Tellurium

I am not certain about placing this here. However, it represents the two principal obstacles to sustainability, namely, providing a truly renewable energy source of sufficient scope and maintaining steady-state storehouses of strategic materials.

For some time, I have been hearing about cadmium-tellurium photovoltaic cells with the warning that tellurium is rather scarce here on Earth although not particularly scarce in the universe. I hope against hope that this does not provide at long last a valid excuse for space travel. How scarce is it?

It is estimated that there are 24,000 metric tonnes of tellurium. The exact number isn’t needed. By rule of thumb, we use 100 metric tonnes of tellurium per gigawatt of electricity in the rest of this exercise. We decide to use no more than half the world supply of tellurium, which gives 120 gigawatts or 0.12 TW of electrical power. The world electrical budget is 2.73 TW of a world total of 17.7 TW. Only 15.4% of the world energy budget is electricity, and cadmium-tellurium solar is estimated to supply 4.4% of the world electrical budget or 0.7% of the total energy budget.

If we can expect 435 kilowatts from an acre of cadmium-tellurium. We will need 2300 acres per gigawatt or 17.6 million acres in case half the tellurium in the world is in play.