[HN Gopher] The Life Of Lithium
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The Life Of Lithium
Author : bertman
Score : 113 points
Date : 2024-06-27 15:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.noemamag.com)
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| yogurtboy wrote:
| Seems like an excellent history.
|
| Can't stop thinking of the Simpson's World Without Zinc:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWpPrWHBHcQ
| h0l0cube wrote:
| An interesting and well balanced article, but for this (emphasis
| added):
|
| > Anyone who imagines a future of electric passenger planes,
| _long-duration grid storage_ and air taxis is conjuring a dream
| founded on lithium.
|
| Grid storage doesn't rely so much on density. Sodium-ion
| batteries would do (as well as the other numerous storage
| technologies that don't rely on lithium)
| drekipus wrote:
| I've always wanted to look into this but the information is not
| readily available.
|
| I ask my father in law (who works in the energy grid industry)
| and he just says "if salt batteries work and are cheaper we'd
| be using them"
|
| Well they appear to work, and appear to be cheaper, so why
| aren't we using them?
| epistasis wrote:
| CATL is starting to scale up production, but they haven't
| been explored much until now. The thought is that they might
| be similar enough to lithium batteries that they could
| benefit from much of the same industrial learning. But only
| time will tell.
|
| If lithium prices spike again, it will provide an opening for
| replacements. Until then, there's little pressure to move off
| the main path for batteries that can be used in a wider range
| of applications.
|
| Lithium ion's density might not be needed for grid storage,
| but it also doesn't pose any problems, as you point out.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| The first 'large scale' sodium ion grid storage went online
| in May, so it might take some time for it to trickle down.
| But I think the economics of it already work today.
|
| https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/05/15/china-switches-on-
| fir...
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Exactly. I wouldn't call this article very balanced. It
| actually is perpetuating a lot of myths about lithium ion
| batteries popular with the anti renewables pro fossil fuel
| crowds.
|
| It opens emphasizing the scarcity of lithium. It's actually one
| of the more common elements on this planet. There is no
| shortage. We're not going to run out. It's literally everywhere
| and we've barely scratched the surface looking for rich
| deposits of it. There are indeed several viable ways to store
| energy that don't involve using lithium at all.
|
| Flammability is of course called out as well. Never mind that
| most car and truck fires are good old ICE vehicles. Battery
| electric fires are so rare that most fire men will never deal
| with one in their careers. Very much unlike ICE car fires which
| they deal with on a daily basis. And never mind that there are
| lots of very safe lithium ion batteries now. LFP is pretty safe
| for example.
|
| Calling out long duration storage is another red flag. How much
| of that is needed? In giga watt hours please. Nobody ever
| bothers to qualify that. It's just asserted that we need
| stupendous amounts of it and insinuated that we'd need to
| bankrupt the planet getting it.
|
| As soon as you put numbers on it, it turns into a simple
| logistics problem. Oh we need X amount of batteries and it's
| going to cost Y amount of dollars. And of course while people
| seem to assume that we need stupendous amounts of it we are
| actually witnessing the effects that very little amounts of
| short term storage are having already on the electricity
| markets. It's wiping out coal and gas plants as a viable way to
| generate power economically. Short term energy storage is a lot
| cheaper and apparently removing all these plants is not causing
| any issues as we have still got way more base load than we
| need. That's another thing that is rarely qualified with a
| number.
|
| A lot of coal and gas plants are facing early closures because
| of batteries. Modern gas plants designed to run for many
| decades that came online only recently are already being
| replaced by short term battery storage. It's simply cheaper and
| gas is expensive. With relatively predictable and stable daily
| cycles of peaks and dips in renewable energy production, short
| term storage is covering most of what we need.
|
| Batteries are now being produced at a rate measured in TWH per
| year. Most of those batteries are kept at a high charge rate
| most of the time. That's a huge amount of untapped potential
| energy. It's cumulatively going to amount to hundreds of twh of
| stored energy that we have just sitting there in batteries
| designed for short term storage distributed all over the place.
