According to the US Department of Energy, each EV needed ~8 kg of lithium in 2022.
The US Geological Survey has identified 20x10⁹ kg of exploitable lithium reserves.
That means there is currently enough lithium for
20x10⁹ ÷ 8 = 2.5x10⁹ = 2.5 billion
electric vehicles
According to the US DoE, 1.4 million electric vehicles were sold in the US in 2023.
2.5 billion is much, much greater than 1.4 million.
The assertion that “there isn’t enough lithium on Earth to supply just the U.S.'s annual vehicle production” is, therefore, wrong by a factor of
2.5x10⁹ ÷ 1.4x10⁶ = 1786
tl;dr: There is enough lithium on Earth to build 1786x as many EVs as current US annual production.
PS: 13.8 million EVs were sold globally in 2023. That means we could keep producing EVs at the current rate for 181 years before running out of lithium. As more lithium reserves are discovered, that number will only increase.
PPS: In 2023 there were ~1.47 billion cars on Earth. Since there is enough known lithium to build 2.5 billion EVs there is… obviously… enough lithium to replace every single car currently on the planet with an electric one — then build another billion more.
Nope, no problems there, either. Clearly an exponential growth in lithium production. (Australia cut back production in 2019/20 due to oversupply, in fact.) So all “but we can’t extract it” arguments are baseless as well. ( Just getting in early )
Sensationalist headlines about lithium shortages always twist and exaggerate short-term supply-chain issues being experienced by a limited number of battery manufacturers. Covid messing with the lithium supply-chain for a couple of years, for example, does not mean the world is running out of lithium. There never was a lithium shortage. There isn’t a lithium shortage. It’s just that supply — every-so-often — temporarily does not keep up with demand, and writers with an agenda then seize the opportunity to twist the truth and spread FUD.
PPPPS: Just like 99% of lead is recycled from ICE car batteries, an ever-increasing amount of lithium is being recycled from batteries that reach end-of-life. The percentage of new lithium that is required is therefore going down each year. This trend stretches reserves greatly. We will likely shift to a new and better battery chemistry centuries before we come even close to exhausting reserves. There is no reason to believe we will ever run out of lithium.
He is just talking trash.
Nobody is interested in a real discussion.
We have
people feeling smug about their small installation
people that try to drown others with links
people that just believe every optimistic bs a company tells them
people that don’t even believe in climate change
The good thing about this topic is, that it does not really matter what we write here.
In the end, economics and politics will decide where we are heading.
If coal stays untaxed, MS will open up a coal mine to fuel the Ai hype-train.
If PV is cheaper than coal, MS will install PV to fuel the Ai hype-train.
Maybe the world isn’t even that black and white and MS will install PV and open up a coal mine at the same time.
The 2022 Tesla Model S Long Range uses 18650 battery cells with a 3.4Ah capacity
Li-ion cells are not made of pure lithium
Each (~49g) cell only has 3.4 * 0.3 = 1.02g of actual lithium in it *
The 2022 Long Range has 8256 cells in its 100kWh battery pack
The lithium content is thus 8256 * 1.02 = 8421g = 8.4kg
That’s it. A bit over 8kg per car. Nowhere near 700lbs.
tl;dr: You’ve overstated the lithium amount by a factor of ~38. As a result, your math and the conclusions based on it are wrong.
* For a basic Li-ion cell chemistry you multiply the Ah by 0.3 to get the Li content in grams. Folks are tweaking the chemistry all the time, however, so the actual multiplier might be a little bit more (or less) than 0.3. There also might be some lithium used elsewhere in the car (but where/how that might be, I don’t know). Regardless, if we’re just talking about the battery, then the actual amount of pure lithium in it is very small. I’ve seen some chemistries with multipliers of 0.6… but don’t know exactly what the LR uses in 2024. Even with a multiplier of 0.6, the battery pack would only have 16.8kg of pure lithium in it… which makes no functional difference to the matter — your math and conclusions are still wrong.
I posted videos about this some time ago above. Volvo working on Hydrogen and Scania on electric ones. Some range up to a million kilometers or something but that still needs to be proven.
And well cars already have the range for every average length trip. And iirc some up to 800km. But cars and trucks are still vehicles that pollute the city air and make locations unfriendly.
Were the rail infra better in every country then most cargo would be transported with that to your local centre for last mile couriers to bring it to the location.
That figure struck me as a bit odd. 190 million car sales per year in a country with only 340 million would mean that every man, woman and child in the US — from cradle to grave — was buying a new car every 21 months. Nah, that can’t possibly be right. Smells a bit off.
The US Bureau of Economic Analysis (via the St Louis Fed):
Ah, that’s more believable. The real number is 15.5 million for 2023.
( That figure reflects car and light truck sales — both ICE and EV. )
So, in coming to the conclusion that electrifying even the US vehicle fleet was impossible due to a global lack of lithium, you used a production value which was (190÷15.5=) 12x too high, and a lithium content per car figure which was (700lb÷8kg=) 38x too high, resulting in calculations that put demand for lithium (12x38=) 456x higher than reality.
