Models

Small interactive models, each built to make one mechanism visible.

These are teaching toys, not research. They run on fixed coefficients, nothing in them is optimized, and no number they produce should be cited. What they are good for is the shape of an argument — the thing that is hard to see in a table and obvious once you can move it.

• What a Grid Is Made Of

  Energy demand → the generation that meets it → components → metal → rock.

  Copper is a few percent of the metal and the large majority of the rock. Steel dominates the tonnage — a wind tower is a very heavy object — while copper, which nobody weighs, dominates the mining.

  Pick a generation mix and it tells you what that mix is made of. Two timescales: over a year, the fleet run flat out against annual demand; over one day, the share of demand the battery carries.

• A Toy Linked Model

  Battery demand → critical mineral demand → primary mining and end-of-life recovery.

  The recovery loop is a supply source whose size was set by decisions taken ten to fifteen years earlier. You cannot ramp it in the year you discover you need it.

  A deterministic stock-and-flow sketch. Push demand growth until a shortfall opens, then try to close it by raising the recovery yield — the material simply is not in the waste stream yet.

• Too Late to Decide

  A mine takes about sixteen years. Work backwards from the year you want metal.

  For any target inside the next decade and a half, the decision is already behind us. A 2030 target needed work under way in 2014; a 2035 target needed 2019. The date does not move because the target is important.

  Drag the target year toward the present and watch the required schedule slide back past today. The shaded region is the part that has already gone.

Where the numbers come from

Every coefficient in these models says which kind it is — a published figure from the IEA, EIA or USGS, or an order-of-magnitude estimate made for the page. Roughly a third are estimates. That is fine for arguments that turn on ratios of two hundred to one rather than on ten percent accuracy, but it is not fine to hide, so the label travels with the number and every model carries its figures as a table as well as a picture.

Where a model cannot compute something, it says so and does not draw it. The day-shape diagram on What a Grid Is Made Of is a schematic that deliberately does not respond to the controls, because the model underneath has no time resolution and a diagram that reacted to the sliders would be claiming to have calculated something it has not.

The real versions of these questions — a mix that is chosen rather than given, under capacity limits, lead times and recovery — are the actual research, and do not fit on a web page. That work lives in the lab and in the papers.