There is a clear path to a fully sustainable earth, with abundance.

That’s Elon Musk back in early 2023, presenting Tesla’s Master Plan Part 3, Sustainable Energy for All the Earth”:

This paper finds a sustainable energy economy is technically feasible and requires less investment and less material extraction than continuing today’s unsustainable energy economy. While many prior studies have come to a similar conclusion, this study seeks to push the thinking forward related to material intensity, manufacturing capacity, and manufacturing investment required for a transition across all energy sectors worldwide.

Like most of Musk’s efforts this sounds fantastically ambitious and while it’s not wise to bet against the man I do not agree with the argument that America can move to a net-zero electric age without government coercion or subsidies even if everything the Tesla founder says is true.

This later article points to the key problems with Musk’s vision of abundance, even accepting the key truth about electricity which the Tesla plan relies upon; that it’s more efficient than combustion:

The International Energy Agency (IEA), shows how energy inputs (on the left)—fossil fuels, renewables, and biomass—are converted either into electricity or directly into useful heat and motion in the four primary economic sectors: industry, transportation, residential, and commercial. Using petawatthours as the primary energy unit, what is most pertinent in this flowchart is the fact that only one-third of the energy put into the system as fuel comes out the other end as useful work. Two-thirds is lost to friction and heat.

Hence the argument from Musk/Tesla that their wondrous utopia of an all-electric world can be achieved without subsidies, taxes or any other coercion; the efficiency gain is such that it more than pays for itself.

But there’s a problem with all that, and it should be obvious given that even with the 2/3 gain from eliminating friction and heat via combustion, non-combustion energy inputs still only contribute about 8% to global energy input. That’s a huge mis-match in the numbers, clearly there’s more to the story than simple energy loss, even when it’s so large.

The fact is that there are many energy uses that electricity has difficulty meeting because of how its distributed, and recent events showed that up big time in the very area where Musk has made his money – electric vehicles in the LA fires:

If you have no power for a week, as thousands of Los Angeles residents who live near the evacuated fire areas have experienced, you can’t charge your car battery. What happens if the fire spreads and you can’t get out? When their lives depended on it, the diktats and mandates didn’t help, but gas cars sure did.

That article actually quotes the LA Times, and for them publishing the following must have been like having their teeth pulled:

A gasoline car “can evacuate in any direction on any road and still get fuel when needed,” said Matthew Butterick, a Los Angeles attorney who lives near Griffith Park. “The EV stations on evacuation routes would have massive lines and delays, gasoline stations less so. And the electric grid may not be available. Power companies turn off power to avoid sparking a fire and also to avoid legal liability. This is probably the future of all the hillside neighborhoods.”

His sentiments were echoed by Val Cipollone, who lives in the wooded hills above Berkeley. She owns a Nissan Leaf, a full electric vehicle with a roughly 220-mile range, which she plans to sell. “Who knows how far you’d have to drive” after a disaster, she said. “I used to think I’d only need to drive to my place of work. But who knows, I might have to go much farther.”

Gasoline (and diesel, fuel oil, etc) is not just a vastly more compact power source but that power is easily distributed and stored, ready to be combusted! Those factors are the reason our world runs on them, despite the inherent losses in combustion, despite two-thirds of the energy being lost in friction and heat.

Aside from that the article points to two other big problems with Musk-Tesla’s utopian vision.

First, how much energy is needed for everyone on Earth to have a decent, modern life? Tesla’s projections estimate 9,100 kilowatt hours per person. Converting all energy inputs into electrical units shows Americans in 2021 using 29,041 kilowatt hours per person. Even if you cut that figure in half to about 15,000KwH, multiplying that across 8 billion people produces a figure 160% greater than Tesla’s estimate, and they’re pretty vague in arguing how those people can live like Americans with only 1/3 of the energy. They pushing awfully hard on that 2/3 wastage to get what they want.

Second, could all the resources required to produce renewable electricity derived from wind turbines and solar panels, plus the resources to build all the devices that consume electricity (like EV’s) really end up using less resources than are currently used to produce and consume conventional energy in all its forms. The Tesla plan takes a crack at it and contrasts declining amounts of mineral resources (“What People Think Happens”) with their view that global reserves of critical materials will trend upwards (“What Actually Happens”).

It’s nice to have an opposing view to the doom merchants of the last sixty years – the sort who said we’d run out of oil by the year 2000 – but at the same time Tesla’s estimates are, as Sir Humphrey would say, “heroic”, especially when added to their assumption that an all-electric world uses fewer resources. By contrast, assuming that resources for this transition follow existing data, the demand for key minerals would explode, as physicist Mark Mills pointed out in the Wall Street Journal:

“The [International Energy Agency] finds that with a global energy transition like the one Biden envisions, demand for key minerals such as lithium, graphite, nickel and rare-earth metals would explode, rising by 4,200%, 2,500%, 1,900% and 700%, respectively, by 2040.”

Something fellow blogger (retired) Whisky & Pie pointed out several years ago just in regard to Lithium:

Below the fold 1 is a list of reputable critics of efforts to attempt a precipitous conversion to wind, solar, and all-electric vehicles.

One aspect not discussed in the critiques is the contribution of nuclear power to this all-electric world, probably because the Tesla plan simply refers to “existing nuclear”. As with other assumptions they’re all in on wind, solar and batteries (Tesla’s big thing aside from EV’s), but given the Iron Law of Power Density (see graph above), which is increasingly showing up in practice as such renewables fail expensively, I can’t see how such a world can be achieved without massive expansion of nuclear power.

Perhaps Tesla just doesn’t have much faith in the nuclear industry after decades of cost overruns and promises not kept. While we wait for fusion power (Super Lasers and Miniature Suns) we’re also waiting for advances in nuclear fission reactor technology, but there are signs that they may be arriving, having been invented decades ago and stymied more by economics than engineering, Copenhagen Atomics Progressing to Mass Production of Molten Salt Nuclear Reactors:

The reactor type invented by Copenhagen Atomics is a thorium molten salt breeder reactor, which fits inside a custom built 40 foot shipping container and can be mass manufactured on assembly lines with an expected output of minimum 1 reactor per day (per assembly line). The target customers are large plants producing commodities such as aluminum, ammonia or hydrogen.

Their target for mass production is 2030, so will see if this just another failed promise. It’s a similar plan to that of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs, from companies like NuScale) in that the Thorium reactor is shipped back to the factory where it was built once it’s used up its fuel. The key difference is that it’s not as complex – no uranium rods, control rods and boiling water as the energy transport mechanism – plus the fact that there’s approximately 1000 times more thorium (Th-232) in the Earth’s crust than U-235.

Now that’s a resource we could depend upon.

Unfortunately it doesn’t help all those resource questions on the consumption side.

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  1. Peter Ziehan in his many publications including, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization.

    Alex Epstein in Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas–Not Less

    Robert Bryce in his podcast and recent book A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations. ↩︎