Sodium technology could create batteries from seawater
And how do you get the sodium out of seawater? Via a HUGE expenditure of energy. So it will make energy sourcing worse. It USES energy in order to store it
New research has brought sodium battery technology to the point where it’s starting to replace lithium, the metal that powers our laptops, phones, electric cars and energy grids. That includes a battery created with molten salt, which can be derived from seawater, at the University of Sydney.
Dr Shenlong Zhao’s low-cost sodium-sulfur battery has four times the capacity of lithium, which he described as a significant breakthrough for renewable energy storage.
“When the sun isn’t shining and the breeze isn’t blowing, we need high-quality storage solutions that don’t cost the Earth and are easily accessible on a local or regional level,” Zhao said.
“Storage solutions that are manufactured using plentiful resources like sodium – which can be processed from seawater – also have the potential to guarantee greater energy security more broadly and allow more countries to join the shift towards decarbonisation.”
Lithium has received the lion’s share of research and industry interest over the past few decades because it’s extremely lightweight and energy-dense, general manager of Deakin University’s Battery Research and Innovation Hub, Dr Timothy Khoo, said.
“Lithium itself as an element is smaller and lighter than sodium. It’s number three on the periodic table right down the bottom. Sodium’s number 11, so it’s a big ion and it’s heavier.”
But research priorities are shifting from designing the most energy efficient, powerful batteries possible to creating cells that can be made from sustainable and cheap materials.
That’s where sodium comes in. It’s chemically similar to lithium, but it’s about 1 to 3 per cent the price and is one of the earth’s most abundant elements (a little pile can be found on most dining tables).
Lithium-ion batteries also rely on cobalt, a metal mined mostly in Africa in operations plagued by human rights violations, whereas sodium batteries can operate without cobalt, said University of Wollongong energy storage specialist Dr Jon Knott.
“There are some significant concerns around the sourcing of cobalt. Sodium-ion batteries not needing to use cobalt could actually be a good benefit beyond a technical benefit.”
Australia’s first large-scale sodium-sulfur battery was installed last week at a mine southeast of Kalgoorlie by researchers testing how the technology could be used in Australian power infrastructure.
“They can function in really harsh climates,” National Battery Testing Centre QUT project lead, Dr Joshua Watts, said. “The battery itself runs hot, so it doesn’t need any air conditioning, so it’s perfect for the desert.”
Watts will be monitoring the battery’s functionality and potential to fully power remote communities and mine sites, and support the integration of wind and solar energy into electricity grid.
In China, which is driving the boom in sodium battery technology, manufacturers CATL and BYD will produce sodium-ion batteries to power electric cars for the first time this year.
But sodium battery technology is best suited to large-scale applications such as power grids and storing renewable energy, and both Khoo and Knott said it’s unlikely to supersede lithium’s use in smaller applications such as cars, phones and airpods.
“I don’t see it as something that’s going to replace lithium, in the same way that lithium hasn’t completely replaced lead acid batteries, for example,” Khoo said. “We’ve got both of them running side by side and certain for certain applications. It’ll be the same case with sodium batteries.”
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King Charles III Has a Climate Record to Live Down
This Saturday’s coronation of King Charles III marks a significant moment in Britain’s history. No previous constitutional monarch has expressed his political views so openly. Unlike his mother and grandfather, whose opinions, if they had any, remained unknown to the general public, the king’s record-setting seventy years as heir apparent to the British throne saw him define himself as a deeply committed environmentalist.
In 2000, the BBC invited the then-Prince of Wales to give the last of the 2000 Millennium Reith lectures on sustainable development. Charles spoke of his belief in the “bounds of balance, order and harmony in the natural world which sets limits to our ambitions and define the parameters of sustainable development.” He name-checked the founders of the modern environmental movement—Rachel Carson and Fritz Schumacher, authors, respectively, of Silent Spring and Small is Beautiful. He embraced the precautionary principle, warning that the absence of hard scientific evidence of harmful consequences from genetically modified (GM) crops should not be taken as a green light to exceed nature’s limits.
Instead of looking to science for all the answers, mankind should work with the grain of nature, Charles argued. If a fraction of the investment going into GM technologies was devoted to improving traditional systems of agriculture, “the results would be remarkable,” he declared. He then praised fellow Reith lecturer Vandana Shiva, an environmental campaigner and director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in New Delhi, for condemning large-scale commercial farming “so persuasively and so convincingly.”
