Are completely out of touch with copper mining

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9 points·auxym··3 comments

Thing is, renewables don't need copper. Definitely nice to have, but aluminum will substitute with only minor losses. And intermediate solutions like CCAW (copper clad aluminum wire) are already in use.

Edit: every material and technology that we use, has around it an invisible cloud of alternatives that we could have used instead, but don't (yet) use, because of cost, or history, or politics.

(With few exceptions: air, water, silicaceous rock, calcium rock, iron, carbon, sodium, phosphate, perhaps aluminum.)

Claiming that "X is a show-stopper" is just displaying ignorance of this penumbra of alternatives.

I call this "frozen world" fallacy: the idea that we are stuck forever doing exactly what we do now, with exactly the materials we now have.

You need a little bit (or at least it helps a lot).

Al metallization is completely pants, so a few hundred kg of copper and nickel per MW is 'necessary' insofar as ae can't really do it without.

Similarly al windings and internal cabling for wind are currently commercially viable, but al alloy undersea cabling is not great and there's some Cu needed in high strength alloys in the gearbox.

We could easily get enough for a 2kW per person target by dismantling existing nuclear and coal infrastructure though.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1584306032653717505.html

Quite a long thread, much more readable as a cohesive document without all the twitter noise.

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