It’s easy to divide people. For example,
White vs. Black. And even if you’re Black, are you Black enough?
Or, Smart vs. Stupid. OK, as a Physicist/Engineer I may be smart about a few things, but just talk to any of my neighbors and they’ll tell you how Stupid I am about a whole a whole shitload of other things.
I make life simple and divide people into two categories: Nice People, and Assholes. People often ask me, “Were you born an Asshole, or did you take Asshole lessons?” I do my best to straddle that boundary and try to be a Nice Polite Asshole.
Now, in the physical world, it is much easier to make distinctions between the basic Elements: Are you a Super Nova Element or not?
As stars burn, using fusion, they turn hydrogen into helium, into lithium, into beryllium all the way up to Iron releasing energy in the process. Elements with atomic masses above Iron can’t fuse, but they can fission (e.g. Uranium) and release energy by splitting apart. So all the elements above iron were not produced in the fusion burning in stars, but rather in Super Novas (so they say). So we can easily divide all the elements on the earth between Super Nova and Non-Super Nova elements. Super Nova Elements, e.g., Gold (Au) and Silver (Ag) are rare; elements lighter than Cobalt (Co), e.g. Iron (Fe) are non Super Nova Materials and abundant. See Figure below.
From Oxygen to Iridium, the abundance changes by a factor of trillion (a thousand billion, or a million million, or a thousand thousand thousand, or a hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred hundred). But even here, the Black/White distinctions are not perfect. You can find a find some Super Nova elements (e.g. Sr and Ba) that are more common than some non-Super-Nova-Elements (e.g., Li [Lithium], relatively rare among the Non Super Nova Elements).
Now, the PV Industry, which will eventually power the world, has it easy: Zero Resource Limitations. Si (Silicon) is the second-most abundant element on Earth, after O (oxygen). (E.g., Cadmium Telluride (CdTe) solar cells may work well, but Te is as rare as gold and will never be a long term Big Player in the PV Industry [IMHO]).
The Battery Folks don’t have is so easy. In a previous Post I lauded how Green was that nasty dirty evil heavy metal Lead (Pb) battery industry which is actually the Poster Child for Sustainability. But, looking at the Figure above, you can see that Pb is a Super Nova Element, albeit 10,000 times more abundant than gold, but still a limited resource. Even with their near 100% recycling, Pb (Lead) is perhaps a 25 year resource if life continues as normal (if you can call how we’re living in today’s CoVid-1984 “new normal” as “normal”). There are resource limitations (I hope I’m not starting to sound like Malthus here); for example, if we powered the Earth entirely with Nuclear, we’d use up all the Uranium resources in about 10 years. Uranium is quite rare (see Figure above).
Today Lithium is the So Like Really Cool Big Green Element, but it too is quite limited, and hardly recycled. Perhaps a solution near term for use solely in transportation where weight is important because it is so light. On the Other-Other hand, if people think that batteries have a future for very large scale stationary energy storage, they had better not be looking at Lithium, but rather Iron (Fe) batteries, hundreds of times more available than Li and more than 50% recycled. Of course, for me, I wanted the lowest-cost longest-life technology available, not vapor-ware, so I went with Pb-acid1.
Of course, instead of being so esoteric, and dividing the world into Super Nova Elements and Fusion Product Elements, we could just be simple and divide the world into Light Elements and Heavy Elements (if that is politically correct), e.g.:
So, yeah, Iron has 15 times the density of Lithium
But only 70% the density of Lead, so at least it’s not the worst!
But lead has a density 1/12th that of Uranium, so maybe lead is light because it’s all relative. (Depleted Uranium is great, compared to lead, for penetrating tanks and we have polluted the world with lots of depleted cancer-causing Uranium e.g. in Iraq. Can you say “War Crimes”?).
Anyway, rather than PV and Massive Battery Storage, I like the .idea of PV and Sharing: Superconducting cables crossing the oceans. When the sun shines here, we send our excess power to Russia and China, and vice-versa. Of course this isn’t my idea. I heard this from Larry, an engineer a couple of decades ago who told me about some decades before that being at a workshop with Buckminster Fuller where they came up with this idea as the ultimate (billions of years [at some point our sun will turn into a Red Giant and we will be fried]) solution. For example: all those PV panels the “Greens” installed in Germany could have produced twice as much energy had they been installed in Spain (ditto Indiana vis-a-vis Arizona). It may not all be about producing and storing energy, perhaps it is more about sharing and transporting energy.
And, you know, Energy does makes the world go round!
Of course, another solution to all this energy stuff is that we all just move to Ajijic Mexico or Matagalpa Nicaragua where you never need to worry about either freezing to death or dying of heat prostration (two of my three worries), and you can easily power your home all year round with Solar. Of course in Indiana, we have wood.
From a recent E-Mail from an expert in the battery manufacturing industry:
To this day I can make lead last longer than LFP for about half the price. Not to mention lead is 99.7 recycled, you are lucky to recycle 15 percent of an LFP battery. So I'm still not a fan of lithium chemstries yet.
Yes with lead you will see reduced capacities as they age... and yes eventually they too just crash... Lithium does as well.
Who knows, maybe I’ll get this fellow to start looking at Iron.
By the way, I see I made a mistake!
"thousand thousand thousand" should be "thousand thousand thousand thousand".
How embarassing.
As I've noted before, this is NOT an Investment Blog; here, as Apostates, we fight Narratives. But have you looked at the price of Uranium lately? E.g. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/U-UN.TO?p=U-UN.TO&.tsrc=fin-srch