dalecoz

A couple of days ago I drove past a huge wind farm that recently sprang up around five miles south of where I live. As I went past a line of wind turbines stretching to the horizon, I realized that alternate energy is happening now, in a big way.

I'm a huge fan of alternate energy, as anyone who reads this blog regularly probably knows. At the same time, I'm becoming increasingly concerned that if we take the wrong paths as we push things like windmills, solar cells and hybrid cars, we'll end up with energy choices that are simply not scalable to the sizes they need to be scaled to, and we'll also end up remaining dependent on the whims of other countries for our energy future.

A big hunk of the problem is that a very high percentage of alternate energy technology is dependent on "rare earth" minerals for some crucial part of its working. As this article in the Daily Mail points out, that creates two problems: First, that means we're uncomfortably dependent on China to make much of the green energy revolution possible. Second, the methods of getting those crucial minerals are anything but green.

China controls over 90 percent of rare earth production. It isn't that the minerals aren't available elsewhere. It's more a matter of price. The Chinese have been very aggressive on pricing and most non-Chinese sources of rare earths have either closed or been bought out by Chinese companies. Now China is talking about keeping rare earth minerals for their own manufacturing, and squeezing exports. That's a serious problem for a lot of types of green energy.

As the Daily Mail points out: "The rare-earths blasted out of rocks here feed more than 77 per cent of global demand for elements such as terbium, which power low-energy lightbulbs; neodymium, which powers wind turbines; and lanthanum, which powers the batteries of hybrid cars such as the Toyota Prius.

They are also used in mobile phones, computers, iPods, LCD screens, washing machines, digital cameras and X-ray machines, as well as missile guidance systems and even space rockets. Industries reliant on the rare-earths are estimated to be worth an astonishing £3trillion, or five per cent of global GDP."

Not a good situation. As we look at alternative energy, we need to look at the production cycles of the alternatives, spot areas that would make us dependent on scarce resources or a limited number of suppliers and try to steer development away from those kinds of dependencies. It would have been easier to do that ten or twenty years ago than it will be now. It'll be easier now than it would be ten or twenty years down the road if we build infrastructure and manufacturing around alternatives that may not turn out to be as sustainable, as easy to scale up, or as green as we would like to see them be.