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Comment by ErroneousBosh | Hacker News Reader

> it’s ultimately superior technology that’s ripened to displace gas peaker plants

What's the ecological impact of constructing all these batteries?

The same as the ecological impact of constructing gas tanks and pipelines. Only using electricity from batteries doesn't have ecological harms, whereas burning gas does.

Gas tanks are made from steel, which last time I looked was a lot cleaner to refine than lithium, and with a lot less energy input.

How so? Both require mining, separating metal from ore and so on. Steelmaking is done in blast furnaces that burn coal. Lithium can be refined by evaporating brine in large open ponds under sunlight.

Let's see some actual numbers.

Here are the relevant numbers:

- Worldwide Li-ion battery production per year: 35GWh

- Worldwide grid capacity: 5000GWs

- Lifetime of a specific cell in a grid scale battery: 20-30 years

- Current known reserves of Lithium worldwide at current usage rates: 80 years

So even if we magically mined all known Li reserves this year, it still would only be about 14% of the grid for 1 hour or about 9 minutes total for the entire grid. You don't actually need to backup the entire grid (only about 20-30% of it), but you need to do it for at least 4 hours. Basically, it isn't even close even if we only used Lithium for this use. You can get more with Na-ion, but if you think NPPs are dangerous (they aren't)...let's just say nobody would ever insure a grid scale Na-ion battery. Just one leak and it goes up with 1000s of tonnes of TNT of explosive force.

Na-ion batteries are very safe?

Please re-check your numbers, since they’re all wrong.

For example, the world deployed 1600 GWh batteries in 2025.

Your entire post is fiction. And not the good kind.

> Worldwide Li-ion battery production per year: 35GWh

This source: https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/lithium-ion-b... tells me China alone manufactured 1200 GWh in 2022. You're at least an order of magnitude off.

> let's just say nobody would ever insure a grid scale Na-ion battery

Well they did.

https://energiesmedia.com/3-1-mwh-grid-battery-energized/

https://www.energy-storage.news/peak-energy-launches-first-g...

Substantially smaller than building and running gas peaker plants

So you'd be happy with a lithium refinery at the end of your street?

Good thing lithium is transportable, eh?

Ah, I see, you don't mind the planet being destroyed as long as it's not in *your* back yard?

Batteries are 90-95% recyclable.

Gas is 0% recyclable.

That's nice that they're recyclable.

What's the runoff from the chemical processing to make the batteries like?

Or does it not matter if you poison great swathes of China?

You think the Oil and Gas industry is cleaner?

Recylable is important because it means we don't have to mine as much.

Oh good lord -- cite something real, or stop fear-mongering.

This is what happens when you feed the sea lion.

> great swathes of China?

What's the total acreage of lithium extraction ponds in China today?

As distinct, of course, from the artificial lake of sludge known as the Weikuang Dam, four square miles in size, holding rare earth processing sludge waste in Baotou (Inner Mongolia) which is not from lithium processing.

What percentage of China's land area do these tailing ponds amount to, is "great swathes" really a fair estimate?

Do you think that acreage will drop with the current rise in Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE: new technique that skips traditional evaporation ponds, using filters or membranes to pull lithium directly from brine. It's faster, uses less water, and works in areas with lower brine lithium concentrations.) ?

What's your worksheet on waste from fossil fuels V waste from battery production looking like, is it online for others to look at ?

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