Essay by Eric Worrall
“… Each new megawatt of solar power requires 35-45 tonnes of steel, which still needs iron ore and coal …”
Critical minerals ‘main event’ in climate change action
By Marion Rae
Updated June 26 2023 – 12:41pm, first published 12:38pmMore mining, not less, is needed to support the world’s climate change targets and avert an energy shortage, a global summit has been told.
The shift to clean energy systems is gaining momentum, and unlike previous transformation it relies on critical minerals and rare earths, Resources Minister Madeleine King said on Monday at a mining symposium in Brisbane.
An onshore wind power plant requires nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired power plant, Ms King said.
Each new megawatt of solar power requires 35-45 tonnes of steel, which still needs iron ore and coal despite “exciting developments” in hydrogen that may eventually lead to Australia producing green steel.
“That remains distant, so metallurgical coal will remain a necessary component of steel for some time to come,” she said.
…
Critical minerals are “not a sideshow for clean energy, it’s really part of the main event”.
…
Read more: https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8246914/critical-minerals-main-event-in-climate-change-action/
Its refreshing to see Canberra Times mention some cold hard facts, even if they are mixed with fantasies about the shift to clean energy systems gaining momentum.
The reality is nobody knows where the minerals required for clean energy targets will come from. In 2019 Foreign Policy analysed what would be required, one of the requirements was a 2000% increase in Lithium production: (2050 – 2023) x 2000% = 540 years worth of current Lithium production to hit Net Zero by 2050.
The minister mentions “hydrogen” smelted green steel. For now industrial scale green steel is a pipe dream. Iron ore can be smelted using hydrogen rather than coal, but the process is expensive, because all traces of hydrogen must be removed from the final product. The slightest hydrogen contamination in steel causes embrittlement, which leads to serious and difficult to detect structural defects in the final product.
If you add green regulatory hostility towards industry, spiralling energy prices, a struggling manufacturing sector, and aggressive enforcement of environmental regulations to the gross shortfall of green mineral resources, it is not difficult to see why the world is on track for a big Net Zero miss.
The way Reality is shaping up, the coal in the lead picture would make a nice Christmas present. The green wienie nonsense just gets weirder and weirder.
time to paint some coal green and give it to a Green 🙂
a good project for one of those AI programs- or just Photoshop- I’ll expect to see such an image at the top of an upcoming essay
Yes I’m bewildered why Extinction Rebellion for example haven’t taken to painting wind turbines & towers black, brown & yellow. Those all-white windmills everywhere must be a galling symbol of white supremacy that just has to be diversified, equalised and canceled.
Come on, windmill supporters – where’s your sense of climate justice? 🙁
It sure takes lots of FF to power the carbon-free economy. Like a dog chasing its tail.
Or like a snake eating its own tail.
Requiring Net Zero advocates to use “renewable energy” to build windmills and solar panels would shut down that folly.
There is a niche place for wind and solar.
(That niche place place is not suppling the grid.)
Maybe this is it! Wind and solar power ONLY used to manufacture and build more wind and a solar!
A perpetual waste machine!!
Wind & solar have been used as supplemental power generation sources in remote mining and cattle ranching bases for decades.
Diesel fuel for industrial generators to keep battery banks charged out there was / is very expensive to truck by tanker to these outstations, so saving $$$$s in any way effective is applied.
But they would think it absolute madness to rely solely on wind & solar.
That would be a Darwin Award right there.
“Rely On”.. two words that can never apply to wind and solar. !
That’s a great idea!
“Operation Coal” but – dear neighbours – we get there … if it was a song it´s “almost” as beautiful as “Espicially For You”.
This Hegelian principle “use of coal out of chaos” is attributed to the political theories of Marxism, and only works when government authorities enforce the “solutions” to the alleged threats. We get there, nice try.
I looked up some quick supporting numbers, mainly from USGS.gov and NREL. A typical 3mw wind turbine is, by weight, about 75% steel (foundation rebar, tower) requiring coking coal, fiberglass or carbon fiber plus resin blades 11-16%, and cast iron ~6%. Copper and aluminum are only 1-2% each. It also requires ~1200 tons of concrete for the foundation, and ~2 tons of REE from China for the generator permanent magnets.
So much for net zero wind aspirations even before the FF backup generation.