| That's an enormous buffer of energy expanding every year. Only
| a small fraction of that is cycled on a daily basis.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > Batteries are now being produced at a rate measured in TWH
| per year
|
| I don't disagree with you, but I think specifically lithium
| batteries for storage is going to be a small part of the
| picture as we move towards having larger capacity. Sodium ion
| batteries in particular remove the resource bottlenecks that
| still hold back battery storage. That said, _yearly
| additions_ to grid-scale battery storage (of any type) is
| basically doubling every year.
|
| https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/annual-
| grid-s...
|
| https://www.iea.org/reports/batteries-and-secure-energy-
| tran...
|
| To the point, that by some very basic projections I made, it
| looks like there will be more battery capacity than daily
| solar generation by 2034, and then _more capacity than daily
| usage_ less than a year later.
|
| https://www.desmos.com/calculator/lunahw7gvo
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| Especially for grid storage sodium ion is looking very
| promising. As are several other chemistries. But most of
| the current production is still lithium based for now and
| it will take time for that to change. I would say non
| lithium storage might become dominant from the mid 2030s
| and onward.
|
| As for battery capacity. There will indeed be way more
| batteries than energy generation. But that's only a problem
| if you assume all those batteries are being cycled to
| capacity continuously. IMHO that's actually not the case.
| Most car batteries don't get drained on a daily basis. It's
| more like once a week or two weeks for average drivers.
| Same with grid batteries. They are used more intensively of
| course but also oversized so they don't constantly run out.
|
| My point was that most batteries are, on average, holding a
| charge that's probably close to fully charged (or 80%,
| which is more optimal for some battery chemistries) and
| that only fraction of that aggregate capacity is discharged
| and recharged on a daily basis. Having that much batteries
| is really good news. IMHO it's a trend that will accelerate
| as batteries continue to get cheaper. We'll just buy more
| of them and find more places where it's nice to have them.
| Think of an e.g. AC units with a battery that can charge
| during the day and discharge in the evening.
|
| As for the IEA, take their numbers with a grain of salt.
| They are notorious for having to correct their own
| predictions regularly. And there are some well known issues
| with their modeling and assumptions. Generally, you can
| subtract at least a few years from most of their
| predictions.
|
| I'd recommend reading some of the reports by Bloomberg NEF
| they've had a few interesting reports on investments for
| battery production. Apparently we can look forward to over
| production and price drops next year already.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| > But most of the current production is still lithium
| based for now and it will take time for that to change.
|
| I wager differently. I see no reason why sodium-ion
| batteries couldn't leapfrog lithium, just based on
| simplicity and economy. I suspect the learning rate will
| be much quicker for sodium ion.
|
| > Most car batteries don't get drained on a daily basis.
| It's more like once a week or two weeks for average
| drivers. Same with grid batteries.
|
| That's only because grid batteries aren't really being
| used to offset peakers. They are basically arbitrage for
| when prices are very high, as lithium batteries can hold
| charge for a very long time and can be dispatched almost
| instantly. In terms of batteries being used in place of
| gas and coal stations, they _will_ need to cycle deeper,
| but maybe after about 6-12 hours of capacity is reached,
| they won 't have to.
|
| That said, the graph I provided is _global_ capacity.
| Right now, batteries are still a specialty item, but for
| broader applicability, they 'll be needed in more diverse
| scenario, including where there could be large gaps in
| renewables output. But even anywhere, an emergency
| capacity of days would become necessary in order to
| divest fully from non-renewables as both baseload and
| peakers (e.g., when overcast, still, and very cold/hot
| temperatures, or powerlines failing etc.)
|
| > As for the IEA, take their numbers with a grain of
| salt. [...] Generally, you can subtract at least a few
| years from most of their predictions.
