Energy Matters

  Minerals and the Energy Transition To reach the worldwide goal of keeping global warming under 1.5 °C, it’s clear we need to increasingly substitute low carbon energy for fossil fuels. This means ramping up production of solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, power lines, electric vehicles for public and private transport, heat pumps, etc. These technologies require many minerals including some “rare earth” elements for their manufacture. Maybe it’s the name, “rare earth.” Maybe it’s the scary idea of complex technology versus good old-fashioned burning of stuff. But whatever it is, it inspires a lot of negative conjecture: Won’t all the mining destroy the environment? Won’t children be exploited for labor? Surely more energy will be used to mine the minerals than they can create? Won’t all the turbines, panels and batteries be impossible to dispose of?… As I always said to my students in answer to these very good questions, we need to think about them rationally and as a MATTER...

  On the Road to Electrification Please note that cost estimates in this article are based on oil, gas, and electricity prices at the time of publication. (Jan 2022) Change is in the air, and it’s downright electric. Carbon-free renewables, their technology, and their economics have reached a stage that brightens our prospects for meaningful reductions in the greenhouse gas emissions that have threatened the future world of our descendents. It may actually be possible to start feeling good about something. Like, instead of fighting fossil fuels , might we try enthusing about electrification? Know this: Electrification is the key to decarbonizing the world’s energy. As we discussed in a recent column, the economics of wind and solar are on a trajectory to actually supplant fossil fuels with or without subsidies or aggressive regulation in the coming decades. A widely acclaimed paper came out of the University of Oxford in September, demonstrating abundantly that “ if solar photovolt...