2. Distribution doesn't just include long distance distribution. It includes all the wiring between transformers and houses and all the internal wiring of the house and all the devices inside etc.

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

hey it has been 15 years

asteroid mining

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.

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.

asteroid mining

only residential wiring uses copper, everything from 350kV down to 400V lines is aluminum, and even in houses aluminum can be used too

aluminum can be used too

Thousands of fires disagree

In a lot of cases you can also use Aluminum instead of copper. You need thicker wires and it's less flexible, but it's doable and cheaper. Some old electric motors from the eastern block used aluminium coils for that matter, because copper was much more expensive there.

Perhaps it’s time to start researching alternative materials.

Plenty of metals floating around in space. Just need to go and get them.

Only need to capture one decent sized metalliferous asteroid from a near earth orbit and we'd be set for a century or two.

aluminum can be used too

Thousands of fires disagree

Landfill mining.

There could be two ways to address this problem. One is asteroid mining, which has the potential to be extremely lucrative because there are lots of asteroids with huge metal deposits.

Another is discovering new conductors. There's been progress in developing conductive plastics.
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-scientists-material-plastic-metal.html

Well couldn't we, like, share it? The average joe in america is consuming 100 times more than an indian

The US is allergic to it, but needs to get over it.

Aluminum wire was tried in the 1970s due to a spike in copper prices. The problem was that they just tried to swap it right in. Aluminum and copper have different rates of expansion. Over time, that would slowly loosen the connectors, and the wires would pop right out and cause a fire.

You can design connectors to handle both, and you'll see many electrical things today specify that they're good for aluminum or copper wire. It still has a bad reputation among electricians; they haven't unlearned the problem yet.

Now, one place it's more of a problem is in things like transformer windings. There are kilometers of wiring in any of them, so the higher resistance of aluminum is a problem.