Sodium is extremely plentiful, while lithium is not.
Lithium is worth about $40k per tonne, or $40 per kg. A Tesla power wall 2 is about 150kg, if half of that is lithium, then the lithium alone is worth $2.3k. Powerball costs about $9.5k, so the lithium is a fair portion of the cost.
https://www.thisoldhouse.com/solar-alternative-energy/review...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/606350/battery-grade-lit...
Note, I know raw lithium carbonate is not stuck directly into a battery, just spitballing with the little bit of learning I just did.
Some articles, if you are interested:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09626... https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/fac...
It's not even comparable to sodium, which is abundant practically everywhere.
Like every other raw resource we use.
The amount you need for driving a car for 3 years is several kg vs tonnes. And you can recycle the battery but you can't recycle the oil you burned.
That's why I'm not particularly harsh on lithium externalities. Let's get the low-hanging fruits first before we focus on nuances.
This estimate is very far off.
1% is closer.
When you think of an application like grid connected energy storage, most of those performance metrics are irrelevant, and the only thing that really matters is cell cost per total energy stored and delivered during its lifetime. We will likely see something over-engineered and simplified to maximize cycle count and minimize cost, leading to a much larger raw material consumption, at the expense of density - the cell is not going anywhere.
So the ability to use dirty cheap ingredients is a game changer for the grid storage market.
an order of magnitude less. 30KWh is just about 3kg of lithium in theory. On practice it would be about 7-10% of the weight of the battery.
The CIA wants to know your location /s . I know this kind of joke is not appreciated on HN (for good reason), but one has to ponder of the implication of cheap/dense energy/storage and what big actors like governments, big corporations would think about not being able to effectively control energy production/storage/distribution.
The USA doesn't care if there's Xium inside the USA.
Xium just has to be in a few places and it has to be moved across the globe, transacted in USD and guarded by the US Navy.
Big corporations will not invest if they can't create a moat.
For now. But more importantly, there are sovereignty problems to considered in case things get worse in the future. And the quality and usability of the lithium substrate varies quite a bit between suppliers, with the better ones, for now, coming from the less "attractive" suppliers.