Solar Is Bigger Than Ever—But So Are Fossil Fuels
Plus: Hire More Sheep!; Japan May Start Sea Mining Next Year; and more about the real costs of renewable energy and digital tech, and how we can do better.
Solar Is Bigger Than Ever—But So Are Fossil Fuels
Solar power is going nova. Practically nonexistent just a couple of decades ago, it generates billions of watts of power today, and as the Economist spells out, that growth is accelerating. “Installed capacity is doubling every three years. … solar power is on track to generate more electricity than all the world’s nuclear power plants in 2026, than its wind turbines in 2027, than its dams in 2028, its gas-fired power plants in 2030 and its coal-fired ones in 2032.” Or even sooner; over the last 20 years, the speed of solar’s growth has consistently exceeded virtually all analyst’s projections. “The people who have come closest to predicting what has actually happened have been environmentalists poo-pooed for zealotry and economic illiteracy, such as those at Greenpeace,” the Economist grudgingly acknowledges. Other renewables are also surging. The latest numbers from the International Energy Agency show that a record $2 trillion will be invested in “clean” energy this year alone, nearly double what’s going to fossil fuels.
And yet: At the same time that renewables are providing more power than ever, the world is also burning more fossil fuels than ever. Last year, carbon emissions topped 40 gigatons for the first time, according to The Guardian. Why? Because developing countries in particular are using more energy of all sorts, as their economies advance and their standards of living rise. India, China and other rising powers are installing renewables, but also rely heavily on fossil fuels to keep pushing their economies upwards. India alone now burns more coal than all of Europe and North America combined. In other words, while renewables’ slice of the energy pie is bigger than ever, so is the pie.
It would be great if solar power pushed fossil fuels aside more quickly—great, but not perfect. Everything has a cost. Solar panels are made with silicon and silver, extracting both of which takes a toll on the environment. The tech’s real Achilles heel, though, is in the infrastructure that’s required to transmit the power generated by those panels to wherever it will be consumed, be that a factory, a data center or your house. That journey requires countless miles of electric cable, made mostly out of copper. In fact, the energy transition will require us to dig up more copper in the coming decades than we have in the all of human history, with all of the destruction that entails. Plus since the sun doesn’t shine at night, we’re going to need battalions of batteries to store that electricity—batteries made with lithium and other critical metals.
In short: solar and other renewable energy sources alone won’t save us. They’re a necessary part of the cure for climate change and for making life for ten billion humans sustainable on this planet. But we need to do more than simply switch power sources.
How We Can Do Better: Hire More Sheep!
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Those expanding solar farms have some on-site drawbacks, too. They take over land that might otherwise be used for farming, and their panels often get clogged up with weeds. One simple, cuddly solution: sheep! Seems a growing number of sheep farmers are renting out flocks of these charming ungulates to clean up solar fields and get fat in the process. Across the US, at least 80,000 of these woolly workers are currently munching on 100,000 acres of solar sites in 27 states, according to the latest numbers from the American Solar Grazing Association, which is apparently a real thing. Goats, cows, pigs, and horses can do the job too, but they’re more likely to damage panels. “Sheep are naturally suited to the job of solar grazing,” the Association points out. “They enjoy the shade of the solar panels on hot days, napping and grazing where humans would struggle to reach.” It’s a bleating edge solution.
Japan May Start Sea Mining Next Year
It’s looking increasingly inevitable that we’ll soon start tearing up the ocean floor in pursuit of minerals. Japanese researchers just discovered a massive trove of rocks rich in metals needed to build batteries on the sea floor, and they aim to start digging up millions of tons of them beginning as soon as 2025.
Though international law forbids (at least for now) mining in international waters, where the sea is deepest, there are no such restriction in countries’ territorial waters, which can extend up to 200 miles from their shores. Japan, which has plenty of shoreline, has long been developing sea mining capabilities in the hopes of reducing their reliance on imported battery metals for their auto and consumer electronics industries. Government-supported teams have been exploring for several years, and last week confirmed they had hit serious paydirt. About three miles below the ocean surface near an uninhabited island lie an estimated 230 million tons of the metal-bearing rocks, known as polymetallic nodules, containing enough key battery metals to fill all of Japan’s needs for years. Test mining is expected to begin next year.
More sea mining might also begin in 2025 on the other side of the world. Norway just announced it is preparing to hand out licenses for sea mining in its territorial waters in the coming months.
The problem, of course, is that ripping up the seafloor could wreak all manner of environmental havoc, as I’ve written about here. The Japanese government has said it will do its best to minimize the damage, but at the same time, as a government spokesperson recently told Mongabay, “We believe (sea mining is) important, from the perspective of economic security.” You’d think Japan, of all countries, would have learned its lesson about the dangers of disturbing things that have lain dormant for years beneath the sea.
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