Unfortunately for the people for Sri Lanka, Shiva also convinced the Sri Lankan government to ban GM crops and chemical fertilizers and switch to organic farming. The results were worse than remarkable; they were disastrous. According to Matt Ridley, within months of Sri Lanka going organic, “the volume of tea exports had halved, cutting foreign exchange earnings. Rice yields plummeted leading to an unprecedented requirement to import rice. With the government unable to service its debt, the currency collapsed.” Soon after, the government collapsed, too. Street protests forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee to the Maldives in an air force jet.
In a 2013 speech on protecting rainforests, the prince’s rhetoric became distinctly unroyal, accusing those who questioned the need to act as belonging to “the incorporated society of syndicated skeptics and the International Association of Corporate lobbyists.” This would have come as news to his father and sister. Asked in a 2020 interview whether she discussed farming with her brother, Princess Anne replied, “Yes … occasionally, but rather short,” adding “I don’t even go down the climate change route.”
According to the terms laid down by his son, Prince Philip would also be numbered among the syndicated skeptics and corporate lobbyists. In 2018, Philip wrote to Ian Plimer to congratulate him on his book The Climate Change Delusion. Prompted by Ridley’s 2016 Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture on how carbon dioxide emissions were greening the earth, Prince Philip had lunch in the House of Lords with Ridley and Nigel Lawson.
Father and son clashed on wind farms. In 2011, a wind farm developer reported that Prince Philip had told him that wind farms were “useless, completely reliant on subsidies, and an absolute disgrace.” In his movie “Harmony—A new way of looking at the world,” Charles speaks of wind energy “working with nature’s freely-given forms” and the need to “end our dependence on fossil fuels.” In the film’s opening sequence, showing a wind turbine in a meadow, Charles intones, “Time is running out.”
Indeed, time has run out for Charles’s forecasts of climate apocalypse. In March 2009, Charles warned that only 100 months remained to avert “irretrievable climate collapse.” That forecast expired in 2017, with no climate collapse. Subsequent dating of doom was pushed further out and became less precise. In 2015, the 100-month deadline was stretched to 35 years.
A 2021 paper on extreme climate forecasts tabulates 79 predictions of climate-caused catastrophe dating back to the first Earth Day in 1970. Charles has the distinction of being the only individual to be featured three times, with separate predictions of climate apocalypse. As the paper’s co-author David Rode of Carnegie Mellon University comments, alongside Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, Prince Charles has “warned repeatedly of ‘irretrievable ecosystem collapse’ if actions were not taken, repeated the prediction with a new definitive end date. Their predictions have repeatedly been apocalyptic and highly certain . . . and so far, they’ve also been wrong.”
Here’s hoping that the reign of King Charles will be a happier affair than his failed forecasts of climate doom. Long live the King.
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Will Electric Vehicles Disappoint You? Beware of the range claims on the sticker
No doubt many taxpayers have already developed a healthy skepticism if not distaste for government-subsidized electric vehicles. But consumers may also have reason to beware, based on a recent report from automotive magazine Car and Driver.
Also in the news is one more reminder that it can be a bumpy road to the energy transition envisioned by the White House.
Why, it was just three months ago that a Reuters report from David Shepardson noted: Two senior Biden administration officials got behind the wheel of new electric vehicles (EV) Wednesday at the Washington, D.C. auto show to urge Americans to consider buying a zero-emission model.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi took spins in a Ford F-150 Lightning and a Chevrolet Bolt as they touted revamped $7,500 EV tax credits and new $4,000 second-hand EV credits.
But perhaps all subsidized things must someday come to an end. The Journal’s Mike Colias reports on General Motors today: The Detroit auto maker... said Tuesday it would drop the Chevrolet Bolt from its lineup, killing off its first mainstream electric vehicle as it moves to newer battery technology...
GM’s decision to unplug the Bolt—while expected by analysts—ends a troubled run for the model, which had become a black eye for the company after battery fires and costly recalls dented its early push into electric vehicles.
Fortunately many car shoppers seemed to be aware of the vehicle’s problems long before the federal officials who kept urging them to buy.
Now there seems to be another concern that goes beyond Chevy. Regardless of the manufacturer, taxpayers looking to get some of their money back from the feds by purchasing a subsidized e-car should be careful to restrain their expectations.
Caleb Miller reports for Car and Driver: A new paper published by SAE International uses Car and Driver’s real- world highway test data to show that electric vehicles underperform on... efficiency and range relative to the EPA figures by a much greater margin than internal-combustion vehicles. While the latter typically meet or exceed the EPA-estimated highway fuel economy numbers, EVs tend to fall considerably short of the range number on the window sticker.
The paper, written by Car and Driver’s testing director, Dave VanderWerp, and Gregory Pannone, was presented this week at SAE International’s annual WCX conference. It points to a need for revised testing and labeling standards for EVs moving forward. “Basically we’ve taken a look at how vehicles perform relative to the values on the window sticker, looking at the difference between what the label says and what we actually see in our real-world highway test,” explained VanderWerp.
