What happens to all the dead electric-car batteries?
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
Unfortunately I’m not surprised the article fails to mention him.
It's not a problem, it's in fact a huge business.
The negative tone of the comments feels like a an old car salesman trying to sell you a diesel engine instead of an EV.
An old EV battery pack is still incredibly valuable both for second hand usage in renewables (An old EV battery is not 'dead' just not performant enough for vehicle use) and recycling materials (Lithium is incredibly difficult to mine).
Considering the top comment when I got here was almost exactly that, I'm not surprised one bit. There's a lot of money to be lost by the FF and ICE industries.
Do you have any source for that? My impression was that it is relatively easy to mine but not economical enoguh
It doesn't exist naturally in huge concentrations (you can't just get a chunk of Lithium) you either extract it from a huge volume of evaporated salt brine, or you filter through huge amounts of ore to yield something rich in lithium.
Thanks for pointing this out. Pretty important point!
1. Use them for energy storage 2. Automated battery recycling 3. Use recovered materials to make new batteries
If a Tesla Model S battery dips below 70% capacity, you can easily remove it from the car and reuse the individual battery packs in 2 or 3 home battery solutions. People don't need a super performant battery that holds 100kWh for their homes, 15kWh will probably do.
So?
Charge oil companies for the cost of removing their product from the atmosphere after it's been burnt, and charge battery companies the cost of mining pollution and recycling
I would even argue that it's possible to increase pollutions so more people would die and burden on healthcare systems would be reduced because of that. Weird argument, but still.
An externality is a cost or a benefit that is not accounted for in the trade.
The massive number of COPD cases are not paid for when fossil fuels are burned. The good things we get from fossil fuels is why we pay for them, that's their value and it is accounted for.
If you think that those things are more valuable than what fossil fuels charge you right now, shouldn't you call up your utility and offer to pay more?
What sense of "value" are you using here? I like to live, so I find food to be a great thing, so perhaps in one sense the value of food is infinite, but in a much more useful sens of value I pay something that it much closer to the cost to provide it than how much I would theoretically pay if my choice were to go without.
Now recognize that this happens across all industries in the world every single day. New things are discovered that displace old things. We don't know all of the consequences for the new shiny product when we start producing and selling it to mass markets. Sometimes the new things have major disadvantages that we just don't know at the time we start using them. Look at historical problems with CFCs (which lead to ozone holes in the atmosphere) PCBs (which cause birth defects and can cause cancer), or how neonicotinoids impact insects (which can lead to the deaths of beehives). If the vendor pushing these products had to bear the full cost of the consequences of their use, they might never have been widely accepted. Capitalism is and always will be imperfect in this regard.
This created huge incentives for criminal organizations. Sketchy recycling companies that dodge regulations, bury toxic waste into building foundations, and make huge profits.
Also, most companies in developed countries simply offshore polluting industrial processes to less rich countries.
Exactly what shocked me when I heard about all the plastic rubbish shipped to Malaysia. Shocked, because I was kinda proud how much rubbish we sort (Germany) only to be put into a container and sent around the globe...
Not that I wasn't aware of all the electronic waste shipped to Africa to be burnt and scavenged. It just made me a bit more cynical. Our politicians really couldn't care less, if it wasn't for the votes.
Just because those companies or us as individuals don't need to pay for the future damage, doesn't mean that cost doesn't exist, and by not accounting the externalities, the consumption of said products is incentivised since they become "cheaper" than alternatives that are presented to the end user with a higher cost.
Also means they're all incentivised to invent cheaper ways of cleaning the planet.
Also, it'd be nice to do this all the way down the line, then maybe we'd finally see the legislation implemented for disposable packaging that the "Keep America Beautiful" propaganda was designed to counter[0].
[0] - https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec...
The environmental problem seems worse for products that are cheaper and easier to produce from scratch, than to recycle.
The gigafactories that pop up around the world right now contain recycling lines to feed the battery production.
Is Cobalt valuable?
Is Nickel valuable?
Can a car battery be repackaged/refurbished to home energy storage?
Can a car battery be repackaged/refurbished to appliances like lawnmowers and snowblowers and power tools?
This is almost as dumb a headline as "what will we do with all the windmill blades?"
Meanwhile, there exists something called "mountaintop removal" in coal.
That seems to fit well with what the article described as ideal: "direct recycling, which would keep the cathode mixture intact." I guess Tesla would have to remove their "indestructible polyurethane cement that holds [the cells] together."
Maybe think less in terms of used lead acid batteries but used car tires instead?
though even those are refurbished nowadays.. :shrug:
Worrying about "dead" lithium batteries is like worrying about "dead" aluminum cans ...
Also there’s that thing about don’t believe everything you read. Ask: Who benefits by the publication of this article?
Lead acid battery recycling is not always done as a relatively clean, industrial process in other parts of the world.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/new-em...
Nature is periodic, take it seriously: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
I didn’t see in the article, but why can’t the nuclear power plants shut down well before they ‘go Fukushima’?
A more reasonable article-
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-studies-warn-...
1. Batteries ripped out of cars
2. Sold to "unscrupulous" scrap dealers
3. Put on boats to Phillipines or West Africa
4. Crushed and pounded with a rock by a 10 year old child, then burned in a rudimentary smelter to separate metals from plastics.
5. Extracted metals bought by middlemen
6. Metals certified as being safely mined/sourced
7. Re-manufactured into a car battery
Battery powered cars are going to be the next disaster, after the fibre glass disposal scandal of wind farms.
I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.
“Wind turbine blades at the end of their operational life are landfill-safe, unlike the waste from some other energy sources, and represent a small fraction of overall U.S. municipal solid waste,” according to an emailed statement from the group. It pointed to an Electric Power Research Institute study that estimates all blade waste through 2050 would equal roughly .015% of all the municipal solid waste going to landfills in 2015 alone.
TL;DR: It appears Vestas is partnering up with another company to bring to market a process to break down the epoxy resins that bind the fiberglass in the blades. The resulting base chemicals are useful for the production of further resins and new windmill blades. This process could be useful in other industries.
As wind blades multiply and start to age out, this is already being worked on very strongly in the composites industry, and there are major breakthroughs[e.g., 1,2]. This should not be a disaster in the future
[1] https://electrek.co/2021/04/26/a-scottish-university-finds-n...
