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Comment by zizee | Hacker News Reader

I had thought that this was not a huge win, as lithium is fairly cheap, and not a large portion of the overall cost of a battery. However, my research taught me I was incorrect.

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.

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Lithium is cheap because the externalities of the environmental damage it causes is not accounted for in the pricing. It's a highly exploitative resource which has destructive impacts on local bacterial ecosystems, human communities, and water availability.

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.

> Lithium is cheap because the externalities of the environmental damage it causes is not accounted for in the pricing.

Like every other raw resource we use.

Let's not flatten it. Different materials have different externalities. And are available in different places with different levels of human rights and environmental protections

Lithium and sodium are both easily mined from sea water.

Seawater contains less than 1ppm of lithium (compared to 300-7k ppm in brine). There are zero commercial facilities to produce lithium from sea salt. It's not even a notable byproduct from other seawater-based processing facilities

Sodium is better than lithium in that respect. But both are MUCH better than hydrocarbons.

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.

Now compare to fossil fuels.

> A Tesla power wall 2 is about 150kg, if half of that is lithium,

This estimate is very far off.

1% is closer.

That's a electric car battery, optimized for mobility: fast charge & low self-discharge, maximum density allowed by the projected lifetime, custom form factor, heat and cold resistant, vibration resistant and mechanically sturdy etc.

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.

>A Tesla power wall 2 is about 150kg, if half of that is lithium

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.

Do you have a source for that? I don't doubt what you write, but I would love to learn more.

realistically the cobalt based Li-Ion can reach ~250Wh/kg (and they are better than the LiFePO4). So 3kg of cobalt based li-ion would be below 1kW/h

Also right now about 70% of all lithium comes from only two places (Chile, Australia). Iron and sodium are pretty much everywhere so this potentially eliminates at least one supply bottleneck

> eliminates at least one supply bottleneck

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.

At least in Europe, governments are going to great efforts and expense to decentralise and decarbonise the production, storage and distribution of energy. The implication is that as well as producing energy through renewables close to where it is used, it can be cheaply and sustainably stored there as well.

If you are the Chilean or Australien government you would maybe be unhappy about moving away from Lithium. Most other governments would love it e.g. Europe doesn't have much Lithium (or at least not a lot that is easy enough to extract to make it profitable). The EU and european governments already try to rely less on foreign supply chains, especially since they relied so heavily on Russia for gas and now have to scramble to find other sources.

Maybe the corporations of those countries. But Australian and Chilean citizens both loathe the environmental and health impacts of these industries. Especially those that live in or around the "sacrifice zones" of these industries

> Europe doesn't have much Lithium

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.

> lithium is fairly cheap

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.

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