Hopefully, with those corrections taken care of, it is now clear that lithium supplies pose no obstacle to the electrification of the vehicle fleet.
Thanks to Vehicle-to-Grid technology, all of those mobile batteries have an important role to play in load-shifting demand on the grid. A common scenario will be that they charge up while parked “at the office” during the day — taking advantage of cheap and plentiful solar — and once they are driven back home they help power the house during the evening and overnight.
A car air conditioner usually uses 3 to 4 kilowatt, so 400 watts incoming does not make as much of an impact.
That aptera ac is only 1200w, but their testing has shown that they only need 200w for max cooling/heating. They say it is because they are attempting to heat/cool a thermos instead of an aluminum can. The Aptera frame is made out of a carbon fiber reinforced epoxy, instead of metal. The body panels are made from a glass fiber reinforced epoxy.
Australia’s biggest coal generator AGL Energy has reported success with a ground breaking initiative that will allow it to shut down coal units in the middle of the day, effectively making way for rooftop and large scale solar to dominate the grid.
The first trials have been held at AGL’s Bayswater generator … and involves a process called “two-shifting” – meaning it takes a unit offline and brings it back online within a 12 hour period… “Our team desynchronised 20 seconds ahead of the 10am target and resynchronised within 50 seconds of the 3pm target."
Energy industry insiders said the significance of this development … should not be underestimated.
Right now, the main reason for wholesale electricity prices to go negative so often is because coal generators think it is not possible to switch off their units without incurring significant economic cost and damage to the machines.
They have learned how to ramp down by as much as 80 per cent of their rated capacity in response to the gyrations of rooftop solar, and the growing solar duck curve that emerges in the middle of the day, but have been prepared to bid negative prices to ensure they are dispatched by the market operator and stay on line.
That has an impact on other generators, forcing wind and solar farms to shut down – often because their contracts require them to do so when prices are negative – and leading to large amounts of what is called “economic curtailment”.
The ability of coal generators to turn their own units off could allow more wind and solar production, and provide more incentive for additional projects to be built.
“It will be interesting to see if this becomes common practice… It’s one thing to be technically capable of doing this – it’s another for it to be economically viable. It’s also more of a stay of execution rather than something that will significantly extend coal generation."
The only technology grumbling about this development might be big batteries, who might see less of the volatility in prices they depend on, and of course the nuclear boosters who might find it difficult to replicate these capabilities with their technology.
AGL is looking to introduce this as part of the next phase in its transition to “flexibility”, in recognition of the transition to a grid dominated by renewables.
It was once the central principal of grid operations, to have “always on” power, but with the arrival of zero marginal cost wind and solar, and the need for flexible generation, that is now going out the door. Energy experts point out that this does not mean a reduction in reliability – baseload is more a business model than a grid requirement.
There are two ways to do the calculations. The way that ends up with maximum profit margin for the vendor is:
How much are you paying now? Well if we make that into a 30 year loan payment, then find out what the dollar value is. We can do a solar installation that meets your needs for 20% less than that amount.
This method is bullshit. A friend of mine was quoted 54k to install 5kw of solar panels on his house with 2 tesla battery packs. The “discount” price of 2 tesla batteries was going to be $35,000, a retail of 28k each. They are only 5kw each. I can buy the equivalent retail for $1300 from eg4 etc.
If we went with retail prices it would be about 7K for the same thing, minus a crew for 2 days of labor to do the install.
The other way is time and materials. I buy the parts, or pay you for the parts you install, then I pay for your time.
I only skimmed over your math parts, but from what I could tell, you didn’t even account for the lithium reclaimed by recycling. I can’t tell you how many times people tell me “but the landfills”. I tell them that we’ll just recycle the batteries. When they give me a blank look, I ask them, “What do you think happens to the billions of lead-acid batteries currently used by ICE vehicles”? We recycle them. I tell them I used to work for Batteries Plus Bulbs, and lithium battery recycling was second only to SLA and SLI batteries for recycling profitability. But we, ofc didn’t recycle EV batteries - which are a more lucrative business model for battery recycling supply chains than that of recycling PED batteries.
Most folks seem to have an aversion to math, so the less one uses to refute an argument, the better.
Yes, over 99% of lead from ICE batteries is recycled. There’s no reason to think that the same won’t (eventually) happen with lithium as well — and at that point new lithium extraction will be so low as to be inconsequential.
