Comment on Solar power surpasses coal in EU for first time
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 1 week agoMost EVs this year will use LFP batteries because they are much cheaper. They also provide grid with a free resource, and EU likely has the critical mass to let consumers monetize service to grid. A big advantage of LFP is longer life, and so more consumer profit opportunity, and less investment required by grid.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I’ll take Germany as an example to see if the numbers make sense.
Annual electricity consumption in Germany is about 512 TWh/year, which means they use about 1.4 TWh every day. Let’s assume that all of it is produce by renewable means, and about 50% of the daily energy demand needs to be buffered in grid energy storage to balance the intermitent nature of renewable energy production. This means you would need about 701 GWh of storage capacity in total. If we assume that the each car has about 100 kWh of storage capacity, you would need about 7 million cars like that. The population of Germany is about 83 million, so roungly 1 car per 12 people should do the trick.
It’s nothing crazy like 20 cars per one person. on the contrary, it looks surprisingly doable, given that Germany already has abouto 49 million cars registered. However, producing millions of batteries using NMC or NCA technology is a bottle neck. LFP would be cheaper, but it still requires lithium. Meeting the demands of one country is entirely doable, but the rest of the world uses electricity too. Would there be enough lithium for all the LFP batteries we would need? Estimating that is very tricky due to the way mineral exploration works, but let’s not dive into that rabbit hole today.
Anyway, using the existing battery chemistries to take steps in this direction should be worth it because transportation and electricity production are major sources of CO2 emissions. I still don’t think these technologies are quite enough to meet the demand. We really need to develop some alternate energy storage solutions that don’t depend on relatively rare elements like lithium and cobalt. For example, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, oxygen would be great alternatives if we just figure out how to make viable batteries out of them.
humanspiral@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Less because most electricity is consumed in daytime, or can be incentivized to with Summer solar.
US sells 1 car per 20 people every year. Not sure about Germany. But if same, 20% of car sales as EVs is potential to meet that in 3 years.
11m EVs sold in China 2024. Lithium prices not skyrocketing, and so production level could absorb more.
Sodium Ion batteries are in commercial production now. It does mean unlimited battery materials for humanity. Lithium is not particularly rare though. It is Nickel and Cobalt that are rare, and LFP doesn’t use those. Hydrogen is important to just have alternate use of both abundant renewables, and abundant batteries.
Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz 6 days ago
Totally forgot about hydrogen. Using that technology in cars has proven to be possible in Norway, so clearly that’s an option too. When energy production exceeds demand, it makes sense to dump that energy into hydrolysis, and later use that hydrogen when the opposite happens. You could use that with industrial scale solutions and cars as well, so that seems like viable strategy.