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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

This is reasonable. Nuclear is still valuable though. It still works after a week of bad weather that would badly affect wind or solar.

Regarding renewables: are we held back by solar panel manufacturing? I thought the constantly falling prices are a sign that the panels are abundant. I think serious utility use of solar is held back more by the cost of storage. If we speak about best allocation of scarce labor, maybe battery manufacturing would have more impact.

Thermal storage (mirrors hearing rocks or melting salts) is also pretty material- and labor-intensive, even though it likely would require slightly less demanding processes of laying concrete and welding steel than a nuclear installation.

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> Regarding renewables: are we held back by solar panel manufacturing?

I would say yes, tentatively.

Looking at the growth rate[0], and given the capacity factor in practice appears to be 10%, the current estimated manufacturing rate of 316 GW in this calendar year implies 31.6 GW of average output, multiply that by a lifespan of 25 years to get the steady-state level and it's 790 GW — nice, but well short of the ~2 TW of current electricity usage, and ideally the post-scarcity solarpunk future has far more electricity available as most of the world doesn't currently get aircon, electric heating, home freezers, cars (batteries or hydrogen argument is irrelevant as both need electricity), and we also electrify steel and other chemical processes.

Assuming current estimated growth rate continues as an exponential, new PV factories start changing from "well obviously we should build it" to "hmm, let's think carefully" some time around 2027.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

Storage is definitely a factor currently, but a lot of battery factories are scheduled to come online in the next few years and I expect the situation to improve considerably.

I watched a representation of an mining industry insider ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgOEGKDVvsg ) some months ago who makes the point that all these projections are completely unrealistic because of mining constraints. He says/shows that you need an order of magnitude (I think) more ore of many elements and this is impossible because:

1) The Mining industry is incredible mature and there are no easy disruptive technologies on the horizon.

2) Even if there was the will to do it, new capacities take at least ten years to go live and he does not even see any relevant increased investment in the sector, never mind concrete projects.

Mark P. Mills [1] may be a number of things but he is absolutely not by any means a "mining industry insider".

He is a senior fellow for a think tank that claims as axiomatic that the popular conception of climate change as posing an existential threat to modern civilization is not supported by climate science or economics.

It comes as no surprise that he repeatedly makes presentations aimed to undercut transition to green energy.

Regardless of the truth of his position though he is clearly no expert on the mining industry.

[1] https://manhattan.institute/person/mark-p-mills

My friend who works at the mines says the same thing. But maybe this is just a meme in the industry.

My main point here is that Mills was described as a mining industry insider when his own Bio and presentations makes it clear he is not.

Mills makes a number of statments so I'm unsure what "the same thing is" .. but as far as the two points raised in the GP comment go:

1) Rio Tinto has 'recently' improved throughput using semi autonomous Haulpaks, trains, plants [1] and 'proved' that this works to the order of some ~ 800 million tonne per annum. They also have well advanced plans for a very different type of mining operation for a USD $64 billion copper resource in the US .. should that go ahead.

2) New operations do typically take ten years to bring up to production from (say) exploration drilling to mine opening ... however that's very much the rythm of the domain, relatively steady demand and growth sees forward planners leaving new $360 million capital investments "uncommitted" as long as possible - when the last active resource tails off, a new one is bought online. There's no hard constraint that prevents them bought online faster other than fear of surplus crashing price - typically there are many potential green sites ready to be advanced through further exploration and into economic feasibily technical reports and intial prospectus raising (to meet mine plant costs). [2]

[1] https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation

[2] https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/campaigns/met...

Thank you for that information.

One can build storage with only common elements (see pumped thermal, pumped hydro).

The world makes about 2 BILLION tonnes of steel a year. Storage made from materials like that will not cause significantly increased mining.

Electric vehicles are key, because they lead to V2G: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

I think he's underestimating the ability of the industry to go "hmm, we're short on X, but we can switch to an alternate chemistry that avoid using it at a slightly lower efficiency". This is already happening in the E-V market, and fixed batteries (home or grid) are even less space/weight constrained.

Also, when there is a demand the market finds a way.

These guys have been doomsaying about renewables for decades now and have been consistently wrong. https://zenmo.com/en/photovoltaic-growth-reality-versus-proj...

Another issue is transmission. The best solar and wind sites are often not near existing transmission capacity.

I remember reading an article about how old coal mines and plants are getting second lives as solar or wind farms because they already have large transmission lines.

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Nuclear might have the same issue, since these days I would imagine it would be hard to get a plant approved near a highly populated area.

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