Digging for cobalt [image credit: mining.com]
When was that, you may ask. Anyway, whoever thinks there was such a time is about to find out it’s becoming a memory only, according to this article. For one thing, the required mining has been exposed as lacking investor appeal due to its environmental footprint, so to speak. Also, demand is likely to accelerate and the mining industry could well struggle to keep pace.
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Supply chain disruptions, rising raw materials costs, and geopolitical tensions have jolted the price of solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries, and some analysts now think that the era of cheap renewable energy is over, says OilPrice.com.
The continual decline in production cost for wind, solar, and EV batteries was touted as the driver of their growing adoption and ultimate takeover of the global grid.
Up until two years ago, there was no other scenario on the table—even though inflation was as much a reality then as it is now.
Only now, it has become a lot more pronounced.
At a recent metals and mining conference in Riyadh, several attendees noted that the mining industry had fallen out of favor with lenders because it was deemed as damaging for the environment as oil and gas.
Yet now, it is becoming abundantly clear that without the mining industry, there can literally be no energy transition. Solar panels, wind turbines, transmission lines, and EVs all depend on metals and minerals in sufficient quantities.
These quantities, however, are already problematic. During the pandemic, supply chain disruptions—one of the most popular phrases of the pandemic, it would seem—wreaked havoc across industries that resulted in various raw material shortages, notably in metals and minerals and polysilicon.
Shortages typically lead to higher prices, and this is exactly what happened here as well. As a result, the cost of solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries started climbing—a development that virtually no renewable energy forecaster had anticipated.
Bloomberg reported this month that solar panel prices had surged by more than 50 percent in the past 12 months alone. The price of wind turbines is up 13 percent and battery prices are rising for the first time ever, the report noted.
Of course, all this could be dismissed as a temporary glitch because of those pesky supply chain disruptions; once those are dealt with, prices should return to normal.
Unfortunately, this argument does not hold water because the demand projections for all those metals and minerals called critical precisely because the energy transition hinges on them are invariably bullish.
Put another way, the world will need a huge amount of copper, lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt, among others, to continue with the energy transition. And they are not coming fast.
That lending problem for the mining industry as well as oversupply in some segments of the metals market led to lower investments in new mines in recent years.
That added to an already existing problem of falling ore grades: now, a miner needs to dig out a lot more ore to find the same amount of copper, for instance, than they had to 20 years ago.
Full article here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Cheap renewables have always been a big lie.
This is an important article – it gives you the odd sense that the whole renewable energy project was designed to fail from the outset. But by who? And why?
Phil, it’s not ‘decent’ to inquire. There is a ‘divine right’ attached to this set of preferences. You’re right out of line.
Ruinables are never cheap. Cui Bono? CCP.
the price in Yuan for lithium marches inexorably upwards on a daily basis, having risen 25% per tonne this January already, adding to the 500% rise last year.
No one is saying how much this has affected the price of a EV battery today, as they still bandy about the same prices as a year ago.
Reblogged this on Utopia, you are standing in it!.
Prices rising for the first time, garbage.
I use Li Po batteries in my remote control aircraft. Batteries I could buy for $12 , & occasionally on special for as little as $5 have been increasing in price continually, & are now $24 & ocasionally on special fir $18.
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I ‘don’t get it..’ talking to the stirks this now ( yes we have WiFI in the Steading) Renewables and batteries: Major investments announced recently somewhere in UK ( all gobblygook news so don’t listen properly anymore – so depressing – Duck to dog- ‘hit the Red Button’ ) but just around CHristmas, wasn’t there an other UK Battery Manufr closure see https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&q=scottish+battery+factory+closes&sourceid=opera&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8 but after a bit of digging, in the Guardian is this report https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/nov/14/battery-failures-like-johnson-matthey-risk-leaving-british-carmakers-disconnected which tells us: “the signal it sends for UK industry is not welcome. Johnson Matthey points out – accurately but belatedly – that battery manufacturing is a scale game, and that rivals are far ahead. China, Korea and Japan have a huge lead. The EU and US have also woken up, and are investing in new “gigafactories” at a rapid pace.
