this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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How exactly is the production of batteries cleaner and cheaper than the production of natural gas?
You make the batteries once, and the pollution due to production is spread over the 10-15 year lifetime of the battery. During that time gigawatt hours of clean power sloshes in and out of them. This in contrast to having to produce enough gas to make all of those gigawatt hours once, then throw the gas away as co2 and get more, along with the attendant pollution.
Batteries have infinite energy now? No storage issues due to electrical surges, heat, cold, or anything else that makes batteries sub optimal? While seemingly by magic, mining rare earth minerals spreads its environmental impact over 10-15 years of the lifetime of the battery with 0 negative impact to the area the mine is located?
Oh wait... None of that is true so I guess you can try again.
Sodium batteries require very little rare earths in comparison to lithium batteries.
It really is too bad about the weak life cycle, poor charge/discharge rate, and incredibly low voltage that begin the story of "Why don't we just use sodium ion batteries?" and place it directly in the "tragedy" section of the book store.
Why are people so mad that batteries are better than dead dinosaur farts? What is the weird obsession with burning ooze and gasses from mother earth? We have better options?
Does it hurt being this ignorant or is it truly as blissful as they say?
The fact that you don't understand battery materials are pulled from the ground in much the same way that oil and gas is speaks volumes about value of your opinions.
Once. They are pulled from the ground once. After which they are essentially infinitely recyclable.
Oil/gas is extracted then used a single time and it's gone.
Nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, is "infinitely recyclable". Literally defies physics.
Lets also not forget that oil is recyclable.
Yes. Things can be infinitely recyclable. But since you're such an expert. Tell me, what part of a lithium atom degrades during its life as a battery? I'm not expecting a good answer from you though since you think that burning a compound (to release the energy in its bonds) is then recyclable.
No, nothing can be recycled to infinite. It is asinine to even attempt to assert that.
Recycling Lithium batteries recovers approximately 20-96% of materials. This means best case scenario, which is not the norm in battery recycling, every time a battery is recycled 4% of the materials are lost.
Doesn't take a math genius to see how quickly finite resources dry up with a 4% loss every single time a batteries life ends.
Funny because I never said gas was recyclable. You should learn to read before you try to make snide comments.
I hope the simple math and explaination I used is understandable to you, but I am not expecting much.
I can't get over this. We're talking about energy and hydrocarbons, and you bring up that said hydrocarbon is recyclable. I assume that you're talking about the use of said hydrocarbon in the energy sense (which means burning it to make energy) because given the context that's what makes sense.
Instead you were talking about a completely different and irrelevant use of the hydrocarbon and then think that's it's my fault for not following your nonsensical argument.
Like I thought, you're misunderstanding what you're reading.
Yes current recycling processes can lose 4% of the material. But that's not because they aren't recoverable, that's because it's not currently financially feasible to recover it all.
And that's just the recycling part. For someone suggesting that I should read better you sure aren't great at reading either. So I'll ask it again.
What part of the metal atoms degrade as part of them being used in batteries?
Like I thought, you have nothing meaningful to say. I won't waste further time with you.
What? You're the one claiming that various metals aren't infinitely recyclable.
It's true that not all metals are, but many of them are (iron, aluminum, lithium to name a few) infinitely recyclable.
Current recycling technology doesn't really matter as it can and will improve with time as the brand new industry scales up.
I'm just here pointing out that your statements are false. That doesn't need to be meaningful to you if you have no interest in learning, but it's useful for other people who are reading this thread wondering why you're being downvoted.
The information I've seen regarding deep discharge life-cycle for sodium ion is that the latest tech is actually extremely good, at least according to this. I don't see how the lower voltage is a problem, since for grid situations you'll have step-up transformers anyway, and the batteries can just be hooked up in series to increase the voltage.
They use abundant materials, will be much cheaper than lithium ion, don't need to be actively cooled, and massively lessen the risk of rupture and fires.
The low density per unit of weight isn't relevant for grid storage, so they seem pretty ideal.