Why Chaos on a Tiny Pacific Island Matters for Electric Vehicles

Plus: US vs Chinese EVs; batteries made of sand?!; and more about how the materials we need for renewable energy and digital technology are hurting people and the planet, and how we can do better.

May 23, 2024

Lethal riots have surged across the tiny Pacific territory of New Caledonia since last week, shutting down roads and the main airport and leaving at least six people dead. Australia and New Zealand are evacuating their nationals, tanks are in the streets, and French president Emmanuel Macron is making an emergency visit to try to calm the storm.

Dramatic stuff, but why should you care about unrest in such an obscure corner of the world? Because despite its minuscule size, New Caledonia—a French territory—is vitally important to the world’s transition to renewable energy. This month’s protests were sparked by proposed legislation that would affect which of the territory’s residents are allowed to vote, a move indigenous Kanak people fear will dilute their representation. But the overriding economic issue driving conflict in New Caledonia is control of the territory’s nickel mines.

As attentive Power Metal readers will recall, New Caledonia has barely a quarter million inhabitants, but its nickel endowment is colossal. The territory, which includes several islands, is the world’s third-biggest supplier of the metal, a key ingredient in batteries for electric cars and digital devices. Almost since French colonists began mining the metal in 1864, New Caledonia has been wracked by periodic spasms of violence as Kanaks battled with primarily French settlers over the division of the booty. The latest round is the worst in decades.

New Caledonia’s nickel industry is under increasing pressure from a wave of lower-cost nickel flooding into the world market from Chinese-controlled operations in Indonesia. That has led local companies to slow operations and even consider closing down. If they do, it would strengthen China’s already firm grip on the global nickel supply. The French government has been dangling loans and subsidies to New Caledonian miners, aiming to shore up the territory’s economy and also to maintain a source of nickel under their control. If New Caledonia falls further into chaos, the main beneficiary might be Beijing.

Protecting US Renewable Industries Might Worsen Climate Change

Speaking of efforts to combat China’s dominance of the supply chains for just about everything involved with the energy transition, the Biden Administration is launching sky-high tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles and other renewable-related tech. Import taxes on some batteries and the critical metals needed to build them, reports The New York Times, will increase to 25 percent, while rates for Chinese solar cells will jump to 50 percent, and tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles will quadruple to 100 percent.

The goal is to shield American businesses making these same products from cheaper Chinese competitors. Makes sense from a geopolitical standpoint. Not so much, though, in terms of climate change. The problem is that choking off imports of Chinese renewable tech could slow down the already-sluggish sales of electric cars in the US, as well as the energy transition more broadly.

Driving up the costs of imported critical metals and batteries will keep the price of American electric vehicles high, which won’t help their anemic sales. Ditto for solar panels: the more they cost, the less likely Americans are to buy them. Similarly, keeping out Chinese-made electric vehicles is likely to keep the number of American EV buyers low. Electric cars from the likes of Ford, General Motors and Tesla are still quite expensive. Chinese companies make dozens of cheaper models that aren’t sold in North America. Some retail for as little as $10,000. And while lower-cost Chinese cars are often seen as shoddier, smaller, and generally crappier vehicles, that might be an outdated notion. Kevin Williams of Inside EVs took a look at a bunch of the latest models at the Beijing Auto Show earlier this month, and came away impressed. His conclusion? “Western automakers are cooked.”

How We Can Do Better: Heat Your Home with Sand!

As someone who wrote a whole book about sand, I’m a sucker for stories about new uses for the world’s most underappreciated commodity. So imagine how pleased I was to learn, thanks to Tim Newcomb of Popular Mechanics, that there’s a whole town in Finland that aims to quit using oil and instead get its energy from a battery made of sand.

Sand batteries are basically heat storage systems. As anyone who has traipsed barefoot across a beach can attest, all those grains absorb heat extremely well. As Matt Ferrell of Undecided explains, “sand has low specific heat, meaning it doesn’t need a lot of energy to heat up fast. And sand’s high density allows it to store large amounts of thermal energy.” Put a load of sand in a container, raise its temperature using solar or wind-generated electricity, and you’ve got a lot of energy banked for when the sun isn’t shining or the wind blowing. The battery’s stored heat can then be directly extracted to warm up a building, or indirectly to generate steam to turn a turbine, transforming the heat back into electricity. The Finnish town of Pornainen is working to install a 1-megawatt version of this concept, which they expect to free them from needing oil in the coming years. (Plus the battery’s maker, Polar Night Energy, promises the sand will be sustainably sourced!) Meanwhile, at least one startup is selling smaller sand batteries for private homes.

On the plus side, using sand to store energy means avoiding all the environmental and human harms that come with extracting the metals that go into lithium-ion batteries. On the minus side, sand batteries are really big. Pornainen’s will require about 110 tons of grains and stand about 42 feet tall and 49 feet wide. Even residential units take up a lot of space. Plus, they’re relatively expensive (at least for now), and not as efficient at returning electricity as conventional batteries. Bottom line: Sand batteries won’t ever replace all of their conventional counterparts, but they can probably replace some of them. With a problem as big as climate change, every little grain helps.