[2] https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1716110/vestas-deve...
https://youtu.be/wzJI8gfpu5Y?t=2317, cue children at https://youtu.be/wzJI8gfpu5Y?t=2364
thrash tends to conveniently vanish into the 3rd world or east europe, where it gets burned or poisons the environment.
Those are not broke after 5-10 year of usage. Small cells might be broken but replaceable and if not used for cars we still can and will use them for power storage.
And then we can recycle them.
You think this is the kind of thing people will do in reality? Will there be economic incentive for this activity?
> And then we can recycle them.
What will the recycling look like? Any idea if it’ll be a net carbon negative?
Pay several thousand to replace the entire battery pack, or pay some fraction to replace the bad cells? Seems pretty clear to me.
> Any idea if it’ll be a net carbon negative?
Doesn't need to be carbon negative, it just needs to be less bad than what we're doing currently with ICE.
That’s what I meant. I guess all in, EVs have to be better than ICEs?
> I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.
"Battery powered cars are a small disaster, so I'll keep my big disaster instead".
It's not nothing and certainly better than just a few years ago, but it's still not exactly like a significant fraction of diesels use a significant fraction of vegetable oil.
There are certainly enough old diesels out there and enough people willing to go around collecting old oil to keep a small number of people occupied and mobile.
It is also not really a viable large scale solution to "how do you move people around?"
There are lots of really good answers (walking, public transit, electric bicycles) but one obvious answer is "cars" and electrifying those is probably a good solution.
Electricity can be generated from fossil fuels more efficiently at large scales than small (a power plant produces less CO2 than a car for a given amount of work). Electricity can also be generated by extracting "free" energy from the environment (wind / solar / hydro / dogs on treadmills). The distribution system for electricity is already quite robust and is already everywhere, and people like cars. There's even lots of inexpensive electricity available at night, when most people aren't driving their cars. All we need is a way to get the power to the cars that park where people don't own the parking space.
Disposing of the waste stream of parts of the cars has always been a problem. Hopefully people come up with a way to solve it; there's enough valuable metal in a car battery that it is likely they will.
There are already all sorts of terrifying industrial processes which I can't imagine are possibly cost effective and yet they're the foundation of modern society. There are also all sorts of hideous "farm out the cost to someone else" processes relying on destroying somewhere else / poisoning someone else.
People refine gasoline by boiling crude oil in a rusting metal tank; people refine gasoline in trillion dollar oil refineries. Why and where and for who answers how it gets done.
Can one cost-effectively convert refined materials in a battery (cobalt / nickle / lithium) back into raw inputs for a new battery? Can it be done profitably by a child in a toxic fire pit or can it be done profitably by a chilled shredder in inert gas?
Not a simple problem, but probably one that can partially be solved with market incentives and partially solved by laws and partially it won't get solved. But we should probably try, right?
Not every solution needs to be large scale to be usefull. I think biofuels should be promoted and used as much as possible (obviously within the limits where it makes sense ecologically speaking, e.g. not destroying ecosystems to plant more biofuel crops or burning coal to synthetize (m)ethanol). Both the idea that EVs are suited for every purpose and that they'll quickly take over the entire ICE car pool are ludicrous. Where EVs can not / not yet be used it makes perfect sense to use alternative fuel sources.
Probably just going to land in the river, and then the sea.
Go ahead and try drinking a glass of lithium, or try growing vegetables with lithium instead of water.
The claim that electric cars are good for the environment is a lie. They are not "good", they are not even "neutral". They are "bad".
People that really care about the environment ride a bike. They don't buy an electric car and try to justify the currently unknown long term environmental consequences of their purchase as somehow being better than the known consequences of gasoline and diesel cars.
Today we just ship car batteries oversees to be scrapped for parts in the cheapest possible way by children. That doesn't sound good to me at all.
> People that really care about the environment ride a bike. They don't buy an electric car and try to justify the currently unknown long term environmental consequences of their purchase as somehow being better than the known consequences of gasoline and diesel cars.
This is so much false dichotomy that I'm having trouble assuming good faith.
In many parts of the world, you would take a train or other forms of public transport to travel distances too far to ride by bike. Those often have last-mile problems when the train doesn't go quite where you need it to, but given sufficient density at the source/destination bikes are an effective solution to the last-mile problem.
Of course, in the US, we typically have sprawl at the source/destination, unsafe infrastructure for bicycling, and often not-very-useful public transport, which does rather limit this option.
So....exactly like normal cars then? Buying a brand new car is bad for the environment, full stop, ICE or EV.
The statement above makes sense if taken in isolation - take an existing ICE car and an existing EV car - the EV car is undoubtedly better for the environment, there is no discussion. But it would also be a lot better if neither existed, as manufacturing new cars is EXTREMELY wasteful and produces incredible amounts of CO2 debt, again, EV or not.
>>oday we just ship car batteries oversees to be scrapped for parts in the cheapest possible way by children.
As opposed to stripping out electronics and precious metals from ICE cars, which is only ever done by well regulated workers in rich western countries, right? /s
Like, come on - I get your point. Shitty "recycling" practices exist. That doesn't mean that's the standard or the default, and it definitely can be fixed going forward. We aren't destined or doomed to only recycle our lithium batteries with 10 year old children with rocks, and for some reason you're framing it as if that's the only available method.
I don't, because I don't feel like putting my life at risk on a regular basis just to get where I need to go.
There's a reason that bike ridership skyrockets when useful protected bike infrastructure gets installed. The demand is there.
Not all, but many.
#1: The whole point of preserving the environment is to keep it inhabitable for humans. Fueling humans is non-negotiable up to at least a baseline level of survival, and still desirable beyond that level because we like being well fed.
and
#2: Due to that whole "we like being well fed" thing, most humans in the first world -- the part of the world where people worry about things like whether biking to work is good or bad for the environment -- are already overfueled. We have a surplus of human fuel that we're consuming anyway because it feels good. Might as well burn some of it off on transportation.
We are enormously expanding our use of lithium, and the biggest problem for the places that are currently trying to recycle lithium batteries is that there aren't enough of them to recycle. A big source of their current batteries are just the defects from the current manufacturing process.
Hopefully by 2030 there will be a robust network of recycling facilities around the world, for the majority of exhausted lithium batteries.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/batteries-storage/lithiumio...
