GPSGuided wrote:Valid and important points there.
Tesla has a high entry price tag and then much of the maintenance costs are rolled by the company during the warranty period. As some owners are starting to find out, the costs skyrocketed once they are out of covered period for parts and services, let alone the cost of battery pack replacement.
Warning signs for the future in EV. Sensing it as if the EVs are going to become a disposable single use gadget, potentially erasing its projected environmental benefits. Time will tell.
The average age of Australia's vehicle fleet is 10.1 years, although more than 30 per cent of vehicles on the road are fewer than five years old.
South_Aussie_Hiker wrote:It’s not just the purchase price of the batteries.
It’s also the carbon cost to manufacture. Mining for materials and manufacturing lithium batteries is a very heavy process. A replacement electric car battery costs a fortune because it is so costly (financially and environmentally) to produce.
I think the future will appear in the ability to recycle and remanufacture batteries with very little waste.
And batteries are only one method of storing energy. If we move away from cars to the electrical grid, batteries are not a good option because they are consumable and will require maintenance and replacement.
A better energy storage system for base load is to use solar and wind to pump water up to reservoirs, and then retrieve the energy through hydro generation.
lithium is usually extracted from lithium minerals that can be found in igneous rocks (chiefly spodumene) and from lithium chloride salts that can be found in brine pools. [4] The largest producer of lithium in the world is Chile, which extracts it from brine at the Atacama Salt Flat.
photohiker wrote:
Lithium is mined in several methods, once made into a battery it will be used for it's usable time and will then be recycled into newer batteries. Would be 10-20 years for each of them. They won't be dumped, they will be recycled.
north-north-west wrote:So are the small 'disposable' lithium batteries recycleable? I'm moving to rechargeables for the GPS and similar toys, but I like to have a few lithiums on hand for backup.
Apologies for the digression.
photohiker wrote:Yes, the lithium batteries are recyclable. Just need to find where to drop them off in Tasmania. We have found recycle places around Adelaide so there should be somewhere in your area.
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 9 guests