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A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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Apple will probably use a version of cobalt oxide operating at 4.35 volts and delivering about 165 milliampere hours per gram, a 22% improvement on the best lithium-ion cobalt-oxide batteries delivered in recent years.
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Anonymous
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A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be.
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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A typical 100-kilowatt-hour Tesla lithium-ion battery is built in China on a largely coal-powered grid. Such an energy- and carbonintensive manufacturing process releases 13,500 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the carbon pollution released by a conventional gasoline-powered car traveling 33,000 miles. That 33,000-miles figure assumes the Tesla is only recharged by 100 percent greentech-generated electricity. More realistically? The American grid is powered by 40 percent natural gas and 19 percent coal. This more traditional electricity-generation profile extends the “carbon break-even” point of the Tesla out to 55,000 miles. If anything, this overstates how green-friendly an electric vehicle might be. Most cars—EVs included—are driven during the day. That means they charge at night, when solar-generated electricity cannot be part of the fuel mix.*
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Peter Zeihan (The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization)
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RENEWABLE ENERGY REVOLUTION: SOLAR + WIND + BATTERIES In addition to AI, we are on the cusp of another important technological revolution—renewable energy. Together, solar photovoltaic, wind power, and lithium-ion battery storage technologies will create the capability of replacing most if not all of our energy infrastructure with renewable clean energy. By 2041, much of the developed world and some developing countries will be primarily powered by solar and wind. The cost of solar energy dropped 82 percent from 2010 to 2020, while the cost of wind energy dropped 46 percent. Solar and onshore wind are now the cheapest sources of electricity. In addition, lithium-ion battery storage cost has dropped 87 percent from 2010 to 2020. It will drop further thanks to the massive production of batteries for electrical vehicles. This rapid drop in the price of battery storage will make it possible to store the solar/wind energy from sunny and windy days for future use. Think tank RethinkX estimates that with a $2 trillion investment through 2030, the cost of energy in the United States will drop to 3 cents per kilowatt-hour, less than one-quarter of today’s cost. By 2041, it should be even lower, as the prices of these three components continue to descend. What happens on days when a given area’s battery energy storage is full—will any generated energy left unused be wasted? RethinkX predicts that these circumstances will create a new class of energy called “super power” at essentially zero cost, usually during the sunniest or most windy days. With intelligent scheduling, this “super power” can be used for non-time-sensitive applications such as charging batteries of idle cars, water desalination and treatment, waste recycling, metal refining, carbon removal, blockchain consensus algorithms, AI drug discovery, and manufacturing activities whose costs are energy-driven. Such a system would not only dramatically decrease energy cost, but also power new applications and inventions that were previously too expensive to pursue. As the cost of energy plummets, the cost of water, materials, manufacturing, computation, and anything that has a major energy component will drop, too. The solar + wind + batteries approach to new energy will also be 100-percent clean energy. Switching to this form of energy can eliminate more than 50 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, which is by far the largest culprit of climate change.
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Kai-Fu Lee (AI 2041: Ten Visions for Our Future)
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it was the tzero that ultimately caught their imagination, like it did for Musk. Eberhard, who was growing increasingly worried about global warming, saw potential for commercialization and a chance to show that gasoline wasn’t the only answer for motor vehicles. At the same time, he and Tarpenning had noticed that lithium-ion batteries had been improving at a rapid rate and were getting cheaper, thanks largely to their use in laptop computers. The auto industry, too, no longer seemed as impenetrable as it once was. Since the 1990s, automakers had been outsourcing many aspects of vehicle production, including the sourcing of components and in some cases even assembly. The men figured it would be possible for a start-up to design and build at least a prototype, with the hope of later raising more money to advance their ambitions. If things went well, a low-volume electric sports car with kick-ass acceleration might
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Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
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The average efficiency of an internal combustion engine in converting fuel into a car’s forward energy ranges from about 14 to 30 percent. For the electric car, it’s about 90 percent. But the real difficulty for anyone arguing the case for gasoline cars is found in the economics. We are fast approaching a time when gasoline cars will no longer be able to compete with electric cars on price. To date, the number one factor holding Tesla back from offering cheaper cars has been the energy cost per unit of its lithium-ion battery packs, which is why it started by selling only high-end vehicles in which the cost of the battery could be absorbed by the premium price point. Tesla has never revealed exactly how much of its cars’ costs can be attributed to the battery pack, but in 2013, chief technology officer JB Straubel told the MIT Technology Review that it accounts for less than a quarter of the cost of each vehicle—which for the eighty-five kilowatt-hour Model S, at that time, would have put the battery pack somewhere in the $18,000 to $25,000 range (assuming Straubel was factoring feature-rich versions of the car into his calculations). That would have put the cost per kilowatt-hour of the battery pack at anywhere between $210 and $300.
