31 ms·

I want to love the idea of large battery banks. However I'm getting a lot of angry faces for what seems like logical questions of a layman: - What communities

by 0des 4y ago

I want to love the idea of large battery banks. However I'm getting a lot of angry faces for what seems like logical questions of a layman: - What communities do those minerals come from, and what ailments arise from the sequestration and disposal of them? How are those people taken care of for their effort in comparison with modern wage standards? - What changes are happening to emergency services and fire now that we have a battery, similar to car or marine batteries, which are difficult to extinguish en masse? - How are these recycled? I dont mean, just ship it to X company for rebate, I mean what actually happens to the waste products and how are those neutralized? Please help me feel better about these so I can transition off my current (unreliable) hydroelectric power source without losing sleep. Bonus points if you can reply without treating me as a shit-starter or idiot southerner, I'm asking completely with clean hands here.

WorldMaker 4y ago
As mentioned elsewhere, these questions keep coming in to derail frank discussions of renewable energy, so a lot of people are tired of them because they are often used as an argument tactic not in good faith. Sometimes the question is "why not just google it yourself", though of course at this point because the questions are asked in such ways as to derail arguments that google is full of awful nonsense and bad faith versions of the answers so "just google it" isn't a great response either. - Lithium is the primary element and is primarily sourced from salt basins. It's not mined so much as it is skimmed from salt lake brines and such. It's in the top three elements in the periodic table which also puts it among the most common elements in the known universe. There are sometimes environmental concerns about lithium mining sometimes getting "chemical slurries" released into downstream water sources, but even (especially?) "cheap" mining operations want to avoid them because there are often other things they could sell if they recaptured those "slurries". - Cobalt is the only "rare earth metal" often involved in a shrinking minority of battery Lithium Ion compositions (many are Cobalt-free already or "mostly no Cobalt"). Despite the periodic table group name "rare earth metal", Cobalt is not that all that rare on Earth and for centuries was a "waste product" coming out of Nickel and Tin mines known mostly for its usefulness in blue paints (which is why the word "cobalt" is so associated with blue today). Nickel and tin mines aren't great, but people are always going to mine nickel and tin for their many, many uses. Cobalt is just going to keep being a "waste product" of that. But many Lithium Ion batteries don't need Cobalt any more in their formulations anyway. - Fire and emergency services are expected to get retraining on Lithium Ion batteries, but my understanding is mostly for high voltage concerns rather than extinguishing concerns. A classic car/marine battery is a Lead Acid composition, and far more toxic (lead poisoning; chemical/acid burns). It's also a lot lower voltage as most Lead Acid batteries can barely move 12 volts in a steady current. Lithium Ion batteries can deliver a lot more voltage faster and learning to safely disconnect the batteries is much more important (because the risk of an electric shock is much worse). To my understanding, once circuits are safely disconnected (and many large Lithium Ion battery packs have multiple redundant systems to do so as automatically as possible at this point) extinguishing fires is generally easier than a Lead Acid battery. - To my understanding: Lithium is easily recycled. It's a metal that forms salts easily. Cobalt is straight forward to recycle in most battery compositions, but rarely worth the effort economically (because Cobalt is a "waste product" of other mining). ETA: - Better than recycling is reuse. As far as we can tell the reuse cycles for lithium ion batteries are relatively extremely high. Very few EV car batteries have left their "primary usage" yet (as car batteries), even with just about a decade and a half of car sales already. Almost none of those that did move into "secondary usage" in grid storage or other secondary uses have left those roles/needed recycling. Right now it seems like large Lithium Ion batteries may have multiple decades of time in primary and secondary usages long before recycling is even a direct need. (Yes, directly in contrast to small Lithium Ion batteries people experience in phones/laptops. Size and heat management change a lot of the experience/expectations.)
- gamblor956 4y ago
  A lot of what you wrote is wrong. Cobalt is not a rare earth metal in terms of abundance or chemical classification. There are a number of niche rare-earth lithium batteries chemistries on the market, but these batteries are not manufactured in large quantities and are quite expensive. Cobalt hasn't been a waste product of nickel and tin mining for several decades. It is a very desirable byproduct of nickel and tin mining, and in many modern mines, the nickel and tin are the waste product. (Cobalt is currently selling for $72,xxx/ton. Nickel is selling for 22,2xx/ton; Tin for 25,xxx/ton.) Lithium-battery makers are moving away from cobalt-based chemistries because it is too expensive, but cobalt chemistries are still considered the most performative. Lithium-based batteries are highly flammable, and extinguishing fires in lithium-based batteries generally takes a lot of water (several fire trucks worth) and time (up to a week in the worst cases). Just last week a story hit HN about a Tesla that burned for several days and required 40,000 gallons of water to put out. Lithium batteries are not easily recycled. While the lithium itself is trivial to recycle, the products containing lithium (batteries) generally require a fair amount of work to disassemble before the lithium can be recycled. Lead acid batteries are actually much easier to recycle due to their much simpler construction.
bruce343434 4y ago
- Lithium mining fucks the planet like all mining, and miners don't earn a livable wage to our standard. - Lithium-ion battery fires are considered a Class B fire, so a standard ABC or dry chemical fire extinguisher should be used. - I'm not sure. I'm sure it's an industrial process but I can't imagine that lithium can not be recycled.
photochemsyn 4y ago
