> How are we actually going to build hundreds of billions of dollars worth of batteries?
With battery factories. The very same that will be required to electrify vehicles when jurisdictions are enacting combustion vehicle sales bans at the end of the decade. 74-78 million new vehicles are sold each year. That's a lot of battery demand, which will be a forcing function to scale up battery manufacturing, driving down costs.
And where will we get the raw materials needed to build such vast amounts of batters? Global supply of lithium is already an issue just for electric car production. Global supply of lithium will not be sufficient to store grid scale amounts of energy.
The world could face lithium shortages by 2025, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says, while Credit Suisse thinks demand could treble between 2020 and 2025, meaning “supply would be stretched”.
About 2 billion EVs need to be on the road by 2050 for the world to hit net zero, the IEA says, but sales stood at just 6.6 million last year, and some carmakers are already selling out of EVs.
Lithium supply faces challenges not only from surging demand, but because resources are concentrated in a few places and over half of today’s production is in areas with high water stress.
To be fair, grid-scale storage does not have to use lithium batteries, and likely should not use too much of them, because they are such a fire hazard.
A number of alternative chemistries exist, which are much less expensive and less flammable. They of course have lower energy density, but it does not play a major role: batteries sitting on the ground can afford to be be bulky and heavy.
The same way we found oil for the last century and a half; we explore and produce based on the price of the commodity. Lithium is one of the most abundant materials in the Earth's crust.
"Lithium is one of the most abundant materials in the Earth's crust."
Abundance alone is irrelevant; you need certain concentrations for the mining process to be viable. AFAIK that is the challenge with Li: the necessary concentrations are only found in several places of the world.
Same was true of oil. People predicted peak oil multiple times over, thinking we’d found all the easy oil, and drilling for the expensive oil was gonna lower production. That never happened, instead people found ways to get the hard oil cheaper, e.g. by fracking, and peak oil has yet to happen. Lithium mining is sure to go through similar story. Maybe after the third failed prediction of “peak lithium” they will find ways to harvest it from the ocean or something.
It is well possible, but there are factors other than price in play. Fracking seems to be fairly dangerous for the environment, and current methods of lithium production have this problem as well (a lot of water is consumed in dry Bolivia to produce lithium).
In the future, we might be able to mine lithium from some sources that are now useless, but the environmental cost might be enormous.
This is a good point. I certainly hope this history doesn’t repeat. However if we keep our current economic incentives, it probably will.
In an ideal world we would innovate with better chemistries which would render the need for lithium obsolete before we cause more damage. I know the technology exists (particularly for grid scale storage), but knowing humans, we will probably ruin more environments (and foreign economies) before such technologies will be meaningfully explored.
Odd. As you are playing the internet expert and telling us the problem was unsolvable, I had assumed you knew all about this sort of thing. I mean, you wouldn't want to be exaggerating the level of knowledge backing up your assertions, now would you?
It's acceptable as an efficiency for backing up renewables. The cheaper the input energy is, the less important efficiency is vs. the capital cost of the storage system.
With battery factories. The very same that will be required to electrify vehicles when jurisdictions are enacting combustion vehicle sales bans at the end of the decade. 74-78 million new vehicles are sold each year. That's a lot of battery demand, which will be a forcing function to scale up battery manufacturing, driving down costs.
https://news.bloomberglaw.com/environment-and-energy/electri...
> How are we going to dispose of them?
We recycle them. We already do today. https://www.redwoodmaterials.com/ (Redwood has battery recycling agreements with several automakers)