It’s crazy how actually terrible lithium-ion battery are for the environment while portrayed as green. From production to charging with usually fossil energy. Not even speaking of hazards like shown in this article.
The dirtiest part of lithium batteries is cobalt, which is being substantially reduced (or removed entirely) from lithium battery chemistries. Lithium itself is an abundant resource and is not especially dirty, at least when compared to many other raw materials. And there are prospects for future mines being much cleaner than in the past.
With sufficient investment, lithium batteries can be highly recyclable and it's feasible that within a couple of decades, nearly all the materials in new battery production could be recycled. And would be recycled because it would be cheaper (and thus more lucrative) than mining from earth.
Once there's a strong pipeline of electric cars headed for wreckers, the scale is there for recycling to be significantly more profitable than mining raw materials. The scale isn't there right now because most battery packs pulled from vehicles (wrecks, end-of-life, etc) are still highly valuable intact.
Companies like Redwood Materials are scaling up in preparation for this future.
(Non-vehicle lithium batteries are likely too small, too fiddily, too difficult to build a supply chain for that recycling to be economical on their own. But once the pipeline is there, adding all the small batteries to it would be a no-brainer.)
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/092134...
The only missing piece to achieving scale is a pipeline of recyclable material; this will obviously exist once electric cars begin to age out in sufficient quantity.
It's also expecting to make a lot of revenue from frequency control which is a critical service in a grid relying more on renewables.
So yes this battery is going to be very effective at reducing carbon emissions in Victoria. As a similar battery did in South Australia.
That's not the fault of lithium-ion battery. Also, I think it is interesting that all of a sudden people care about the production of lithium and paint it as particularly detrimental to the environment when in fact they accept the same realities in every other resource they are using. Almost like they follow a stupid agenda propagated by a dying industry.
Edit: I'm not saying we shouldn't care about lithium production and it's effect on the environment. But things are improving drastically and the arguments I hear against lithium are always the same talking points the ICE-industry used to take on Tesla.
The reason I think that might be the case is because lithium-ion batteries seem to be on track to become pretty ubiquitous. It probably won't ever be equivalent to oil products, but it'll probably get far closer than most things. Yet it's still relatively early days. We're not at the point where fundamental change is impossible.
We're increasingly aware of all the problems with oil-products, but... not so much is happening about it. They are so fundamental to everything that major changes are exceedingly difficult and expensive.
With lithium-ion batteries we aren't there yet, but we're getting closer every day. If we put an outsized amount of attention on the problems now, we have a better shot at actually fixing them, as bigger changes are more feasible now than they ever will be in the future.
If the action is "start a 7-year process to research solutions to solve them" -- great!
If the action is "block lithium mining" then that environmental policy will be as effective as San Francisco housing policy.
The solution to the harm inflicted upon the environment by humanity isn't some new feat of technology or invention, it's downshifting. In every field, not just in individual's private lives.
VC's, 'entrepreneurs' and green energy journalism seems to have a vested interest to in a sense consume 'green innovation' rather than just treating it as technology.
I do have problems with people who argue against transitioning to 100% renewable energy with this argument. That's actively harmful. You won't actually convince anyone but it plays into the hands of anti-EV, pro fossil fuel interests. The likes of BP that spill a fuck ton of oil into the ocean and we just shrug it off. And then they go "but mining lithium is harmful" (which it isn't, at least not more harmful than mining gigatons of coal or fracking gas).
The problem with your position is a total lack of perspective of what's harmful to the planet and what can realistically be done about it.
The heaviest polluters and carbon emitters on earth could very easily reduce their pollution and emissions by at least 50% say, if not way more by changing the way we consume, travel, what we eat and so on. We are talking low hanging fruits here.
Do you now how many battery stations we need to plaster on earth, how many not yet invented technologies we need to get to significant renewable use which we could get for free if we could turn half of our coal plants off?
Just for 'perspective', over the last 30 years we have gone from, 93-95% carbon based fuel sources to... 88% today. People want to go to Mars in 10 years but it's 'unrealistic' to advocate that people replace beef with chicken and air travel with a train? This is the actual most bizarre thing about this argument, the complete inversion of who has lost perspective and realism.