Yes. But total emissions from the once only build of a wind turbine are less than the equivalent gas generator would put out in a year.
Once only build Nick?
Experience so far is that ~ 20 years pulls up the maintainable operating life of your average windmill.
And as they make them larger, like any other constantly moving machinery, the life expectancy gets shorter and the maintenance down-time becomes much more frequent and longer.
The warranty periods offered on new windmills should be a reasonable indicator of expected life.
With nearly all manufacturers requiring an initial period of warranty operation and maintenance (O&M) service for turbine purchases, which typically runs for between two and five years, owners should be aware of the level of service provided during this period and be prepared to evaluate the condition of the turbines before they are turned over to them.
https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/989458/turbine-servicing—act-warranty
“Experience so far is that ~ 20 years pulls up the maintainable operating life”
And in that time, it saves 19 times the emissions used to build it.
But in fact most of the emissions came from the foundations and monopile, which would last a lot longer than 20 years.
Yes but if you’re gonna invest $$$$s and effort in building something that you need to supply you with continuous 24x7x52 electricity that secures the basic conditions of modern life for a human lifetime, at an affordable cost, negligible emissions are the very last consideration for any rational person.
Remember –
ALL LIVING THINGS ON EARH THRIVE WITH HIGH CO2.
THAT’S THE SCIENCE.
So you pretend that new (larger) turbines can just be bolted to the smaller foundations of existing (failed) ones?
Never was a wind turbine that ever produced enough energy to mine & process the ores, construct the foundations erect and maintain the turbine, connect to the grid and run for twenty (at very best) years. Not forgetting the removal and disposal at life end.
Did you check out Siemens’ little recent problems?
If BigWind was any use, it wouldn’t need endless subsidies.
again, liar or ignorant?
show me one foundation that was re-used.
it doesn’t matter how long the foundation lasts … it is not re-used for replacement.
Because, it was not cost-effective to begin with, and without the subsidies it will not be replaced in-kind. Bigger & better are needed … the foundations are not adequate.
Your fantasy that the a windmill can produce enough energy to replace itself in just a year is not reflected in any real world data. You are off by a factor of at least 20.
That is nothing like what I said.
Are you planning to set a 10 MW turbine on a concrete foundation designed for 2.5 MW?
“And in that time, it saves 19 times the emissions used to build it.”
You made that up.
The arithmetic is set out here
No-one can refute it.
Once? I don’t think so.
Each turbine is built once only.
Well, once every ~ 20 years or so.
(My poorly-maintained 100 series Landcruiser lasted much longer than that)
Actually the emissions calculated are for the tower and foundations, which will last much longer.
Except that they don’t. !
Towers and the turbine are proving to last considerably less time than 20 years….
Yes, the base and the blades do last “forever”… a mass of polluting concrete buried in the ground, where NOTHING CAN GROW and the blades as toxic landfill.
Quite the environMENTAList, aren’t you Nick . !
Which we all know are always reused and never abandoned… Yeah Riiiight
Around here we have whole crews with rope and cranes going around rehoning and repairing wind turbine blades because they found the erosion is so bad they lose up to 25% of nameplate max output within the first 12 months..
…talking of which there are many many days when the damn things are not turning at all (no wind – in a nice flat area called the Baltic states), or when the ultra regular gales are blasting and they are forced to stop – or they blow up!
So how do they keep the lights on?
Interconnect a bit of nuclear from Finland, inject a bit of hydro, burn oil, and of course loads of oil shale as per usual.
So far all those things have done is increase my electricity bill by direct subsidy by 20% make loads of turbine noise right next to our village, and I can’t refuse any of it.
If only:
https://stopthesethings.com/2023/04/23/costly-pathetic-performance-thousands-of-wind-turbines-being-replaced-after-12-years/
I love how Nick compares the energy needed to build one wind turbine to the energy put out by an entire gas power plant.
The lie by omission that Nick commits here is ignoring the fact that it will take hundreds of wind turbines to replace that single gas power plant.
Beyond that, that gas power plant will last at least three times as long as Nick’s precious wind turbine.
“by an entire gas power plant”
No. It is for equivalent GWh.
Nick I think you are using “optional starting and stopping” the same technique used to make it look like someone has ESP when being tested. You count the hits and do not count the misses.
It seems to me that if one is able to build and maintain a wind turbine, that alone is PROOF that it is not needed.
