That alternative material is aluminum. It's like a top four abundance material in the crust. It's just super fucking hard to refine from minerals that don't like to give it up without oodles of energy. Like, turn minerals into plasma levels of energy. So the irony is, to grow our energy economy past the need for copper, we will first need to grow our energy economy.

Should fusion ever actually meet its promise, then this is one of the likely things we could do with this level of energy.

If we ever become a spacefaring civilization, it'll almost certainly be necessary during the colonization of other planets/moons/asteroids, since the geological processes that concentrate copper on the earth are not present in those places. Whereas aluminum is plentiful any place rocky.

Drone miners with streaming cameras yes please

What is this publication and who finances it because this section is incredibly sus:

Copper use is not carved in stone. Hybrid cars, which pair small batteries with gasoline engines, need far less of the metal than fully electric vehicles.

Power grids that mix nuclear, wind, solar, and a pinch of natural-gas backup can slice the copper bill dramatically compared with battery-heavy systems.

“First of all, users can fact-check the study, but also they can change the study parameters and evaluate how much copper is required if we have an electric grid that is 20% nuclear, 40% methane, 20% wind, and 20% hydroelectric, for example,” Simon said. “They can make those changes and see what the copper demand will be.”

Like you think we can transition to an increasingly electrified world, where all power comes from electric utility lines, and you think our copper usage will be ... just in renewable power plants?

This reads like straight fossil fuel propaganda. In an electrified future the majority of copper use comes from distribution lines and products that use electricity not the type of power plants generating electricity.

Only in first-world countries did everyone have a phone and the Earth's population was half what it is now.

Recycling aluminum, however, is much more energy-efficient!

Recycling? What about the mining economy? We're going to need our investors in order to make it to Alpha Centauri.

Very true. However, it doesn't add new material to the equation. If we need it to build electrical infrastructure, recycling won't suffice.

Recycling aluminum is actually literally the best thing you can recycle in terms of environmental impact and cost efficiency. There are other things we recycle, but nothing pays off nearly as well.

I'm not defending the article, but I think most overhead power lines are aluminium, which is probably good as it's abundant compared to copper.

This all suggests that we keep producing, wasting and manufacturing things infinitely without ever recycling, reusing or re purposing everything that we are mining out of the ground. The article notes that this includes recycling but only at the rate we have now.

If we keep running our world the way we are now for the next hundred yes .... than yes, we are going to run out of everything because we live in an absolutely wasteful society that only runs in a way to produce things designed with planned obsolescence to break down in a short amount of time so that we can produce more junk to sell and drive a stupid economy to make a small group of idiots even more wealthy. The whole system is designed to run on making infinite money by producing infinite junk that doesn't last long.

Yes at the rate we are going and the way we are producing things and the way we shape our economy and the way we base our manufacturing .... we are definitely going to run out of everything.

We can change our economy and the way we produce and manufacture things - and get rid of this stupid structure of society of just endlessly making money for a small group of morons .... or we can keep doing things the way we are now until we run off a cliff and destroy everything and drive our species into extinction.

Your argument against the article that talks about copper usage is founded on incomplete knowledge of where copper is actually used?

Have they tried pulling it out of the walls of abandoned buildings? There's a lot left in there that no one uses anymore. /s

Aluminium is very commonly used. It isn't near as good a conductor as copper, but you can easilly use more toeget results and in most cases that works fine.

The reason we stopped using aluminimun more is it is relly tricky. when you tighten a screw the al deforms over time and so you don't get a lasting connection. Al also corrodes to a non conductive state. Many house fires were traced to al wiring in just the few years it was common. We can mitigate all the above issuses but it takes care and so copper is preferred despite al being much cheaper.

Sounds like doomish stuff. We innovate all the time. If copper and lithium are short supply items then technology will morph to use something else.

So the irony is

I see what you did there...

Eh. Or we could just keep some areas impoverished and underdeveloped and profit off their cheap labor...

!remindme 15 years

The problem with aluminum is that it gets REALLY hot when current is run through it. It used to be ised to wire homes, but is now banned because it wasn't safe.

That's incorrect. Aluminium is about 30% worse by volume than copper, meaning you need to go up a size. What stopped it being used for houses was that the terminations weren't good enough, because aluminium has different thermal expansion and corrosion properties, plus they were using much worse alloys. That's now mostly fixed and if you're in the US, there's a very good chance that your service main is aluminium, and there's talk of allowing copper-clad aluminium (CCA) for subcircuit wiring.

Per mass, aluminium is a better conductor, which is why it's almost exclusively used overhead and in pretty significant volumes underground. The power grids were built on ACSR.

The original study abstract is a little more clear. The main concern is grid storage batteries and EV batteries.

Given that the sharp increase in copper demand is primarily driven by batteries, the extra copper needs for electrification can be significantly reduced if the need for electrical storage is minimized. This can be achieved by generating electricity through a mix of nuclear, wind, and photovoltaics; managing power generation with backup electric plants fueled by methane from abundant resources of natural gas; and transitioning to a predominantly hybrid transportation fleet rather than fully electric vehicles.

hey it has been 15 years

You're wrong in terms of long distance power lines being mostly copper, but this does seem a lot like fossil fuel propaganda.

Motors, generators, and transformers can be built using aluminium; they're just a bit bulkier and less efficient. Very common practice.

It looks like CCA might be making its way back into house wiring in the near future, with much lower risks than the 70s aluminium scare.

The big thing is that batteries really should be a last resort, behind demand response (using power when it is available, rather than storing it for later), long distance transmission, and public transport instead of private vehicles.