Global power consumption is at ~23TWh. To make it through the night on nothing but solar, you'd need about 1/3th of that dedicated to batteries (Likely a lot less though due to wind, hydro, and nuclear production) So ~8 TWh of storage on the extreme end. Roughly 8000x our current battery deployments.
A lot, but not really crazy.
> how many not yet invented technologies we need to get to significant renewable
0. There are no technologies needed for significant renewable deployment. About the only thing needed is manufacturing capacity. Solar efficiency is crazy high as is wind which has driven cost/watt way down. Battery prices have similarly fallen off a cliff (and are still falling), which makes that extremely feasible at this point.
New tech will make the whole transition cheaper, but certainly isn't needed to get things switched over.
> which we could get for free if we could turn half of our coal plants off?
Ok.. but that solves only the power generation problem and runs smack dab into the politics problem. Wanting to turn off coal doesn't make it happen.
> 'unrealistic' to advocate that people replace beef with chicken and air travel with a train?
Yes, because you are talking about winning over a huge diverse group of people. Going to mars requires one rich asshole to invest in mars travel. He doesn't have to convince millions to change their habits or minds.
Realism is realizing that you can't control others thoughts or behaviors. An excellent example of this is what's happening with COVID.
You want to tell me it's realistic to convince people to give up their favorite foods when getting people to just wear masks is seen as a breach of liberty or whatever garbage?
Come on. The amount of rational people is FAR too low to realistically expect that sort of pleading to work.
Then how are batteries going to screw that up? If and when we do that, using batteries would still make things more energy efficient and greener.
Very easily? People start protests over much less than 50%.
ICEs running on renewable fuel has localy observable emissions and are not sexy. The decommision of ICEs are way easier then EVs and the refeuling infrastructure simpler for liquids. It is a shame there is a look-in on EVs.
Except most power grids are not pure coal, they include some mix of zero carbon energy already. And there are opportunities for EVs to contribute to a high-renewables grid with smarter charging.
And separate to your concern (or lack thereof) about climate and renewables, moving emissions away from the tailpipe has significant advantages for local air quality where most people live.
I was referring to renewable fuel, where the tailpipe carbon goes back into nature.
> moving emissions away from the tailpipe has significant advantages for local air quality where most people live.
Yes, but where most people don't live is also where ICEs are advantageous in that an BEV would need Tesla size batteries for range, which are oversized for normal city-ish driving.
I think BEVs are a better solution for most cases, but my feeling is that renewable ICEs and EVs with smaller batteries and "trolley bus" solutions just are way downplayed and underrated.
Ethanol is made from wood or grain and any losses during the harvesting etc for the end product is comparable to the wind losses around the turbine (note that it is a bad comparison, since wasting wind is kind of no cost ...) or comparable with burning wood to power a steam machine generator to power EVs.
I.e. the degenerate case is using gasoline do power a powerplant to power a EV. You would be better off just using it in an ICE car. My point is turning wood into ethanol might be a good supplement to solar and wind EVs. E.g. for wood ethanol 1J product requires 0.6J input (except the wood of course) [1].
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_fuel_basics.html https://ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/files/ethanolnetenergy.p... (table 1)
But yes, a tiny sliver of fuel demand can be satisfied from plants. You're right about that. I'm less convinced that you're better off burning the fuel in an ICE than turning it into electricity in a large power plant and running an EV. Large generators are more efficient than small ones. If you manage to do something useful with the waste heat of your power plant (e.g. use it for district heating), there is no way a small ICE can compete, even if you take into account transmission and charging losses.
UK 9.34 million hectares agriculture area. [1] 6,470 l/ha ethanol in Brazil [2]
60,4 billion liter ethanol for all agricultural land in the UK. (Surely a big share of the land is not good for this usage but what ever.)
About 45 billion liter of gasoline and diesel used in UK per year.[3]
I mean, it is not totally off by orders of magnitude to be practical for a significant share of driving.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_the_United_King... [2] http://www.globalbioenergy.org/uploads/media/0907_Goldemberg... [3] https://www.racfoundation.org/data/volume-petrol-diesel-cons...