In its report released in April, Batteries and Secure Energy Transitions, the agency charts out a path for massive growth in battery energy storage consistent with the goal of 'Net Zero' by 2050.
A little background: Despite the advances in battery technology and the decline in their costs, some scientific and engineering realities distinguish batteries from other forms of energy storage.
The report addresses the challenge of supplying the many critical minerals necessary for enormous increases in battery manufacturing, including a chart showing a projected five to 30 times increase in demand for the different battery metals by 2050.
Any mention of waste from batteries comes in connection with downstream wastes and the need for future recycling with little attention paid to the upstream wastes generated prior to battery manufacture.
The flammability of lithium-ion batteries, already a safety factor in aviation and maritime trade and in crowded urban areas, only merits mention in the context of new battery chemistries - Lithium Iron Phosphate and Sodium-ion - that pose reduced fire risks are also far less energy dense.
Because battery costs play such a dominant role in the price of electric vehicles, manufacturers are turning to less expensive battery chemistries, like LFP, that exclude rare metals but have lower energy densities than current Lithium-ion batteries.
Today, at the Kapolei Energy Storage outside Honolulu, over 6,000 tons of LFP batteries activity needed to support the market growth for battery technologies at the scale imagined, as well as the dis-economies of scale that result from the inherent limits of batteries as an energy storage technology.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/06/02/the-many-problems-with-batteries/
No comments:
Post a Comment