1) You were the one who started using the phrase “entire gas power plant”.
2) There is no difference between talking about the output of an “entire gas power plant”, and the “equivalent GWh” of an “entire power plant”.
Even by your standards, that attempt at diversion was pathetic.
No number of wind turbines can replace that CCGT, because wind turbines are not dispatchable while CCGT is. In the US, the onshore wind capacity factor is about 31% and declining because the best locations are already used up. So the grid needs CCGT 69% of the time. All that happens is the CCGT is underutilized so the capital is more expensive per MWh.
I did not run (yet) the CO2 produced per ton steel and concrete for a wind turbine. But suspect that if I did, times (800MW single CCGT/ 3 MW wind turbines) 267 wind turbines that the net CO2 would be significantly positive when added to the 69% of the tome CCGT is production CO2. Remember, cCGTbis about 61% thermal efficient at full load (and 59% at minimum 40% load), and the Meghan combustion produces 1 CO2 and 2 H2O so the exhaust is only 1/3 CO2. OTH, smelting iron ore with coke and converting limestone to CaO for cement for concrete produces 100% CO2 emissions.
Ok, got and ran the rough numbers.
First the CCGT.
With wind, runs 69% of 365*24 hours, so about 4835522 MWh per year. The new CCGT produce about 0.34 ton CO2/MWh, so about 165.077 tons/year. Big wind turbines last at best 20 years (Siemens Gamesa financial problems post comments explain why.) So over the wind life, about 3.3 million tons CO2.
Without wind, CCGT would produce about 4.8 million tons.
Second the wind turbine. I got numbers for the Vestas V90/3000 (3Mw). The steel tower weights 235 tons. On average, 2.75 tons of CO2 per ton steel, so 646 tons CO2 just for 1 tower, ignoring foundation rebar. Ordinary 3 bag cement concrete is 0.9tons CO2/tone concrete, so one foundation is 1080 tons CO2. So one V90 is (646+1080) 1726 tons CO2. But we need 267 of them, so production means 460842 tons CO2.
That added to 3.3 million for CCGT with wind is 3.76 million total tons. So less than dispatchable CCGT by about 1 million tons CO2.
BUT this calculation is very wind life dependent. IF 3 MW wind turbines only last 16 years (Siemens Gamesa), then the thing is a complete CO2 wash at about 3.8 million tons CO2 either way. And CCGT still has the about 2.5x lower LCOE cost plus dispatchability advantages.
“Without wind, CCGT would produce about 4.8 million tons.”
I think the arithmetic goes astray there. You have that the 100 TWh produced by the wind turbines over 20 years would emit 3.3 Gtons CO2 if generated by gas. I think that is the correct prima facie savings figure. Some argue that the reduced efficiency of CCGT should be offset, but that is a different calculation.
You didn’t say clearly what the wind array was, but I gather it is 267 turbines averaging 550 MW.
“That added to 3.3 million for CCGT with wind is 3.76 million total tons.”
No, 3.3M was the emissions that CCGT would have made. It makes no sense to add the emissions of building wind.
Here is my arithmetic based on your numbers
Wind produces 5 TWh/year
5TWh/year of CCGT would emit 5*.34= 1.7 Gtons/year
Building wind emits 5 Gtons CO2; about 3 years of CCGT emissions
“Building wind emits 5 Gtons CO2; about 3 years of CCGT emissions”
Oops, my eye slipped a power of 10. RI said
“so production means 460842 tons CO2″
or, say, 0.5 GTons. That is less than 4 months CCGT emissiuons.
So, you are admitting that wind turbine production does essentially nothing to aid life on Earth.
They really are a “why bother” waste, aren’t they
…. (except for those subsides, of course.)
Times 267 turbines. Nick, my proximate arithmetic was rough but very explicit. You either dissemble or are reading challenged. And this stuff even isn’t math, just elementary school arithmetic.
I was very explicit. You are apparently reading challenged. 1 800MW CCGT equals 267 3MW wind turbines at a 0.31 wind capacity factor, ignoring dispatchability. Arithmetic, not even math.
“but very explicit”
It wasn’t at all explicit; the 267 turbines turned up halfway through. And now you can’t even say what you think is wrong. I worked consistently with 267 turbines.
But OK, we can work it out, on your figures, more simply with 1 Vestas turbine. Faceplate 3 MW, so produces 1 MW. That is 8760 MWh/year.
