The green economy is hungry for copper, and people will steal, fight and die to satisfy it

Moqadi Mokoena had been feeling uneasy all day. When he left his home on the outskirts of Johannesburg, South Africa, to go to work as a security guard, he had to turn around twice, forgetting first his watch, then his cigarettes. He had reason to be nervous. His superior had assigned him to a unit protecting an electrical substation where, just two days earlier, four other guards had been stripped naked and beaten with pipes by armed thieves. Now, on this day in May 2021, Mokoena and a fellow guard were at that substation, staring nervously out the windshield of a truck as a group of gunmen approached.

Mokoena pulled out his phone and called his wife, the mother of their 1-year-old daughter. He told her about the gang heading his way. “I feel scared,” he said. He himself had no weapon. “I think it’s the same ones who attacked our friends.”

“Call your supervisor!” she told him.

Minutes later, the men opened fire with at least one automatic weapon. Mokoena’s partner jumped out of the vehicle but was shot. A third guard nearby ran for cover, fired shots at the robbers, then ran for facilitate. When he returned with a superior, they found Mokoena and his partner dead. Police later said the criminals escaped with copper cable worth about $1,600.

“We face these dangers every day,” a surviving guard later told a local journalist. “You don’t know if you’ll come home when you go on duty.”

In most places, power companies are a fairly lifeless business. But in South Africa, they are literally under attack, attacked by heavily armed gangs who have crippled the country’s energy infrastructure and claimed an increasing number of lives. On virtually every day, homes across the country are plunged into darkness, railway lines are closed, water supplies are cut off, and hospitals are forced to close, all because thieves are targeting the material that carries electricity: copper.

The rallying cry of energy transition advocates is “Electrify Everything.” Meaning: Let’s power cars, heating systems, factories, and every other kind of machine with electricity, not fossil fuels. To do that, we need copper—and lots of it. Copper is the second-most naturally conductive metal on Earth, second only to silver, rarer and far more steep. We need it for solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. (A typical electric vehicle contains 175 pounds of copper.) We need it for the giant batteries that will provide power when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. We need it to massively expand and upgrade the countless miles of power cables that support the power grid in virtually every country. In the United States, the capacity of the electrical grid will have to triple to meet expected demand.

A recent S&P Global report predicts that the amount of copper we will need in the next 25 years will be greater than the amount humanity has consumed in its entire history. “The world has never produced anywhere near this much copper in such a short period of time,” the report notes. The world may not be up to the challenge. Analysts predict that supplies will fall by millions of tons in the coming years. No wonder Goldman Sachs declared “no decarbonization, no decarbonization” and called copper “the new oil.”

As the energy transition accelerated, the value of copper also skyrocketed. In the past four years, the price of a ton of copper has risen from about $6,400 to more than $9,000. That has made electrical wires, appliances, and even raw metal fresh out of the mines juicy targets for thieves. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of the metal have been stolen around the world—and countless lives have been lost. With the possible exception of gold, no other metal has caused as much death and destruction.