Great technology! It’s totally going to solve climate change!
We need to accept a premium for the cleanest and safest baseload generation we have.
You can build a lot of batteries for 35 billion. And those don’t produce waste that you have to store for millennia.
Some modern nuclear reactor models produce less long-term waste than batteries.
Hypothetically. None of those are anywhere near to actually being built.
Lmao and what about battery waste when they’re past their lifespan in 15 years?
Lmao and what about battery waste when they’re past their lifespan in 15 years?
Well, if you mean Lithium batteries, you grind up the dead batteries and make new Lithium batteries from that. Its not like lithium is burned up never to be used again with these. Here’s the lithium and cobalt extracted from recycled lithium batteries after all the plastic and other metals are removed:
You can watch the whole process from dead battery to extracted materials here, if you want.
But that’s today’s tech. Sodium batteries are quickly taking over for grid scale storage. Sodium you might know as the 7th most abundant element on Earth, so we’re not running out of that any time soon.
Oh boy, why are these sorts of comments always upvoted by people who obviously don’t know shit?
First Lithium batteries are often reusable for secondary purposes when they don’t meet original specifications, and then they can be recycled pretty efficiently.
At the cost it comes in at, it competes with longer-duration energy storage. Very expensive, and only has value to the extent that it reduces the need to build storage instead.
As far as I could tell, according to the article this delay is caused by the Covid pandemic.
