Fires Spark Battery Backlash; Robot Hordes Threaten Rare Earth Supplies; North Carolina Mine Fight
Fires Spark Battery Backlash; Robot Hordes Threaten Rare Earth Supplies; North Carolina Mine Fight
And more about the human and environmental costs of renewable energy and digital technology—and how we can do better.
Fires Spark Battery Backlash
We absolutely need to build lots of big, grid-scale batteries to pull off the transition to renewable energy, but a surge of local opposition is torpedoing proposed battery projects.
The key concern is that these huge battery energy storage systems (aka BESS) catch fire with unsettling frequency, and when they do, the damage can be serious. Battery fires can reach temperatures topping 1,000 degrees and emit toxic gases. Worse, they often can’t be extinguished by water or normal firefighting chemicals. In the San Diego area, residents spooked by three fires at battery facilities in the past year are mobilizing to block a proposed new one. Similar campaigns by anxious locals have shot down battery projects in New York, Alberta and Ontario in recent months. Energy storage projects in the United Kingdom are facing the same backlash.
For sure, there are legitimate concerns here. The problem is that too much of this not-in-my-backyard sentiment could really slow down the switch to renewables. Solar, wind and other renewables can only provide dependable power if there’s some way to store the energy they generate when the sun is shining and the wind blowing for when it isn’t. Without batteries to store that energy, renewables can never completely replace fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency estimates the world needs to build six times as much energy storage capacity as we currently have by 2030.
Which makes the fire issue very important. Industrial-sized battery energy storage systems are mostly just gigantic versions of the lithium-ion batteries that power your laptop, power drill or Tesla. I’ve written before about the growing number of fires caused when those batteries are punctured, crushed or overheated. Dozens of people have been killed in such fires. A dog chewing on a lithium battery set an Oklahoma house on fire just last month. (And was caught on video doing it! Bad dog!)
Grid-scale battery fires are relatively rare, but still a real risk. There have been more than 20 such “failure events” at big energy storage facilities in the US since 2011. Last June, at least 22 people died in a fire in a South Korean battery factory, mostly from inhaling ultra-toxic smoke from the burning batteries. In the US, a 20,000 pound lithium-ion battery caught fire inside a Florida factory last year,. One day later, a similar fire broke out in Sweden. Just a few months after that, a major battery in New York took four days to put out, spewing potentially toxic smoke all the while.
Researchers are working on less fire-prone battery chemistries, and energy storage companies insist they are learning from their mistakes and boosting safety measures. I hope they’re both successful. At the end of the day, though, there’s no way to make any industrial procedure 100 percent safe. As always, nothing comes for free: The energy transition comes with costs and tradeoffs. To blunt the risks of climate change, we’re going to have to accept a certain amount of other risks.
Robot Hordes Threaten Rare Earth Supplies
Magnets made from rare earths are another key piece of hardware for the energy transition. They’re the link that enables wind turbines to convert motion into electricity, and electric cars to convert electricity back into motion. Those two applications have been driving the booming magnet market, but in the coming years, according to a new report from Adamas Intelligence, it will come to be dominated by robots. “From a small demand category today led by industrial and consumer service robots, we forecast that robotics will grow to become the single largest (rare earth magnet) demand driver by 2040,” says the report.
“If you think about how a robot works, every time you’ve got a moving part it requires an electric motor,” analyst Reg Spencer told Australia’s Financial Review. “And the beauty about rare earth permanent magnet electric motors is they’re the most efficient, and you can make them very, very small and powerful.”
Manufacturing all those magnets, however, will require lots of rare earths, which are mined at an often brutal cost to people and the planet. China dominates the entire magnet production chain, from mine to finished product, which is deeply concerning for manufacturers and American policy makers. What’s more, China might not even be able to produce enough. To keep up with demand, Adamas figures China will need to quintuple production at its titanic Bayan Obo mine, "massively depleting the country's reserves."
How We Can Do Better: Researchers in several places are working on permanent magnets that don’t use rare earths. A U.K. based company announced in June that they’ve developed a prototype rare-earth-free magnet with the help of artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, General Motors and other car makers are backing an American startup aiming to produce rare earth-less magnets specifically for electric vehicles. So far, the main problem is that while such alternative batteries work, they don’t work as well as rare earth-based ones. If you want the deep details on why and on which approaches are most promising, check out this IEEE Spectrum rundown.
You Should Really Listen to This: Mining for the Climate
Brought to you from Princeton University’s Blue Lab, “an environmental research, storytelling and art group,” the first season of this new podcast goes deep into the controversy around a proposed lithium mine in Gaston County, North Carolina. Once upon a time, the state produced almost all of the world’s lithium. From the 1950s through the 1980s, North Carolina lithium went into glass, pharmaceuticals, and even nuclear weapons. But the mines were shuttered as cheaper alternatives opened up in Chile, Australia and China. Now, with global demand going through the roof, a mining company is aiming to start digging in North Carolina once again—but locals are fighting back.
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