At your 0.34 tonCO2/MWh, CCGT would emit 2978 tons to produce that 8760 MWh.
You say turbine build cost is 1726 tons CO2. That is 0.58 of 1 year’s CCGT emissions (at 1 MW).
But the turbine runs for 20 years, and the structure on which you based the 1762 tons to build would last longer.
“and the structure on which you based the 1762 tons to build would last longer.”
Yes, as a totally useless lump of concrete embedded in the ground, POLLUTING FOREVER the natural environment.
They are not reused, so you cannot count them for longer than the lifetime of the turbine, 20 years or considerably less.
Your comments are getting more and more nonsensical and disingenuous.
I’m sure Nick agrees that ALL wind turbines should be built using zero fossil fuels.
Except even nitty-nick knows that can never be done.
Pulled from anus with no reference. It is nonsense. There is no equivalent gas generator. The guaranteed output of the wind turbine is ZERO. A gas plant that has the same guaranteed output produces no CO2.
And the emissions from disposing of the turbine components after they have worn out after 20 years? Which is already becoming a problem. Lies by omission again Nick?
No Nick. You didn’t allow for the GT having to be built to run 70% of the time to generate when the wind isn’t there.
This is emissions accounting. Are you speaking of extra emissions in building GT?
Mark Twain had it right:
“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”
And ending total emissions from 25.5m Australians wont make the slightest difference to world CO2 levels as they will be replaced and surpassed by China, India, Indonesia etc in a month or so.
In 2021 Australia’s emissions were estimated to be 481Mt CO2. China’s emissions for the same year were 11.4 billion tonnes CO2.
Nick, why limit “emissions” in the first place?
The “settled science” behind CAGW/climate change has made many projections over the decades. None have happened. Rather than scrap the failed hypothesis that Man’s CO2/GHGs will cause (fill in the scare) by (fill in the year), they just make new ones.
Natural variability is ignored.
Nick, why limit “emissions” in the first place?
I should add so as not to be misunderstood.
Does Man’s CO2 do something?
I didn’t believe it could do anything until I saw this.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/10/moncktons-schenectady-showdown/
So I accept that it could have an effect but, if that effect could be separated out from Ma’ Gaia’s activities and effects; it’s hardly harmful or worth the cost in $$ or freedoms it has cost to prevent it.
Not even one wind turbine to “supply” the grid.
That’s bollox Stokes.
Take the example of a German wind turbine.
In winter months there is often no wind at all for weeks (FOG).
So, you need 100% backup from sources other than solar and wind.
That means your so called “Investment ” in generating sweet zilch is actually DOUBLING the costs of your reliable generating capacity by weighing it down with a vast tonnage of useless crap.
Fact is, these unreliables neither pay for themselves when actually needed in Winter, and harm the investment climate of reliable grids by forcing governments to shut down 100% reliable backup power such as German Nuclear power stations or relying on Russian gas!
It’s all very well to vent your crap arguments and theories on here, but the real world is that power cuts such as the one that took out UK mainline electric trains for an afternoon, cannot do anything other than become less than isolated exceptions.
Stokes should be getting a Darwin award for freezing OAPs to death during winter months….all we wait for is just one of those wonderful winter anticyclone periods….stuff people all forget about during the warm – oh so record temperatures (NOT) in summer months!
Do any any of these calculations include battery storage(if needed) for when the wind stops?
Battery storage to cover a 15 minute gap is possible, but very costly. So far no one is buying battery packs that big, not just to fill the gap while a fossil-fuel plant kept hot but not rotating comes up to replace wind or solar power. To cover 12 hours of solar downtime every night requires much bigger batteries, which would cost so much no one can even build a prototype. It would dwarf the cost of a fossil fuel plant built just to back up the renewables – and that’s assuming building a 50 times bigger battery doesn’t turn up new engineering problems. To cover a two week wind outage with batteries would only require 28 of those battery packs that we can’t afford and have never built.
“Its refreshing to see Canberra Times mention some cold hard facts,”
They are quoting
“More mining, not less, is needed…Resources Minister Madeleine King said”
She is promoting her portfolio.
Better than endlessly promoting bullshit, Mr. Stokes.
and rationality (sometimes referred to as “common sense”).
Facing the truth,.. something Nick can never allow itself to do.
