I think to do an accurate assessment of the impact of a technology, you have to take into account what that technology replaces. As an example consider aluminum. Aluminum requires huge amounts of energy to produce, which is why mills are typically located near hydro dams, such as in Kitimat BC. A hydro dam is, arguably, renewable energy - at least compared to burning fossil fuels to produce steel. Of course you have to weigh this against the mining and transportation of bauxite, but then you have to mine and transport iron ore as well, so that's probably a wash.
Where aluminum triumphs IMO, is in building construction, where siding and frames are increasingly being made of aluminum which has a much longer life expectancy than wood frames and siding. Less fire hazard too! Also, when the building finally needs to be taken down, most of the materials can be recycled, whereas most of a wood frame building can't and has to be hauled to the dump. Recycling aluminum is a big win because you don't have to go through the entire manufacturing process, just the final stages.
I don't have any numbers to support my observations, but I'm sure someone's done a study on this, besides which, the replacement of wood with aluminum suggests that the market has already made that determination, at least on a cost basis, otherwise we'd still be using wood in construction.
Terrific article - I've never seen anything like it. Are there any analyses that take into account all of this when they calculate the total carbon used to make chips and PV panels?
Wow. Very comprehensive treatment of something I knew little about, even though I studied the application of the technology, its production was not something we looked at. It was just taken for granted - here are some chips, here's what they do, now design a circuit that does X.
That said, to get the full picture one has to do not just an industry analysis, but a comparative analysis of similar processes, such as copper, steel and aluminum manufacturing, including the effect they have not just on the environment, but on previous, less efficient processes they replace.
That is a complex equation with many variables that are hard to quantify, but a simple example should suffice to demonstrate what I mean. Consider the cell phone. It uses microchips with all the material processes (and consequences) that entails. However, cell phones have almost entirely replaced telephone landlines which used enormous amounts of copper, which requires similar intensive production processes. In many parts of Africa cell phones actually overcame the cost-prohibitive aspects of landlines which prevented telephone networks altogether. In some areas to make a simple phone call you had to travel many kms to a town or village which was connected to the network just to place a call.
Now everyone has a cell phone and can stay connected to friends and family, but most important, you can call ahead and get a quote on your products before you make a potentially wasted trip to sell something for which prices are too low to justify. So energy saved. It's worth noting that in many areas the cell phones are charged using solar cells, so subtract that elusive number from the entropy figures for solar panels.
Then there's the impact on education. A phone or tablet, previously unavailable, can be used for remote learning, thus making basic education available in areas where it was once too expensive to consider. Literacy is a basic element of any successful culture, so there's another difficult to measure positive outcome of the energy expended in producing these devices.
Aluminum is another example, Very energy intensive and not worth the effort if all you're doing is replacing hardwood and fabric in building bi-planes. That's not what happened of course. Aluminum created the commercial aviation industry with all the massive savings in transportation costs compared to road and rail. How do you quantify that? Of course along with the services comes all kinds of disservices that have to be accounted for. Here's where that analytical rubric I mentioned comes into play: novelty to convenience to necessity to obstacle. So we solve one problem, but in the process create another higher order problem. Is the cost worth the benefit? How do you measure that?
Going back to phones. In the late 70's I drove tanker trucks for a major oil company. We had no CB radios so a standard piece of safety equipment was a 25 cent piece. A quarter. I had occasion to use it too when I was first on scene at a bad accident. Today you'd simply dial 911 on your cell phone. Back then I had to stop a car (try that on the highway!) and convince the driver to take the next exit and find a payphone to call in the emergency. In that case it took almost an hour for help to arrive. Today maximum response time is about 15 minutes. So how many lives have cell phones saved, compared to lost from idiots stepping into traffic while looking at their phone? Probably a net gain, but again hard to quantify.
There is my new Russian friend! I do appreciate your well thought out comments and points, which are many.
Solving the conundrum: despite the increases in efficiencies realized by our digital Si devices, consumption and population continue unabated 24 x 7 planetwide.
Perhaps if one were to focus solely on one demographic or country, and freeze that in time, a life-cycle analysis could be achieved with less than 10 % error. Maybe.
