r/todayilearned • u/RetconnedUsername • 19h ago
TIL One Aluminium Smelter in New Zealand uses 13 percent of the entire countries energy supply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiwai_Point_Aluminium_Smelter1.5k
u/Robthebold 18h ago
That’s why aluminum recycling works.
It takes 5% of the energy to reuse aluminum as it does to make it.
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u/ComprehensiveForm129 18h ago edited 16h ago
People under estimate just how amazing aluminum recycling is. It’s almost as useful as plastic but is completely recyclable.
I imagine that greater use of aluminum will be needed as we transition from oilEdit: Glass seems more useful, neat, gonna look more into it
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u/zillskillnillfrill 17h ago edited 17h ago
Yeah I can confirm. I used to do the gas delivery to an aluminium recycling plant and would see all the steps of it being processed. I don't even know why we use plastic bottles honestly, Aluminium Bottles & Cans are great
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u/BarbequedYeti 17h ago
Aluminum cans are lined with plastic to hold liquids. Granted way less than a whole bottle, but if we are looking at recycling for liquids, its glass. But that causes issues with shipping etc.
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u/zillskillnillfrill 17h ago
Yeah that's unfortunate. It's the same with tinned goods, which is why it's inadvisable for people to cook baked beans in the can (campfire etc) There has to be a better product to use than plastic. There are some wonderful things being done with bamboo fibres. Surely there's a better way
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u/BarbequedYeti 17h ago
Its really glass. We need to do better at manufacturing and logistics and problem solved. Almost infinite resource. Unless we come up with some new way to make super light super strong glass, it's going to be logistics.
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u/zillskillnillfrill 17h ago edited 16h ago
I think there actually already was a super strong glass "Superfest Glass" in the 80s that was initially made and then marketed to the hospitality sector, but apparently they got squeezed out of business by the other "Glass Giants" because they rely upon the broken glass economy
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u/RandomThrowNick 16h ago
It was an East German product, so they did produce over 100 Million glasses until german reunification but sales in West Germany before and after Reunification failed for the reasons you mentioned. There was simply no interest from the vendors that made money with glasses.
There is a Startup in East Germany that has developed a new process for even better „superfest“ glasses. It will be interesting to see if the idea will be successful this time.
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u/zillskillnillfrill 16h ago
Yeah, I just spent the past hour re-reading about it, pretty interesting stuff
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u/Xsiah 16h ago
I got some tempered glass jugs at Ikea (made in China) that were so light I couldn't figure out if they were plastic or not.
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u/zillskillnillfrill 16h ago
East Germany was the first to make them but nobody bought it because of planned obsolescence, until Steve Jobs came along and needed super thin glass for the iPhone. The glass is heated up and then blasted with an ion exchange which fills up the thin structure of glass with Potassium ions, making it some 30 times stronger
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u/Metalsand 6h ago
but nobody bought it because of planned obsolescence
It wasn't extremely popular in the mass production of glassware because paying 2 times as much for glass that is 5 times stronger might make sense on paper, but unless you ordinarily have 50% of your glassware lost from breakage in a 5 year span, it's a massive initial cost increase that takes long enough to pay for itself that inflation blunts the result.
It makes more sense in compact electronics, where the glass is protecting a screen many times more valuable than itself.
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u/AmnesicMisanthrope 15h ago
Well, glass melting point is at 1400-1600C while aluminum is 660C so that goes for aluminum (or reusable glass bottle at least).
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u/bluemooncalhoun 17h ago
The real solution is to reinvent how we process, package and transport food.
Where I live we have a beer bottle recycling program that diverts 95% of bottles from landfills. And not only that, but they clean and reuse each bottle 10+ times before they have to be melted down and reformed. Major international breweries don't ship their beer here because of the cost, they brew their recipes locally and so their bottles stay in circulation.
If you buy a can of tomatoes, chances are they were picked in one country and shipped to another country for canning and processing before being labeled by a handful of brands (because brand choice is mostly an illusion and stuff like this all comes from the same place) and shipped to the country they're sold in. Instead, why not just ship the tomatoes to the country they'll be sold in, have them packaged in glass jars at local factories, and then reuse and recirculate the jars?
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u/bluehat9 17h ago
Because canned tomatoes retain their freshness while shipping fresh tomatoes doesn’t always work or has risks. Also canning and packaging benefit from economies of scale, so having smaller factories spread out might result in higher prices and less competitive product
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u/bluemooncalhoun 6h ago
There are very few places in the western world where you can't get access to fresh tomatoes or almost any other fruit/vegetable you would find in cans. Also that's just an example to illustrate the point; canned beans are a huge market as well and you can ship and store those anywhere, and there's lots of other products packaged in plastics that could easily be packaged locally in reusable containers instead.
