Marielle Remillard

So let me give you an example.

If we wanted to answer this question, can we achieve net zero?

Do we have enough stuff for just the wind sector?

Classically, you might approach this question by looking at all the materials you need to make a wind turbine and then comparing supply and demand.

And what you would see is that maybe through 2030, you'd see some scarcity in carbon fiber, possibly terbium, but it's really unclear once you get to the bottom of the list.

Once we start factoring in the rest of the economy, the picture looks like this.

There are 14 materials that would face scarcity in the wind energy supply chain through 2030, once we account for the full economy.

I don't know about you, but I found these results staggering.

It's exactly this type of perspective that we need to bring to policymakers to make informed decisions and to bring to investors so that they're investing in clean technologies that will actually have meaningful impact.

Now, you may be wondering, you know, isn't this just one scenario, right?

There are many pathways that you could take to reach net zero.

And in fact, there are hundreds of design choices that go into each of these individual technologies.

So what happens if we start factoring in actual design choices?

Our team wanted to do this, so we ran a modest 6,000 experiments

where we varied not only the amount of solar and wind in our net-zero scenario, but individual design choices.

So for our solar panels, we looked at whether they were made from crystalline silicon or thin films, whether they were framed in aluminum, whether they had a glass backing and whether they were mounted on the roof or on the ground.

And we varied similar parameters for the wind sector.

What we found was that 45 percent of the materials needed to build solar and wind panels could face scarcity through 2030 under every scenario we tested.

Some of the materials we expected, things like cobalt or rare earth metals, have been in the news for a long time, but others were a lot more surprising.

No one's talking about aluminum or carbon fiber.