Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

I’m all for solar - but does it really solve the geographical / geopolitical issues of oil, as it’s currently rolling out?

China produces pretty much all the solar panels - That’s quite a big concentration of power, even more so than oil.

Yes, because if the US blockades you so you can't import oil, your trucks and power plants stop running in six weeks. If the US blockades you so you can't import Chinese solar panels, your power grid stops running in 20 years. Actually, that's just the end of the warranty period, so more like 30. Or 40. The US is gonna have to keep up that blockade for a long time before it starts causing you any pain. Probably after the President For Life dies.

How and from where do you source the necessary primary materials for such an endeavor?

If you try to answer those questions you will see that you are bullshiting yourself.

You do need materials, but you can source the materials anywhere on Earth; it's just a question of how expensive it is to refine them. Every element occurs as an impurity in every rock at some level. When you can import them freely, some deposits are uneconomic.

For building a plant to refine silicon, things like platinum and iridium, which are very scarce in most rocks, are very helpful. But they aren't ingredients in the solar cells themselves. Solar cells themselves are made of silicon, aluminum, silver†, lead, and tin, with trace quantities of phosphorus (or arsenic) and boron. These are mounted to "ultra-white" glass, which is made of silicon again, oxygen, sodium, calcium, and trace amounts of manganese. The mounting is done typically with EVA, which is mostly a hydrocarbon with a little oxygen in it.

The total amount of these materials is surprisingly small. The silicon wafer (2.33g/cc) is about 100μm thick, and the glass (2.5g/cc) is typically 2.5mm thick (3.2mm is "ultra thick"). So a square meter of solar panels, rated at some 200W, contains 6.3kg of glass (mostly oxygen and silicon) and 0.23kg of crystalline silicon, plus much smaller amounts of other materials.

So raw materials aren't a constraining factor unless you're living on a barge or a space station or something. Knowhow, organization, discipline, cooperation, etc., are the constraining factors. Sadly, those are in short supply almost everywhere.

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† Silver is used for large conductive strips on the surface of the silicon; it can be replaced with copper at a significant loss of efficiency. There is already pressure to do this because the raw-materials cost of silver accounted for about 10% of the wholesale cost of current PV modules last time I checked, and about 10% of global silver production went into PV modules. Since then production has increased and PV prices have dropped.

Silicon production is an energy intensive process; you need 11-13 kWh per kg of silicon produced. Technically it's a process using electrodes and thus raw electricity so you could source it from renewable. But that's in theory you need large amount of predictable power for a long time and on demand, which is not at all what the renewables have been so far.

Then if you look into aluminum production you will see that it requires carbon electrodes, that are made in ovens continuously heated to up to 1300°C for hours on end (about 20h per anode). They do not shut down those ovens since it takes multiple WEEKS to get to temperature, and they use natural gaz as the fuel. It's not clear if we could even make an alternative using purely raw electricity that would have enough power density. The aluminum production process itself requires megawatts levels of energy, usually you need a 500MW substation. Most plants are built next to a power plant, usually coal or nuclear. At the current 200W/m2 efficient level for solar panel, you would need about 2 500 km2 of solar panel to get that much power.

Glass production also requires a lot of dense energy. It typically uses gaz for heating but maybe they can figure out an industrial process to electrify it, currently not the case anyway. We are talking about megawatts level of energy again and a glass furnace cannot ever be shut down during its 15-20 years lifetime, so it's not like intermittent renewable are an option.

And I'm not talking about the various mining operations, necessary to get the raw stuff which is basically running almost exclusively on fossil fuel (but at least some of it can be transitioned to electric).

So now, I have to say 2 things: - firstly, my question was obviously rhetoric, the answer for anyone who has studied the subject is clearly no. But that requires an understanding that isn't surface level. - secondly you are clearly an arrogant asshole who thinks he knows shit when he clearly doesn't. But I'll let you live in your fantasy world where you can have industrial production with just electricity from solar panels.

Your calculation of solar capacity is off by a factor of a million; 500 megawatts at 200W/m² is 2.5 km², not the 2500 km² you say (the size of Yosemite National Park), which would be 500 terawatts, roughly 30 times current world marketed energy consumption. The same magnitude of error in the other direction would have led you to claim that an aluminum smelting plant requires 500 watts, less power than a household blender.

You also forgot to divide by the capacity factor; 200W/m² is the nameplate capacity, what the square meter produces in full sun, not the year-round average, which is closer to 30W/m², depending on factors like latitude, clouds, and tracking. (That increases the estimate from 2.5km² to 17km², 1700 hectares or 7 sections, the area of the city of Los Altos, California, or a quarter the area of the Curonian Spit park in Kaliningrad.)

These basic errors suggest that either you are not fully aware of the extent of your knowledge, or you are knowingly exaggerating it.

It seems like your primary objection is the intermittency of solar energy, which can be straightforwardly solved with BESS; even without lithium resources, either liquid metal batteries or nickel–iron batteries are an adequate resource anywhere in the world. Sodium-ion batteries are another scalable form of BESS that does not depend on scarce elements; a 200MWh utility-scale sodium-ion battery came online a year ago in Qianjiang: https://www.energy-storage.news/first-half-world-largest-200... but plausibly nobody outside of China knows how to do this.

There are straightforward solutions to the problems you're describing, even without BESS; many haven't been developed beyond the lab scale because they aren't economically competitive with the established approaches you're describing. In a hypothetical blockaded country, those alternatives wouldn't be competing with cheap fossil fuels. In practice, though, BESS is plenty.

Silicon purification to solar grade is not simply an electrolytic process, as you incorrectly imply; it requires a series of refinement steps to become PV-grade silicon.

In the case of glassmaking, the necessary technology is already well developed. An all-electric glassblowing pilot plant entered production last year in Cognac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuK8f4cB7Ps. And you can buy off-the-shelf glassmaking furnaces for mass production: https://www.hornglass.com/products/melting-furnaces-and-equi...

Electrically heated furnaces are more controllable and versatile, which is why they are universally used in laboratory glassmaking. Unlike the case with aluminum, fossil fuels are nothing but trouble for glassmaking; limited adiabatic flame temperatures, glass-batch contamination from fuel impurities, and the unfortunate necessity to vent flame-fired furnace to the atmosphere are problems glassmakers have had to overcome in order to use cheap energy from fossil fuels, not benefits.

Carbon is probably the only possible electrode material for aluminum production, although zirconia has been suggested. The net reaction is Al₂O₃ + 3C → 2Al + 3CO, consuming about 700kg of carbon per tonne of aluminum produced. Fortunately such small quantities of carbon are not difficult to obtain, and in extremis it would even be bearable to obtain them via direct air capture; we're talking about hundreds of grams of carbon per 300-watt solar panel, so a single tree contains enough carbon to smelt the aluminum for a megawatt or so of panels.

Mining is almost entirely electrified already; attempting to run fossil-fuel machinery in an underground mine shaft, or even an indoor warehouse, poses the kind of risk of asphyxiating workers that is normally considered unacceptable except in, for example, Russia. Gargantuan strip mining machinery like the Marion 8750 is largely electric for the same reasons that diesel locomotives are electric.

Thank you for a productive, if gratuitously insulting, exchange of views!