Full disclosure: I am long TSLA.
What's the problem with burying blades in a landfill? They don't degrade, OK, but rocks also don't degrade.
- They're too big to drift to the ocean and be ingested by animals, which is the problem with plastic objects.
- They don't leak nasty stuff into the groundwater, because landfills are lined properly to prevent that. Also fibreglass is pretty much inert.
What is the environmental cost of burying fiberglass wind turbine blades versus recycling them?
What is the environmental cost of not building these wind turbines right now, as fast as we possible can, and stopping the extraction of fossil fuels as fast as we possibly can? Extremely real, the extinction of hundreds of thousands of species, massive disruption to all habitats, including those of us humans.
We have a narrow path to averting the worst effects of climate change. The worst threat to actually enacting change is the sort of false concern that keeps us on our present course driving off the cliff.
It is not clear why it would be better to recycle them. Breaking things down for recycling costs a lot of energy, sometimes more than obtaining new materials and making the thing from scratch.
For example, plastic recycling is a bad idea from an energy standpoint. As far as I understand, it was publicized by plastic companies so plastic sales would not risk being regulated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24714880 and https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-...).
Some things (like metals) should be recycled though.
More seriously, global shipping at scale is ridiculously cheap. This site currently shows a rate of $987 to ship a 20' container from NYC to Jakarta: https://www.icontainers.com/ship-container/indonesia/
Car parts are overall more expensive, and installation, replacement and even disposal happens through specialized entities, typically. Most maintenance work is done by manufacturers or dealers themselves.
In other words, it's not inevitable that car battery systems would necessarily be sent overseas the same way that consumer electronics are when they reach end of life. With lower volume and more centralization, regulation will be easier to implement and enforce. And the economics may also make it cheaper for initial recycling to be situated in the originating country as well, given that the parts are more valuable and given the economies of scale that emerge from centralized reclamation networks.
Already in the US there is a healthy industry of third-party businesses that will replace hybrid car batteries and reclaim the old systems for refurbishment. Most of the reclaimed systems are refurbished and re-used.
There's no reason to think that with proper regulation and standardization an efficient & environmentally-safe reclamation market cannot emerge in first-world countries, preventing car battery waste from spilling over to third-world countries.
The difference between batteries and petrol is that batteries can be reprocessed. The problem is unless we do something (set up regulation) it is likely the unregulated way in which it is going to happen will cost a huge pollution and suffering.
Think in terms of lead and lead-acid batteries specifically. There is a mandated system (at least here in EU) that tries to prevent the components of lead acid batteries to get back into environment. For example, when I want to buy a replacement battery I can't throw the old one in the trash and I am expected to exchange the old one for the new one and pay extra if I want to only buy new one without giving away the old.
Is it too hard to think we can do something like that for the huge card batteries which are much less disposable than the lead acid ones?
Who is we? I don't remember being able to vote for any politicians that are interested in this sort of thing.
Hydrogen cell cars are probably the best option for the future. It's very abundant naturally and its byproduct is H2O. We have to figure out how to mass produce it though.
We, the People?
Isn't that the whole point of democracy?
Democracy works on fixing the problems over time. It means usually there is a delay between a problem and a fix. At any point in time you will see a lot of problem, but that doesn't mean that democracy doesn't work.
Think about Jira. If every project has a lot of issues in Jira, does it means they are all shit and need to be scrapped? Do you think whining about the number of issues is going to help?
It's always weird to me to hear people talk about "democracy" as an abstract moral philosophy or a system of government. It sounds to me like people talking about "hammerism" or something, like the Builder faction from the Thief series.
There are many, many faults of democratic methods. But, let it be succinctly said: human beings are easily manipulated on short time scales. Anything left to a decision of the "majority of the people" is easily influenced by propogandists. In a system that is based entirely on the tool of democracy, power is accumulated by those most adept at manipulation.
A robust system of government that protects liberty, dignity, and enables people to improve their quality of life, will include democratic processes, which are useful, but will also need to employ a variety of other governmental and moral decision making tools.
Even more to the point both historical and contemporary evidence indicates that power and influence spread more evenly across a countries citizens is strongly correlated to overall quality of life.
-Boss Tweed
Think today is much different?
Many renewable sources (mainly solar, wind) are only intermittently producing, therefore we need to store energy produced during over-producing periods.
For example, in the EU, they've banned some plastic single-use food containers, like straws, etc. The other day I was reading an article in a local French paper about how some organization did a study on the replacement products used and found them to be pretty terrible. Both for the environment and for the human body.
The kicker was that some of those containers were sold as being "bio-degradable" but it turned out they weren't.
Now batteries and similar are a "new" thing, so they probably didn't have enough time to think about this, but selling something as something that it's not, even if we leave aside the whole ecology thing, sounds pretty much like fraud to me. But apparently they're looking into ways of banning these, not taking up the suppliers for fraud.
How can they not have time to do their job? What are they busy with, getting away with bribes?
And the real trouble is that once everyone's gotten (understandably!) cynical about the institution, most of the stuff that would help (more staffing, public financing of campaigns) feels like giving more money to crooks. So we go on this way despite everybody knowing the problem and the solutions being not that complicated, or even very expensive in the grand scheme.
1. The article was in Le Figaro: https://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/des-substances-nocives-r...
2. It talks about a study by Generation Future (not familiar with them). The actual paper is in French, but a bunch of references have English titles and seem to be in English: https://www.generations-futures.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/0...
3. In particular, there's a reference to a Danish law enacted last year (in English): https://www.foedevarestyrelsen.dk/english/SiteCollectionDocu...
4. UFC Que Choisir (French consummer-watchdog-like organization): https://www.quechoisir.org/action-ufc-que-choisir-test-sur-l...
I would argue banning plastic single-use food containers is a bit of category one and a bit of category three. Of course the replacements are terrible, if the replacements were great then people would already prefer them and we wouldn't need the law. But banning single-use containers creates demand for better alternatives, which incentivizes innovation and the creation of actually good alternatives.
Batteries are very much an old thing. We solved it for walkmans. Non-replaceable batteries are a somewhat new thing that is in need of some legislation to close the gaps.
CFL bulbs are fine; they last years and they don't heat up your house like crazy.
LED bulbs are better in every way, but didn't exist 20 years ago and CFL did.