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Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
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battery prices will fall to $100 per kilowatt-hour by 2023 just by following the 16 percent per year cost improvement that the world saw between 2010 and 2016. And that’s probably a conservative estimate. GM has predicted that its lithium-ion cell costs will hit $100 per kilowatt-hour by 2021. Keep in mind that these cost reductions require no breakthrough in battery technology, and they don’t take into account improvements likely to arise from increased competition, consolidation, scale, and innovation as automakers and utilities push further into the market. The effect will be dramatic.
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Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
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The Keeling Curve is a useful reality check, one that cuts through all the noise and confusion of the climate and energy debates. Unlike the slopes of the huge volcano on which it is measured, the initially gentle upward curve gets steeper the higher you go. That means that the rate of CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is steadily increasing, from roughly 1 ppm in the early years to about 2 ppm annually today. There is no visible slowdown, no sudden downwards blip, to mark the implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, still less 2009’s Copenhagen ‘two degrees’ commitment or the landmark Paris Agreement of 2015. All those smiling heads of state shaking hands, the diplomats hugging on the podium after marathon sessions of all-night negotiating – none of that actually made any identifiable difference to the Keeling Curve, which is the only thing that actually matters to the planet’s temperature. All our solar panels, wind turbines, electric cars, lithium-ion batteries, LED lightbulbs, nuclear plants, biogas digesters, press conferences, declarations, pieces of paper; all our shouting and arguing, weeping and marching, reporting and ignoring, decrying and denying; all our speeches, movies, websites, lectures and books; our announcements, carbon-neutral targets, moments of joy and despair; none of these to date have so much as made the slightest dent in the steepening upward slope of the Keeling Curve.
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Mark Lynas (Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency)
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Lithium ion anodes have been developed that use lithiated carbons to temper the reactivity of lithium metal
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Kirby W. Beard (Linden's Handbook of Batteries)
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CATL and BYD in China; LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, and SK Innovation in South Korea; and Panasonic in Japan. In 2021, these six companies produced 86 percent of the world’s lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, with CATL alone holding a one-third global share.
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Siddharth Kara (Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives)
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One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement. Obviously, they are not the same sort of inventions: the solar panel (and its cousins the wind turbine and the lithium-ion battery) is hardware,
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Bill McKibben (Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?)
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Today, cell phones use lithium-ion batteries, which aren’t subject to the same confusing requirements. You can safely recharge them at any time, regardless of whether they’re partially charged.
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Bathroom Readers' Institute (Uncle John's Canoramic Bathroom Reader (Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, #27))
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that a lithium ion battery stores 0.54 megajoules of energy per kilogram, while body fat stores 38 megajoules, and kerosene contains 43 megajoules
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Joel Achenbach (A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea: The Race to Kill the BP Oil Gusher)
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U.S. scientists said they have invented a cheap, long-lasting and flexible battery made of aluminum for use in smartphones that can be charged in as little as one minute. The researchers, who detailed their discovery in the journal Nature, said the new aluminum-ion battery has the potential to replace lithium-ion batteries, used in
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Anonymous
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the fewer times you charge the phone, the better, because the lithium ion batteries in phones, laptops, and other devices will start to wear out after a few hundred charges.
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Anonymous
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GGMM E5 has built-in high capacity rechargeable lithium-ion battery that supports 15 hours of playtime at 20 Watts output.
