Earlier this year I had posted this:
https://www.ft86club.com/forums/show...&postcount=671
Sweden finds the largest deposit of rare earth elements:
https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/...earth-elements
And now we have this:
India finds 5.9 tonnes of Lithium:
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/...4.cms?from=mdr
In other news, cheaper grid storage batteries could be on the horizon. This is exciting for storing wind and solar for the grid, but also for personal use. It would be nice to have a battery pack for the home with little to no fire risk that is cheaper. At $7/kWh versus current $130-150 kWh for lithium-ion, the batteries themselves should be much cheaper, but the installation and inverters and other components would still be the same, so in all, the batteries shouldn't be super cheap. For instance, a 13.5kWh Tesla Powerwall, which includes installation, is like $11k, but the battery is only $2k at $150/kWh, and it would drop to $100, so now $9k instead of $11k. Good, but not great. The energy density isn't as good, so these wouldn't be for cars. For large grid storage systems, the price savings would be significant.
Sodium aluminum battery for renewables storage:
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/02/...ables-storage/
Quote:
Scientists from the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) have designed a molten salt battery based on an anode made of molten sodium (Na) and a cathode made of aluminum (Al) and sodium tetrachloroaluminate (NaAlCl4).
They described the novel battery as a low-cost, grid-scale solution for long-duration renewable energy storage and said the use of NaAlCl4 offers extra accessible capacity hidden in acidic chloroaluminate. They said the proposed battery chemistry relies on the sixth and second most abundant elements on Earth.
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Quote:
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Th research group found that the battery achieves a high areal capacity cell of 138.5 mAh cm−2 at a high current density of 4.67 mA cm−2. The scientists said the battery could potentially achieve an energy density of up to 100 Wh/kg at a cost of $7.02 kWh.
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Other article covering this:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0207081251.htm