Simon Michaux: “The Arcadians”

Simon Michaux is a geologist, not a renewables grid designer. He cherry-picks 2 main things – Germany and NMC batteries. The result of this? Let’s just say if this were about building the Sydney Harbour Bridge – he would say we cannot because there is not enough gold in the world! It’s all incredibly silly cherry-picking – and NMC batteries are WAY too expensive and upmarket just for grid storage! Even EV’s are moving away from them to LFP! If we just swap his NMC out for sodium and pumped hydro – we’re done! All those NMC Critical Minerals are saved! Game set match.

So cherry-picking Germany and NMC breaks 4 BASIC rules of renewables. As a silly mnemonic renewable grids must be “Sunny, Super, Salty, and Soaked”.

RULE 1: “SUNNY” – THE SUNSHINE BELT

This is an enormous area of the earth that stretches from the 35th parallel South up to the equator to the 35th parallel North. 3/4 of the human race lives in this belt. It does not have winters to trouble a renewable grid. This includes all of Australia, Africa up to the Mediterranean sea, India, the southern quarter of China, and most of South America up to the USA to about Las Vegas across to Alabama. The other 1/4 of us live mostly north of these lines across the top 60% of the USA and Canada and Russia and Northern Europe.

MICHAUX IGNORES THIS RULE by cherry-picking Germany which is well outside the Sunshine Belt – and makes frozen German winters normative for us all. He applies the conditions of the 2 billion to the other 6 billion.

RULE 2: “SUPER” – SUPER-GRIDS

So what do we do about the two billion people in colder regions? That’s why super grids are needed. Two important things have changed in the last 10 years to make these more affordable. Renewables are cost 1/4 nuclear (unfirmed LCOE) which allows us to Overbuild their CAPACITY. Then HVDC powerlines improved and only lose 1.6% of their power per 1000 km distance – which allows us to Overbuild across a VAST AREA. Overbuilding both capacity and across large areas MOSTLY FIRMS the grid for us. Scientific American explained this way back in 2015 with their article on the “Law of Large numbers”. The idea has also been called Geographic Smoothing. Super-grids are now in popular culture. Michaux should have known about this. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/renewable-energy-intermittency-explained-challenges-solutions-and-opportunities/

How does this work in practice? Meet Professor Andrew Blakers. He won the Queen Elizabeth Prize for inventing the PERC solar cell which is now in 90% of all solar panels. Professor Blakers has developed plans for Australia that show if each state tried to go it alone they would REQUIRE 5 TIMES MORE STORAGE than if we linked the whole continent in the one super-grid. But join them with HVDC super grids ul and they only need 2 days for each city. https://reneweconomy.com.au/solars-stunning-journey-from-lab-curiosity-to-global-juggernaut-wiping-out-fossil-fuels/ Professor Blakers summary talk: 25 minutes (timed to avoid slow intro) https://youtu.be/BIcwaXRN1Hs?t=105

Australia is in the Sunshine Belt. If Australia needs a super-grid – how much more does Germany which is well outside the Sunshine Belt? It is also 21 TIMES smaller than Australia! Fortunately Germany and the whole EU itself is in the ENTSO-E super-grid spread across 35 countries and 532 million people. The area is a THIRD LARGER than Australia. They are going to trade northern wind with southern solar. It reduces storage to a few days – maybe a week at most. https://www.entsoe.eu/ There are many other plans for Super-grids, some for Europe stretching down into Africa. (Maybe one day when the geopolitics is right.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_grid

MICHAUX IGNORES THIS RULE by cherry-picking a few odd studies into a HYPOTHETICALLY isolated Germany. This lie ignores the easily verifiable FACT that Germany is in the ENTSO-E Super grid. He was just busting to chant “28 days storage!” all over youtube – but an isolated German grid is just not the plan!

RULE 3: “SALTY” – SODIUM BATTERIES

Sodium is in sea-salt. They can use agri-waste to make the Hard Carbon cathode (and aluminium for the casing – it does not need copper.) We’re NOT running out of sea-salt or agri-waste! Sodium batteries are 30% cheaper, operate in a greater temperature range, and don’t burst into flames like NMC batteries! Michaux also ignored that ISP designers like Professor Blakers only use batteries for the first 2 HOURS – and then pumped hydro takes over for the next few days to a week (at maximum!)

MICHAUX IGNORES THIS RULE by claiming sodium batteries were not at industrial scale yet – ignoring the fact that his whole paper pushed different technologies up to various industrial scales he wanted to hypothesise about. But sodium batteries WERE in commercial sales at the time and already on the Chinese grid! So instead Michaux chose NMC batteries for us. These are expensive, as they require lithium, nickel, manganese, cobalt, and copper. 30% of the car market is already LFP (Lithium Iron Phosphate) which do NOT use any Critical Minerals. Yet instead of even LFP – Michaux insists the grid needs NMC batteries which are trending to be for exclusive luxury cars. He ignored both sodium and LFP, and went for NMC. THEN he ignored the 2 hour rule and went for 28 days! Talk about cherry-picking!

RULE 4: “SOAKED” – PUMPED HYDRO FOR LONG STORAGE

Back to Professor Blakers – who says pumped hydro should take over after the batteries have covered the first hour or so. He says a good pumped hydro site has 2 dams separated by about 500 metres height. The higher the better till about 800 m. So you tend to look for sites in mountainous regions. As Blakers said “Triple the height, halve the cost.” His team have a satellite database of all the best OFF-river pumped hydro sites on earth – and there is 100 TIMES more than we need! OFF-RIVER is better because it does not damage fragile river systems, can be built faster, and is half the cost because it avoids expensive spillways. https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/pumped_hydro_atlas/

MICHAUX IGNORES THIS RULE without any effort – as his 1000 page PDF just ASSERTS there are not enough sites. (No source!) Then he let it slip on youtube. Oh no – watch this 60 seconds. https://youtu.be/LBw2OVWdWIQ?t=1342 Yep! Singapore – tiny flat Singapore where their highest hill is 15 m. Gee – I wonder why THEY had trouble finding enough sites! I call this “Painting the world Singapore” and honestly can’t stop laughing about it.

FINALLY – MICHAUX’S OWN PAPER shows that if we just replace his NMC batteries with sodium and pumped hydro – there’s more than enough minerals! I did the math here.
https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/michaux/

The whole QUESTION “Are we going to run out of minerals?” is ridiculous when you realise we can recycle them all – AND just like EV’s moving away from NMC to LFP – most brands of wind and solar and even electric motor and generator are moving away from Critical Minerals due to cost.

OTHER CRITIQUES OF MICHAUX:-
Michael Barnard: an actual renewables engineer with experience in the industry.

https://cleantechnica.com/2023/07/04/how-many-things-must-one-analyst-get-wrong-in-order-to-proclaim-a-convenient-decarbonization-minerals-shortage/

Nafeez M Ahmed: investigative journalist and tech writer

https://ageoftransformation.org/energy-transformation-wont-be-derailed-by-lack-of-raw-materials/

OTHERS THAT KNOW BETTER:

International Energy Agency:

https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in-clean-energy-transitions/mineral-requirements-for-clean-energy-transitions

Data Scientist Hannah Ritchie:

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/minerals-for-electricity

https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/energy-transition-materials