I'm not saying lithium ion is going to replace jet fuel, obviously the energy density of jet fuel is still way better. As a metric for how far battery tech has come though it works.
600 miles? Almost not worth taking a plane (if we had less onerous airports that would not be the case), but if you tried to do that with lead acid batteries in 1970 it would be 50 miles i.e. lucky to get off the ground before the battery overheats. So we see a transition from actually pointless to a niche use case.
Steam could power cars and aircraft too, but we don't do that for a reason. It isn't efficient compared to using hydrocarbon fuels. Same with electric planes. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it.
600 miles with 9 passengers at 240 knots and 10,000 feet altitude. That's massively pathetic compared to a turboprop or jet.
That's a bold statement, the planet is pretty big.
It's true. Estimated reserves are fairly well known. That is, we can estimate pretty closely the entirety of lithium on the planet. Of that, about 25% is recoverable. Simply not enough to go around. Also, as you approach that 25% number, the costs of recovery are going to go way up just as they have for other minerals. Sure, we can recover newly found gold ores where it is profitable at $3000 an ounce, but we're not going to find lumps of gold just lying on the ground like our ancestors did as recently as 200 years ago.
Every thirty years people pointed out that the known oil reserves would run out in 30 years but by the time the doomsday date arrived had found more reserves.
Lithium will be no different.
We even still keep finding gold veins although the concentrations aren't as high as our ancestors enjoyed.
We know about oil reserves that are untapped. They're untapped for a reason: We can't extract them economically. Lithium is the same way. Much of it cannot be extracted economically. As use goes up, that cost of extraction of more marginal and difficult to refine sources will go up too.
Well maybe we can do some calculations on that. Get a ratio of lithium mass to stored charge. Multiply it by the likely lithium available to be mined (although like I said that number has huge error bars on it), and then look at the kind of buffering that a 50x current power grid would need.
In order to make lithium battery storage on the grid a viable thing and give solar and wind the ability to supply power 24/7 you are looking at something like 7 to 14 days of storage for as much as 75% of the power supplied on the grid daily. This allows for lulls in wind, bad weather that drops solar production, and for nighttime use in the case of solar. The batteries would at 10% of today's costs run into the hundreds of trillions installed. We don't need any of that--ZERO--with nuclear and natural gas (both of which are actually renewable unlike wind and solar).
Yea that's not making it easy, but they're doing that because of people fear mongering about the lighting on fire. Given time more elegant solutions are possible.
Tesla did it in part because it prevents third party repair of their batteries. Tesla didn't want independent mechanics and the like fixing their cars far cheaper than their dealers charge.
As for an "elegant" solution. There's none that I know of. Potting is an electronics industry standard going back to the 1940's. Sure, the materials have improved, but the end product is not economically fixable, then or now.
To give you a microcosm example companies like Dewalt, Ryobi, and Milkwake are basically sticking a bunch of 18650 cells in a plastic box with a controller and calling it their own propriety battery.
When market standardization takes over it is stable, but these silly "only invented here" strategies need to be defeated first. Look at the double AA battery and its counterparts.
For multiple generations those standards held and anybody who rebelled died. There was no reason not to do the same thing with new battery chemsitry, all we needed to do was standardize charging logic chips, but like I said every company was pulling in their own direction and there was no big playbook to look towards.
That's a fixable problem.
No, it really isn't. The little lithium cells everybody is using are due to manufacturing inertia. It's often difficult to change what's become standardized on a wide scale. That's why the US hasn't adopted the metric system. It's simply too expensive to change over suddenly. Maybe in a few centuries the US will gradually get there, but it won't be next week.
When I saw removable battery they could be entirely modular. Car batteries being a casing with a bunch of standardized small batteries with EEPROM about the chemistry and charge cycles and such that allows the casing charger to know how to use it.
The fact you need massive amounts of equipment to swap out an EV battery, and that it takes more than a few minutes to do it, is going to be an insoluble problem. Also, the 'one-size-fits-all' requirement would be a likely fail in the market. It isn't going to be a solution.
If any cell starts misbehaving cut it off and potentially eject it. Yes it's a lot of engineering effort at the start, but when something is standardized we can build a whole lot of them and that means we can use dedicated production lines so even complicated machines become cheap.
Gruber Motors already was doing that. It took them about 2 - 3 days to get into a Tesla battery pack and find the failed cell(s). The company also has had several battery fires. They've also found other issues in opening a battery pack that couldn't be repaired like infiltration of moisture that rotted the batteries.
Potting the battery as I pointed out has made that nearly impossible, and Tesla did it more to keep companies like Gruber from fixing their products than any concern about safety.
Cars are an excellent example of this fact. They are very complicated machines. Computers even more so. It's completely wrong to look at the cost of ordering 10 novel computers and say "that is the cost of a computer".
Or a one off car (which is like 10 million) and say "that is the cost of a car".
The real question is "how much would it cost per unit if we made a billion of these things".
Cars are not that complex except for all the added crap necessary to meet some government regulation or another or because of added bling. That I need a smart phone to operate a Tesla, as one example, is asininely stupid.
"the cost of integrating that into the grid is beyond any nations ability to pay for it"
What? With AC you sync the phase and you add power with a slightly higher voltage than the grid. With DC it's even simpler (and we should switch to a DC grid).
The AC v. DC grid idea was settled long, long ago. DC is horribly inefficient when used on a large grid. AC won because it works. With DC you are limited in what you can run as devices. Adding or subtracting loads to a DC system is a major problem that you can't resolve. Conversion of DC to AC adds complexity and costs without any real advantage.
The one place where DC is viable is in transmission of power using ocean or lake bottom cables. DC doesn't couple to the water leading to a serious line loss of power like AC does. In this special case, DC is the way to go because the loss is sufficient that DC becomes economical.
This is the problem with DC in a nutshell:
Voltage changes with changes in the load and you get a voltage loss with each load in the circuit.
There are machines that do this right now.
https://www.amazon.com/Inverter-Sta...cphy=9007918&hvtargid=pla-2281435178538&psc=1
That's $120, but if it became standard to the meters to support plug and play generation and buffering then that would be like $10 added cost per meter, again if you make them all the same way it gets cheap. The greatest enemy of efficiency is unnecessary specialization (ask the military logistics planers).
We were talking about batteries buffering peaks with an underlying primary source of nuclear fission.
Inverters on a scale to do major distribution systems just don't fly. For those, dynamic conversion is usually used, that is motor-generator sets.
