Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

Comment by at-fates-hands | Hacker News Reader

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I agree.

Strangely, all of these issues were conveniently left out of the article.

Not sure everybody knows this, but its not economically feasible to recycle these batteries:

"Recycled lithium is as much as five times the cost of lithium produced from the least costly brine based process. It is not competitive for recycling companies to extract lithium from slag, or competitive for the OEMs to buy at higher price points from recycling companies. "

Add in the fact there are currently very few dedicated LI recycling companies in the world, let alone in the US:

"With lithium recycling in its infancy, there is currently no main recycling infrastructure in the world that treats only automotive Li-ion batteries. A few pilot plants, such as Umicore's Hoboken plant in Belgium that are at a demonstration stage exist. Lack of standardisation in battery chemistries and changing landscape with respect to different elements under research for battery production other than lithium have made evaluation of the recycled value of the components uncertain for the recyclers."

source: http://www.waste-management-world.com/articles/print/volume-...

Call me skeptical, but I'm not sure Tesla has really given consideration to these issues. Their approach to these obvious issues are not addressed at all in their press release.

So I recently needed a special cable to make some old gear work. It was only available from a single source and they charged me an arm and a half for it.

Why am I telling you all of this? Because the price of something has very, very, very, very, very little to do with how feasible something is, how much work is required on a fundamental level.

So what? Recycling lithium isn't profitable right now this very instant? Because the price is too high? Apart from the circular logic here, this means nothing.

(This kind of thinking is disappointingly common here. We will never get anywhere when we do some adhoc "price" analysis on every new technology and obviously deduce it's infeasible and should not be explored. Cars were economically infeasible back when you bought petrol from the pharmacy.)

Yes. Thank you. I wish I could upvote your comment more than once.

Musk has addressed this a few times. If I recall correctly Cobalt production will be more of a constraint than lithium... for example, from the Q1 2014 earnings call:

the lithium, although lithium is sometimes thought of as a bigger thing than it really is for lithium ion cell.

It’s like using maybe a couple percent of the cell mass, but the biggest cost constituent is nickel

There's a great analysis of material constraints here [1].

1. http://seekingalpha.com/article/654441-ev-myths-and-realitie...

I posted the same link in this thread already, in another context, but it's relevant enough: http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/mythbusters-part-3-recycling... "The result from this process is that we are able to recycle about 60% of the ESS materials and reuse a further 10% (by weight). We currently plan to landfill only the benign fluff, which comprises about 25% of the ESS, but we expect to nearly eliminate this in the future when our volumes get higher and we can justify the effort required to separate and reuse the plastic."

This is the recycling system. Ex-car batteries into house batteries.

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