Plans for a global energy revolution threatened by unexpected probems

From The Times  19th November 2008

The tempting dream that global recession may be vanquished by a worldwide push into green technologies is threatened by a powerful international army of threats - Chilean salt lakes, German ball bearings and Japanese ingots.  Without this trio of resources, Europe and Asia’s ambitious plans to build dozens of nuclear power plants, China’s dream of giant wind farms and America’s hopes for the electric car could be, at best, delayed and, at worst, dashed entirely. Chile is a primary source of lithium - a now critical element. Since the commercialisation of lithium ion batteries in the early 1990s, production and use of the technology has soared. The metal - difficult to extract and with reserves skewed to certain pockets of South America - has been seized on by the global electronics industry as the answer to its prayers. The power of the lithium battery drives personal information technology, from iPods and mobile phones to laptops and BlackBerrys. However, some experts say, the present calculations of lithium reserve usage do not take sufficient account of the potential demand from the car industry if it truly plans to convert the world to cleaner, emission-free electric cars. The sort of batteries large enough to power a car use about 100 times more lithium than a laptop and, according to William Tahil, research director of Meridian International Research, there is not enough commercially extractable lithium in the world to meet the sort of demand implied if motoring goes electric - Toyota said recently that it did not believe that future lithium supply would be able to sustain the dual demands from the electronics and car industries. Another of the cornerstones in the world’s attempt to wean itself off fossil fuels has been the belief that nuclear power could be ramped up substantially. If all the plans for new nuclear generators are totted up, the World Nuclear Association has said that an additional 237 reactors will be built over the next 21 years. The only snag with that plan lies in the island of Hokkaido and in a century-old steel forge that produces 80 per cent of the world’s reactor cores - a highly specialised piece of steel, milled from a single 600-tonne ingot, which only a few companies in the world can handle. Nearly two years ago, the nuclear industry started to get worried: Japan Steel Works (JSW) was able to churn out only four of these reactors a year, far, far below the demand implied by the politicians’ promises and considerably lower than the biggest players in nuclear - Areva, of France, and Toshiba, of Japan - were at all happy with. JSW has said that it might be able to produce 12 reactor cores per year by 2011. Nuclear industry insiders told The Times that JSW’s virtual monopoly was still the “biggest, most overlooked bottleneck” for a nuclear renaissance. Where the nuclear industry is confronted by the complexities of handling very large hunks of specialised steel, the wind-power industry, especially in China, faces a technology bottleneck on a far smaller scale: it cannot lay its hands on enough gearboxes and the German ball bearings that keep them rolling. As one of the most important components in a wind-turbine generator, and the second most costly after the supporting tower, gearbox supply issues feature heavily in the industry’s growth plans. The component shortages are particularly acute. In the past, leading turbine makers invested heavily to secure the supply chain, buying up the gearbox makers, but that has still not solved the issue. Simon Powell, of CLSA Asia-Pacific Markets, said that although the financial crisis had mildly alleviated the imbalance of supply and demand in wind power, the gearbox and bearings shortage could last for another two years.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article5254564.ece