Idk how it works in America but in Romania while they pay you back the energy you give back, they charge you the grid costs of carrying your energy back into the grid, so it’s more ideal to have batteries. Not to mention that putting less strain on the grid by having local battery powers to go through first is a win-win for the infrastructure that might be getting old in a few decades
I live in Canada not America but there are home users who have solar here so still have a lot of questions on this stuff(warranty,return power). Will just have to ask another home user
you are not very good at this math thing
unless you also believe the Earth is a flat disc?
you are using numbers based on perpendicular incidence
The reality is an integral of cosine in both the x and y axis when viewing the earth from the sun
which means you need approximately 49x more surface area than
which is 3.6% of ALL land mass, and still assuming ideal conditions
OH! while also increasing net energy on Earth by increasing the total energy received by the sun by 1000%
You are working under a few assumptions:
-Your privilege allows you to force everyone to use less energy so you feel better
-The Earth is flat
-Solar panels magically convert solar energy into electricity without absorbing heat
Mass forced solar adoption is trying to force people in developing nations that can barely afford energy now, to be priced out of their own development. Kinda racist.
Yes, you are correct in that one can derive and solve an integral equation. You will, however, end up with the same answer. There is more than one way to solve the problem. I chose one of the easier approaches.
The Earth is an oblate spheroid. Oblate spheroid math is, unfortunately, heinous, so let’s treat the Earth as a sphere because that simplifies the math tremendously whilst introducing a negligible amount of error.
How much of the Earth is lit up by the sun? The answer is basically half. The half facing the sun at any point in time.
If you place a big, flat piece of paper behind the Earth, and orient it perpendicular to the sun’s rays, then the Earth will cast a shadow on it. The shadow is dark — absent of light — because the Earth gets in the way and blocks/absorbs that light.
The amount of light missing from the paper is the same as the amount of light that hit the Earth.
The shadow will be a circle with a radius the same as that of the Earth — 6,371km. The area of a circle is πr² so the shadow will be (3.1416*6371000²=) 1.275×10¹⁴ m² in size.
The amount of energy missing from the paper is also the same as the amount of energy that hit the Earth.
Since light is falling perpendicularly on the paper, it is simply 1kW/m² of the shaded area, so 1.275×10¹⁴ kW.
You can get the same result by simply cutting the Earth in half and noting that the light that previously fell on the curved part of the planet now falls on the flat part of the cut.
The advantage of this approach is that it immediately gives us perpendicular (always noon and summer) sunlight — something that is used to determine peak output from solar panels — eliminating any need to do panel tilt math as well.
No matter how one manufactures, positions, or orients panels, one cannot capture more than 1.275×10¹⁴ kW. It forms the upper limit on how much solar energy can be harvested from the surface of the Earth. (Unless you allow the atmosphere to be stripped off, in which case you can harvest up to 36% more.)
So, treating the Earth as a flat disc and performing simple math gives the same answer as treating the Earth as an oblate spheroid and performing complex math.
No, you don’t.
While 0.07436% is the minimum amount of land you would need to cover with solar panels to meet the entire planet’s electricity needs, you actually want to spread panels around the planet as much as possible to improve availability and negate the negative effects of localised weather.
You, for some reason, see land use as a bad thing. It is, in fact, a good thing. The planet has a staggering amount of poor-quality and unutilised (or underutilised) land. The more of that land we can press into service to farm photons, the better!
Since multiple industries (especially agriculture) and solar can co-exists happily, you don’t even need to dedicate land exclusively to solar. Keep using it for agriculture, and just add solar. No-one loses.
Land use arguments — like lithium arguments — are much ado about nothing. The actual numbers involved are so small as to be inconsequential. You could build and deploy all the panels needed to power the world with 99.99% availability and not even notice them from space.
As a former physics teacher with a postgrad degree in astronomy from the Swinburne Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing, I’d say my math skills are adequate for the task at hand.
I am human, though, and do make silly mistakes from time-to-time. This, however, is not one of those times.
I’ve no Idea what that is even supposed to mean, or where the 1000% figure came from.
Privilege? Don’t waste time going there. I’m not forcing anyone to do anything. I just use data and science to build a model of the universe which is a good approximation of reality, and that allows me to reliably predict what will happen in the future and modify my behaviour accordingly to optimise the outcome for my family. Use as much energy as you like — makes no difference to me. Barring some 4-sigma event, the climate is screwed regardless of what we do… so your personal actions no longer matter (in the big scheme of things). Breeders doomed us to ecological collapse… and it’s too late to prevent the worst of the effects. The best humanity can do is try and manage the crash — but vested interests and general ignorance means that is unlikely to be very successful. Nature will thus teach us increasingly harsh and painful lessons, and forcibly put us in our place.
The Earth is an oblate spheroid. Using a flat shadow or cross-section to simplify and solve a math problem is not the same as believing the planet is flat.
I haven’t been party to your previous discussions about solar panels causing additional heating, but you happen to be right about that one. Solar panels do have a lower albedo than the typical background they are mounted on. They thus decrease the amount of energy reflected back into space and trap more energy on Earth — contributing to heating. The effect is probably not as significant as you think it is, but I haven’t crunched the numbers so don’t know for sure — it is definitely non-zero, though.
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