|
| My projections were based on historical data, and
| regressing exponential curves onto them. Not super
| scientific, but the exponential trends are very visible
| for solar, wind, and storage. The linear trend for energy
| consumption seems to be holding now for decades, but that
| could also change.
|
| > Apparently we can look forward to over production and
| price drops next year already.
|
| I've already seen the prices drop ~40% from August last
| year to January on prismatic LiFePo4. I bought twice as
| many cells for just a little extra. I expect to buy again
| next year and double my capacity for about the same as my
| first purchase. We'll see.
| thelastgallon wrote:
| (adding some references to the points you made)
|
| Government data show gasoline vehicles are up to 100x more
| prone to fires than EVs:
| https://electrek.co/2022/01/12/government-data-shows-
| gasolin...
|
| Data from the National Transportation Safety Board showed
| that EVs were involved in approximately 25 fires for every
| 100,000 sold. Comparatively, approximately 1,530 gasoline-
| powered vehicles and 3,475 hybrid vehicles were involved in
| fires for every 100,000 sold:
| https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/environment-energy-
| coordinatio...
|
| Statistics from 2015 showed that 174,000 vehicle fires were
| reported, and almost all of them involved gasoline vehicles.
| Tesla claims that gasoline cars are 11x more likely to catch
| fire than a Tesla, and that the best comparison of safety is
| fires per billion miles driven. If we compare using this
| method, there are approximately five EV fires for every
| billion miles traveled, compared to 55 fires per billion
| miles traveled in gasoline cars:
| https://driveelectriccolorado.org/myth-buster-evs-fire/
|
| From https://www.evlithium.com/Blog/advanced-safety-features-
| of-l...
|
| Non-flammable electrolyte: LiFePO4 batteries use a non-
| flammable electrolyte that does not catch fire even if the
| battery is punctured or damaged. The electrolyte is a mixture
| of lithium salts and a solvent that is less volatile and less
| flammable than the organic electrolytes used in other types
| of lithium-ion batteries.
|
| High safety: LiFePO4 batteries have a lower risk of
| overheating and catching fire due to their more stable
| cathode material and lower operating temperature. They also
| have built-in protection circuits that prevent overcharge,
| over-discharge, short-circuit, and physical damage.
| hansvm wrote:
| That's an interesting set of stats, but it's not decisive.
| Some alternative explanations:
|
| - The stats are just plain wrong, even at a surface-level
| inspection. They suggest that over 20yrs you'd have 3 fires
| for every 10 ICE vehicles ever sold. I ought to know 50
| people in my current company who have had a car burn down,
| 30 in my last company, 5 in my extended family who I'm
| close with, 100 in a slightly wider net of acquaintances,
| .... I know 0. I highly doubt _anyone_ in the country comes
| close to having seen the "right" number of ICE fires,
| outside of firemen and people who otherwise gravitate
| toward such problems intentionally.
|
| - The problem mostly isn't gasoline; it's shoddy
| manufacturing, especially wiring. How do the stats look if
| you ignore Hyundai and other particularly low quality
| manufacturers? Normalized by miles driven (which is closer
| to what ought to be correct), the delta is 10x rather than
| 100x. That's roughly the delta between how often a BMW
| breaks down vs a Toyota, so as a coarse estimate you might
| expect the data to be entirely explained by having the
| wrong denominator (cars vs miles) and the fact that you're
| just comparing different tiers of manufacturer.
|
| - Back to the "denominator" issue, which is always a
| problem with normalized statistics. If your baseline isn't
| that each car has an equal chance to burn down for each
| mile driven, but that older cars are more likely to burn
| down because rust and other degredation allows for water
| infiltration and electrical fires, the older ICE fleet
| would naturally generate the reported stats.
|
| - Back to the "denominator" issue, per car sold this year
| is maybe correct, per car ever sold is maybe correct, per
| currently running car over 20yo is maybe correct, per mile
| per one of the previous items is maybe correct, .... You
| really want to see the stats broken down by those
| categories, and to help avoid fishing for hypotheses to
| then come up with other testable ideas to examine for each
| interesting subcategory you find.
