Surely Not! Solar Panels and Electric Charging Points

The minute you claim most rare metals are mined in China totally invalidates your argument. Over half the lithium (The most crucial element in current battery tech and will continue being well past when the ban on fossil fuel cars happens) that is mined comes from Australia and over 25% from Chile. China is number 3 and produces a decent amount but it's around half of what Chile produces and actually China's production is on the decline as their supplies get tapped. I actually suspect what you have heard and misinterpreted is that China accounts for the majority of the refining of the lithium and other rare earth metals used in both battery and tech overall. Even the Swedish find that you mention would almost certainly just be sold to China to be refined and then packaged into batteries before then being bought back by Sweden and the rest of Europe as part of their equipment.

And something you need to realise about Rare-Earth metals is sure as our ability to detect them has got better we have found they are more plentiful than initially thought but the reason they were thought to be rare is that large deposits are rare. Again Liutium is the 25th most common element but most of it isn't in minable deposits, it's in small quantities in most rocks. Most of the big deposits are found in the Southern Hemisphere, the US used to have a decent amount but they have already mined much of their usable supply. There is a pretty big deposit in Canada that they haven't mined and there is a good chance they will never mine because of the environmental damage and risk of pollution of the water table that comes with mining it, that's part of the reason why Australia and Chile produce so much because their deposits are mainly found in the lifeless desert where no-one really cares if you have some ugly mine that's causing pollution as you arent ruining natural beauty, you aren't poisoning flora and fauna, you aren't poisoning local human settlements and there is a lack of water making it getting into the water table much less of an issue.

 

The renewable fuel market is equally reliant on the availability of supply though, that availability might be at a different point in the chain (less in the production and more in the storage) but it's still there. It's no good putting solar panels that in themselves waste so much of the available power (In ideal situations where they get no shade at any time of the day and they are kept clean you might get 20% efficiency in the power production from solar) if much of what you do produce then has no way for us to store it for use later when demand is higher but where production may be lower (ie between 5 pm and 8 pm which even in the summer but especially in winter when electricity demands are even higher; is when solar production is lower but energy demands are highest). If Australia was sanctioned for crimes against humanity and our Supply of things like Lithium then dried up then both supply and prices would shoot up (In fact even in 2022 Battery prices rose by 7% the first time battery prices have gone up in over a decade and they are expected to have a similar rise in 2023. That's a combination of everywhere but Australia seeing the amount they are able to mine falling, the small amounts mined in Russia and Ukraine no longer being on the market and what is being mined in places being impacted by the global distribution problems that are impacting almost every operation that has to import and export. Plus the ever-increasing demand for batteries)

Ultimately I don't know what the overall solution is but even now we are way more likely to run out of what we need to produce batteries than we are to run out of Fossil fuels and that's without some hard deadline where we stop production of things like combustion engine cars and other things that are part of the that's pushing us to the edge even quicker all in the hope that suddenly we have some battery tech breakthrough that can be rolled out quickly and cheaply which isn't going to happen. I talked above about the battery prices going up for the first time in over a decade, in 2010 the cost of a battery was $1,160 per kWh, in 2021 it was $140 per kWh. The first Litium-Ion battery was invented in 1985 and went into commercial production in 1991 so by 2010 it was already a 19-year-old product and when it took a further 11 years to get the tech developed enough to get the price down to a good level and for batteries to be more suitable for more uses it gives you a good idea of the kind of timescales even a breakthrough happening right now would take to be ready, 31 years certainly puts us well past the date we really need to have a better option ready.

It's really going to be no good if the laptop you might need for work goes from having a battery that accounts for 10-20% of the machine's costs to 70-80% because battery demand is so high and production low so everyone who wants batteries is rationed. What's going to happen to car companies when they can't make combustion engine cars but they can't get the batteries to produce anywhere near as many cars. EV prices will have to rise to account for making fewer cars and the batteries being more expensive. It will actually push people even more into the used car market (and not the EV used cards as getting those batteries replaced will be cost-prohibitive) which is actually worse as combustion engines have been getting better as the years go on, but with them banned then that progress stops. And while some hybrids are getting 5 extra years even those will be banned by 2035. We should be encouraging hybrids as a better option than full-combustion engines and we should also be encouraging better combustion engines for example while we have made the move to E10 Fuel which most cars made after 2002 there is scope to keep increasing the Ethernol mix especially if engine development can continue so we can keep reducing emissions through evolution while having a more realistic goal for battery techs to have evolved where moving to EV fully is more likely to be viable

 

Having looked it up it seems what we have is the actual scientific definition of rare-earth elements/metals and then the more 'mainstream' one that lumps in things like Lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite amongst other elements which are important in battery and tech production for simplifying things despite them not actually scientifically being rare-earth elements.

While there are some actual rare-earth elements in batteries, its Lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite which are more important and lithium and cobalt especially is a declining resource that we have

 

Server farms certain are power-hungry, if you look at this image from a google data centre



you have 3 racks, each rack has around 25-30 servers in it. Each of that server will have a PSU's ranging from a normal desktop of 500-600W anywhere up to several thousand and they don't have one, they can generally have anywhere from 2 to 4 PSU's so they can handle a PSU failure.

And from this picture you can get an idea of how big the room is


That one isn't even full, you can see a space place for another 3-column rack (maybe even 2) to go in. And this is just one room, most of the big data centres from the likes of Google and Amazon will have atleast a dozen such rooms, maybe even more in some of the massive ones.

Obviously having that many machines produces a massive amount fo heat in the room, the enemy of a computer is heat so not only are the servers often using elaborate water cooling on the components to keep them cool but the rooms themselves are airconditioned to further help.

The thing is though much like the negative press when it comes to Cryptos energy use it's not that clear cut. These data centres are often in the middle of nowhere with plenty of land around them and they are able to take advantage of their own renewable arrays, usually a combo of Solar and wind but in some places, they may include hydro. These most likely wouldn't exist without the data centres so it's not like they are being powered by large amounts of fossil fuels. Certainly, the increased move to the cloud is actually more environmentally friendly than having lots of localised servers

 

I would argue it is relevant as the merits of renewables and EVs play a fairly big part if installing solar panels and EV chargers makes sense for City to be doing this. The EV charging points, for example, seem like the kind of thing being done on the basis that EV's and EV's using the current tech is going to get mass adoption when they get a combustion engine ban comes in. If sales and maintenance cost hits demand for EV's which the resale value seems to suggest then what's the point (And we already have EV points around the country that not all cars can use due to different tech)