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Running on Empty: Copper

thehonestsorcerer.substack.com

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Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#31

Post by quickthrowman »

crote wrote: post #22
quickthrowman wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, no, power can be delivered by wires made out of aluminum and indeed, it often is, I don't think that much of the transmission grid is copper Seconded, aluminum works just fine as a conductor. I’m pretty sure that all overhead utility distribution conductors are a steel core wrapped with aluminum conductors and air for insulation, and I’d bet that underground distribution conductors are also aluminum. SER cab…

> I’m pretty sure that all overhead utility distribution conductors are a steel core wrapped with aluminum conductors That's the classical setup, but there's been some innovation. These days there's also stuff like aluminium alloys which don't need steel reinforcement, or aluminium reinforced with carbon fiber. But indeed, copper is vanishingly rare.

Thanks for the additional info, I’m interested in learning more technical details about the electrical grid, like conductor size/ampacity but it’s hard to dig up information about it. I work in commercial construction and the highest voltages I ever deal with are 4160V and sometimes 5kV and 15kV, so I know a bit about medium voltage equipment and conductors but I’d like to know more about the utility side.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#32

Post by philipkglass »

quickthrowman wrote: post #31
crote wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m pretty sure that all overhead utility distribution conductors are a steel core wrapped with aluminum conductors That's the classical setup, but there's been some innovation. These days there's also stuff like aluminium alloys which don't need steel reinforcement, or aluminium reinforced with carbon fiber. But indeed, copper is vanishingly rare.

Thanks for the additional info, I’m interested in learning more technical details about the electrical grid, like conductor size/ampacity but it’s hard to dig up information about it. I work in commercial construction and the highest voltages I ever deal with are 4160V and sometimes 5kV and 15kV, so I know a bit about medium voltage equipment and conductors but I’d like to know more about the utility side.

Are you on a mobile device? Ampacity charts for aluminum conductor steel-reinforced cable are pretty easy to find but most of them appear to be PDFs, like this one:

https://www.prioritywire.com/specs/acsr.pdf

Cables in that table are rated for between 105 to 1,751 amps under these conditions:

"Current ratings based on 75˚C conductor temperature, 25˚C ambient temperature, emissivity 0.5, 2ft/sec wind in sun"

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#33

Post by SyzygyRhythm »

toast0 wrote: post #27
SyzygyRhythm wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Aluminum is actually a (far) superior conductor to copper per unit mass. It would be used on transmission lines even if it was the same price as copper, because the towers can be cheaper and farther apart. It's in increasing use in EVs due to the lower mass. Copper is still used when the conductive density matters, like the windings of an electric motor. But if copper prices increase further, manufacturers wi…

> I've seen increasing use of copper in fairly mundane uses, like computer heat sinks, that used to be aluminum. Copper heatsinks go in and out of style... Copper heat pipes have stayed en vogue, but typically embedded in aluminum blocks.

I'd suppose the fashion goes somewhat with the price of copper, though I haven't tracked it. The heatsinks themselves have gotten far larger as CPUs and GPUs have gotten more power hungry, not to mention RAM and SSDs. A material that's a good tradeoff at one scale isn't necessarily one at a different scale.

At any rate, one should expect many of these trades to go the way of Al if Cu gets more expensive (which it might not). Not all of them, but we'll probably see a bias towards physically larger systems in cases where space isn't at a premium. And also a bias towards active systems over passive, liquid cooling over air, and so on.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#34

Post by 0manrho »

Other HN users have pointed out the many outright falsehoods present in this article, so I'll just get straight to the point: This is nonsense from a fearmongering collapse blog that doesn't understand what they're trying to speak authoritatively about.

Other headlines currently present from the frontpage of this same site:

> Collapse Will Look Nothing Like the Movies

> How I Came To Believe That Civilization Is Unsustainable

> 2025: A Civilizational Tipping Point

Even if you find that content compelling, it's dishonesty and objective inaccuracy in which it substantiates its points suggests you shouldn't waste your time.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#35

Post by bryanlarsen »

parliament32 wrote: post #5

Something I could use some clarification on: > Even though the industry would be willing to pay top dollar for each pound of metal delivered, there is simply not much more to be found. Copper bearing formations are not popping up at random, and there is no point in drilling various spots on Earth prospecting for deposits, either. The major formations have already been discovered, and thus the ever increasing investme…

We ran out of cheap pure copper a long time ago. Now we're producing copper out of ores that contain a very small proportion of copper. If the price goes up we'll produce copper from ores that contain an even smaller fraction of copper.