Perhaps you like to kvetch and grouse about small inconveniences; the world is not and never was a perfect place. Most of us just take the pebbles out of our shoes and move on rather than whinge on about how shoes back in the day didn't have rocks in them.
So you live with a box filled with fragile glass tubes with mercury in them that you keep putting more glass tubes with mercury in for three years? When you take them to the hardware store, do you double bag them to keep the mercury from leaking when the tubes inevitably shatter against all of the other bulbs? Is that mercury ever recovered in "recycling", or does it just poison a land fill for the next thousand years?
> CFL bulbs are fine; they last years and they don't heat up your house like crazy.
Please tell that to my IKEA and other CFLs that were lucky to last one year. And a properly made incandescent can last many years as well. In fact, when I was a kid, my family restored a 200+ year old home that had a very, very old bulb in it (it was large and looked like an old Edison bulb -- it was bigger than my fist) that still worked great -- it was nice and bright and probably on the order of 150 watts. It was probably from the 1940's, because there were old magazines from the 1940's stacked underneath it. (Great old mags like Popular Mechanics that had ads for "Buy U.S. War Bonds" in them).
CFL's used to (and still) cost a lot more than incandescents. Four to ten times as much when the mandate was introduced, and they were almost as unreliable as cheap incandescents, and produced a horribly cold blue light.
For incandescent bulbs, yes, the heat issue is an issue, and the fact that they're much, much less efficient, but they didn't contain dangerous metals or present a serious environmental hazard when they were disposed of.
LED bulbs did actually exist 20 years ago; in 2000, a friend gave me one (I tried it out and was decidedly not impressed), and I saw them in Fry's for $25+ dollars in 2000 dollars. They were not very bright and had some real issues (and big heat sinks, interestingly enough).
But I miss incandescent bulbs, and believe that the market would have moved us over to LED's soon enough. I would have chosen LED's now over most incandescents, but I'd still prefer incandescents for a few types of uses.
The irony is that the really inefficient incandescent bulbs -- bright and hot halogens -- were not banned; only the run of the mill $1 bulbs (in fact, literally, you could buy a 4 pack of Sylvanias in the dollar store, because that's how I bought bulbs in college).
That's the problem with these mandates: they just harm the poor people, because people who create these mandates are definitely not poor and don't really care -- but these technocrats know better, because of some future energy emergency that never materialized. The CA blackouts wouldn't have been close to mitigated by everyone switching over to CFLs, but it probably helped corporate interests and whoever manufactured all those CFLs clogging up landfills.
And now we have at least a century's worth of oil just in shale that wasn't even accessible 25 years ago, and the sea levels never rose in 2014 as Al Gore so confidently predicted. (I wonder if he bought property in Miami after the prices dropped!) Is this push toward electric cars just another greenhouse warming, ozone depleting, nuclear winter, DDT-thins-bird-eggs proto-catastrophe? We don't know, but it seems clear that the science on macro-events is settled only in hind-sight. Personally, I think we should ban volcanic emissions.
I agree, some CFL bulbs, and some LED bubls, and some incandescent bulbs fail well before their rated lifespan. Some companies put sawdust or melamine in baby formula. The world isn't a perfect place. There are some incandescent bulbs that have lasted 100 years. Regardless, in general, LEDs and CFL last longer. Whataboutism isn't really a good faith argument.
CFLs (and hey, why are we talking about CFL? You should be buying LED) are somewhat more expensive, but I've been able to buy replacements (that have lasted years at this point) for roughly the same price as quality incandescent.
>LED bulbs are better in every way, but didn't exist 20 years ago and CFL did.
Correct from political and marketing perspective, but not from consumer perspective.
Integrated CFLs contain the tube and ballast in a single unit. The tubes will last very long time, the ballasts will fail quite frequently, more often than incandescent.
Same with LED bulbs. The LED itself will last very long time, but the electronics driving it will fail much sooner than CFL ballasts.
So, yes, CFL and LED will last longer if we want to be pedantic on naming, but to the consumer it means nothing. Will the new CFL or LED bulbs that I screw in last longer than my old light-bulbs?
I will even take it a step further, LEDs are constructed to fail sooner in some countries - https://hackaday.com/2021/01/17/leds-from-dubai-the-royal-li...
They cost orders of magnitude more than incandescent bulbs. I used to get incandescents 4/$1.00 on sale.
They don't last a lot longer. I haven't kept stats, but it feels like I am still replacing bulbs about as often as I ever did.
They contain mercury and need to be disposed of as hazardous waste. And if you break one, now you have mercury in your house.
LED bulbs don't seem to have the "warm up" period that CFSs need to achieve maximum brightness, but you have to be carful about buying the right color temperature because most of them are very harsh bright blue/white. Again I am replacing them routinely. Maybe in theory they should last a lot longer but in practice they seem to be made of minimally adequate components that don't hold up. And they cost even more than CFLs. I just paid $16 for four LED bulbs for the bathroom. Incandescents would have cost me a few dollars.
The only advantage of these bulbs is the reduced electrical usage. But how long will it take to save $16 on my bathroom bulbs? $16 at KWh/$0.15 buys me 106KWh. Assuming the old incandescents would draw 240W, thats 440 hours of operation. My bathroom lights are on maybe 30 minutes/day? So roughly 2.5 years later the LEDs come out ahead, and by then I am needing to replace at least one or two of them in my experience.
It's been my experience that in general LED bulbs last way longer than the CFL / Incandescent bulbs they're replacing. There have been some cheapo CFL / LED bulbs that didn't last very long, but that was also the case for incandescent bulbs as well (cough $0.25 bulbs). There's always been cheap junk in the world, some of it is packaged to look the same as quality products.
Yes, it is slightly tedious to match color temperatures, but that was the case with incandescent bulbs as well. It is also slightly tedious to find bulbs that are compatible with dimmers.
On the whole, though, these new bulbs are far better than the things they're replacing, and eventually even you will come to use them without noticing.
LED might a similar relationship to fuel cell cars since they work like the old kind and don't have huge disposal problems.
Any way to get hydrogen can generate electricity, usually more efficiently.
Electricity is easier to generate, distribute, and store than hydrogen.
Fuel cell cars also need batteries because they're not able to deliver large bursts of energy.
Maybe hydrogen / fuel cells might be better for very large mobile applications (ships / trucks / trains) but that's an open question.
