[Rockhounds] Minerals and climate change

[Tim Fisher]

The price of solar on the power market is getting cheaper much faster than predicted. It briefly (albeit for less than a day) became cheaper on a mass scale in the southwest US than any other source that was online and available at the time. Of course there's a lot of solar already online in the usually cloud-free desert. So regardless of your worldview or the environmental factors involved, it's more or less inevitable that at some point (IMO when the remaining storage issues get worked out, and batteries are just one factor), it will become a dominant source where it makes sense (along with wind of course). I consult to a big hydroelectric player, and even they are seeing their margins getting squeezed by solar and wind. All three have extremely low operating cost when there are enough of them on the grid as compared to fossil fuels, and all three will play a bigger role on a global scale in the very near future than coal, oil and gas. When you think about it a relatively large number of minerals play a significant role in electric power production and distribution. Would be fun to get a list together along with their relative impact.

Tim Fisher
Orerockon.com