1) Solar PV + battery storage is the only real option for the off-the-grid electical home, and you'd want maximum power output per roof area. The best option for PV is monocrystalline Si panels, produced almost entirely in China with proprietary technology. Lifetime is basically indefinite as well, >30 yr, and they contain no heavy metals so recycling is not much of an issue. Battery technology for home use is more variable, but LiFePO4 (lithium iron-phosphate) is probably the optimal tech at present (cost is relatively high, recycling is not much of an issue as there's no toxic heavy metals involved). 2) A properly designed PV-battery system has little fire risk, and probably less than a tank full of gasoline or diesel fuel or pressurized propane gas (which go off like bombs during wildfires). You also have to consider whether or not a grid-tied system or a completely off-the-grid system is the optimal choice. This depends a lot on local utility policy (net metering means you get paid as a power provider if you're feeding more power to the grid than you use), and whether or not you want reliable power if the grid goes down, i.e. can you disconnect from the grid and just use your battery bank for power at night, and so on. A reputable installer will have answers to these questions for your local area.
natmaka 4y ago
3/ (recycling) There are massive projects, for example https://northvolt.com/ https://northvolt.com/
weberer 4y ago
I'd imagine you'd want lead-acid batteries for a home backup solution since weight isn't an issue. They're easily recycled and not a real fire hazard.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  Lead-acid batteries do not like being cycled (1500 vs >5k in LiFePO4) or being under constant load - everyone operating a server UPS knows that. The other problem with LA batteries is that they can produce hydrogen gas during operation... which is why you have to be careful when jumpstarting a car [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_start_(vehicle)#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_start_(vehicle)#Limitatio...
- beambot 4y ago
  I could easily quibble with some of the assumptions, but a basic analysis [1] shows that... > A USGS report from 2011 reports 80 million tons (Mt) of lead in known reserves worldwide, with 7 Mt in the U.S. [...] That’s still not enough to build the battery for the U.S. alone. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
jchw 4y ago
The angry faces are likely a knee-jerk to what other people perceive as a "but sometimes!" response. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 Not exactly applicable of course, but I'm just trying to give you an idea of where I think the disconnect comes from. Honestly, I get it. How many people ask about the ethical concerns when it comes to having traditional utilities hooked up to their home? I've honestly never once thought about what my particular power company does to the environment.
r00fus 4y ago
You need to ask those same questions of the energy sources currently being exploited as well if you want to be considered to be asking in good faith.
- 0xffff2 4y ago
  Batteries are a means of energy storage, not an energy source. If OP was talking about solar, yeah that needs to be compared against coal. Adding huge batteries to your home is an entirely new phenomenon. There is no comparison to be made.
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    Batteries are a prerequisite to making other energy sources viable though. So you really do need to be comparing current energy sources to be acting in good faith because the presence of batteries make it possible to better exploit solar or wind energy.
CyanBird 4y ago
- What communities do those minerals come from, and what ailments arise from the sequestration and disposal of them? Preface: everything you do has an environmental cost, because you are a human, and on top a human living in a developed country (so I assume), understand this cost and understand that despite things having costs it is generally better to be environmentally conscious and take environmentally conscious routes than not doing it Depends on what type of battery you are using, lead acid batteries such as cars are common and already produced at scale despite their environmental cost, because battery banks do not have weight limitations it is generally recommended to not use lithium for them and instead use other types of batteries for the task Lithium batteries have different processing costs, if you are using lithium assume that the workers are being paid more or less fairly at market rates, if you are using lead, then your guess is as good as mine because of the sprawling production line, who knows what an iron miner in west papua earns/month, any product you ever buy will have human suffering embedded to it as a cost, any product, because suffering is inherent to both human existence and production of goods at competitive prices, that's how it is, deal with it > What changes are happening to emergency services and fire now that we have a battery, similar to car or marine batteries, which are difficult to extinguish en masse? No changes are happening, and you need to deal with that uncertainty, changes will start to happen when enough lithium based vehicles start setting themselves on fire and people dying that the system is forced to react and develop countermeasures, the world is ruled by institutional inertia, no changes will happen until that inertia is overcome by these new forces, which will happen eventually, only after enough accidents have happened and attention has been called to the issue > How are these recycled? I dont mean, just ship it to X company for rebate, I mean what actually happens to the waste products and how are those neutralized? Unknown. Lead acid batteries can be recycled, unknown if tightly packaged/glued lithium composites wrapped in plastics akin to tetrapak can be recycled, there are facilities which do it, they grind the batteries to dust for it tho, then reprocess what they can But, the good thing is that unlike tetrapak recycling there's lots of money on the line for novel methods of lithium recycling https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-lithium-ion-batteries-can-perform-better-than-new-ones/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-lithium-... But yeah, overall it is a good outlook and it is developing fast vs current state of affairs with fossil fuels
theshrike79 4y ago
Battery materials can be recycled to 90-95% efficiency _today_. This means the stuff needs to be dug up only once and it can be used and reused for decades. This is infinitely better than digging up more and more fossil fuels and literally burning them up in smoke.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  > This means the stuff needs to be dug up only once and it can be used and reused for decades. Technically true but if you want widespread battery adoption required for it to work, you still need to dig a lot more of it from the ground. Humanity has nowhere near enough materials right now to cover for even the very short term needs.
  - theshrike79 4y ago
    That's true. On the other hand battery tech is improving at a breakneck speed at the moment due to the money being poured into it by huge companies. Tesla has already moved to LFP batteries that don't need any Cobalt and there are dozens of companies with working prototypes/pre-production models with different properties.