|
| - It's always worth mentioning with EVs that the
| distributions aren't directly comparable. You have
| different populations driving the cars in different places
| from their ICE alternatives. Similarly to the previous
| point, you want to see results broken down at least by
| crude demographics. It matters more for self-driving safety
| claims, but it might be relevant here.
| hansvm wrote:
| Elaborating slightly on the denominator and population
| issues:
|
| The reason you care is that these stats aren't just
| abstract quantities; you're trying to gauge what the
| impact of a specific intervention might be. Suppose you
| could magically flip a switch and transition the country
| to EVs (which I'm not arguing against, just potentially
| the fire data thing), and you based that decision on this
| data. You weren't sold before, but since the fire risk is
| so low you were willing to apply that intervention.
| Instead of low fire rates, you might see:
|
| 1. When EV/EV collisions happen instead of EV/ICE, the
| higher total energy from heavier vehicles makes short-
| circuits and fires more likely than your model predicted
| (this is different from most of the rest of my points
| since it assumes your model is actually correct and
| unbiased today in some meaningful way but would still
| fail to be very helpful).
|
| 2. The data was just wrong and thus had no bearing on the
| real world.
|
| 3. You have the same fire rate as shoddy manufacturers
| enter the mix.
|
| 4. You have low rates initially, trending toward the same
| rate we're at now as the cars degrade, except now those
| fires are incredibly dangerous and toxic.
|
| 5. A mandatory software update while you're driving down
| the road inadvertently triggers a short circuit, leading
| to unknown-unknowns potentially affecting large swathes
| of the population at once (unlikely probably, but you are
| exposed to new failure modes and don't have a ton of data
| about the rarer ones yet -- much like (1) this isn't
| actually a criticism of the stats themselves, just their
| interpretation).
|
| 6. When you get more people driving these things in
| rural, snowy, mountainous regions you get more collisions
| and fires.
|
| 7. Having more teenagers driving EVs substantially
| reduces any claimed fire hazard deltas.
|
| And so on. Global stats (like fires per crash, per mile,
| per car, ...) are suggestive of the next place to look
| for more data when trying to make an informed decision,
| but when you're talking about something affecting
| hundreds of millions of people, they're the beginning of
| the conversation, not the end. That's doubly true when
| they obviously have some kind of glaring flaw (like the
| napkin-math observation that they're off by at least an
| order of magnitude, probably 2 in this case).
|
| Separately, once that data is interpreted correctly,
| you'll probably find other important observations. E.g.,
| if ICE and EV have the same fire rate excluding shoddy
| manufacturers, and you have more solid evidence backing
| that up, that gives you very easy followups. The
| conversation can shift to the severity of those fires,
| their mitigations, and whether they're worth the cost
| given the other benefits EVs have. Moreover, you learn
| that you can greatly reduce car fires by just having
| better engineering, so (carefully and thoughtfully) toss
| in a law or tax or something to try to encourage better
| behavior.
|
| Similarly, if you find old vehicles are the root cause
| then you can encourage recycling or rust-proof coatings.
| That might even be a point in favor of EVs since the
| batteries don't last long, so they'll be recycled before
| they're likely to combust (again, assuming for simplicity
| that everything else stays constant, which a policy-maker
| hopefully would not).
|
| Just the stats presented though, especially without
| evidence that the obvious confounders don't apply, would
| likely not be helpful in making an informed decision. You
| could do just as well, perhaps better, from a gut
| instinct, and the presence of those stats in isolation is
| (charitably) just to help provide to people the data we
| do have and encourage further discussion, or
| (uncharitably) to present decontextualized information in
| a way that biases the populace in an intended direction,
| despite the fact that it's useless for the stated goal.