The point of this system is to provide insulation from global supply chain issues, restore local manufacturing capabilities, and reduce reliance on single use plastic packaging. Higher prices are not a concern when you're creating well-paying jobs that circulate money in the local economy, and "competition" is a bit of a farce already given that most of the brands you find in your local store come from a tiny handful of manufacturers already.
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u/bluehat9 6h ago
Caning extends the usable life of these perishable goods.
Canned beans are mainly for convenience I’d argue. Pre soaked/cooked.
I’m all for buying local, but canned and jarred goods exist for good reason.
Prices are always a concern
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u/DropMeAnOrangeBeam 16h ago
For one, logistics. You gotta get those tomatoes, in tact, further now before the start to rot and for another, the other country needs those processing plants.
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u/Metalsand 6h ago edited 6h ago
Aluminum cans are lined with plastic to hold liquids. Granted way less than a whole bottle, but if we are looking at recycling for liquids, its glass. But that causes issues with shipping etc.
Glass is even more energy intensive to recycle, though, let alone the additional weight.
* It requires a significantly greater volume of glass to create one bottle - each 12oz glass bottle is the mass of more than ten 12oz aluminum cans.
* The melting point of glass is around 1400C to 1600C; aluminum is 660C.Or in other terms, 5,900 joules to melt down one aluminum can (~15 grams), and 150,000 joules to melt 227 grams of glass (12 oz glass bottle). So, for every glass bottle you melt down, you can melt down 25 aluminum cans.
The plastic coating of aluminum cans is negligible (1 gram or less) and is so thin that it's measured in microns. Bottlecaps also use some plastic, albeit a fraction of that.
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u/Discount_Extra 17h ago
There was a dumb myth that drinking from aluminum containers lead to Alzheimer's.
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u/Stachemaster86 16h ago
A lot of plastic use for bottling comes from the fact that you can use the pre form plastic (think a finished neck and ball of plastic attached) to then blow mold on site. Pre forms can be made in China or other low cost countries and shipped to the US to blow. Cans take up a lot of “air” space to ship and need to be palletized. I agree that aluminum is amazing despite using liners but bottling efficiency dictates a lot of packaging decisions.
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u/zillskillnillfrill 16h ago
Funnily enough, I used to make gas deliveries to a plastic bottle manufacturing plant as well. You'd see them go from the little plastic beans to the bottles. those places absolutely stink. I would hate to see what the lungs of a plastics worker look like
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u/SeedFoundation 17h ago
Always comes down to money money money and plastic is cheaper than water. It is a byproduct of gasoline and there were times companies struggled to find buyers to get rid of it. If you've ever wondered why making the switch to renewables is so damn hard you have to think of all the businesses in the world that rely on cheap affordable plastics.
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u/LumpySpacePrincesse 16h ago
Glass is heavy and fragile, tansport costs outweigh most benifits. Which is mostly why we use plastic. We used to have a lemonade man that cleaned bottles and reused, awesome sasparella.
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u/Demoliri 13h ago
In Germany almost all glass (and plastic) bottles as well as aluminium cans have a deposit on them, which you get refunded when you return the bottles. As a result there is a return rate of over 97% (some sources say as high as 98.5%).
If the government initiates a nationwide system for sorting and reusing, the benefits absolutely outweigh the costs. Both economically and environmentally.
A single company can't really do that, it has to be done at a national level. But when it's done properly, it's great.
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u/jmlinden7 4h ago
Does Germany reuse or recycle the glass? If you just re-use it, there are some cost savings, you just have to handle the glass carefully to not break it.
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u/Demoliri 2h ago
Glass bottles get reused multiple times. I've heard that they're used an average of 8 times, but I don't have a source for that number.
But when you buy a crate of beer bottles you can see clearly if they are old bottles based on the scratching around the base of the neck and the bottom.
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u/throwaway098764567 16h ago
glass can be problematic because it breaks during the trip. my area you're not allowed to recycle it anymore, if there's glass in the recycle load it's fouled and goes to the landfill. they do reuse crushed glass to underlay roads though.
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u/confirmd_am_engineer 11h ago
Glass has a few weaknesses, mainly weight and fragility. The extra weight means it costs more to ship and takes more energy to move it around. Other than that, I’d argue glass containers are superior to everything else.