Your template:
The Law of Conservation of Energy, which is also known as the First Law of Thermodynamics, states:
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed
Energy cannot be renewed, but rather only transformed from one form to another.
Change in energy in a system is the sum of heat and work: ∆E = Q + W
Per the Second Law of Thermodynamics, almost all processes in the world are irreversible, and things tend towards disorder. To make ordered materials and renewable contraptions, we must do work to create these ordered objects, and plenty of disorder and waste heat is generated along the way.
"Solving the conundrum: despite the increases in efficiencies realized by our digital Si devices, consumption and population continue unabated 24 x 7 planetwide."
Population growth in most of the western world has fallen below replacement levels. There's a number of factors driving the trend, but one could argue that industrialization is the leading cause. On that basis, one could also argue that as the developing world becomes more industrialized their birthrates will also decline.
Whether or not this avoids the implied Malthusian catastrophe is still up for debate I would say. I've seen estimates that the planet can support a population of 10B which coincidentally is the same number predicted for the levelling off of global population growth, after which we enter a period of slow decline. I can't speak for the accuracy of either prediction, just thought I'd mention that they exist.
Sorry to disappoint you but I'm not Russian, although these days I wish I were. I was born in England and emigrated to Canada with my family when I was a kid. I am, however, very interested in Russian culture, going back to the USSR days when I used to tune in to Radio Moscow. I come from a military family, and you can imagine that my father, who was a major in NATO mobile command, didn't approve of my interest! He also didn't think too much of me becoming a musician as he'd already decided on a military career for me. Long story short, I left home at an early age and have been supporting myself, including my education, ever since, thus the trucking jobs.
There's an equally long story that involves my switching from electronics and physics to epistemology that came about as a result of a project in educational software where I had to learn the pedagogical concepts as well as the technical details. This led to an interest in systems theory which is ongoing, as well as cultural studies where I look for the common denominators that inspire cultural exchange and understanding, thus the music substack, as I believe music is central to understanding other cultures.
Incredible information. I had absolutely no idea how much energy and what types etc went in to solar panels and chips. The intricacies are incredible and the supply chain seems quite vulnerable in many ways with so much being done in China. One more reason Substack writers are leading an educational revolution for people who care to be educated. Thank you for taking so much time and effort to condense an incredible amount of information in to something a regular person could understand and enjoy. It made part of my hay hauling this afternoon quite enjoyable.
The article mentions wood chips, which made me perk up because I was hauling them for a couple of years as a part-time retirement gig (I like to stay active).
When I was a kid, we'd go on vacation to BC, and along the way you'd see these monsters blowing smoke and sparks, lighting up the sky and stinking up the air.
They were used to burn wood waste and you might still see the odd one, rusting away in silence, although most have been scrapped at this point. Why? Because wood chips and sawdust went from a waste product to a valuable commodity, mainly driven by the cost of energy.
Wood chips are used in making paper, a very energy intensive process. In the past, trees were cut and shipped to paper mills by rail, which still happens, but the place I worked - a chip mill processing logs into chips couldn't have existed because the waste had no value. Now not only are chips from lumber mills hauled to paper mills, but plants like ours exist to process substandard logs from clear cuts that would otherwise be left on the ground or burned as waste. Now only do the chips go to a paper mill, but the bark and sawdust as well, where it gets burned to produce steam.
Caution: remove all coffee cups and loose objects before tipping!
Now consider the paper making process itself - very energy intensive and requires many hazardous chemical inputs (which incidentally I also hauled at times). Paper mills today are in trouble because of foreign competition, but also because of a decline in the use of paper for printing. For example, I have over 200 books in PDF format that didn't have to be printed in order to own a copy. I don't know how many trees that has saved, but to do a proper accounting of the impact of silicon chips on forests it's definitely an offsetting factor.
I watched the tipping video on YouTube, that 's awesome!
I am slightly familiar with paper making and the chemistry, brutal chem and heat to make those fibers workable. Tremendous water use and waste.
**In addition to Laws of Thermo 0-3, remember: there is no such thing as renewable energy or renewable energy contraptions. They violate the First Law - it is just sales and marketing BS.