| stoperaticless wrote:
| > Calling out long duration storage is another red flag. How
| much of that is needed? In giga watt hours please. Nobody
| ever bothers to qualify that.
|
| That includes you. (No numbers just assumptions that all will
| be fine)
|
| Worth noting that there is no "required" amount of kWh of
| storage, people can get used to blackouts and/or real time
| prices spikes and/or adjust habits (reduce usage).
|
| Just to have _some_ numbers:
|
| 1kWh of battery costs 139$
|
| US uses 11,267 kWh/year/capita of electricity alone. Thats 30
| kWh per day. So 1 day electricity storage costs 4000$/capita
| of investment.
|
| Total energy consumption in US is 295 million
| BTU/capita/year, which is 236 kWh/capita/day.
|
| To cover for one day of all energy, US needs
| 32000$/capita/person investment.
|
| In current setting, Oil/Uranium/wood act as a kind of
| battery, and we are very used to having large "batteries".
| (Some people prepare wood for couple of winters ahead)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States)
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/883118/global-lithium-
| io...
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States
| adrianN wrote:
| Grid storage needn't rely on batteries at all. We could store
| energy as hydrogen for example. AFAIK that's the most proven
| way for storing months worth of energy.
| LeonM wrote:
| I haven't familiarised myself with the latest in hydrogen
| development, but isn't the round trip efficiency absolutely
| horrible? Not to mention boil off and leakage (afaik no
| material exists that can store hydrogen without leaking).
|
| Hydrogen as energy storage would be amazing, but as far as I
| am aware it is still far from practical at this point.
| adrianN wrote:
| Efficiency only matters in so far as it affects cost per
| MWh. It is plausible (from what I heard at least) that
| hydrogen is cheaper at the required scale than batteries.
| After all we will likely have incredible oversupply during
| long summer days where electricity is essentially free.
| Scaling battery manufacturing to store enough power for a
| whole winter is difficult.
|
| In any case I think storage is something where ,,let the
| market figure it out" is a reasonable strategy.
| beAbU wrote:
| Round-trip efficiency is not the only variable at play
| here. Storage plant longevity, self-discharge over very
| long periods of time, cost of installation and maintenance,
| cost to the environment to source the raw materials etc
| also play a big role.
|
| Round trip efficiency might be way less than any other
| method of storage, but it might win out on all the other
| points. I don't know the answer though - just saying it's
| important in discussions like these to not get hung up on
| single metrics. We're not playing trump cards.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Never meant to imply that, though hydrogen is just a
| different manner of chemical storage and wildly inefficient.
| Pumped hydro (gravity storage) is also doing its part, but
| not really growing in the exponential manner as battery
| cells[0]. I'd be curious to know if there's any non-'battery'
| storage technologies that are on a similar growth curve.
|
| [0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1304113/pumped-
| storage-h...
| pfdietz wrote:
| Hydrogen is not good for daily storage, where round trip
| efficiency is important. It is much better for very long term
| storage or rare event backup, where RTE is much less
| important.
|
| RTE does become less important as the cost of the input
| energy declines in comparison to the cost of the storage
| system.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Hydrogen is the _least_ proven one. It looks good on paper
| but there 's remarkably little green electrolysis being done
| and most of it is going to industrial use to replace "brown"
| H2. Storing H2 at the same scale as existing natural gas
| storage is tricky because it diffuses much more.
| practicemaths wrote:
| What about second-life use though for lithium batteries in grid
| storage?
|
| We're building a lot of EVs right now. Pretty much any battery
| has hard to process material in it. Packs for vehicles last
| between 5-15 years, but there's still a lot of energy storage
| capacity left.
|
| You reduce the amount of processing & mining needed AND make
| EVs more affordable if you can extend the life of the battery
| pack beyond just it's automotive application by giving it
| another life in grid storage.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I can't see how this works at scale personally. You'd at
| minimum need standards in cell construction so that you can
| plug them into some kind of rack. Battery packs as standard
| come in too many different formats, voltages and cell
| chemistries etc.
