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Comment by datashovel | Hacker News Reader

I think this touches on an important point. According to the article, Earth's crust contains 0.06% lithium and 2.6% sodium. I think it will be critical for the future of manufacturing (and especially for things like storage of energy) to find workable solutions using abundant elements.

Without the most critical infrastructure (for example batteries for storage of energy) being built using abundant elements there's a strong risk of a lot of instability in markets in the future. Shortages, etc.

I think if a workable solution exists using abundant materials (regardless if it's the most perfect solution) it should be used. Otherwise I imagine there are plenty of hedge funds on Wall Street who will be more than happy to start stocking up on critical raw materials in short supply.

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One possibility being investigated by Siemens is thermal stone storage.

Basically you dig up a gigantic hole in the ground, line it with insulation, put the dirt back in and send hot air through it (500-600 C). Then when you need the power, you connect a turbine to it and can use the heat to drive it.

I'm glossing over some details, but that's the basic operation. Last thing I heard about it they were going to build a demonstration project in Germany.

You can use a similar thermal mass trick under a house if you're looking to balance day/night energy consumption. This can have a very large impact on your bills, payback times are on the order of about a decade, much shorter than the projected lifetime of a house.

This sounds horribly inefficient.

> Without the most critical infrastructure (for example batteries for storage of energy) being built using abundant elements there's a strong risk of a lot of instability in markets in the future.

Yes, please. Let's not repeat the petrochemical mistakes this time around.

At the time we got hooked on oil, there were places you could drill a hole in the ground, and oil would shoot out in a huge geyser. Oil ~was abundant; we just squandered it all on inefficient industrial processes, disposable consumer goods, and transporting around big four wheeled metal boxes containing just a single (relatively light) human.

Of course. That's why we used it. (Also, it being technically infeasible to create advanced modern batteries with 19th century technology!)

But there's a big difference between "oil" abundant and "sodium" abundant.

I guess my questions are. Do Sodium batteries suffer fire problems like Lithium batteries? Can you use water on those fires? How is toxicity of the battery overall, are the other metals and such (electrolytes) less toxic?

Sodium is a bit less inflammable than lithium, not much. You still can not throw water over it.

Hey so do you know how many commodity hedge funds own storage assets? Did you know those storage assets are highly specialized for each commodity? Just trying to politely point out that it's not the hedge funds that would be doing that :)

I wouldn't necessarily reduce my claim to "high inflation environments", but this link might prove helpful:

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/051905.asp

Here's another:

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/102915/do-hedge-fund...

Or perhaps they'll just buy all the companies that store commodities of a certain type. I've heard horror stories (from a family member in finance) about hedge funds who will buy up all of a certain type of commodity (in this specific example all of the farms that produce a specific type of egg) and just wait until the manufactured "scarcity" causes prices to go up, and then they'll start selling.

So even if it's not necessarily part of their "plan", I know of at least the one case above. My relative assured me there are plenty of other examples out there. I'd say at the very least Hedge Funds have proven to be a very opportunistic bunch who would probably salivate at the idea of a scarce commodity that was the primary component in all batteries manufactured in the world.

The reason I ask is because I worked for one of the largest traders of physical commodities in the world, and was involved in that trade.

What you're talking about is called cornering the market, and when it happens, the people go to jail. You're using anecdotal evidence to support your claim about a large swathe of people.

Also, if their buying activities meant to create artificial scarcity was the only factor driving the prices up, why did their selling not have an equal effect pushing the price back down?

I'm certainly not a professional trader, but it seems intuitive to me that as long as demand is greater than supply for an extended period of time a trader could "unwind" the position over that entire time frame. I think it would be silly to assume these kinds of schemes would be opened and closed overnight.

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