We can’t eat coal and you can’t eat wind turbines and solar panels either. Welcome to the new kid on the block grabbing up farming land.
The mining that is described as a ‘gift’ to developing counties by the advocates of renewable energy are in most cases open cut mines with little or no environmental safety conditions placed on them. I am complete sure that in time it will be exposed that the mining operations have taken the wealth offshore to developed countries. Open-cut tin mining
As a ‘traditional environmentalist’ I was horrified to find a coal mining option (exploratory licence) on our farm. This is a completely legal option any business or individuals can take out to mine the resources under any land in Australia, the owners have no say unless of course they are first nations people or a sitting member of parliament. In Australia you have no ownership of the land under a certain depth. The specific depth is only decried as a precedent, not an actual official figure.
As you may be aware Solar and Wind are transient energy sources that can provide a current only during windy or sunny days and require either a coal or nuclear power source for down times or a significant battery array, in most cases lithium. These are the same technology used in mobile phones and tablets but upscaled hundreds of times. House battery arrays can offer redundancy for blackouts and power hot water systems, refrigerators and air conditioners after dark. It makes sense at face value to include a battery array with a solar array to ensure power for these appliances when the sun is down. The trick however is understanding your existing power use and matching the solar array and battery requirements. It’s a bit of a minefield, and in our case it simply didn’t make financial sense as we needed to upgrade our solar array by 200-300% and install an additional inverter and either two Telsa Powerwall batteries or a wall of BYDs batteries at $30,000 - $50,000. We would not spend that in the time before the solar panels and batteries lost efficiency and became redundant.
When I designed our new homestead, I included this requirement. I planned for a considerable solar array and house batteries enough to charge one or more EVs. I wrote about it here: To EV, or not EV
I was aware (by that time) of lithium battery fires, so I opted to install the array(s) in the shed. This had the benefit of keeping the panels off the clean lines of our homestead roof. As it turned out we never did install the batteries, as mentioned earlier, it didn’t make sense from a financial perspective. As I have mentioned in previous posts, I’m a renewable energy sceptic. I can’t honestly say it’s any better or worse for the environment due to the manufacturing and supply chain or longevity of the hardware.
Safety Concerns
Lithium battery fires need to be witnessed. Probably a hoot for youtubers, but for a home owner truly terrifying. Readers of this blog might know I have built some AgriTech devices. For some time I experimented with solar panels and lithium batteries to support remote installs. What you might not know is I have repaired hundreds of lithium battery powered devices as well as performed battery upgrades and replacements. Lithium batteries if punctured or overcharged can burst into flame. When they do, these fires can be extremely difficult to extinguish. The normal strategy of staving the fire of oxygen doesn’t work as they ‘self oxygenate’. Lithium Fire
There is also the environmental impact of the residual toxic chemicals after a fire. The fire extinguishers for sale at Bunnings will be useless on anything other than a laptop battery. A house or car battery will burn until there is nothing left. It will burn to a heat that will melt the metal shed or the cars next to it. You have to see it to believe it.
Reliability vs Usage. Return on investment. Warranty
Lithium batteries do not like being charged or discharged quickly or completely. It’s a chemical reaction with limitations. The cynical part of me feels that much of the push for lithium batteries has been around planned obsolescence. Conventional vehicles were not originally designed to last a long time until the Japanese started to make cars utilising their Zen Buddhism grade quality control in the 70s. I wrote about that here: The problems with quality
I used to renew my daily driver every five years when I was driving nearly 38,000klm a year. If you are leasing a daily driver over a term less than 5 years perhaps a battery powered car is fine. If you are expecting some residual value avoid them. Some manufacturers will cover house and vehicle batteries for 5 or more years with strict conditions. What you need to understand is that a manufactures warranty isn’t a sure thing like a government backed consumer guarantee is. Manufacturers warranty conditions and your adherence to it are determined by the manufacturer or distributor. General Australian consumer warranties and guarantees are for shorter, typically 12 months. All I can say is good luck.
To add another spoonful of salt, the Chinese EVs and batteries hitting the Australian market are heavily subsidized. None of the manufacturers are (to my knowledge) turning a profit and the Chinese economy is slowing after tariffs were introduced in much of Europe and the US.
I would not expect to see any of these companies still in business in their current form in three, let alone, five years. Again, good luck. If we look at the very best practice with Lithium Polymer battery technology and management, the Apple iPhone most of us would expect to get 4-5 years before the battery lost sufficient efficiency to render it useless. Phones sip their power over many days and trickle charge when plugged in. This is the preferred strategy for lithium batteries. Drone batteries are a better example to compare with home and EV use as they fully charge and fully discharge each cycle. Form drone batteries you can expect at best to get 300-400 cycles before the chemicals in the battery are depleted. We do have usage data on the life cycle of EVs spanning back some time as Teslas have been around for ten or more years. Using older Teslas as an indicator of batter life is problematic because testing remaining capacity in a battery is challenging. A full charge and discharge cycle is required and most people selling their Tesla do not want this information disclosed as its 30% of the cars value. Because Tesla’s are a prestige car, most owners won’t admit they bought a lemon.