Translation: I can’t refute the data, so I’ll attack the messenger.
By Nick’s standard displayed here, nothing he ever says should be taken seriously, because Nick’s income depends on the continuation of the global warming scam.
I think Nick is retired.
It is his few remaining comrades at CSIRO that he has to comply with.
He says one thing against the CC scam, he will get outed and de-friended.
He is lonely and sad enough already. !
No, he’s got Miriam Hot Whopper (aka ‘Sou’) at Mount Beauty a couple of valleys over from Moyhu.
Great countryside, with not a windmill in view anywhere, of course.
“Miriam Hot Whopper”
As I said, very sad and lonely !
Obviously needs a couple of big wind turbines in his back yard… or on top of the hill… just to keep him company. !
What you say Nick… have you put in a request yet?
I’ve asked Stokes several times why RE needs Government subsidies if it’s so wonderful. He has never replied. Similarly, he has never explained why energy prices always increase with the proportion of RE in a country’s energy mix.
It’s almost as though he doesn’t want to answer.
Their ABC in Australia reported today that the imminent electricity cost price increase is due to the long tail in price increases of coal and gas. There was no mention of the closure of Liddell power station or the ever increasing cost of transmission.
It did mention that those who can afford it can buy solar panels and batteries to reduce the impact of rising costs but no mention of the theft from the remaining consumers to support the savings from the new distributed generators. The level of theft increases as new “renewable” energy targets are set and it is falling on a diminishing number of consumers unable to enter the Ponzi scheme.
You would think these lunatics would realise that nothing about “renewable” energy is low cost or sustainable.
A weather dependent grid can never compete with distributed power generation using the same collectors. There is no benefit of scale and the distributed generator/consumer avoids the high cost of transmission. Those who are cashed up will leave the grid. The best investment for anyone with cash reserves in Australia is solar panels and batteries to get off grid. It would be nice to see the Panasonic ENEFARM on offer in Australia. That would definitely allow moving off the electricity grid.
Madeleine King is the sane one in the Labor party room. We need to hear her more, but I suspect that the party and the media conspire to prevent that whenever they can – which is nearly all the time.
Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators. The earth is not in a climate crisis, CO2 is not the control knob for earth’s climate and earth is not going to reach a tipping point and suffer irreversible global warming.
Someone finally made the Aussie guvmint morons sit down and pay attention to how the pieces of the windmills are produced and of what materials. Really? If it weren’t for the subsidies there would be no solar panels nor windmills. They just don’t work well enough to replace the fossil fuels in present use.
On the idiocy of Bowen (Australian energy minister) and his plans for energy poverty, de-industrialization and de-growth.
Has the labor/green coalition updated their “estimates” on the cost of the unrequired “transition”. I know some numbers have been thrown around, and we had AEMO estimates and CSIRO modelled guesses. Those numbers IME are years old now, those already astronomical figures would have blown out since then. My estimate is capital costs have increased by between 20%-30%, that funnily enough, seems to align with the increase in consumers energy bills.
Bowen, just one of many UN IPCC puppets needs to provide the latest modelled cost increase estimates, and total costs that will be incurred over the remaining term of the current labor/green government, and beyond. It is worth noting, that there is an assumption of “future technologies” within the cost models in order to reduce costs.
There is also discussion here comparing net emissions of gas FF v construction of wind turbine. What has been lacking is the additional emissions generated in order to connect wind turbines to a grid. Or the emissions generated in building an entirely new grid or grid extension. One simply cannot compare emissions for wind v gas for instance in the context of building a solitary turbine sitting in a field.
For new renewables do we not need to add the emissions generated from expanding an existing grid, or building a new grid and all of the associated infrastructure required to operate and maintain that grid. For instance.
Roads
Towers
Transmissions / Interconnectors
HV substations
Distribution
Underground infrastructure
Offshore cabling
On shore cabling
Batteries.
What windmill/solar advocates never address is this:
When storms occur and take down power lines, the current electricity generating plants do not get damaged. It only takes a relatively short time to repair the power lines to get people their power back.
With windmills and solar as your sole electricity generators, when a storm takes those out, you cannot get power to the people for many months or even years.
Two options:
Option 1 wastes the very resources idiots are claiming should be kept in the ground while destroying society. Option 2 is what anyone with common sense and an instinct for survival will choose.