What is this publication and who finances it because this section is incredibly sus:
Copper use is not carved in stone. Hybrid cars, which pair small batteries with gasoline engines, need far less of the metal than fully electric vehicles.
Power grids that mix nuclear, wind, solar, and a pinch of natural-gas backup can slice the copper bill dramatically compared with battery-heavy systems.
“First of all, users can fact-check the study, but also they can change the study parameters and evaluate how much copper is required if we have an electric grid that is 20% nuclear, 40% methane, 20% wind, and 20% hydroelectric, for example,” Simon said. “They can make those changes and see what the copper demand will be.”
Like you think we can transition to an increasingly electrified world, where all power comes from electric utility lines, and you think our copper usage will be … just in renewable power plants?
This reads like straight fossil fuel propaganda. In an electrified future the majority of copper use comes from distribution lines and products that use electricity not the type of power plants generating electricity.
I’m not defending the article, but I think most overhead power lines are aluminium, which is probably good as it’s abundant compared to copper.
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The article is shit, the study is about copper used for reducing fossil-fuel power generation. It is basing the projected use of copper on windmills and especially large batteries.
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Those high-powered and long distance power lines are made aluminium and steel.
- Distribution doesn’t just include long distance distribution. It includes all the wiring between transformers and houses and all the internal wiring of the house and all the devices inside etc.
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The original study abstract is a little more clear. The main concern is grid storage batteries and EV batteries.
Given that the sharp increase in copper demand is primarily driven by batteries, the extra copper needs for electrification can be significantly reduced if the need for electrical storage is minimized. This can be achieved by generating electricity through a mix of nuclear, wind, and photovoltaics; managing power generation with backup electric plants fueled by methane from abundant resources of natural gas; and transitioning to a predominantly hybrid transportation fleet rather than fully electric vehicles.
Or you use pumped hydro, or compressed air, or gravity batteries, or any of the other energy storage technologies that aren’t chemical batteries.
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Do they think the copper is consumed? Like, renewable resources burn copper?!
Your argument against the article that talks about copper usage is founded on incomplete knowledge of where copper is actually used?
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It’s founded on the article not making a cohesive argument. Current copper usage is primarily in consumption and distribution, not generation.
This smells a little funny, as others have suggested. I read an article a while ago that suggested that we’re not running out of raw materials; we’re thinking about the problem wrong:
Chachra proposes that we could – we must – treat material as scarce, and that one way to do this is to recognize that energy is not. We can trade energy for material, opting for more energy intensive manufacturing processes that make materials easier to recover when the good reaches its end of life. We can also opt for energy intensive material recovery processes. If we put our focus on designing objects that decompose gracefully back into the material stream, we can build the energy infrastructure to make energy truly abundant and truly clean.
This is all outlined in the book How Infrastructure Works from Deb Chachra.
That would be great except for one problem: capitalism. Proper recovery and recycling of materials will never happen so long as production of new materials is cheaper.
Also capitalism’s need for infinite growth has lead us to impose engineered “demand creation” (through advertising) and now even “growth hacking” to supercharge this process. It has made us more wasteful than ever. We are headed into a wall.
The problem is the cost of each. Right now material is dirt cheap and energy prices are going up. And we are not good at long term planning.
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this website is cancer. I’m I’m mobile and counted 6 ads in my view with space left for 3 lines of text. Don’t post crap like this. Yes, i normally use an ad blocker but this is inside the connect app
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it could be theess of a website but i saw no link to a peer reviewed publication, so i think its safe to assume were good with he cooper
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This all suggests that we keep producing, wasting and manufacturing things infinitely without ever recycling, reusing or re purposing everything that we are mining out of the ground. The article notes that this includes recycling but only at the rate we have now.
If we keep running our world the way we are now for the next hundred yes … than yes, we are going to run out of everything because we live in an absolutely wasteful society that only runs in a way to produce things designed with planned obsolescence to break down in a short amount of time so that we can produce more junk to sell and drive a stupid economy to make a small group of idiots even more wealthy. The whole system is designed to run on making infinite money by producing infinite junk that doesn’t last long.
Yes at the rate we are going and the way we are producing things and the way we shape our economy and the way we base our manufacturing … we are definitely going to run out of everything.
We can change our economy and the way we produce and manufacture things - and get rid of this stupid structure of society of just endlessly making money for a small group of morons … or we can keep doing things the way we are now until we run off a cliff and destroy everything and drive our species into extinction.
When we run out of things, it’s we who run out of things but not those with power to get what they need and kill excess population.
So preaching to them is useless.
The article notes that this includes recycling but only at the rate we have now.
The original study says they assumed an annual increase of 0.53% as observed over the last 20 years.
Abolish copper coins. Job done :-)
