Manufacture of electronics uses same magnitude of energy as launching into space
What requires more energy? Manufacturing a cell phone or launching one into space?
It surprised me! More energy is required to create a cell phone than to put it into orbit.
It takes between 250 and 1000 MJ (278 kWh) to manufacture a cell phone [1][2][3]. With a weight between 200 and 900 grams, this works out to about 1000 MJ/kg.
A Falcon rocket uses 155 tons of RP-1 to put 8300 kg of payload into orbit. At 42.9 MJ/kg, that is 6,640 GJ in the RP-1, or 800 MJ/kg of payload. [4][5]
The reason is that electronics rely heavily on pure and crystalline materials that require significant amounts of energy to create. For example, the silicon crystals that are at the heart of microprocessors and many solar cells require between 1000 and 1500 MJ/kg to create. [6][7] For example, a microprocessor may have up to 8000 MJ/kg of embodied energy [8][9]. Additionally, batteries require significant energy. One estimate is about 1150 Wh embodied per Wh of storage [10]. For a typical cell phone with 150 Wh battery, about 620 MJ per phone. So between batteries and electronics there is a lot of energy embodied in a cell phone.
So, getting to orbit is on the order of the energy to create electronics! With the advent of reusable rockets, this is one of the reasons that the economics of space based solar power (SBSP) continue to improve!
[1] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Embodied_energy
[2] http://web.mit.edu/ebm/www/Publications/9_Paper.pdf
[3] http://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2011/papers/hotnetsX-final56.pdf
[4] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/4330/how-much-energy-is-required-to-put-1-kg-in-leo
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9
[6] https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Silicon
[7] https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/metals/3_Environmental_Challenges_Metals-Full%20Report_36dpi_130923.pdf
[8] https://blog.openenergymonitor.org/2015/07/what-is-embodied-energy-of/
[9] EU Methodology For Ecodesign - https://lnkd.in/gPpHtZHE
[10] https://ris.utwente.nl/ws/portalfiles/portal/189571307/10.1016_j.procir.2019.01.099.pdf