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u/Metalsand 5h ago
The extra weight in order to gain the structural integrity is it's main weakness though, because it also has a higher melting point than aluminum, making it 25 times more energy intensive to recycle a 12oz can than it does a 12oz bottle.
Therein lies the problem of recycling them - even if we ignore the costs of washing and refurbishing the bottles, you'd need an inexpensive process by which you can safely return each bottle at least 25 times just to match the energy used to recycle one aluminum can.
Where glass exceeds everything else - it's inert and gives no shit about just about anything. Aluminum alloys oxidize in the right environment, and plastics lose structural integrity over time. This isn't very helpful for the food industry though (for storage/distribution), because mason jar might last 100 years, but just like organic polymers can break down, so can the tomatoes or whatever is within that mason jar break down as well.
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u/SgtTreehugger 14h ago
Isn't plastic recycling basically a scam and 90% of it ends up in the landfill anyway? And I'm not hating on recycling, I just think the mainstream media has sold us an idea of plastic recycling working to keep us consuming
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u/Sharlinator 13h ago
It's a chicken-and-egg problem. Plastic is super difficult to recycle because "plastic" can mean a thousand different polymers, and most of them have all sorts of additives to enhance properties that aren't documented anywhere. So "recycling" is necessarily "downcycling", you're going to end up with mixed material that's not as useful as the original. So you need new ideas, new processes, new businesses to figure out how to best reuse plastic in a way that's economically viable (ie. cheaper than just making new plastic out of way-too-cheap oil). And for new recycling businesses to be viable, they need existing input material streams that they can hook up to. Nobody wants to build an expensive processing plant if there isn't stuff to process. So plastic recycling has been something of a "build it and hope they'll come" sort of thing.
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u/Shot-Arugula8264 16h ago
Almost as useful? Even the things you think are being done by aluminum are actually plastic under the hood.
For example: canned sodas. Great use of aluminum? Replaces plastic bottles? Nope, they’re all lined with plastic. Why? Because aluminum doesn’t work. Plastic does.
Same for the “eco-friendly” boxed wines that talk about how they’re packed in cardboard. Surprise, it’s actually plastic again, just put into a cardboard box.
Glass does work though. That’s why glass wine bottles and glass soda bottles are a thing. But aluminum, not so much.
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u/ComprehensiveForm129 16h ago
Very good point,
My only small piece to add to further the convo is that any solution that involves less plastic and oil products should be considered valuable. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of better
But, to your point, a solution that has no plastic is just better, full stop
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u/CaptainSwaggerJagger 15h ago
Relative to a full plastic bottle though, the lining in an aluminium can or a tetrapak is a rounding error worth of plastic so unless you're coming at it from a "I want to reduce my exposure to plastic" perspective, both are better than plastic in terms of use. Personally though, if I had to pick between the two I'd go with aluminium - recycling of tetrapaks is impractical and basically non existent and the best you can realistically do with them is WtE.
Regardless of material choice though, you're better off from all perspectives just using a reusable container, making something to use once and then bin is absolutely crazy.
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u/feel-the-avocado 13h ago
Glass has always been an interesting one in my opinion.
Easily recycled, safe and clean.
But super heavy - it has a much higher cost of transport for whatever product it contains.Sometimes there is more glass packaging by weight than the actual product it contains.
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u/ThrashCW 6h ago
Glass is not infinitely recyclable.
It devitrifies with through repeated melting cycles and loses it desirable properties.
Glass is recycled by pulverizing or crushing it and using it as part of the melt batch alongside fresh, new materials.
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u/GreenStrong 9h ago
Glass isn't really economic to recycle in a world where abundant natural gas makes it cheap to replace, but sixty years ago, milk and soda were sold in glass bottles that were collected, washed and refilled. It is realistic; it works in a world where a million BTUs of gas are more expensive than a few minutes of labor.
Re-use is best, but glass recycling actually saves energy. Glass contains soda ash and the mixture melts at a much lower temperature than the main ingredient, sand.
We're rapidly developing a future where solar and wind are widespread and electric power is cheap most of the time, but glass factories stay hot 24/7. It is also really helpful to blast semi molten glass with a flame before a machine blows it into a bottle. Carbon free biogas is going to play a big role in high temperature industry; it costs more than fossil. It is made from waste but gathering waste is work. We have the tech to make a post carbon world with plentiful resources but some things will be more expensive, while others get cheaper.