They're no a reasonable alternative to BEVs. If anything, hybrid cars are the CFL, having all the drawbacks of both modes and few of the advantages of either (the ability to refuel quickly from anywhere with gas stations is the sole selling point, and it is a big one).
Unless you think BEVs are the "final car," and there are no fundamental future advancements to ever be made, something like fuel cell cars are going to happen.
On balance, CFLs were lower energy and safe enough for general use. They were much better than their contemporaries for the environment.
Incandescent < CFL < LED. I don't see a problem with recommending new solutions as they are found, nor recommending LEDs over CFLs.
By targeting specific low hanging fruits, legislation ensures that the industry finds workarounds that continue to be cheap and environment-unfriendly, but in ways that have too complex details for an average joe to understand _why_ something that is labeled environment-friendly isn't quite so in practice. It's the environment equivalent of overprescribing antibiotics (shortsighted legislations) only to find years later you've inadvertently created superbugs (industries that produce things whose unrecyclability is extremely misleading and resilient to the level of understanding legislators have).
IMHO, a lot of environmental legislation is mostly out-of-touch theatrics with no real impact. See realities of recent recycling center shutdowns and what sort of stuff gets picked up on beach cleanup days.
It's always mostly plastic containers like bottles, plastic bags, fish nets and some random broken pieces of something bigger. Almost never straws.
https://i.wpimg.pl/3500x0/d.wpimg.pl/355768210-77880789/zani...
https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img,w_7...
https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/garbage-on-the-sand-bea...
Edit: It might also be an effect, that recycling mandates had to be introduced, becase lead-handling mandates had dissuaded anyone from recycling them. Not that I'm aruging against lead-handling mandates, it's a pretty nasty material.
Serious question: What is the fibre glass disposal scandal of wind farms? I googled for it and I didn't find it.
There's currently no way to recycle these, ok. They usually end up in landfills or incinerators. It's not ideal and we can hope that better technologies will come up in the future. But that's not really what I'd call a scandal.
No green energy is truly green or perfect, but we aren't aiming for perfect we just want better.
Otherwise it is a mere technical problem calling for a better solution than what is avaiable right now.
Because we are approaching a cliff when a lot of 1st and 2nd generation wind turbines are about to be decommissioned or refurbished.
Note: this is for Scotland.
Its bad enough a single wind turbine blade requiring a convoy escort along small winding roads for installation. Now they have to do the same and dispose them.
The cost is going to have to be paid somewhere, most likely by consumers.
Or they will be disposed off cheaply in a bad way.
I did not have a point of reference to see in what sense this is efficient or not, so I checked how much CO2 humans exhale. It turns out your car emits about as much as 2 humans exhale.
Here's the math:
- car: on average people drive about 10000 kilometers/year in the UK [1], so if you drive like an average person in the UK, your car puts out 790 kg of CO2 in a year
- humans: on average people exhale about 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day [2]. That makes about 762 kg/year for 2 people
The CO2 that a human exhales is from the carbon in the food they consume. That carbon ultimately comes (whether indirectly via animals or not) from plants, which drew that CO2 out of the air directly, typically at most a few years prior. The net change in CO2 concentration is zero.
Contrast this to burning fossil fuels which moves carbon from places where it is not enhancing the greenhouse effect (e.g. it's in coal, gas wells or crude oil) into the atmosphere where it will cause global heating - a net increase in CO2 concentration.
As a side note, methane produced by livestock or food waste does still have a global heating effect as CH4 is a more "potent" greenhouse gas than CO2, so there is a net increase in heating potential due to this conversion.
Gases and dust, that are a serious health hazard en masse in cities.
Also I doubt that the 79g/100km is the full number, that includes drilling for, refining and transporting that diesel to your car, before you can burn it there.
And btw., those kids in africa are poisening themself with ICE car parts too.
So I don't think anyone said, we should all wreck our ice cars today and go all electric immediately. That clearly makes no sense ressource wise.
But in the long run, yes. I want noise, smoke, fumes and dust free cities as soon as possible, along with a somewhat stable and intact environment. You have to start somewhere.
Of course I am ignoring CO2 emissions caused by industrial agriculture and those should not be understated but breathing alone doesn't contribute any net CO2, it's the industrial process that does it.
Cars emit new CO2
https://ec.europa.eu/environment/topics/waste-and-recycling/...
> I'll keep my very efficient Audi diesel car (79g/km CO2) for now thanks.
Why are you framing this as being a particular problem for electric cars and wind farms? It sounds like a problem that encompasses all of global trade, manufacturing and modern technology.
It is, which is why it is absurd on its face that supposedly more "sustainable" solutions to transport and electricity generation increase all three of those.
You might be right, but EVs are not the solution. The solution is realising that we just can't use so much energy.
Of course we need to move from burning coal too, but EVs are absolutely part of that.
Obviously, we want our EVs powered from renewable energy. In that case, unless we go nuclear, in my opinion energy will become that much more expensive that using it to transport ourselves in massive, heavy wheeled metal boxes will be out of the question.
I'm sure you'll object to this, so I'll start by pointing out that most of our "renewable" energy sources are made in China using brown coal and awful working conditions.
88 mpg equivalent for an EV, that requires a huge amount of extra mineral resources and manufacturing energy, is not good enough when the average clapped-out diesel family car here in the UK gets around 60mpg. As I said, they are barely more efficient overall.
The thing is, we realized some time ago that CO2 emissions are not all that matters in a car, and your diesel is spewing very harmful NOx emissions whever you drive, plus if you haven't got a DPF(I don't know how old your car is) the amount of fine particulate matter that is proven to be dangerous to health is quite high as well.
Auto makers are just selling the feeling of doing something good for the environment to consumers because that’s what is in vogue.
I bet that's the exact reason why you drive that exact car. Because of course the coolant, oil, acid batteries, etc. your car uses is disposed of correctly, or one of the hundreds of parts that needs replacing every X amount of time in an ICE. Never mind the waste that oil production itself causes.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/01/fossil-fuel...
New modes of transportation and energy generation will not be 100% clean and waste free, I think it would be naive to think we could actually do that. But they can be steps in the right direction.
If your cynical assumption is that we can't do it right anyway, why do you even pretend that driving your old car is somehow better? If we won't dispose of lithium batteries properly, we won't dispose of all the things your old car produces either.