“We see a big difference in that gap between gas- powered vehicles and the performance of EVs. The real question is: When first-time customers are buying EVs, are they going to be pleasantly surprised or disappointed by the range?”
On Car and Driver’s 75-mph highway test, more than 350 internal- combustion vehicles averaged 4.0 percent better fuel economy than what was stated on their labels. But the average range for an EV was 12.5 percent worse than the price sticker numbers.
The column will go out on a limb and predict that ensuring e-car benefits are not overstated will not be the top priority of the Biden Environmental Protection Agency. Looking at the happy federal officials pictured in the doomed car model at the top of this page—and considering all the lobbying that went into subsidizing it—one can only wonder: Would you buy a schmoozed car from these people?
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.tv.pol-incorrect/c/uRDCCBJ3ZVY
****************************************Green New Deal Appeasement Leads Nowhere
It is frustrating to watch people who should know better, including politicians, state regulators, and even leaders of traditional energy companies, play along with the green energy transition. Any day now, I expect a modern-day Neville Chamberlain to say that in the war on carbon, it is peace for our time.
The rationale offered is that cooperating with the Net Zero agenda will buy some time for traditional energy producers. I understand that there is pressure concerning quarterly financial disclosures, but appeasement will only end one way. The time is coming when your upcoming quarterly financial reports will be your last. Efforts to go along to get along will not be enough.
The sad story of North Dakota’s largest coal-fired power plant, Coal Creek Station, should be an important lesson for anyone involved in carbon-based energy. The prior owner of Coal Creek was Minnesota-based Great River Energy, which has come under growing pressure from the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission to rethink its coal dependency and was looking at its options, including mothballing the dependable plant that was producing reliable and affordable electricity for 1.7 million consumers in Minnesota and Wisconsin.
In 2021, Rainbow Energy, based in North Dakota, agreed to buy the plant. The sale closed in mid-2022. Rainbow Energy’s plan to save Coal Creek Station included a large-scale carbon capture and storage project. That plan should have been music to the ears of Green New Dealers.
Rainbow Energy’s carbon sequestration plan had several significant technical hurdles and it was also going to be expensive. The company’s initial estimate was that pumping the CO2 back underground would take 30 percent of the power produced by Coal Creek, and that estimate will be low if the plan is fully implemented.
The plan got another boost when the (ahem) Inflation Reduction Act was passed by Congress, which included a boost in the 45Q tax credits from $50/ton to $85/ton. The carbon capture and storage plan not only checked the 45Q tax credit boxes, but it made the electricity produced green enough that Great River Energy agreed to buy the electricity (at least the output left over after capturing and storing the CO2) for 10 years. Great River Energy CEO David Saggau said, "Purchasing energy and capacity from Rainbow was not in our original plan, but it will serve as a reliable steppingstone in our power supply transition.”
It looked like a win for coal and a win for appeasement, but there was a catch. There is always a catch.
Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) gave notice to Coal Creek Station, now named Rainbow Energy Center, that it is considering the denial of a permit for its coal ash disposal system. The comment period for this proposal closed on April 15, 2023, and if EPA follows through, the power plant will be shut down for three years.
The impact on the electric grid will be significant. According to reports, Rainbow Energy Center generates nearly half of the electricity in North Dakota and 40 percent of the power exported to other states.
North Dakota governor Doug Burgum said the EPA “is moving the goalposts after the game started.” He is right, but the larger lesson is not getting through to the coal, oil, and natural gas sectors. Appeasing those who want you gone is a fool’s errand.
Rainbow Energy Center is the poster child in the multi-front war on carbon, but the signs are everywhere. In April, EPA announced aggressive plans to crack down on power-plant emissions. For anyone who believes in karma, these rules also target natural gas-powered plants. Early on, the natural gas sector quietly, and not so quietly, applauded the attacks on coal. A short-lived tactic, as it turns out. Also, last month, EPA announced three settlements with natural gas plants for air pollution violations.
Then last week, in an example of the ever-shortening time lapse between conspiracy theory and fact, New York lawmakers and Gov. Kathy Hochul agreed to ban natural gas hookups in new construction.
At the federal level, the three-letter agencies continue to make laws as actual lawmakers navel gaze. The U.S. Supreme Court announced it will finally take up a case aimed at the agency authority under the Chevron Doctrine next term. So, maybe a year from now, the out-of-control federal agencies may lose a bit of their power.
The future looks increasingly dark for the coal, oil, and natural gas sectors.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/green_new_deal_appeasement_leads_nowhere.html
***************************************My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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