by 0des 4y ago

WorldMaker 4y ago

As mentioned elsewhere, these questions keep coming in to derail frank discussions of renewable energy, so a lot of people are tired of them because they are often used as an argument tactic not in good faith. Sometimes the question is "why not just google it yourself", though of course at this point because the questions are asked in such ways as to derail arguments that google is full of awful nonsense and bad faith versions of the answers so "just google it" isn't a great response either. - Lithium is the primary element and is primarily sourced from salt basins. It's not mined so much as it is skimmed from salt lake brines and such. It's in the top three elements in the periodic table which also puts it among the most common elements in the known universe. There are sometimes environmental concerns about lithium mining sometimes getting "chemical slurries" released into downstream water sources, but even (especially?) "cheap" mining operations want to avoid them because there are often other things they could sell if they recaptured those "slurries". - Cobalt is the only "rare earth metal" often involved in a shrinking minority of battery Lithium Ion compositions (many are Cobalt-free already or "mostly no Cobalt"). Despite the periodic table group name "rare earth metal", Cobalt is not that all that rare on Earth and for centuries was a "waste product" coming out of Nickel and Tin mines known mostly for its usefulness in blue paints (which is why the word "cobalt" is so associated with blue today). Nickel and tin mines aren't great, but people are always going to mine nickel and tin for their many, many uses. Cobalt is just going to keep being a "waste product" of that. But many Lithium Ion batteries don't need Cobalt any more in their formulations anyway. - Fire and emergency services are expected to get retraining on Lithium Ion batteries, but my understanding is mostly for high voltage concerns rather than extinguishing concerns. A classic car/marine battery is a Lead Acid composition, and far more toxic (lead poisoning; chemical/acid burns). It's also a lot lower voltage as most Lead Acid batteries can barely move 12 volts in a steady current. Lithium Ion batteries can deliver a lot more voltage faster and learning to safely disconnect the batteries is much more important (because the risk of an electric shock is much worse). To my understanding, once circuits are safely disconnected (and many large Lithium Ion battery packs have multiple redundant systems to do so as automatically as possible at this point) extinguishing fires is generally easier than a Lead Acid battery. - To my understanding: Lithium is easily recycled. It's a metal that forms salts easily. Cobalt is straight forward to recycle in most battery compositions, but rarely worth the effort economically (because Cobalt is a "waste product" of other mining). ETA: - Better than recycling is reuse. As far as we can tell the reuse cycles for lithium ion batteries are relatively extremely high. Very few EV car batteries have left their "primary usage" yet (as car batteries), even with just about a decade and a half of car sales already. Almost none of those that did move into "secondary usage" in grid storage or other secondary uses have left those roles/needed recycling. Right now it seems like large Lithium Ion batteries may have multiple decades of time in primary and secondary usages long before recycling is even a direct need. (Yes, directly in contrast to small Lithium Ion batteries people experience in phones/laptops. Size and heat management change a lot of the experience/expectations.)