Copper is 60 ppm of the crust. As long as the price keeps going up, we'll never run out.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#36

Post by bigiain »

morkalork wrote: post #3
chemotaxis wrote: post #2

I think the author is speaking authoritatively about things they may be less familiar with, or where they really want to push a particular doomsday / degrowth agenda (the only prescription at the end the article is that we need to stop technological progress). This paragraph in particular caught my eye: > Bah! Who needs copper anyway, when we have so much aluminum?! > Have you thought about how aluminum is made? Well…

I don't know about other countries but in Canada, I can think of a few aluminum smelting operations and they're all geolocated in close proximity to hydroelectric dams.

I heard a story from a usually reliable friend, that there are old decommissioned aluminium smelters on the river or in the mountains east of Portland, that closed up back in the early 2000s or so when Google and Amazon and other datacenters started showing up and buying all the capacity from the hydroelectric dams nearby.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#37

Post by duffmancd »

SyzygyRhythm wrote: post #10
chemotaxis wrote: post #2

I think the author is speaking authoritatively about things they may be less familiar with, or where they really want to push a particular doomsday / degrowth agenda (the only prescription at the end the article is that we need to stop technological progress). This paragraph in particular caught my eye: > Bah! Who needs copper anyway, when we have so much aluminum?! > Have you thought about how aluminum is made? Well…

Indeed. Aluminum is actually a (far) superior conductor to copper per unit mass. It would be used on transmission lines even if it was the same price as copper, because the towers can be cheaper and farther apart. It's in increasing use in EVs due to the lower mass. Copper is still used when the conductive density matters, like the windings of an electric motor. But if copper prices increase further, manufacturers wi…

We even use aluminium on "dumb" transformers for power transmission. Dry-type transformers tend to be physically larger because they use air and resin (rather than a tank of oil) to insulate, and so the major downside to aluminium conductors (needing a larger cross-section to carry the same current for the same loss) is no longer a limiting factor performance-wise. In most substations, and extra 20-30% physical size of the transformer is a fine trade-off for cheaper construction.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#38

Post by pfdietz »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #35
parliament32 wrote: post #5

Something I could use some clarification on: > Even though the industry would be willing to pay top dollar for each pound of metal delivered, there is simply not much more to be found. Copper bearing formations are not popping up at random, and there is no point in drilling various spots on Earth prospecting for deposits, either. The major formations have already been discovered, and thus the ever increasing investme…

We ran out of cheap pure copper a long time ago. Now we're producing copper out of ores that contain a very small proportion of copper. If the price goes up we'll produce copper from ores that contain an even smaller fraction of copper. Copper is 60 ppm of the crust. As long as the price keeps going up, we'll never run out.

Seafloor massive sulfides and manganese nodules also have significant amounts of copper.

But I would like to see improvements in copper recycling and in breeding of copper hyperaccumulator plants.

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#39

Post by IAmBroom »

wat10000 wrote: post #14
auspiv wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other countries are very much the same. Almost always located near giant hydroelectric generation facilities. Brazil + Russia are two big ones that come to mind. Probably China too.

Iceland has a massive amount of geothermal and hydroelectricity. A large portion of that electricity is exported in the form of aluminum.

What a fascinating sentence to read!

Re: Running on Empty: Copper

#40

Post by IAmBroom »

DoneWithAllThat wrote: post #8
parliament32 wrote: post #5

Something I could use some clarification on: > Even though the industry would be willing to pay top dollar for each pound of metal delivered, there is simply not much more to be found. Copper bearing formations are not popping up at random, and there is no point in drilling various spots on Earth prospecting for deposits, either. The major formations have already been discovered, and thus the ever increasing investme…

We don’t know. The entire article is garbage.

As defrost points out, we have a pretty damn good idea from the sampling maps we've built, and geological knowledge we've learned.

But the article is garbage.

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