5 Minute Primers: Sustainable Batteries
Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Short Attention Span
CTAN Updates
We have two upcoming 1.5C panel events planned at Manny’s in San Francisco!
Wed, February 15, we will be discussing Sustainable Batteries with Our New Energy, Posh Robotics, and KoBold Metals. Sign up now!
And save the date for Thursday, March 16, also at Manny’s, where we will be hosting Kairos Aerospace, Picarro, and Frost Methane for our panel "The 100x Threat”, on the current bleeding edge in stopping methane emissions!
Here at the ole ‘stack, we set out to provide you with high quality content, thoughtfully constructed arguments, and depth. However, sometimes, the bar that we chose to write in has a drag night, and all your friends are there, and while I do love a good drag show, it is not really an atmosphere conducive to distilling the muse. So, this week, we’re introducing
FIVE MINUTE PRIMERS
We know you want to learn about climate tech! But who has the time to read an entire article, let alone read one, amirite? So, I say, let’s admit defeat in the attention-span department, and try a new experiment: I’m going to try to explain a complex concept, succinctly, and save us all a bunch of time! Today’s primer is about How are we going to make all the batteries?
This is also, not coincidentally, the topic of our upcoming panel which you should definitely come to, and tell all your friends to come to! And fiveish minutes from now, you will be well positioned to ask hard-hitting, informed questions during the Q&A! So here goes:
Decarbonization is fundamentally a two step process:
Decarbonize electricity
But, in an electric society, we need lots of batteries, mostly for smoothing out renewable energy (the topic of a previous 1.5C panel discussion), and electric vehicles, which are two of the largest carbon sources.
Lithium prices went up 400% in the last couple of years, and there basically isn’t enough lithium to make all the batteries we’re going to need. Additionally, mining has an awful human rights record, and we are at great risk of shifting the burden of climate change onto already disenfranchised populations. So what do we do? We gotta start getting creative.
Fortunately, just like with energy efficiency, there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit in this space. Here are a few of the things we can do to get more bang for our buck out of batteries:
At the beginning of the supply chain, we can mine more efficiently, and more humanely, to drive down costs of raw materials.
Lithium is in short supply, and some people are trying to learn how to extract it from sources of high abundance but relatively lower concentration, such as brine. This process is difficult because the Entropy of Mixing makes it energetically less efficient to purify low concentrations of metals relative to mining ore, which is highly concentrated.
We need to learn to manufacture better. Making big batteries is hard, and the industry often wastes a lot due to quality defects. We have a lot to learn about how to make batteries more efficiently.
Alternative battery chemistries are notoriously difficult to commercialize, and may still be a long way away. But, there are available chemistries right now that are more sustainable and require less cobalt, such as lithium-iron phosphate (LFP).
When batteries are too worn out for use in vehicles, they can be derated and used for grid storage, where they can have decades of future service. This reduces the load on battery production for new cars.
And of course, there’s recycling. The Entropy of Mixing (again) means that recycling will always be technologically challenging to make cost effective. But as the prices of raw materials continue to rise, and renewable energy continues to drop in price, the economics of recycling get better and better.
There are no silver bullets for climate. And, in a rapidly changing world where it is difficult to make accurate predictions more than about five years in the future, letting a thousand flowers bloom gives us the most opportunities to find solutions to bending the carbon curve.
So now you know!
Want to learn more about making batteries more sustainable? Sign up to come to our January 15 panel, and come dazzle your friends with your newly acquired deep understanding of batteries!