gamblor956 4y ago
A lot of what you wrote is wrong. Cobalt is not a rare earth metal in terms of abundance or chemical classification. There are a number of niche rare-earth lithium batteries chemistries on the market, but these batteries are not manufactured in large quantities and are quite expensive. Cobalt hasn't been a waste product of nickel and tin mining for several decades. It is a very desirable byproduct of nickel and tin mining, and in many modern mines, the nickel and tin are the waste product. (Cobalt is currently selling for $72,xxx/ton. Nickel is selling for 22,2xx/ton; Tin for 25,xxx/ton.) Lithium-battery makers are moving away from cobalt-based chemistries because it is too expensive, but cobalt chemistries are still considered the most performative. Lithium-based batteries are highly flammable, and extinguishing fires in lithium-based batteries generally takes a lot of water (several fire trucks worth) and time (up to a week in the worst cases). Just last week a story hit HN about a Tesla that burned for several days and required 40,000 gallons of water to put out. Lithium batteries are not easily recycled. While the lithium itself is trivial to recycle, the products containing lithium (batteries) generally require a fair amount of work to disassemble before the lithium can be recycled. Lead acid batteries are actually much easier to recycle due to their much simpler construction.

bruce343434 4y ago

- Lithium mining fucks the planet like all mining, and miners don't earn a livable wage to our standard. - Lithium-ion battery fires are considered a Class B fire, so a standard ABC or dry chemical fire extinguisher should be used. - I'm not sure. I'm sure it's an industrial process but I can't imagine that lithium can not be recycled.

photochemsyn 4y ago

1) Solar PV + battery storage is the only real option for the off-the-grid electical home, and you'd want maximum power output per roof area. The best option for PV is monocrystalline Si panels, produced almost entirely in China with proprietary technology. Lifetime is basically indefinite as well, >30 yr, and they contain no heavy metals so recycling is not much of an issue. Battery technology for home use is more variable, but LiFePO4 (lithium iron-phosphate) is probably the optimal tech at present (cost is relatively high, recycling is not much of an issue as there's no toxic heavy metals involved). 2) A properly designed PV-battery system has little fire risk, and probably less than a tank full of gasoline or diesel fuel or pressurized propane gas (which go off like bombs during wildfires). You also have to consider whether or not a grid-tied system or a completely off-the-grid system is the optimal choice. This depends a lot on local utility policy (net metering means you get paid as a power provider if you're feeding more power to the grid than you use), and whether or not you want reliable power if the grid goes down, i.e. can you disconnect from the grid and just use your battery bank for power at night, and so on. A reputable installer will have answers to these questions for your local area.

natmaka 4y ago

3/ (recycling) There are massive projects, for example https://northvolt.com/ https://northvolt.com/

weberer 4y ago

I'd imagine you'd want lead-acid batteries for a home backup solution since weight isn't an issue. They're easily recycled and not a real fire hazard.

