Finding the land on which to build renewable energy projects is one problem. Another is finding the investment needed to ensure electricity grids can make use of green power
In May, President Joe Biden’s administration announced the approval of Vineyard Wind, a wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts which will require, an American industrial giant, to supply 60 of these airliner-skyscraper-stick-insect hybrids. With a planned capacity of 800 megawatts Vineyard Wind would on its own increase America’s offshore-wind capacity by a factor of roughly 25. But it will not be on its own.
The Paris agreement of 2015 calls for a world in which average temperatures never climb more than 2°C above those of the preindustrial age, and ideally rise no further than 1.5°C. To that end most large economies have now committed themselves to “net zero” emissions—a notional state where the amount of greenhouse gas emitted is matched by the amount absorbed by natural and artificial “sinks”—by the middle of the century.
There is an ethereal charm to replacing fuels won from the depths of the Earth with the barely corporeal powers of sun and wind. But doing so at scale still requires millions of tonnes of raw materials to be mined. Batteries depend on cobalt, lithium and nickel; neodymium and other rare-earth elements make the magnets for electric generators and motors; the veins and arteries of the green economy run with copper.
If the prospect of huge booms in renewables and electric vehicles has not encouraged investment, price signals produced by shortages as those booms get booming may do better. But there are issues that go beyond price. Some investors find a lot of the mining sector off-putting, either because of genuine ethical concern or because they fear tarnishing their environmental and social credentials. They have a point. Lithium mining in Chile has triggered legal fights over water in the Atacama.
Ingenuity can be a powerful force. But it cannot be expected always to offset all the effects of the price signals which drive it. And it cannot do everything all at once. Tesla is still interested enough in nickel to have become an adviser to a nickel mine in New Caledonia. Building infrastructure to deliver green power from panels and pylons in plains and deserts to the places where it is needed faces some of the same challenges. Grids that are both bigger and smarter than today’s are needed to make use of intermittent renewable sources at the scales being envisaged later this decade. “There will be no renewables without networks,” says Armando Martínez, who leads the grid business of Iberdrola, a big utility.
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