>one of the hundreds of parts that needs replacing every X amount of time in an ICE
Yep, it's usually one of the electronic parts, which is why I have no faith that EVs will be significantly more reliable.
Or illegally dumped if we follow OPs cynical reasoning.
> it's usually one of the electronic parts
I didn't know tubes, gaskets, seals, clutches, oil filters, spark plugs, fuel pumps, radiators, alternators were electronic parts.
I am not claiming EVs are perfect but to propose classical ICE vehicles are somehow much better simply does not make any sense. To exist as a modern human is to have an impact on your environment.
I didn't set out to argue that ICE vehicles are much better (although, honestly, I think it might be a defensible position), but the waste products from an end-of-life EV are significantly more damaging than those from an ICE.
I've had a problem with 12V lead acid battery going dead too soon due to the ECU causing vampire drain, replaced on warranty though. Not related to EV drivetrain of course.
For the particular EV I have, I've heard of problems with the gearbox, due to the parking break being implemented in the gearbox. That's a design left over from ICE version of the car, most (all?) new EV models don't have that.
All indications I've seen so far is that EVs drivetrains are more reliable. And we have 10 year old EVs on the road now. Cars are getting more complex in general, so there may be lots of other things that can break. But it's the same with ICE cars, you just get all the extra parts needed for an ICE engine in addition. If I look up most commonly replaced car parts, around half are ICE-only. And break pads needs more frequent replacement on ICE cars.
Which is exactly the point - we are already not properly disposing of things in the proper way (the 10 year old with a rock example), so what makes anyone think that it will be any different going forward? Why would anyone assume that corporations or government will do any better disposing of these 'new' things, when we have had 50-75 years to figure out how to safely dispose of the 'old' things and have so far failed; they end up being shipped overseas, so we pollute someone else's backyard, not our own.
It's hard to convince modern companies (i.e. those who focus on profit above all else) to take such hits against their market value.
Have you owned a modern ICE engine? I can count on one hand the number of parts that my three Honda engines have needed in the last 15 years (1 car, 1 motorcycle, 1 generator). Electric engines in realworld cars need replacement at basically the same or greater rates. Those parts are made out of the same materials (rubber+metal+plastic+ceramics+lubricants) as in electric cars. As for batteries, my three hondas have very recyclable lead-acid batteries that people will pay me good money for once they die. They will never see a landfill.
Most electric motors have none of those materials except metal. Most are induction motors with few to no moving parts internally, and those that do have moving parts don't need them lubricated because they are in naturally low friction arrangements. (Versus pistons that have to be as tightly fitted to chamber walls as possible for the most power in an ICE.) Most EVs you can expect the motors may outlast the plastics in the dashboards.
As for batteries, Lithium is easily recycled today. We don't have a lot of Lithium Ion battery recycling plants today because of economies of scale. There haven't been enough EVs for long enough today to have big needs to recycle their batteries. Most of the oldest EV batteries are still on the road. So far EV battery life has well exceeded expectations, across the board.
Go to any automotive recycling facility. The cylinders are fine. IC engines regularly outlast dashboards. Modern cars get recycled when their electrical systems fail in a manner that is more expensive to fix than the car is worth. Those electrical systems (alternators, rectifiers, engine control systems) are not very much different than those in electric cars.
Take a look at any tesla teardown. The difference in part number/complexity between them and an IC car are superficial at best. They even have similar liquid coolant loops, with pumps that seem to fail more often than nearly identical pumps on IC cars.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90209541/meet-the-renegade-whos-...
If CO2 was the problem, diesels would be fine. We would recapture CO2 in the future. The bigger problem is particulates and NOx
You are confused with "electrical components" that are mostly plastic, very hard to disassemble and not worth it economically.
A Tesla battery cost over $6000. Materials like Cobalt or Lithium are worth a lot in a concentrated form, much easier than extracting it from the mine. As technology improves, the metals in those batteries are worth more.
So what is going to happen is:
Short term: people will use their old car batteries for electrical network support.
Medium term: Governments are going to require recycling protocols like they already do with ICEs cars.
Long term: Companies will develop protocols to recycle it. A battery is the same thing repeated hundreds of times. The individual cells are standardized,and platforms will be shared between different manufacturers, that makes it way easier to recycle.
Are they? My depleted AAA alkalines go straight in the trash (which is the direction of our fairly green-friendly city of Cambridge, MA).
* - https://www.cambridgema.gov/Services/householdhazardouswaste...
Everything is relative, they don't go in the trash anywhere I know in Europe.
I was recently quite disillusioned about that by the series "The Vuilnisman" (The Garbage Man) in The Netherlands, where point for point the entire responsible waste disposal and recycling was shown to be mostly a paper reality. For instance numerous tricks exist to label trash as building material and it can be dumped anywhere for a good profit. If only we knew.
Like you really think a big Akku from a ev is economically so irrelevant that we will ship it to Africa?
Fixing them (if a cell is broken) is easy and we can use them for 10 years more.
No one will just give it away and I bet that in Africa they would fix cells and use it for energy storage as well.
Your car is not just shitty for our climate your exhaust is also polluting the air we breathe
I don't know of any current Audis with similar repeatable fuel economy.
Yep - e-cycling all our old iPads'/iPhones/PC's with the entire village inhaling all those toxic fumes and polluting the groundwater.
Diesel vehicles emit a lot more NO2, as well as particulates that damage the lungs. Sure, it's less CO2 than gasoline cars, but is it worth it for urban air quality?
Diesel exhaust is a concentrated source of sub-micron teratogenic particles.
You're increasing your family members' cancer risk. Against this you have a made-up fantasy.
There is every reason to believe Li-ion vehicle batteries will be recycled as effectively and safely as lead-acid vehicle batteries.
I'm certainly no mechanical engineering or robotics expert, but based on watching a bazillion episodes of "How It's Made", "Modern Marvels", and similar shows, I'm 99.9% sure a machine could be designed and built that can do this step cheaper and faster than a 10 year old child can.
The machine would have a higher up front cost than getting a kid from a poor country to do it so might not be economical if the amount of waste is below a certain amount but that's only a temporary situation.
Does it need re-smelting at all?
I did some napkin math with a friend of mine over coffee and we concluded that just by being brough into existence and to the showroom floor a BMW i3 is equivalent from a pollution point of view to my diesel Ford having done 200.000 miles (I'm nowhere near that).
