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Here We Go Again
Here We Go Again “I keep hearing about battery innovation, but it never makes it to my phone.” – Evan Spiegel For those that have been in and around alternative energy research for the better part of long careers, nothing makes the eyes roll harder than loud proclamations of breakthrough advances in battery technology. Consider […]
Are Green Resource Wars Looming?
Are Green Resource Wars Looming? The Burden of Massive EV Batteries Will Be Borne by People and Ecosystems Much of the excitement over the Inflation Reduction Act, which became law this summer, focused on the boost it should give to the sales of electric vehicles. Sadly, though, manufacturing and driving tens of millions of individual […]
The dark side of Tesla: gigafactories need gigamines
The dark side of Tesla: gigafactories need gigamines The production of electric vehicles requires vast amounts of raw materials such as nickel: Around 32 kg of this metal are needed for the lithium batteries of a mid-range car. To secure access, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is encouraging global nickel mining and is considering investing in […]
Used Car Battery Problems Take Shine Off China’s ‘Green’ New Energy Vehicles
Workers assemble electric cars in a factory in Zouping, east China’s Shandong Province on Sept. 16, 2014. (AFP/AFP/Getty Images) Used Car Battery Problems Take Shine Off China’s ‘Green’ New Energy Vehicles In the last decade, China has rapidly expanded its “green” new energy vehicle (NEV) industry but recycling and disposing of hundreds of thousands of […]
Clean energy minerals shortage: Who knew it could happen?
Clean energy minerals shortage: Who knew it could happen? The race for so-called green energy has spawned another race, one for the minerals needed to make the devices such as solar panels and batteries that produce, store and transmit that energy. A hitherto largely unchallenged economic idea—that we will always have supplies of everything we […]
Placing Energy In A Battery Results In A Loss Of Power
Placing Energy In A Battery Results In A Loss Of Power Anyone that thinks we can simply store huge amounts of energy in large banks of batteries to use at any time has lost touch with reality. The brave new world of energy storage may not prove to be all it is cracked up to […]
Are Electric Cars Good for the Environment?
Are Electric Cars Good for the Environment? This article is Part 5 of an 11-part series analysis of Tesla, Elon Musk and EV Revolution. You can read other parts here. My wife loves driving the Model 3, not for all the selfish reasons I like to drive it (it is fast and quite the iPad on […]
Carmakers Face Supply Bottleneck Of This Crucial Metal
Carmakers Face Supply Bottleneck Of This Crucial Metal For Tesla and its chief competitors in the race for global domination of electric vehicle sales, it ain’t all about lithium ion. There are other valuable metals needed to make the battery packs do what’s asked of them, with nickel being essential. Tesla and its battery producer […]
Sustainable Living: A Primer on Batteries for Use with Solar Storage
Sustainable Living: A Primer on Batteries for Use with Solar Storage Ready Nutrition guys and gals, this article is being posted to address questions posed by one of the readers, as well as any others who might want to know about batteries for use with solar panels. The main thing is to understand this is […]
Batteries, mine production, lithium and the “cobalt crunch”
Batteries, mine production, lithium and the “cobalt crunch” Growth in Li-ion batteries depends on a number of imponderables, such as how rapidly the world converts to electric vehicles, how quickly battery manufacturing capacity can be ramped up and where the electricity to power millions of EVs will come from. This post ignores these issues, concentrating […]
The Most Ethical Renewable Energy Systems
THE MOST ETHICAL RENEWABLE ENERGY SYSTEMS The main thing in renewable energy systems is the embodied energy: the energy over the lifetime of the product versus the energy of manufacturing it. Lithium batteries are used a lot because they are lightweight, but they don’t last. Lead-acid batteries, like car batteries, are also short-lived. An old […]
Blowout Week 240
Blowout Week 240 Finally we have an article from a respected academic institution that highlights the prohibitive costs of going renewable with Li-ion battery storage backup. This article has received minimal publicity on the web, so here we give it a little more by making it our feature story. Then on to OPEC; the oil […]
Battery Technologies for Off-Grid Living
BATTERY TECHNOLOGIES FOR OFF-GRID LIVING There are so many battery technologies out in the marketplace, and it is highly likely between me writing this and you reading it there will be another new fandangled world’s best battery that has hit the market. What Elon Musk has done with Tesla is to create a market awareness […]
Battery storage* in perspective – solving 1% of the problem
Battery storage* in perspective – solving 1% of the problem The energy world is fixated on the “huge” amounts of battery storage presently being installed to back up slowly-increasing levels of intermittent renewables generation. The feeling seems to be that as soon as enough batteries are installed to take care of daily supply/demand imbalances we […]
Blowout Week 167
Blowout Week 167 There are some people you just can’t hold down. One of them is Elon Musk, who has offered to solve South Australia’s grid problems within a hundred days by installing Tesla utility-scale batteries and not to send a bill if the fix doesn’t work, thereby displaying true confidence in the future of […]
