the discussions at the recent conferences, a consensus seems to be emerging that degrowth is indeed a proposal to overcome capitalism, and not just a new packaging for business as usual.

Similarly, degrowth could be clearer on how to change political structures (for example in the discussions about global trade regimes such as TTIP and CETA, degrowth is largely absent), mental structures such as extractivism in all its forms, and social structures.

If degrowth is understood as a heterogeneous and evolving social movement in the making, one can understand the great variety of approaches taken by degrowth actors in terms of its main critiques, proposed alternatives and transformational practices – ranging from sufficiency-oriented adepts of voluntary simplicity to social-reformists, anti-capitalists and feminists.

The climate justice perspective can help in strengthening those parts of the degrowth community that are not blind to issues of structural transformations.

Opposing hierarchies

Second, the climate justice movement is very strong in articulating and opposing hierarchies and power. Degrowth could learn that opposing all forms of power and domination is key if we want to achieve a more just society.

And because the degrowth community is so strongly homogenous – just look around at the degrowth conferences –, it really needs to listen to and learn from others, both in the North and the South. In fact, climate justice is a movement of some of the least privileged people resisting the immediate loss of their livelihoods.

The term goes back to the notion of environmental justice, and the origin of this term is highly illuminating.

When the largely white and privileged American environmental activists resisted the dumping of industrial waste in the 1960s, they basically only cared about their own communities.

This resulted in pushing the environmental costs down the social ladder, onto communities of color and the poor. In opposing this, these communities used the term “environmental racism” and “demanded environmental justice.” And in the 1990s, the term was then also used for the global problem of climate change.

In contrast to this, degrowth is a concept largely supported by some of the most privileged people on this planet – largely white, well-educated, middle-class people with Western passports  (on this, see a forthcoming study on the participants of the Leipzig Degrowth conference). It can even be conceptualized as the self-problematization of privileges in the context of what Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen have called “the imperial mode of living”.

Because of this privileged homogeneity, degrowth needs to be particularly careful not to reproduce hierarchies, unequal distribution of power, and domination.

We do not only need a decolonization of the economic imaginary – on which degrowth focuses – but, since they are all connected, we also need this decolonization in terms of sex and gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and all other forms of division and exclusion.

How these and other hierarchies of the current capitalist, patriarchal, and (post)colonial societies can be overcome in a degrowth alternative and what they imply for degrowth strategies should be at the center of future degrowth and post-growth debates.

To do this, degrowth needs to listen to and build alliances with the less privileged, not only in the global South, but also in the global North. In short, degrowth needs to become more intersectional and diverse.

Let’s look at two examples: In a recent project called “Degrowth in movements” we collaborated with protagonists from more than 30 other social movements and alternative economic approaches to discuss their relation to degrowth and how from their perspective degrowth should develop.

The resultant essays provide fascinating insights – for example from the perspective of refugee movements, queer-feminism, trade unions, care, or food sovereignty -, which provide some entry points for degrowth to enter into broader alliances, reach out to new social groups, and strengthen its own critique of power and hierarchies.

In another project – which was actually one of the outcomes of the degrowth summer schools in 2015 and 2016 – the Konzeptwerk Neue Ökonomie will be organizing a conference together with the transnational refugee activist network Afrique-Europe-Interact that will bring degrowth and refugee activists together in October 2017 to discuss the connections between flight and migration, self-determined development, and ecological crises from a practical and political perspective.

Embracing struggles

The third lesson seems to me to be the most important one. Degrowth can learn from climate justice the struggle. So far, degrowth is largely an academic endeavor to formulate and debate about alternatives, and grassroots efforts to strengthen low-impact lifestyles here and now.

Both are vitally important.

However, degrowth sometimes appears to be somewhat vague on key political questions, in particular in terms of what the necessary struggles that need to be fought to achieve degrowth are, what this would entail, and who are allies and enemies.

To develop meaningful strategies for political change, degrowth should become more confrontational. Degrowth should not shy away from but rather face and embrace the conflicts that are necessary to achieve its goals.

One very concrete situation that the degrowth-climate justice alliance needs to organize against is that, while global carbon majors – the largest oil, gas, and coal companies worldwide – own 5 times more reserves of fossil fuels that are still in the ground than those that can be burned if humanity wants to achieve only the less ambitious 2 degree target, these reserves have largely already been turned into financial assets that are owned by companies and traded on international markets.

Thus, alleviating climate change – and thus achieving one key basis for a degrowth transformation – is only possible if these companies are expropriated of these assets. They’ll do anything to avoid this. What does this mean for degrowth strategies? Also in this regard, the climate justice movement is showing the way.