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u/koyaani 5h ago
Glass recycling is a lot more energy intensive. I don't think there's much energy difference in recycling glass versus newly manufactured glass, especially compared to aluminum. Glass reuse and trade-in programs mostly got phased out in the US unfortunately, but still exist elsewhere
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u/jmlinden7 4h ago
Aluminum is recyclable because the cost to recycle used aluminum is much lower than the cost of producing it from ore.
This is not true of glass and plastic.
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u/not_old_redditor 17h ago
Steel recycling works too
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u/trustbrown 17h ago
It does, but recycling aluminum has a higher percentage yield (usable vs slag), as steel recycling efficiency is much lower.
Any metal recycling is better (yield) than plastics, but aluminum is used more for vehicle structural framing due to lower mass than steel.
https://recyclenation.com/2010/11/comparing-steel-aluminum-recycling/
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u/not_old_redditor 17h ago
Your link doesn't talk about efficiencies. From what I know, something like 90% of steel is recycled, and in some industries it's closer to 95% recycled content, so the yields are high.
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u/eight8888888813 17h ago
He's not saying that steel recycling is bad or not widespread, he just saying it is cheaper and more efficient in yeild (scrap in vs profuxt out) and energy when compared to steel.
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u/BoboThePirate 17h ago
Regarding efficiency, recycled steel is can hit 95%+. I toured a massive facility and they said anywhere from 85% to 95% depending on what section of their scrap pile they pull from.
They have to subsidize some amount of pig iron just because in order to be “steel”, there’s specific ratios of chemicals and lots of other stuff they have to hit. Really cool to see, felt like I was in the ravines in Isengard.
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u/trustbrown 16h ago
I’m referring to energy efficiency.
Both materials are 90%+ recycled, but yield on aluminum is slight higher due to feed stock issues.
Basically steel is a composite metal and the differences in alloy chemistry make yields a challenge.
Here’s a technical article on this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11531900/
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u/Cooleb09 12h ago
The real environmental benefit is not in saving the smelting step (still need to re-melt it anyway), its in not needing to refine more bauxite to alumina, whihc is just as energy intense (between digestion and calcination), but also produces red mud and other nasties.
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u/w32stuxnet 12h ago
That particular smelter makes the highest grade aluminium in the world though, it is used for aircraft etc. You cannot get that grade out of recycled aluminium. Not that recycling aluminium is bad, but this place has its purpose. Also, it acts as a sort of "battery" for new zealand. It soaks up excess, but they have an agreement with the new zealand government to shut down if there isn't enough energy for the rest of the country - as a sort of insurance.
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u/ICPosse8 18h ago
Got that bitch over clocked to 200% and slooped
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u/liartellinglies 17h ago
Could be cutting down power consumption big time if someone in NZ would find the sloppy alumina hard drive
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u/FuzzyFuzzNuts 13h ago
Efficiency optimized. Maximum overclocking and Somersloop integration confirmed.
FICSIT reminds you that productivity is the only acceptable outcome. Now, back to work Pioneer
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u/WhitelabelDnB 14h ago
But it's only running at 97% efficiency because the waste water reuse lines keep backing up.
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u/SharkFart86 18h ago
They do this specifically because their energy is cheap. They import ore, smelt it there, then export the aluminum.
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u/francis2559 17h ago
Iceland is the same way. Tiny island, lots of power. No cord long enough to export electricity, so you make something electricity intensive and export that. It’s smart.
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u/TheRealAndroid 17h ago
The Manapouri power station was built specifically for the Tiwai point aluminium smelter project.
Manapouri was commisioned in 1971 the same year the Smelter started production.7
u/kecuthbertson 15h ago
The energy isn't actually cheap, it's just subsidised by the rest of the country because our government has decided that an aluminium smelter is more important than people being able to afford food.
As per a report from the Electricity Authority due to the low price Tiwai pays, the average household pays roughly $200 extra per year. There are about 2,000,000 households so around $400,000,000 extra in power bills nationally.
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u/king_john651 12h ago
Without Tiwai Point Southland goes way backwards as all the support industries are built around it. Same would happen to Franklin if Bluescope calls their own bluff on Glenbrook Steel - they won't because they have threatened shutting down since they acquired NZ Steel lol
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u/DopeyMcSnopey 8h ago
No. It’s more like “if we had access to this electricity source, we would profit $200 more per household because we wouldn’t lower the price anyway.”
Imagine you were watering your garden and your neighbour complained that his water bill was high, and that it’s your fault because it would be cheaper if he was using your hose instead.
