I am about to get battery backup and solar installed in an already electrified house. Seems like the best thing I can currently do to reduce my carbon footprint. However, I can't help wonder if I should be worried about the finite resources used to create the batteries and the impact of the waste created when the batteries reach their end of life. Is this a sustainable model for energy storage?
However, you're doing the right thing. It's important to not let the great become the enemy of the good. Yes, there is work to be done to make batteries zero impact. But no matter what's happening in the world of batteries it is nothing compared to the extraordinary destructive force of coal, oil, and gas globally.
The rare metals in your battery will be recovered at a rate of 95% and used in a new battery that will probably store more energy with the same amount of metals. Batteries seem pretty sustainable.
What rare metals are in LFP batteries? Lithium? We have a lithium glut.
It should be noted that if an electric vehicle has 70 KWh of batteries in it, then electrifying the 283 million motor vehicles in the US would need 20 TWh of batteries. This is considerably more than would be needed to convert the US grid to 100% renewables (assuming proper use of non-battery storage technologies as well for longer term storage). The implication here is that if BEVs win, then a renewable grid is not a big additional step.
Do you worry about the finite materials you use when you get a plastic container, or buy a car, or appliances, or stone countertops?
This is a very odd belief to have when it comes to batteries, because we are nowhere close to even discovering how much, say, lithium we have easily available, and more deposits are discovered all the time these days. Nobody bothered to identify them in the past, so we are looking now.
Also, batteries will be far more recycled than, say, your furniture or all the other things in the house. They are expecting >90% recovery of the materials, and in the 10-20 years of use, battery technology advances so much that when they get remade into more batteries, that 90% recovery will store even more electricity than the 100% of materials did the first time.
While I'm glad people are having these concerns, in general, they should be concerns about all aspects of consumed goods, not just the goods that are already doing the most to reduce environmental impact.
Sodium batteries are on the verge of commercialization, they're better in almost every way but energy density, making them ideal for energy storage imo. My hope is that this and other steps like this will make battery storage sustainable.