One great example is the Break Free campaign in May 2016, in which tens of thousands of people on 6 continents did something that politicians did not: they took bold, courageous action to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Degrowth should strive to engage more with on-the-ground struggles.

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Dumb and Dumber

SUBHEAD: Coal-loving Wyoming legislators are pushing a bill to outlaw wind and solar.

By Katie Herzog on 14 January 2017 for Grist -
(http://grist.org/briefly/coal-loving-wyoming-legislators-are-pushing-a-bill-to-outlaw-wind-and-solar/)


Image above: The Eagle Butte coal mine outside Gillette, Wyoming is operated by Alpha Coal West Inc. and is one of about a dozen mines in the Gillette area. From (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/20/us/as-wind-power-lifts-wyomings-fortunes-coal-miners-are-left-in-the-dust.html).

On the first day of the state’s legislative session, nine Republican lawmakers filed legislation that would bar utilities from using electricity produced by large-scale renewable energy projects.

The bill, whose sponsors are primarily from the state’s top coal-producing counties, would require utilities to use only approved energy sources like coal, natural gas, nuclear power, hydroelectric, and oil.

While individual homeowners and small businesses could still use rooftop solar or backyard wind, utilities would face steep fines if they served up clean energy.

Wyoming is the nation’s largest producer of coal, and gets nearly 90 percent of its electricity from coal, but it also has huge, largely untapped wind potential.

Currently, one of the nation’s largest wind farms is under construction there, but most of the energy will be sold outside Wyoming. Under this bill, such out-of-state sales could continue, yet the measure would nonetheless have a dampening effect on the state’s nascent renewable energy industry.

Experts are skeptical that the bill will pass, even in dark-red Wyoming, InsideClimate News reports. One of the sponsors, Rep. Scott Clem, is a flat-out climate change denier whose website showcases a video arguing that burning fossil fuels has improved the environment.


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The Stuff Problem

SUBHEAD: How much mined material will we need to build a 100-per-cent renewable energy world?

By Danny Chivers on 15 August 2015 for New Internationalist -
(http://newint.org/blog/2015/08/15/material-requirements/)


Image above: 'Yes to renewables!' Hundreds rallied outside the Victorian Parliament House, Melbourne, Australia on 10 December 2013. From original article.

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.

How much aluminium, copper, iron and cement would we need?
In October 2014, a joint academic study between researchers from Norway, the US, the Netherlands, Chile and China made an assessment of the main materials needed to build renewable generators: steel, concrete, copper and aluminium.¹

They looked at the materials required for renewables to provide 40 per cent of global energy use by 2050, and concluded that this would be feasible within current rates of global resource use.

I’ve taken their figures and attempted to go a step further. How much material would be needed for a transition to a 100-per-cent renewable world, where everyone had access to 13,000 KWh of energy per year? (This is one estimate of the amount of energy needed for an eco-efficient version of a “modern” lifestyle – it’s less than half of the energy currently used per person in the EU).

For this calculation, I assumed that 3,000 KWh per person would be provided by non-electric generation (rooftop solar heat collectors, heat pumps, geothermal heat, waste gas, maybe energy crops). I then assumed we would build the following generation sources to provide 10,000 KWh of electricity for nine billion people (these totals all fit comfortably within realistic estimates of the amount that could be sustainably generated from these sources using current technology):

If we transitioned to 100-per-cent renewable energy by 2040 – thus giving ourselves a decent chance at avoiding runaway climate change – we would need the materials laid out in the table below to build and maintain this amount of generation.



The table shows that this is a serious undertaking and that we’re cutting things rather fine – particularly with regard to aluminuum and copper – but also that the amounts of material required fall within current production totals and so are certainly possible to obtain.³

Once these materials have been extracted once, the metals can theoretically be recycled indefinitely, meaning that we’re talking about a short-term burst of new material use to get everything installed, from which point onwards we’ll be able to get most of what we need from recycling the old turbines, panels and so on.

What if we had to do more mining to achieve this?
Ideally, we would get these materials by diverting production away from less socially useful consumer junk into the sustainable technology that we actually need, so there’d be no net increase in mining.

However, what if that isn’t possible? What if our shift to a renewable future requires us to pull an extra four billion tonnes of material out of the ground over the next 25 years?

There is no such thing as zero-impact mining; it is one of the most notoriously destructive, poisonous and corrupt industries in the world.

Let’s look at this worst-case scenario. The final amount of raw material produced is just the tip of the extraction iceberg; every tonne of metal or cement requires many more tonnes of rock and ore to be hauled out of the ground in the mining and production process. Making four billion tonnes of copper, aluminium, iron and cement will require 50 billion tonnes of real-life extraction.

However, we need to look at the other side of the equation too. Phasing out fossil fuels over the next 25 years will mean a huge reduction in the amount of oil, coal and gas extracted over that period.

