The amount of lithium in a Li-ion battery is not that much, roughly 500g/kwhr. So a 10 kW Tesla Power Wall would contain about 5 kg of lithium. We can make 2.6 billion Power Walls… and E. Musk said at the launch that 2 billion would be enough to convert the entire planet’s energy usage—including industry and transport—to renewable electricity.
Is there enough lithium in the world that we can mine to build enough batteries?
I have mostly seen claims to the contrary. However, there are other technologies that work very well at storing energy at industrial scales; phase change materials come to mind as promising.
My impression is that this sort of thing is not done already because nonrenewables are so cheap. Musk pays more attention to the energy markets than I do, so he might be correct that solar is going to happen in a big way in the near term, but I think this is more likely to be a conspicuous consumption thing than an economically wise thing for the next decade or so.
Investment bank Deutsche Bank is predicting that solar systems will be at grid parity in up to 80 per cent of the global market within 2 years, and says the collapse in the oil price will do little to slow down the solar juggernaut.
Over the last decades solar doubled price efficiency roughly every 7 years.
Batteries also get exponentially cheaper.
Coal doesn’t get cheaper but a little more expensive. It also easy to make it more expensive by creating higher environmental standards and cutting coal subsidies if there’s political desire to do so.
All I know is that current world production of lithium ion batteries is enough to make perhaps 300,000 batteries of the Tesla type per year if all that material went into them.
Elon Musk recently proposed to run the whole world on solar panels + lithium ion batteries.
Is there enough lithium in the world that we can mine to build enough batteries?
Yes, there is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium#Terrestrial gives reserves of 13 million tonnes, ie 13 billion kg. I think these are “proven” reserves, ie economical to mine at current prices.
The amount of lithium in a Li-ion battery is not that much, roughly 500g/kwhr. So a 10 kW Tesla Power Wall would contain about 5 kg of lithium. We can make 2.6 billion Power Walls… and E. Musk said at the launch that 2 billion would be enough to convert the entire planet’s energy usage—including industry and transport—to renewable electricity.
I have mostly seen claims to the contrary. However, there are other technologies that work very well at storing energy at industrial scales; phase change materials come to mind as promising.
My impression is that this sort of thing is not done already because nonrenewables are so cheap. Musk pays more attention to the energy markets than I do, so he might be correct that solar is going to happen in a big way in the near term, but I think this is more likely to be a conspicuous consumption thing than an economically wise thing for the next decade or so.
A bit of Googling brings me to http://reneweconomy.com.au/2015/solar-grid-parity-world-2017:
Over the last decades solar doubled price efficiency roughly every 7 years. Batteries also get exponentially cheaper.
Coal doesn’t get cheaper but a little more expensive. It also easy to make it more expensive by creating higher environmental standards and cutting coal subsidies if there’s political desire to do so.
Lithium doesn’t seem particularly cosmically abundant:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e6/SolarSystemAbundances.png
Cosmic abundance isn’t the important thing. Abundance on earth is.
All I know is that current world production of lithium ion batteries is enough to make perhaps 300,000 batteries of the Tesla type per year if all that material went into them.
That’s not much on the wide scale of things.