But people buy electric vehicles in droves since they're government subsidized and what not - albeit this is another bait and switch, it's not forever and charging isn't free either, plus quality overall is quite lacking, not to mention the OTA updates and potential data mining coming from these cars being oversized smartphones with wheels.
I dread the moment governments will up and force everybody to give up their old but reliable and not really hardcore polluting cars - a petrol/diesel vehicle doesn't do anything when it's off even if it's been like that for 20-30 years, an electric car may require to be always plugged in, trickle charging to keep the battery fed so in the winter you don't go to your garage and find out your range is actually 1/2 of what was expected. Not to mention nobody actually knows how long electric vehicles really last, whilst it's not uncommon for people having had the same ICE car for 30+ years.
Did it ever occur to you that maybe someone had looked into this before? Actually, lots of someones with PHDs have and find the opposite of you. Not only that companies are staking $10Bs on developing EVs, do you think they haven't looked at this either? Does that make you curious enough to read what they have written and see if perhaps your napkin model might not be accurate or are you content to be secure in your conclusion?
Here's a few if you are interested
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-...
https://www.transportenvironment.org/sites/te/files/download...
I am sure it's all fun and games and saving the planet until shit really hits the fan regarding what happens with batteries after they're disposed of but I suppose we're at least 20 years away from that and the comment I replied to will have a completely different meaning for people who don't gobble up the general sentiment that EV cars are the next best thing since sliced bread.
Edit: please understand we used numbers from the manufacturer, not made-up stuff. I understand and respect people with PhDs who look into this, but I have zero respect for car companies in general (random e.g. the VW scandal exposing most manufacturers do the same thing).
If you truly believe that EVs are the right way to go towards unfucking our planet then allow me to be of the contrary opinion (i.e. it's simply a publicity stunt and a way to make people part with their money in chasing the next best thing that isn't actually the next best thing whilst fucking up our planet even further).
Peace and love >:D<
That you mention wind turbine blades leads me to think that this is less about being ethically conscious, and more about having a ciltural axe to grind against 'green' tech.
> diesel car
Just a little reminder, the planet's gonna be on fire if we don't reach carbon neutrality ASAP.
In reality Renault seem to be moving away from that model.
I'm pretty sure we could still use our EV for daily driving with 70% degradation (of 30kWh), since we can charge in our garage. Probably more reliable than an old ICE car too.
The bigger the original battery, the higher the degradation can be tolerated without the car being useless. So the problem will decrease over time. There is also a big focus on long-lasting batteries in battery R&D for EVs. Ref Teslas million mile battery/drivetrain.
Some EVs also make it possible to replace individual cells or submodules of the battery. Though I haven't heard of that being done in the real world yet.
Remember that if you DO replace the battery, you can get a car that's pretty much as good as new with regards to the drivetrain. The inverter and motor is likely to outlast the car anyway. It may even be better than new, in terms of range, if the replacement battery has a higher capacity, which could be possible if replacements are made with a next-generation battery technology.
It's still a problem, the current model still has no active battery temperature management. Strangely their vans do so I'm not sure why the cars don't.
The market prices may seem to be reflecting that overall reliability of an EV is much higher than comparable ICE vehicles as they age and that so far battery degradation hasn't been a market issue. Though again, that may still be some bias from much, much smaller sample sizes to date.
What we do know is that of the EVs entering the used market, very few show noticeable signs of battery degradation (again, at 9 years on average!). Most of the ones with very noticeable battery degradation are Nissan Leafs. Most of those are still getting resold at decent prices (compared to equivalently aged ICE vehicles) and as cars to new owners (often as a second commuter car for a household some of these statistics suggest) and expected to still be on the roads a surprising number of years even after "noticeable degradation".
Some of the earliest of these degraded batteries were still under lease from Nissan, as Nissan for the first few years of Leaf sales had a battery lease model, and Nissan hasn't released statistics but admitted "surprise" that very few of the leases have been called in and most people still prefer to drive the Leafs as-is "degraded battery" or not rather than release the batteries to secondary usage. Nissan had plans for a project like Tesla's PowerWall for secondary life batteries (only; Tesla sells PowerWalls built from entirely newly sourced batteries), but claims so far they've yet to receive back enough batteries to build a single one even given how notably "degraded" their batteries have as a reputation in the used market.
All of which is to say that current indicators are that EVs seem to be on the road with their original batteries right now statistically for 15+ years even most of the "most degraded" ones the used market has seen to date. Replacing the batteries hasn't seemed to be an issue that has manifested yet in the used market. Though that extra reliability currently seems to come at a cost in the used market for the people who rely on cheap used cars because the cars seem likely to remain more expensive than ICE vehicles as that first owner statistic alone likely keeps the prices compared to age higher, but the overall reliability also may be keeping the prices high.
Sure, the wealthy boys will swap out for the best cells, but most of us will ride until it dies.
I have a feeling this might not be the problem we are expecting.
See "Junkyard Planet; Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade" by Adam Minter, fascinating book IMO.
Fascinating how they beach it and then those poor Bangladeshi's/Indians descend on it like a bunch of ants armed with only the most rudimentary tools like acetylene torches and front end loaders.
Stripping it like a dead animal until nothing remains.
And of course, reduction: investments in public infrastructure and pedestrian-based city design to reduce the need for individual ownership and the total number of cars overall.
And then there's the question of energy conversion efficiency. Let's start from the principle that all conversion of energy happens at < 100% efficiency. A switching power supply of automotive class is likely in the 85% efficient, maybe less. Power generation itself is less than 100% efficient. And, finally, charging isn't 100% efficient.
Efficiency math for a chain of devices is simple, just multiply the efficiencies of each device in the chain to obtain the system efficiency.
If power generation efficiency is 80%; charger station another 80% and battery charging (the battery stores less than 100% of the energy that goes into it) 80%, the total system efficiency is 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.5 or 50%. Yikes!
In other words, HALF the energy used to charge an electric vehicle is wasted, likely as heat. That's assuming it is a three step process.
The truth is there are additional links in the chain. For example, the transmission of electricity though power lines and transformers isn't 100% efficient. In California we are at about 90% [0]. This would bring my prior estimate down to about 45%.