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GGMM E5 Wireless Bluetooth 4.0 Superior Sound Speaker
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Pound for pound, the best lithium-ion battery available today packs 35 times less energy than gasoline.
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Bill Gates (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need)
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Take the lithium-ion batteries needed to power electric cars and store solar energy. Producing such batteries requires cobalt, cobalt that right now is being dug out of the ground by slaves in the Congo, including many children,70 some as young as four.
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Megan Basham (Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda)
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The lithium-ion battery was first invented in an Exxon laboratory in the mid-1970s, during a time when it was thought that the world would run out of oil and Exxon would need to find another way to stay in the mobility business.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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Gasoline has eighty times the energy density of the best lithium ion batteries.
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John Stossel (No, They Can't: Why Government Fails-But Individuals Succeed)
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Lastly, I’ll need a charger. The same vendor on AliExpress that I got my BMS from, Greentime, also sells chargers. I’ll select a 42.2 V charger, as that’s the appropriate voltage for my 10s li-ion battery. An aluminum shell charger rated for 2 A charging will do nicely. That should give me about 5-6 hours for a full charge. Plenty of time for my needs. If I wanted a faster charger though, I can choose anything up to 4.5 A, as my cells are rated for around 1.5 A each for charging current. I don’t want to push them too hard though, so 2 A total is fine for me. And that’s it! That’s all I need to
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Micah Toll (DIY Lithium Batteries: How to Build Your Own Battery Packs)
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During the past decade, observant readers have seen many news items about stunning breakthroughs in battery designs, but I cannot find any ever-accelerating growth in the performance of these portable energy storage devices in the past fifty years. In 1900 the best battery (lead-acid) had an energy density of 25 watt-hours per kilogram; in 2022 the best lithium-ion batteries deployed on a large commercial scale (not the best experimental devices) had an energy density twelve times higher—and this gain corresponds to exponential growth of just 2 percent a year. That is very much in line with the growth of performances of many other industrial techniques and devices—and an order of magnitude below Moore’s law expectations. Moreover, even batteries with ten times the 2022 (commercial) energy density (that is, approaching 3,000 Wh/kg) would store only about a quarter of the energy contained in a kilogram of kerosene, making it clear that jetliners energized by batteries are not on any practical horizon.
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Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
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growth of both solar power and electric cars, there’s now a bigger need for better energy storage systems, resulting in a next generation of lithium-ion batteries with increased range, and, as an added bonus, enough power to lift flying cars.
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Peter H. Diamandis (The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives)
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Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how cheap solar gets unless we can store that energy, and storage on this scale has never been achieved before. Grid-level storage requires colossal batteries. Today’s lithium-ion batteries are woefully inadequate. Their storage capacity would need to be improved ten- to twentyfold, and—if we really want them to be scalable—they have to be built from Earth-abundant elements.
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Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
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Batteries: The Key to a Renewable Future Modern civilization depends upon a constant, reliable stream of energy. However, renewables such as wind and solar are notoriously intermittent; wind depends on the whim of nature, and solar power dries up as the sun goes down. Batteries solve this problem by storing excess power generated throughout the day and supplying it in the absence of sunlight or wind. In addition, batteries respond well to high electricity demands, help lower energy costs, and ensure reliability. They are the most crucial components in any clean power future. Power storage is a much more difficult technological problem than power generation. From lithium ion to rechargeable flow, inventors and developers have experimented with many new ideas. There is not yet a magic bullet to solve our power storing needs. The good news, however, is that in the past decade, batteries have made great strides in capacity and lower prices. This is due in part to the electric vehicle industry, which relies heavily on efficient lithium ion batteries. In 2016, Tesla Inc. began manufacturing its Powerwall and Powerpack energy products at its Gigafactory, currently the world’s largest lithium ion battery factory. The goal of the plant is to drive down the cost of the company’s electric vehicle and energy storage batteries while also spurring innovation. Doing so, according to the company, will make renewable energy storage a more accessible and viable option.
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Al Gore (An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power: Your Action Handbook to Learn the Science, Find Your Voice, and Help Solve the Climate Crisis)