Based on IEA projections, shifting to 100-per-cent renewables would avoid the need for around 230 billion tonnes of fossil fuels between now and 2040.

Coal, tar sands and heavy oil, like metals, require the extraction of large amounts of extra rock and earth; when all this is added in, our transition would prevent 1,850 billion tonnes of fossil-related extraction up to 2040.

So even if we needed the full 50 billion tonnes of new extraction to build our new electricity generators, we’d still be creating a large reduction in the amount of destructive extractive industry taking place worldwide. We might be able to reduce the damage further by recycling the materials from all the oil and gas rigs, pipelines, and fossil-fuel power stations that we’ll no longer need, providing raw materials for our sustainable alternatives.

Rare Earth Elements
As well as the high-volume materials, there are also a number of rarer minerals (known as ‘Rare Earth Elements’ or REEs) that we need to watch out for. These include indium, gallium and tellurium, which are used as semi-conductors in some types of solar panel.

These metals have important uses in other technologies too (for example, indium is used in solder and flat-screen technologies, and gallium is used in computing components and LEDs), and are relatively rare; this means that there is likely to be a limit to how many solar panels can be made with these particular semiconductors.

Luckily, this only affects certain specific designs of panel (not including our familiar black silicon panels), and so shouldn’t prevent us from rolling out the amount of solar power we need.

There’s a similar issue with dysprosium, which is used for making magnets in many modern wind turbines. The rarity of this element is likely to constrain the number of turbines that can be made this way. There are, however, alternative ways of making magnets without dysprosium, and so this shouldn’t act as a serious constraint either.

What about the materials needed for the rest of our sustainable transition? A typical ground-source heat pump weighs around 200 kg; air-source units tend to be a little lighter.

If 200-kg heat pumps were installed – slightly excessively – in three billion buildings around the world, that would require 0.6 billion tonnes of materials. If we also installed three billion solar water heaters, weighing 100 kg each, that would give us another 0.3 billion tonnes. So the rest of our power generation would come in at less than a billion tonnes of material.

Even if this required 10 times as much extracted material, bringing our total (when added to electricity generation, above) up to 60 billion tonnes, it would still leave us with a huge material saving thanks to the 1,850 billion tonnes of fossil-fuel extraction that we’re preventing.

A worst-case scenario would involve having enough storage facilities and back-up generators to support our wind and photovoltaic solar generation, making sure that the lights stay on even when the sun sets and the wind drops. Assuming that these facilities required similar quantities of material per KWh as a gas-fired power station, this would add another 0.4 billion tonnes of material, and three billion tonnes of mining.

Electric cars
What about electric vehicles? Well, there are currently more than a billion road vehicles in the world. Currently we are on a path of pure expansion, with the number of cars on the road expected to double in the next 20 years. In 2014, for example, the world manufactured over 80 million new cars, buses and trucks.

A billion vehicles are probably enough. If distributed more fairly around the world, with the priority on buses and car-sharing schemes, they are likely to give us all the mobility we need. Consider, for example, that cities considered to be well served with buses such as London, Rio and Hong Kong contain between 650 and 1,700 buses per million inhabitants.⁸

 If we decided to err on the side of caution and provide 2,000 buses per million people globally, that would require around 20 million buses. Add in a few billion bicycles (most of which probably already exist) and we’ll have sorted out most people’s daily transport needs. The remaining 980 million vehicles should then be enough to plug the global transport gaps as shared cars, taxis, and trucks for freight.

So what if, instead of doubling the number of vehicles globally in the next 20 years, we instead gradually replaced the existing fleet with renewably powered vehicles? This would require no increase in manufacturing overall, just a change in what we manufactured and where. We could even provide a large amount of the necessary raw materials by recycling old fossil-powered vehicles at the same rate as clean-energy vehicles emerge from the factories.

The point is that a genuine transition to a sustainable transport system wouldn’t require an increase in manufacturing, but a redirection of existing manufacturing. This would need a significant shift from our current position though; out of the 80-90 million vehicles currently manufactured per year, only 200,000-300,000 are fully electric.

Of course, we should check in with the worst-case scenario too: what if we ended up manufacturing a billion renewably powered vehicles in a way that added to global material use? Well, a typical car weighs around 1.5 tonnes; trucks and buses, though smaller in number, are larger, so let’s be cautious and say an average vehicle weighs two tonnes.

This would add two billion tonnes onto our material demand, and thus around 20 billion tonnes onto our grand extraction total, bringing it up 80 billion tonnes. This is still far less than the 1,850 billion tonnes of fossil-fuel extraction that we would prevent.

