Archives par mot-clé : Battery

better to know...?

The Battery Storage Delusion.. what 35 million tons of industrial effort buys you

by Dr L. Schernikau, Aug 21, 2025 in WUWT

Details inc Blog at www.unpopular-truth.com

As someone who has spent most my professional life in the global energy and commodities space both as an economist and as a trader, I have grown increasingly concerned about the way grid-scale battery storage is portrayed in public discourse. If you have paid any attention to the headlines, you would have heard that battery technology is “on the verge of solving” the intermittency problem of wind and solar energy. According to this narrative, all we need to do is build more battery storage, and the path to “net zero” will unfold automatically… magically.

If only it were that simple…

In my latest blog post “Pros and Cons of Utility-Scale Battery Storage” I unpack the many assumptions behind this belief. The facts I present may be unpopular, but they are grounded in physics, not politics.

Here a couple of key points that I feel might spark some interest.

35 million tons of raw materials for a couple of hours…

To build a 50 GWh utility-scale lithium-ion battery system (approx. annual output of a Gigafactory), which has the ability to store electricity, for a city like New York, for only a few hours, you need ~ 35 million tons of raw materials (~ 700,000 t per GWh). That roughly covers the mining, upgrading, transport, and processing of ores like lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, iron ore, bauxite, and others.

Think about it like this…a 1-ton utility-scale battery has a storage capacity of around 100 kWh and requires ~ 70 tons of mined, processed, and manufactured raw materials to be manufactured. This is the energy equivalent of about ~40 kg of coal or ~20 litres of oil.

Let that sink in: 70 tons of mining and industrial processing to store what coal already provides in a (40kg) bag, small enough to be carried by hand.

…

renewable energy

The Cost of Net Zero Electrification of the U.S.A.

by K.G. Gregory, Aug 23, 2022 in FriendsOfScience

Executive Summary
Many governments have made promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by replacing fossil fuels with solar and wind generated electricity and to electrify the economy. A report by Thomas Tanton estimates a capital cost of US$36.4 trillion for the U.S.A. economy to meet net zero emissions using wind and solar power. This study identifies several errors in the Tanton report and provides new capital cost estimates using 2019 and 2020 hourly electricity generation data rather than using annual average conditions as was done in the Tanton report. This study finds that the battery costs for replacing all current fossil fuel fired electricity with wind and solar generated electricity, using 2020 electricity data, is 111 times that estimated by the Tanton report. The total capital cost of electrification is herein estimated, using 2020 data, at US$290 trillion, or 13.5 times the U.S.A. 2019 gross domestic product. Overbuilding the solar plus wind capacity by 18% reduces overall costs by 17% by reducing battery storage costs. Allowing fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage to provide 60% of the electricity demand dramatically reduces the total costs from US$290 trillion to US$20.5 trillion, which is a reduction of 92.9%. Battery storage costs are highly dependent on the year’s weather and the seasonal shape of electricity demand.

…

better to know...?, energy and fields

The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction

by A. Katwala, Aug 5, 2018 in Wired

Here’s a thoroughly modern riddle: what links the battery in your smartphone with a dead yak floating down a Tibetan river? The answer is lithium – the reactive alkali metal that powers our phones, tablets, laptops and electric cars.

In May 2016, hundreds of protestors threw dead fish onto the streets of Tagong, a town on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau. They had plucked them from the waters of the Liqi river, where a toxic chemical leak from the Ganzizhou Rongda Lithium mine had wreaked havoc with the local ecosystem.

There are pictures of masses of dead fish on the surface of the stream. Some eyewitnesses reported seeing cow and yak carcasses floating downstream, dead from drinking contaminated water. It was the third such incident in the space of seven years in an area which has seen a sharp rise in mining activity, including operations run by BYD, the world’ biggest supplier of lithium-ion batteries for smartphones and electric cars. After the second incident, in 2013, officials closed the mine, but when it reopened in April 2016, the fish started dying again.

…

…