I agree with you that most of the renewable energy talk is just marketing hype, but we shouldn't overlook an important fact. When talking about energy, you have to look at the total system, which includes energy from the sun. There's nothing in the 2nd law that forbids the emergence of local areas of negative entropy. Plants are a good example, as are all living systems actually. The energy driving the growth of plants, which also supports other life forms, is external to our planet. The sun follows the 2nd law of course, but it's got a long way to go before that becomes a problem.
BTW, have you come across James Grier Miller in your readings? His 1978 book "Living Systems" is absolutely essential reading for anyone trying to get a big picture grasp of not just living systems, but systems in general.
The sun is not a renewable energy source per the First Law.
It is a highly inefficient fusion reactor at 0.7 % mass to energy conversion. It's just a big mofo with alot of gravity to help convert a massive excess of H to He.
"The sun is not a renewable energy source per the First Law."
True in an absolute sense, but it's a very long-lived external energy source which drives all the biota we depend on. My point was that nothing in Newton's Laws prohibits local areas of negentropy, provided the energy source driving it is external to the system being described.
Life itself is a form of negative entropy. Consider the complexity of living organisms, all ultimately made possible by energy from the sun.
I have an issue with Newton's laws BTW. I can't prove it, but I suspect they are local, not universal. I base this on recent observations and theories in physics, which still lacks a unified field theory. It would take an entire essay to explain my thinking, and I'm already crowding this board so I'll await your approval before I do that:)
Thank you for stopping by Al and your long time readership.
Total mass of carbon per panel m^2 would certainly be an interesting 🤔 number.
I would guess that there is a thesis or life cycle analysis out there, but maybe not.
In my trillion chips article I refer to the mass of materials and fossil used for an obsolete DRAM chip and the boevtobrun the Intel fab in AZ.
Stay in touch
TC
I think to do an accurate assessment of the impact of a technology, you have to take into account what that technology replaces. As an example consider aluminum. Aluminum requires huge amounts of energy to produce, which is why mills are typically located near hydro dams, such as in Kitimat BC. A hydro dam is, arguably, renewable energy - at least compared to burning fossil fuels to produce steel. Of course you have to weigh this against the mining and transportation of bauxite, but then you have to mine and transport iron ore as well, so that's probably a wash.
Where aluminum triumphs IMO, is in building construction, where siding and frames are increasingly being made of aluminum which has a much longer life expectancy than wood frames and siding. Less fire hazard too! Also, when the building finally needs to be taken down, most of the materials can be recycled, whereas most of a wood frame building can't and has to be hauled to the dump. Recycling aluminum is a big win because you don't have to go through the entire manufacturing process, just the final stages.
I don't have any numbers to support my observations, but I'm sure someone's done a study on this, besides which, the replacement of wood with aluminum suggests that the market has already made that determination, at least on a cost basis, otherwise we'd still be using wood in construction.
Terrific article - I've never seen anything like it. Are there any analyses that take into account all of this when they calculate the total carbon used to make chips and PV panels?
Wow. Very comprehensive treatment of something I knew little about, even though I studied the application of the technology, its production was not something we looked at. It was just taken for granted - here are some chips, here's what they do, now design a circuit that does X.
That said, to get the full picture one has to do not just an industry analysis, but a comparative analysis of similar processes, such as copper, steel and aluminum manufacturing, including the effect they have not just on the environment, but on previous, less efficient processes they replace.
That is a complex equation with many variables that are hard to quantify, but a simple example should suffice to demonstrate what I mean. Consider the cell phone. It uses microchips with all the material processes (and consequences) that entails. However, cell phones have almost entirely replaced telephone landlines which used enormous amounts of copper, which requires similar intensive production processes. In many parts of Africa cell phones actually overcame the cost-prohibitive aspects of landlines which prevented telephone networks altogether. In some areas to make a simple phone call you had to travel many kms to a town or village which was connected to the network just to place a call.
Now everyone has a cell phone and can stay connected to friends and family, but most important, you can call ahead and get a quote on your products before you make a potentially wasted trip to sell something for which prices are too low to justify. So energy saved. It's worth noting that in many areas the cell phones are charged using solar cells, so subtract that elusive number from the entropy figures for solar panels.
