What is a battery? I think Tesla said it best when they called them Energy Storage Systems. It’s important to understand what they are. They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere.
I’d like you to think about how many batteries you rely on daily? The list is almost endless in society as we know it today.
Although we are moving to so-called green sustainable electricity generation, currently our supply is primarily generated by; Hydro, geothermal, coal, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fuelled generators.
For the purpose of this analysis I will use an electric vehicle [EV] car battery as an example.
It is claimed by many that an EV is a zero-emission vehicle and this in fact not true. Since a percentage of the electricity used to charge the batteries is generated from fossil-fuelled plants, it follows that the same percentage of the EVs on the road are effectively fossil-fuelled.
It takes the same amount of energy to move a gasoline-driven automobile a kilometre as it does an electric one. The question is what produces the power? It does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
There are two types of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell batteries use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium.
We use millions of these two different battery types each year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills and when you throw your small, used batteries in the rubbish, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. When a battery runs down and can no longer power an object we think of it as dead; well, it is not.
It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery’s metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill is toxic. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles etc. The good thing about those is that ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately we do not yet know how to recycle EV batteries like our example or take care to dispose of single-use ones properly.
For those of you excited about electric cars and the green revolution, you need to take a closer look at batteries and also wind turbines and solar panels. These three technologies share what are actually environmentally destructive embedded costs.”
Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. Batteries have embedded costs that not only come in the form of energy use but also as environmental destruction, pollution, disease, child labour, and the inability to be recycled.
The example battery weighs approximately 450Kgs and contains 11Kgs of lithium, 26Kgs of nickel, 20Kgs of manganese, 13Kgs cobalt, 90Kgs of copper, and 180Kgs of aluminium, steel, and plastic. Inside it is 6,831 individual lithium-ion cells.
All of those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV battery they must process 11,100Kgs of brine for the lithium, 13,300Kgs of ore for the cobalt, 2,200Kgs of ore for the nickel, and 11,100Kgs of ore for copper. All told, they need to mine approximately 230,000Kgs of the earth’s crust for just – one – battery.
Sixty-eight percent of the world’s cobalt, a significant part of an EV battery, comes from the Congo where the mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. So should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the embedded cost of driving an electric car?
Currently California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and wind turbines. They claim this is the ultimate in being ‘green,’ but it is not! This construction project is creating a future environmental disaster.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium-diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Wind turbines are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs approximately 1600 tonnes (the equivalent of 23 houses), contains 1300 tonnes of concrete, 250 tonnes of steel, 40 tonnes of iron, 20 tonnes of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 36,000 Kgs and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades so currently they are cut up and buried in landfills.
Wind turbines generate mountains of waste
Sadly both solar arrays and wind turbines kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.
There is a place for these technologies but we must look beyond the myth of zero emissions and identify the true embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them to allow for an accurate analysis of the benefits in comparison with fossil-fuelled energy sources.
Andy Loader