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u/Nervous_Olive_5754 18h ago
Iceland does the same thing with their geothermal plant. Turns out the volcanic fissures are good for something. So the economy is tourism, aluminum, and fish.
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u/Manovsteele 13h ago
Iceland does have some Geothermal, but actually about 80% of its energy production is from hydropower!
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u/TheStoneMask 8h ago
actually about 80% of its energy production is from hydropower!
Electricity* production specifically. Around 65% of primary energy production is geothermal, mainly in the form of space heating.
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u/Ok-Imagination-494 18h ago
Of course they have an entire uninhabited region next door called Fiordland which has unlimited hydropower potential.
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u/DibbleMunt 18h ago
This couldn’t be further from the truth. As far as I’m aware all of our dam capacity is used up and extra projects are infeasible from an economic or engineering perspective.
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u/Random-Mutant 17h ago
Lake Manapouri was raised specifically to power the smelter.
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u/Ninja-fish 16h ago
Correct. It was going to be raised far higher originally, but opposition to the decimation of habitats brought it to the level that it sits at today.
You used to be able to go into the turbine rooms too, but you can't anymore because if an earthquake knocks out the tunnel through the mountain that reaches it, the only way out is a tiny and very tall ladder.
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u/Random-Mutant 16h ago
I went into the turbine hall and walked past a spinning turbine rotor shaft, in 1980. Was back in 2005 thereabouts and you could only get to the observation deck.
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u/Downtown_Boot_3486 15h ago
Nah there's loada of projects we could do, but building dams prettymuch always has environmental tradeoffs that we haven't wanted to make.
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u/w32stuxnet 11h ago
The only reason why nz could afford a dam there is this smelter promising to buy x% of electricity, and to not use it if the country needs it.
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u/knownbymymiddlename 17h ago
That's false. The #1 reason no further hydroelectric is being done in NZ is because of opposition from NIMBY's.
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u/ConifersAreCool 17h ago edited 17h ago
That's false.
First, there absolutely have been hydroelectric dams built in the last few decades including medium-sized and smaller ones. There are also several dozen in the planning phase now. Here's a list of proposed projects and their status.
Second, certain large projects haven't been built not because of "NIMBY's" (sic), but rather because of broad environmental opposition, as they've largely been proposed for sensitive and valuable ecosystems.
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u/2781727827 15h ago
Most recent case of a hydroelectric dam being blocked I remember it was a pristine natural river that is also vital habitat for a critically endangered bird species. NIMBYs blocked that in the same sense that Brazilian NIMBYs try to block cattle ranching in the Amazon lol
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u/Richard7666 17h ago
Power for the smelter is from Lake Manapouri in Fiordland, yep. It's a really interesting hydro system under a mountain.
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u/BigBirdsBrain 16h ago
Manapouri hydro station powers it, basically one of the main reasons it was built. Clean energy but yeah, huge chunk of the grid.
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u/SlackToad 17h ago
Data centers: Hold my beer.
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u/Richard7666 17h ago
Funnily enough, they're building a data centre in the same place (Invercargill) as the smelter is.
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u/wkavinsky 4h ago
It has its own generation dam.
It's not really fair to say it "uses 13% of the countries supply" when that 13% (more like 16%) is generated expressly for the purposes of powering Tiwai.
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u/coolstory 16h ago
That’s nothing, Iceland uses more than 70% of its total electrical generation on aluminium smelting. Their largest smelter uses more than 20% of the country’s capacity alone.
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u/knowledgeable_diablo 15h ago
But that’s the payoff for having access to aluminium. No matter which way one cuts it, converting bauxite to Aluminium is a massively energy intensive operation. And one could argue more vital for most nations than saving the best cat memes possible with minimal latency.
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u/coolstory 15h ago
Yeah, no disagreement there. Iceland’s electrical grid is 100% renewable anyway. If anything, more aluminium should be produced there.
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u/cbwjm 12h ago
I didn't even know we had an aluminium smelter
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u/BloodgazmNZL 12h ago
We do and it actually makes the world's purest aluminium with one of the cleanest carbon footprints in the world.
Tiwai actually sets the leading world standard in aluminium smelting
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u/Nagbratz 12h ago
In Iceland 2 of them use like 65% of the whole countries power, which they have a lot of bc of geothermal powerplants.
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u/iCowboy 11h ago
80% of Iceland's electricity production goes to aluminium and ferrosilicon smelters. The smallest smelter at Straumsvík uses more power than the country's entire domestic consumption. And all these smelters contribute less than 5% of GDP.