mschuster91 4y ago
Lead-acid batteries do not like being cycled (1500 vs >5k in LiFePO4) or being under constant load - everyone operating a server UPS knows that. The other problem with LA batteries is that they can produce hydrogen gas during operation... which is why you have to be careful when jumpstarting a car [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_start_(vehicle)#Limitations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_start_(vehicle)#Limitatio...
beambot 4y ago
I could easily quibble with some of the assumptions, but a basic analysis [1] shows that... > A USGS report from 2011 reports 80 million tons (Mt) of lead in known reserves worldwide, with 7 Mt in the U.S. [...] That’s still not enough to build the battery for the U.S. alone. https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

jchw 4y ago

The angry faces are likely a knee-jerk to what other people perceive as a "but sometimes!" response. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiYO1TObNz8 Not exactly applicable of course, but I'm just trying to give you an idea of where I think the disconnect comes from. Honestly, I get it. How many people ask about the ethical concerns when it comes to having traditional utilities hooked up to their home? I've honestly never once thought about what my particular power company does to the environment.

r00fus 4y ago

You need to ask those same questions of the energy sources currently being exploited as well if you want to be considered to be asking in good faith.

0xffff2 4y ago
Batteries are a means of energy storage, not an energy source. If OP was talking about solar, yeah that needs to be compared against coal. Adding huge batteries to your home is an entirely new phenomenon. There is no comparison to be made.
- mywittyname 4y ago
  Batteries are a prerequisite to making other energy sources viable though. So you really do need to be comparing current energy sources to be acting in good faith because the presence of batteries make it possible to better exploit solar or wind energy.

CyanBird 4y ago

- What communities do those minerals come from, and what ailments arise from the sequestration and disposal of them? Preface: everything you do has an environmental cost, because you are a human, and on top a human living in a developed country (so I assume), understand this cost and understand that despite things having costs it is generally better to be environmentally conscious and take environmentally conscious routes than not doing it Depends on what type of battery you are using, lead acid batteries such as cars are common and already produced at scale despite their environmental cost, because battery banks do not have weight limitations it is generally recommended to not use lithium for them and instead use other types of batteries for the task Lithium batteries have different processing costs, if you are using lithium assume that the workers are being paid more or less fairly at market rates, if you are using lead, then your guess is as good as mine because of the sprawling production line, who knows what an iron miner in west papua earns/month, any product you ever buy will have human suffering embedded to it as a cost, any product, because suffering is inherent to both human existence and production of goods at competitive prices, that's how it is, deal with it > What changes are happening to emergency services and fire now that we have a battery, similar to car or marine batteries, which are difficult to extinguish en masse? No changes are happening, and you need to deal with that uncertainty, changes will start to happen when enough lithium based vehicles start setting themselves on fire and people dying that the system is forced to react and develop countermeasures, the world is ruled by institutional inertia, no changes will happen until that inertia is overcome by these new forces, which will happen eventually, only after enough accidents have happened and attention has been called to the issue > How are these recycled? I dont mean, just ship it to X company for rebate, I mean what actually happens to the waste products and how are those neutralized? Unknown. Lead acid batteries can be recycled, unknown if tightly packaged/glued lithium composites wrapped in plastics akin to tetrapak can be recycled, there are facilities which do it, they grind the batteries to dust for it tho, then reprocess what they can But, the good thing is that unlike tetrapak recycling there's lots of money on the line for novel methods of lithium recycling https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-lithium-ion-batteries-can-perform-better-than-new-ones/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/recycled-lithium-... But yeah, overall it is a good outlook and it is developing fast vs current state of affairs with fossil fuels

theshrike79 4y ago

Battery materials can be recycled to 90-95% efficiency _today_. This means the stuff needs to be dug up only once and it can be used and reused for decades. This is infinitely better than digging up more and more fossil fuels and literally burning them up in smoke.

ElectricalUnion 4y ago
> This means the stuff needs to be dug up only once and it can be used and reused for decades. Technically true but if you want widespread battery adoption required for it to work, you still need to dig a lot more of it from the ground. Humanity has nowhere near enough materials right now to cover for even the very short term needs.
- theshrike79 4y ago
  That's true. On the other hand battery tech is improving at a breakneck speed at the moment due to the money being poured into it by huge companies. Tesla has already moved to LFP batteries that don't need any Cobalt and there are dozens of companies with working prototypes/pre-production models with different properties.