| trainsarebetter wrote:
| Not really. Most pack are 96s Chemistry wise the only real
| major difference for charge profiles is lfp vs standard li-
| ion.
|
| Pretty much every pack spits cell data out over can, and
| contains hv contactors.
|
| Projects like https://github.com/dalathegreat/Battery-
| Emulator
|
| Standardize different pack coms for HV solar inverters.
|
| The big hurdle here is insurance. It's a regulatory
| nightmare, nobody wants to spend the money to provide the
| data that these packs are safe for grid tie. Even though
| they have the data for vehicle safety...
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Taking the Hyundai Ionic 5 as an example you have 3
| capacities 58.2kwh, 72.6kwh and 77.4kwh with 114s2p,
| 180s2p, 192s2p. These have nominal voltages of 523v, 653v
| and 697v respectively.
|
| Even for the same car it's not trivial to use these all
| in the same system. It might even make most sense to
| couple them on the AC side but that would mean a lot of
| small expensive inverters.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I'd assume the plan is not "use pack as is" but to split
| it into constituent 18650 cells and build a mega-pack.
| I'm not sure how reliable that would be..
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Yeah, even that is tricky. Every different manufacturer
| has different packaging for the cells. The Nissan Leaf
| for example uses a pouch style cell rather than 18650
| cells. Even if you stick to say Tesla batteries you have
| to undo the wire bonding and probably spot weld each
| battery back together, then balance and charge the pack
| ensuring you don't have any duff cells. It's a lot of
| work for reclaiming batteries on an industrial scale.
| trainsarebetter wrote:
| Hmm do you have any reference material stating they are
| in fact different series groups?
|
| that's a odd way to do it, generally you just add more
| cells in each parallel group
|
| Regardless most hv solar inverters are 600v or 800v so
| all those packs would work fine
| Tagbert wrote:
| There just aren't many car batteries that are at the end of
| their life in a vehicle. Their lifetime seems to be a lot
| longer than many thought early on. Other than the Leaf
| batteries, most EV batteries from 10 years ago are still
| going. Even with those the volume was low. Now that volume is
| increasing, it will still take 10-15 years before you start
| to see the current batteries available for reuse. The average
| age of a car on the road is around 12 years so you will start
| to see vehicles decommissioned and many of those will still
| have useful batteries but we need much larger numbers of
| batteries and sooner for grid-scale usage.
| practicemaths wrote:
| There's growing commercial use of EVs. These will be driven
| harder and longer. They will not last 10+ years.
|
| The point that you're missing is that you can extend a
| packs life with a secondary application. That secondary
| application can make the cost of its first use lower making
| EVs more easier to adopt.
|
| This requires more and more material. However we can
| recycle this material back through tearing it apart, which
| is a costly process.
|
| It would be better to recycle a pack to its base material
| later than sooner. So the second life use allows for
| delaying the teardown & reclaiming process.
| chasil wrote:
| This article omits one interesting fact about lithium.
|
| '7 Up was created by Charles Leiper Grigg, who launched his St.
| Louis-based company The Howdy Corporation in 1920. Grigg came up
| with the formula for a lemon-lime soft drink in 1929. The
| product, originally named "Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda",
| was launched two weeks before the Wall Street Crash of 1929. It
| contained lithium citrate, a mood-stabilizing drug, until 1948.'
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_Up
| jadbox wrote:
| Wild. So 7' Up started with a mood drug and so did Coca Cola
| (1885) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/cocaine-coca-cola/
| Tagbert wrote:
| Most soft drinks of the day started off as health tonics.
| Health tonics were popular in the late 19th and early 20th
| century and were often made by pharmacists and sold in their
| shops.
|
| That is why we had "soda fountains" in drug stores for much
| of the 20th century where you could go and have a drink that
| originally claimed a health benefit but eventually became
| just a treat.
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