Continuing with my blog series about how the transition from a Christian nation to a secular one has also been a transition from atomic virtues such as honesty, temperance and chastity to a moral system where the basic virtues are allegiance to causes such as Global Warming Climate Change, racial justice and gender affirmation, today we get to the engineering aspects of batteries.
If you won't use nuclear power, then the only way to fight CO2 emissions is by using wind, solar and hydro power. Since hydro power is off the table - we won't dam rivers any more - we're left with the intermittent power sources of wind and solar. That means we will need tons and tons of batteries. Those batteries require lithium.
There isn't enough lithium on planet Earth to make it work. Dig this and this.
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| As we switch over to electric cars and more solar and wind, the demand for lithium will go through the roof. |
Yesterday, I had this to say about the racial justice part of our new value system.
(The racial justice author's) virtue comes from the act of writing about racial justice, from professing her undying loyalty to fighting for racial justice. This is why I see it as their low-level virtue. Just as honesty was a virtue, independent of anything else, so pledging yourself to the cause of racial justice is a virtue, independent of anything else.
There's no need for your actions to make sense and there's no need for them to produce any tangible results. The pledge itself is the virtue.
The same model holds for the Global Warming Climate Change crowd. There are any number of engineering reasons why wind and solar aren't going to do the trick, but that's not the point. All that matters is that you pledge allegiance to saving the planet. It doesn't need an objective definition or realizable goals. Once you have taken the loyalty oath, you can go back to whatever it was you were doing before.
The oath, the pledge, those are the virtues. Results, logic, impacts on other people, those are irrelevant. That's why the climate warriors can take their private jets to climate meetings and not feel an ounce of guilt. It's not the CO2 coming from their jets that matters, it's the CO2 coming from their vocal chords.
Well, first off, I agree that nuclear power is a necessary companion to solar. Particularly because it has exactly the opposite issue from solar. Nuclear power plants are most efficient when they run flat-out full time, so they produce power all night even when nobody is awake to use it. Which is why Consumers Power originally built the Ludington Pumped Power Facility by Lake Michigan. They wanted to save the excess nuclear power from overnight to use for peak loads during the day. Of course, it now turns out that pumped storage is also great for intermittent electricity sources like solar and wind, so now Ludington is both storing excess nuclear electricity all night, and doing load-leveling for solar and wind during the day. This makes the pumped storage even more desirable than it would be if the electricity was all nuclear or all intermittent.
ReplyDeleteThe part I am going to take issue with, though, is that lithium production graph. Not the graph itself, but what you think it implies. It does not imply that the Earth does not have enough lithium. It just means that if we want that much lithium, we are going to have to put a bit more effort into finding and mining it.
We have ramped up production of minerals resources nearly that fast before. Just look at aluminum production statistics after WWII:
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/matse81/node/2233
Or US steel production from 1875 to 1900:
http://unitedstatesriseofaworldpower.weebly.com/graphs-amp-data.html
The thing is, we aren't particularly short of lithium. People only think we are because they don't understand what "proven reserves" means. That just means the ores that we (a) currently know about that (b) can be extracted with current technology at (c) the current price. Changing any one of those factors dramatically changes the "proven reserves". The biggest issue is people notice that, for some commodity, the proven reserves are only enough to support current production for 20-30 years. They then immediately lose their minds, screaming "Oh no, we are going to run out of in 20 years! We're doomed! DOOMED!"
But the reason the reserves are only enough for 20-30 years is that exploration for deposits is expensive. And the mining companies consider 20-30 years to be an adequate margin to allow them to maintain production. So they explore just enough to maintain that margin, and once they reach it, they stop looking.
And then, there is the point that lithium is not in any way indispensable for batteries. Lithium-ion is just the leading chemistry for lightweight batteries. For stationary applications, there are all sorts of other applications that do not use scarce elements and work just fine in big battery banks. In particular, there are a bunch of sodium-based battery chemistries that I think look really promising, and we have sodium coming out of our ears.
The bigger problems with solar and wind power are effective lifetime and disposal. Both technologies have a useful life. And disposal/recycling of the solar panels and blades of the windmill are a huge problem that is being hidden behind the curtain.
ReplyDeleteThere are some windmills in Iowa that have worn out at 15 years, after a promise of 25 year life. And those blades are not recyclable.
The future of batteries is not Li-Ion. Solid State has renewed interest.
But future energy needs without fossil fuel has to involve nuclear to be viable. And no, fusion reactors is not going to be built next year, like the morons on twitter are blathering on about. The few tweets I saw yesterday was immediately obvious that they saw the headline but didn't read or understand anything beyond that. The net output of the reaction was on the order of the power of 1 stick of dyn-o-mite. Or 1 Jimmie J.J. Walker.
I can't claim to understand all this either. I can comprehend less that a quarter of what my son talks about his grad school studies.
MN: I agree that recycling wind turbine blades is not workable, what with them being made of high-end composites, but I don't think the solar panels are that bad. We did a recycling test with a dead solar panel in our lab a while back, and we found out that, from a recycling standpoint, they are sheets of glass with impurities. The glass sheet accounts for probably 85-90% of the weight of the panel, and most of the rest of the weight is the aluminum frame and the plastic backing, all of which can be peeled apart and recycled pretty easily. The silicon is about the thickness of a coat of paint, and can be power-washed off of the other components. This leaves it mixed with copper and silver from the conductive traces, and it is easy enough to use an electrostatic separator to fractionate those into recyclable components, too. Although, it is the copper and silver that are worth recovering, the silicon is basically a few grams of waste that will oxidize back into sand given a chance.
ReplyDeleteYeah, I was trying to make too many points there, and didn't finish the solar panel thought.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that the people that bought into these solar panels 15-20 years ago, thought they were getting free energy and no downside.
The panels will expire and have to be recycled. And they don't go in the recycling bin at the curb every other week. The home owner will need to pay to get them removed and hauled off, and then pay for new ones.
Watch in the next few years, this is going to be a political issue, that the left will want taxpayers to pay for these people's recycling costs.
Tim, thanks for the comments about the batteries. I'd suggest that there are additional problems with the size of the battery banks necessary to power Los Angeles when it's dark and there's no wind and then with the disposal of said batteries once they die.
ReplyDeleteThis all goes to what I'm getting at these days - the virtue is not in solving the problem, but in supporting the solving of the problem in a theoretical sense. "I'm a big supporter of the fight against climate change!" is the virtue itself.
"What about disposing of all the dead batteries?"
"You're a science denier!"
MN, I think we've moved beyond the whole trash in the environment thing. The new thing is climate change.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to see trash, just image search for "illegals trash border." It's stunning.
See also: trash around homeless encampments.