In addition, there are certain elements used in electric cars that we need to be particularly aware of. One of them is copper – a typical electric car contains around 60 kg of copper, compared with 20 kg in a fossil-fuelled car. If we build a billion of these vehicles over 20 years, we’ll need 0.003 billion tonnes of copper per year.

This compares with 0.002 billion tonnes per year that’s already being used for manufacturing conventional cars; if we succeed in phasing out fossil-fuel car production and only building clean-energy vehicles, then we’ll only be increasing overall copper demand by 0.001 billion tonnes per year – much of which should be obtainable from recycling old vehicles.

In the worst-case scenario, with no recycling, mining the extra copper needed for a billion electric cars would add another nine billion tonnes of mining onto our extraction total,¹⁰ still leaving us way below the fossil-fuelled business-as-usual amount.

Rare elements in electric cars
A recent study by Delucchi et al into the material components of electric cars identified a number of rare elements that could potentially limit their growth.¹¹ The first is neodymium, an element used in electric motors and also in the generators of many wind turbines.

Maintaining a billion electric vehicles and obtaining a quarter of our energy from wind turbines could exhaust global neodymium supplies in less than 100 years; however, there are alternative ways of building motors and generators without neodymium, which means that this needn’t be a constraining factor.

The second group of potentially problematic elements are rare metals and minerals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, manganese, phosphorous and titanium. These are used in the rechargeable batteries in electric cars, and potentially in other energy storage systems too. All of these batteries use lithium, combined with other elements.

The Delucchi et al study found that cobalt and nickel reserves, in particular, could be rapidly depleted by a mass rollout of electric cars using batteries containing these elements. Using titanium-based batteries would be unlikely to exhaust global titanium reserves but would involve multiplying the rate of extraction of this metal by more than 100 times, which might create practical difficulties.

Fortunately, manganese, iron and phosphorous are much more abundant, and so we should be able to make the batteries we need without relying on cobalt, nickel or titanium.

Lithium itself is more likely to be a problem. The Delucchi et al study suggests that a mass rollout of electric cars could exhaust proven lithium reserves within 100 years – not counting the extra lithium that might be needed for improved electricity storage systems in homes and communities.

This means that humanity should be able to obtain enough lithium to make the initial transition to an electrified transport system, but to maintain it beyond the second half of the century we’ll need to either get very good at recycling it, find more supplies, or find safe and affordable ways to extract lithium from the oceans (where it is abundant, but dispersed).

Avoiding a colonialist mindset
There’s another serious issue here. This is one of those moments where it’s easy to slip accidentally into a colonialist mindset, when referring casually to ‘reserves’ of minerals ‘available’ to the world. Whether or not those materials are dug out of the ground should not be a decision for someone like me, a white guy typing on a computer in Europe; it should be up to the communities that live in the area concerned and would be affected by the extraction.

Although the quantities of lithium required for everyone in the world to have decent access to electrified transport are relatively small when compared to high-volume mined materials like iron or coal, the necessary mines would no doubt loom large in their local landscape.

Most of the world’s known lithium reserves are located in Bolivia and Chile. These are real places, inhabited by real people – including Indigenous peoples whose lives, livelihoods and culture are intimately bound up with the land they live on.

Will it be possible to obtain enough lithium for an electrified world without trampling over the rights of local communities? If not, then we’ll need to find a different path to our renewably powered future.

References:

1. Hertwich et al, ‘Integrated life-cycle assessment of electricity-supply scenarios confirms global environmental benefit of low-carbon technologies’, PNAS Sep 2014.

2. The 2014 international study only provides material usage for solar, wind and hydro power. For wave and tidal, I have assumed the same material use per TWh as for offshore wind; for geothermal, I have assumed the same material use per TWh as for a typical gas power station.

3. At current extraction rates, there are more than enough of all these materials in proven reserves to last for decades to come; once extracted, the metals can in theory be recycled indefinitely. 

4. This recycling process would be unlikely to provide more than a few percent of the raw materials required, however, because wind and solar power require far more building material per MWh than oil, gas or coal power. See greet.es.anl.gov/publication-oil-gas-prod-infra

5. Hertwich et al (2014) - Annex

6. nin.tl/groundsourcepumps

7. Wall Street Journal, nin.tl/carsalesrising

8. nin.tl/brazilbuses

9. Forbes, nin.tl/electriccars2014

10. Copper mining is particularly wasteful, with 310 tonnes of rock extracted for every tonne of metal produced.

11. MA Delucchi, C Yang, AF Burke, JM Ogden, K Kurani, J Kessler and D Sperling, ‘An assessment of electric vehicles’, Phi Trans R Soc A 2014 372, 2013.

Renewable Energy: cleaner, fairer ways to power the planet by Danny Chivers is published by New Internationalist and available at nin.tl/nononsenserenewables



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