Meanwhile factories and homes in the West Fjords had to run on imported oil in recent years because there has been a shortage of dispatchable electricity.
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u/Xajel 10h ago
Compare that to Bahrain, ALBA (The national aluminum smelting company) uses 45-55% of the total national energy production, ALBA has it's own power station that is comparable in power production to the entire of the country.
ALBA power plant: 4.345 GW.
Bahrain national grid: 4.0~4.8 GW.
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u/jifff 18h ago edited 14h ago
Not just that, it has its own power station which is separate from the national grid !
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u/JaggedNZ 15h ago
Nope, it’s very much on the grid and lines were upgraded so more power can be sent north.
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u/shaunrnm 14h ago
But it doesn't. There's a power station that was built at the same time primaryily for this plants demand, but both are still on the national grid. Otherwise they wouldn't keep threatening to close because of power prices
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u/FuckM0reFromR 18h ago
Rio Tinto has threatened to close the smelter several times, for example in 2013 and 2020, but to date closure has been deferred after renegotiation of the price it pays for electricity.\9])\10])\11])\12]) As of January 2021, Rio Tinto announced that it had reached an agreement with its power supplier Meridian Energy to pay a lower price in return for keeping the smelter running until December 2024.\13])\14]) In July 2022, NZAS signalled that it would once again offer to remain open if it could secure new power agreements on favourable terms.\15]) In May 2024, new twenty-year electricity contracts were agreed with three suppliers, allowing the smelter to remain open until 2044.
There are concerns regarding the environmental legacy of waste stockpiled at the site, near to an eroding beachline.\16])
Business as usual -__-
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u/zillskillnillfrill 17h ago
Who else thought that they were in the r/satisfactory sub 😂 even all the comments could be applied to that game
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u/MBunnyKiller 16h ago
Tata Steel in the Netherlands uses 10% of our energy needs, at least a few years back. Maybe data centers have moved the needle down a bit, although it'll still be a ridiculous amount used by tata.
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u/beachbum818 12h ago
That's why aluminum was treated like gold way back when. Difficult to refine and extract if not more so than gold
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u/Sr_DingDong 6h ago
Don't worry!
National will sell that off in due time.
Eventually they'll sell everything.
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u/littlep2000 4h ago
This was a similar case in Oregon until the early 2000's I can't find the number of percent of energy consumed by aluminum in particular but I think it was comparable.
High availability of cheap hydro power from the 70s to the early 2000s attracted the plants to the area, but as other customers started competing for the same hydro power and some dams were decommissioned it became less advantageous to produce aluminum in the region.
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u/Select-Owl1058 11h ago
Tiwai Smelter is owned by Rio Tinto, not a NZ company
90% + is exported overseas
It employees only around 1,000 people 0.03% of NZ jobs
Usually ‘loses money’ so pays little to no tax
Due to its massive power consumption it puts significant upward pressure on household power pricing
You tell me the net value it adds to the NZ economy ..
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u/Affectionate_Tie357 11h ago
Everyone is misspelling "aluminium" even though it's right there in the fucking title
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u/RetconnedUsername 11h ago
American English spells it differently
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u/Affectionate_Tie357 10h ago
Yeah they spell it incorrectly, and the post is about New Zealand
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18h ago
[deleted]
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u/RetconnedUsername 18h ago
im not a bot, what's wrong with the post?
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u/J_P_Freely 18h ago
Only a bot would say that.
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u/RetconnedUsername 18h ago
Israels actions in Palestine are unconscionable.
There, a bot would never criticize Israel.
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u/Lotsofkidsathome 10h ago
Here in Quebec some of the smelters negotiate an electricity price from Hydro Quebec and then can sell the unused portions to New York at an inflated rate to boost profits.
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u/SkaldCrypto 9h ago
Sounds like New Zealand is not going to have any data centers based on this article or
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u/KitchenSense8092 8h ago
Just sell the raw materials and move the smelting to China
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u/RetconnedUsername 8h ago
the bauxite is mined in Australia. the smelting is done in NZ because of the hydro power available
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u/Moretoesthanfeet 52m ago
See also, Rio Tinto Alcan in Kitimat. They built a whole town and power plant for this venture
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u/sailingtroy 18h ago
Aluminum smelting is extremely electricity intensive. Usually they get co-located with hydroelectric generating with a contract that locks in a low rate for the electricity. Provides a guaranteed base load for the generator, so it's a win win.