Then there's the impact on education. A phone or tablet, previously unavailable, can be used for remote learning, thus making basic education available in areas where it was once too expensive to consider. Literacy is a basic element of any successful culture, so there's another difficult to measure positive outcome of the energy expended in producing these devices.
Aluminum is another example, Very energy intensive and not worth the effort if all you're doing is replacing hardwood and fabric in building bi-planes. That's not what happened of course. Aluminum created the commercial aviation industry with all the massive savings in transportation costs compared to road and rail. How do you quantify that? Of course along with the services comes all kinds of disservices that have to be accounted for. Here's where that analytical rubric I mentioned comes into play: novelty to convenience to necessity to obstacle. So we solve one problem, but in the process create another higher order problem. Is the cost worth the benefit? How do you measure that?
Going back to phones. In the late 70's I drove tanker trucks for a major oil company. We had no CB radios so a standard piece of safety equipment was a 25 cent piece. A quarter. I had occasion to use it too when I was first on scene at a bad accident. Today you'd simply dial 911 on your cell phone. Back then I had to stop a car (try that on the highway!) and convince the driver to take the next exit and find a payphone to call in the emergency. In that case it took almost an hour for help to arrive. Today maximum response time is about 15 minutes. So how many lives have cell phones saved, compared to lost from idiots stepping into traffic while looking at their phone? Probably a net gain, but again hard to quantify.
There is my new Russian friend! I do appreciate your well thought out comments and points, which are many.
Solving the conundrum: despite the increases in efficiencies realized by our digital Si devices, consumption and population continue unabated 24 x 7 planetwide.
Perhaps if one were to focus solely on one demographic or country, and freeze that in time, a life-cycle analysis could be achieved with less than 10 % error. Maybe.
Your template:
The Law of Conservation of Energy, which is also known as the First Law of Thermodynamics, states:
Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed
Energy cannot be renewed, but rather only transformed from one form to another.
Change in energy in a system is the sum of heat and work: ∆E = Q + W
Per the Second Law of Thermodynamics, almost all processes in the world are irreversible, and things tend towards disorder. To make ordered materials and renewable contraptions, we must do work to create these ordered objects, and plenty of disorder and waste heat is generated along the way.
"Solving the conundrum: despite the increases in efficiencies realized by our digital Si devices, consumption and population continue unabated 24 x 7 planetwide."
Population growth in most of the western world has fallen below replacement levels. There's a number of factors driving the trend, but one could argue that industrialization is the leading cause. On that basis, one could also argue that as the developing world becomes more industrialized their birthrates will also decline.
Whether or not this avoids the implied Malthusian catastrophe is still up for debate I would say. I've seen estimates that the planet can support a population of 10B which coincidentally is the same number predicted for the levelling off of global population growth, after which we enter a period of slow decline. I can't speak for the accuracy of either prediction, just thought I'd mention that they exist.
"There is my new Russian friend!"
Sorry to disappoint you but I'm not Russian, although these days I wish I were. I was born in England and emigrated to Canada with my family when I was a kid. I am, however, very interested in Russian culture, going back to the USSR days when I used to tune in to Radio Moscow. I come from a military family, and you can imagine that my father, who was a major in NATO mobile command, didn't approve of my interest! He also didn't think too much of me becoming a musician as he'd already decided on a military career for me. Long story short, I left home at an early age and have been supporting myself, including my education, ever since, thus the trucking jobs.
There's an equally long story that involves my switching from electronics and physics to epistemology that came about as a result of a project in educational software where I had to learn the pedagogical concepts as well as the technical details. This led to an interest in systems theory which is ongoing, as well as cultural studies where I look for the common denominators that inspire cultural exchange and understanding, thus the music substack, as I believe music is central to understanding other cultures.
Wasn’t it still a dime in the 70s?
Not in Canada:)
As always you give us a fantastic reference. This is all you ever needed to know about solar PV and chips and how they are manufactured. Thanks
Incredible information. I had absolutely no idea how much energy and what types etc went in to solar panels and chips. The intricacies are incredible and the supply chain seems quite vulnerable in many ways with so much being done in China. One more reason Substack writers are leading an educational revolution for people who care to be educated. Thank you for taking so much time and effort to condense an incredible amount of information in to something a regular person could understand and enjoy. It made part of my hay hauling this afternoon quite enjoyable.