I would not be surprised if a full accounting of losses, from generation to energy stored in a battery, is in the 30% range. From that to energy-in-battery to energy delivered to the wheels is a different matter. Maybe 90%?
I haven't seen a study analyzing the realities of mass electric vehicle deployment from an energy efficiency perspective. Does such a study exist?
EDIT: The real question needs to look at deployment at scale. We have about 300 million vehicles in the US. Assuming all of them are replaced with electrics and accounting for generation-to-wheel losses, how much new energy generation would we require? Other than burning coal and natural gas, how do we get there? I suspect electrics are not even close to being as "green" as people think they are. They sure feel good because, locally, in front of your own eyes, they feel clean. However, the real evaluation has to take into account the entire system.
[0] http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...
They haven't been built. You can blame "NIMBY", but the nuclear industry hasn't exactly done what it can to fix its current reputation for continually costing multiples of initial estimates, taking multiple times longer to build, and failing multiple safety and other regulatory requirements.
We have a really good, efficient, nuclear fusion supply, guaranteed to work for at least the forseeable billions of years, safely located 8 light-minutes away from the ecosystem that we're trying to protect.
We also have a thermal side effect from that fusion supply, combined with the rotational energy of our planet, that provides atmospheric fluid energy transfer capabilities that can also be used to generate power.
I say this as someone who purchased and installed his own 20 kW array on a custom- built structure (not on the roof). To put it in simple terms, the system will likely never be profitable. The overall cost and ten to fifteen year lifetime of the components is such that I can’t see or predict when it will break even. My assumption is that all the panels will need replacement in 15 to 20 years, possibly less for the electronics.
Note that this does not include a battery system. This, given the short and long terms economics of the system would be a ridiculous purchase today.
And this is at a reasonably favorable latitude. Start going north and solar becomes far less attractive.
I genuinely wish we had not gone solar. This was likely the single dumbest and worst investment of my life. Anyone thinking otherwise likely doesn’t have solar or never truly analyzed the real economics of their systems.
I also have lots of neighbors with solar, most of which were installed by companies. In nearly every case they are worse off than they were before. The only ones who are not are those who did not pay for their systems directly.
Theory vs. reality are very different things. I am not even going to analyze the cost of such installations when government agencies are the builders. I’ll just guess the number us somewhere between 5x and 10x “civilian” costs. I say this as someone with experience selling technology to government agencies. Simple example: The California high speed train. We were told it would cost ten billion. We are at a hundred billion and I don’t think we have completed ten miles of slow speed train yet.
No. In the UK the National Grid says we only need to go back to 2002 levels of power generation to support the whole fleet moving to electric.
By that way of thinking petroleum, nuclear, natural gas, wind, etc., are free and infinite at a human scale. They are not. Each of this has finite costs, direct and indirect consequences of deployment at scale. And because no energy conversion process is 100% efficient, each of them has consequences related to the fact that waste --most often in the form of heat-- will be generated as an unavoidable part of the conversion process.
We can't look at electric cars with innocent idealistic eyes and think they are the solution to all of our problems just because they don't have a tail pipe. They do, in fact, have an exhaust pipe, it just happens to be distributed across the entire energy and materials supply chain.
I am very much pro electric transportation. I simply don't like the idea of not being honest about what it is and what it is not. Utopia it is not.
Yeah, because we need batteries to charge our car batteries...
>EDIT: The real question needs to look at deployment at scale. We have about 300 million vehicles in the US. Assuming all of them are replaced with electrics and accounting for generation-to-wheel losses, how much new energy generation would we require?
You said energy generation, not electricity generation. It would require negative new primary energy generation because efficiency gains alone will reduce the amount of primary energy you have to waste on waste heat production.
Please people, it is just another industry within consumer capitalism. They externalize all the nasty bits so all the dopes can feel good about driving a Tesla.
All this is supposed to happen within the next 15 years, at least according to quite a few politicians.
Increased lithium prices is a good thing since it means that recycling will be financially viable once prices of freshly mined-lithium increases.
Could not agree more. With all the things we're talking about using batteries for (electrifying almost all wheeled transport and some aviation, huge amounts of grid storage to smooth out rough solar & wind inputs, grid-independent installations), this is going to be an absolutely massive, sprawling industry.
Batteries are likely to be a bottleneck for a long time. We will find ways to reuse and recycle the ones from old cars because there will be enormous incentives to do so.
The downside to this is that I'm not expecting battery prices to really drop much for quite a while. They may even go up. These aren't microchips after all; the laws of physics prohibit any significant miniaturization.
"At 20 mg lithium per kg of Earth's crust,[45] lithium is the 25th most abundant element." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium)
" lead's relatively high crustal abundance of 14 ppm; it is the 38th most abundant element in the crust." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead)
The problem is that easily mined high concentration deposits of lithium are rare so it is expensive to extract.
Some of the high price can be simply attributed to high demand occurring after a period of demand low enough that mines were closed in North America. Now that demand is high there is pressure to develop new mines in the US; see, for instance, https://qz.com/1975325/electric-cars-are-fueling-the-uss-lit....
In theory we can extract vast amounts from seawater we just need enough energy.
See, for instance, https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/seawater-could-provi..., https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsmaterialslett.0c00385, https://www.samcotech.com/is-it-possible-to-extract-lithium-....
There's also the impact of that water supply being diverted to hydrogen production, as well as the shipping of hydrogen.
All of that is solvable, but so is battery technology and recycling of the battery ingredients.
and battery charging doesn't require energy?
> as well as the shipping of hydrogen
It's not very complicated to produce hydrogen where it's needed since there is usually both water and energy everywhere
Speaking as an environmentalist, this is a huge smack in the face. Electric cars are supposed to be "green" but in fact it's the same old story. It just seems so short-sighted!
- - - -
Anyway...
There's got to be a better way!
And there is: alcohol fuel.
It burns clean and is carbon-neutral. Anyone can make it from anything that has starch or sugar. It's non-toxic(-ish).
Alcohol has greater energy density than batteries; the by-products of alcohol production are organic and can be e.g. fed to animals; the exhaust of burning alcohol is non-toxic; the energy is from the sun, the molecules are from the air and water, burning the fuel is carbon-neutral because the carbon came from the atmosphere (not underground); you don't need lithium or other rare chemicals.
C'mon y'all, think it through.