In the UK, the government-funded Faraday Institution suggests carmakers will need annual battery output of about 140GWh by 2040 to sustain the car industry at anything like its current economic heft. There has been one verifiable success so far: Chinese manufacturer Envision’s promise to make 38GWh a year in Sunderland. Startup Britishvolt is gaining momentum to fund another. Yet some observers are sceptical that the UK will ever come close to what the government hopes – suggesting the car industry could shrink rapidly.” Wind energy has been a long time in picking up this winter snd then it comes in extreme gusts. chargers just don’t quite know what to do with the excess and then the slump…. so the batteries are still not re-charged …. ans so on it goes. and now there’s a rumpus over restrictions on use of red diesel for charity runs and ploughing matches …. – ‘cos it is deemed to be entertainment …. We’re definitely heading back to the Dark / medieval ages.
now, a miner needs to dig out a lot more ore to find the same amount of copper, for instance, than they had to 20 years ago.
And in another 10 or 20 years it will be harder still if that trend continues.
JANUARY 26, 2022
Renewable energy: US tax credits for wind and solar mostly benefit big banks
If developers want to get any value out of government incentives, they must try to bring on third-party financial partners—typically massive banks like JP Morgan and Bank of America.
Developers effectively sell their tax breaks to these banks in return for the upfront funds that banks invest in a project. This practice is known as tax equity. If wind or solar farm developers cannot attract tax equity partners then they may never be able to use the tax credits they’re nominally entitled to, and so the project may never get built.
Renewable tax credits were never intended as a backdoor subsidy for Wall Street. Yet they now provide major tax shelters for banks; ones that need highly complex partnership forms to be legal at all. The renewable tax equity market was worth as much as US$18 billion in 2020 alone.
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-01-renewable-energy-tax-credits-solar.html
The irony of Green tech – it relies entirely on the old tech and industries it is supposed to replace.
‘The continual decline in production cost for wind, solar, and EV batteries was touted as the driver of their growing adoption and ultimate takeover of the global grid.’
There is no global grid. The alleged cost decline was always propaganda to get people to believe renewable energy supply is feasible.
‘Up until two years ago, there was no other scenario on the table—even though inflation was as much a reality then as it is now.’
See, Biden and the Democrat’s absurd spending didn’t cause inflation; it already existed before they came along. It’s Trump’s fault.
way back at the beginning the idea of windmills and solar arrays was ludicrous on the face of it. The energy creation density (land used per KWH) is massively greater than nukes and gas generation. In addition there is the ‘spinning reserve’ issue when the sun goes down or the clouds roll in.
A phrase I read often on the blogs was, “This is stupid.” Well, duh.
Here’s my attempt at costing EV batteries. Lithium carbonate Li2CO3 is 14/74ths Li by weight, and therefore we can say the Li cost is about 5.3 times as much, which is about $300/kg based on $57/kg for the carbonate. A typical battery cathode composition can be written as LiNi0.5Mn0.3Co0.2O2 for an overall molecular weight of 98. Nickel is about $22/kg, and Cobalt $72/kg, and we can ignore the manganese and oxygen as being trivial in cost. The overall cost is therefore (300×7) + (22x59x0.5) + (72x59x0.2) or 2100+649+849.6 or a total of $3,600 for 98kg. Cobalt and nickel have roughly doubled, while lithium has increased 9 times, so the cathode cost would have been about $230 for the lithium and $750 for the rest, or about $1,000. So cathodes have increased by a factor of ~3.6. There is also a graphite shortage for the anodes – and it turns out that China controls 100% of the global graphite flake production. I can’t find an up to date anode price but it seems likely that prices will have doubled. One battery costing I found from earlier was roughly 1/3rd cathode, 1/6th anode and the balance for plant, manufacturing, labour, packaging etc. So we are looking at a cost factor of 3.6/3+2/6+1/2 if we assume other costs are unchanged. That’s almost exactly double.