Dave, it is my pleasure and an honor to receive this feedback.
Regards,
TC
GREAT INFO ....... pretty stunning energy usage.
The article mentions wood chips, which made me perk up because I was hauling them for a couple of years as a part-time retirement gig (I like to stay active).
When I was a kid, we'd go on vacation to BC, and along the way you'd see these monsters blowing smoke and sparks, lighting up the sky and stinking up the air.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/407575835003596808/
They were used to burn wood waste and you might still see the odd one, rusting away in silence, although most have been scrapped at this point. Why? Because wood chips and sawdust went from a waste product to a valuable commodity, mainly driven by the cost of energy.
Wood chips are used in making paper, a very energy intensive process. In the past, trees were cut and shipped to paper mills by rail, which still happens, but the place I worked - a chip mill processing logs into chips couldn't have existed because the waste had no value. Now not only are chips from lumber mills hauled to paper mills, but plants like ours exist to process substandard logs from clear cuts that would otherwise be left on the ground or burned as waste. Now only do the chips go to a paper mill, but the bark and sawdust as well, where it gets burned to produce steam.
It was a fun job because I got to do this:
https://www.aminternationaltnllc.com/
Caution: remove all coffee cups and loose objects before tipping!
Now consider the paper making process itself - very energy intensive and requires many hazardous chemical inputs (which incidentally I also hauled at times). Paper mills today are in trouble because of foreign competition, but also because of a decline in the use of paper for printing. For example, I have over 200 books in PDF format that didn't have to be printed in order to own a copy. I don't know how many trees that has saved, but to do a proper accounting of the impact of silicon chips on forests it's definitely an offsetting factor.
I watched the tipping video on YouTube, that 's awesome!
I am slightly familiar with paper making and the chemistry, brutal chem and heat to make those fibers workable. Tremendous water use and waste.
**In addition to Laws of Thermo 0-3, remember: there is no such thing as renewable energy or renewable energy contraptions. They violate the First Law - it is just sales and marketing BS.
I agree with you that most of the renewable energy talk is just marketing hype, but we shouldn't overlook an important fact. When talking about energy, you have to look at the total system, which includes energy from the sun. There's nothing in the 2nd law that forbids the emergence of local areas of negative entropy. Plants are a good example, as are all living systems actually. The energy driving the growth of plants, which also supports other life forms, is external to our planet. The sun follows the 2nd law of course, but it's got a long way to go before that becomes a problem.
BTW, have you come across James Grier Miller in your readings? His 1978 book "Living Systems" is absolutely essential reading for anyone trying to get a big picture grasp of not just living systems, but systems in general.
https://www.panarchy.org/miller/livingsystems.html
Sales and marketing pukes invented renewables.
The sun is not a renewable energy source per the First Law.
It is a highly inefficient fusion reactor at 0.7 % mass to energy conversion. It's just a big mofo with alot of gravity to help convert a massive excess of H to He.
Trust me, I am a pre-woke scientist! LOL
I will check that book!
Best,
TC
"The sun is not a renewable energy source per the First Law."
True in an absolute sense, but it's a very long-lived external energy source which drives all the biota we depend on. My point was that nothing in Newton's Laws prohibits local areas of negentropy, provided the energy source driving it is external to the system being described.
Life itself is a form of negative entropy. Consider the complexity of living organisms, all ultimately made possible by energy from the sun.
I have an issue with Newton's laws BTW. I can't prove it, but I suspect they are local, not universal. I base this on recent observations and theories in physics, which still lacks a unified field theory. It would take an entire essay to explain my thinking, and I'm already crowding this board so I'll await your approval before I do that:)
And the chips are providing an extremely valuable product for which we have no substitute.
PV panels are providing a grossly inferior and worse than redundant "substitute."
Occam's Razor from Ken 👍
Fantastic
Further dashing my hopes of solar-powered solar panel manufacturing!
Unbelievable
I knew it was energy intensive but this is mind boggling!
Thanks for all your hard work! 🙏
This was well covered in the documentary by michael Moore
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE