Batteries: How amazing are they?

Our relationship with batteries, is an interesting one.?

Dry-cell batteries are available in various sizes such as AAA, AA, C, D, and 9V, which are suited for general-purpose applications such as TV remote controls, radios, flashlights, game controllers, media players, and clocks. ??They also are used for obscure things like toy light sabres, nose-hair trimmers and vibrating toothbrushes.?We seem to want to power a large number of useful, and useless, things.?

World-wide, over the next 20 years, the current generation is expected to spend in the order of half a trillion dollars on throw-away batteries. ?

In the US alone, (about 30% of global demand), more than 100 million kgs of alkaline, zinc, cadmium, lead and nickel are binned, and replaced with new batteries.?Most of these batteries last a paltry 18 hours before becomes rubbish.?A football stadium full of them every year; and only 5% are recycled.

At about 30 g of metal per battery, the math would indicate that each person in the US uses, on average, 10 batteries a year.? Electrically, it’s a small amount of power, over a short period of time each; about 0.002 kWh per battery. ?In the US then, 250 million kgs of mined metal stores and distributes only 6 GWh of power before being tipped into the rubbish.?This is the output of a single, small solar farm for one year.?

Which makes the advancements by Tesla, and others, quite astounding.?This poundage of metal, if put into electric car battery packs, would power up 170,000 US cars, with 100 kWh each*.?? That is 17 GWh of battery capacity that, on average, will be recharged every 3 days; versus a one-time storage use of 6 GWh from all of the dry cell batteries.? What is even more amazing, car companies are working towards 90% recycling of the metal at the end of a 10-year life (which makes sense given the servicing control they will have on the cars themselves), compared to only 5% for dry cell batteries. ??

Finally, these amazing new batteries enable travellers access to 11 times cheaper energy than the cost of gasoline**, makes this technological leap truly phenomenal. ? A real ‘moon-shot’ type of achievement.?

So, the next time you pull a corroded ‘C’ cell battery out of your seldom used, battery-powered playing card shuffler, or pay over $100 for a tank of gasoline, think about how incredible electrification of transportation really is.?

*Noting that the composition is different and includes lithium and cobalt.

**An EV can travel 100 km on about $1.08 of electricity compared to $12 on gasoline.?(Math: The US average is 100 km uses 9.4 litres of gasoline (465 billion litres per year for 5 trillion kms of travel) at $1.25 per litre; an EV uses 18 kWh/100 km at $0.06 per kWh ).