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Ev batteries and lithium supply

I think this is where you have to ask "Why is the top of the Washington Monument made out of Aluminum?"

Because it was rare, in "aluminum" form.. Doesn't mean it was rare in the earth.. We just hadn't learned
how to efficiently mine it and refine it, and recycle it..

If the price of aluminum held steady with inflation from then to now.. A 12 foot stick of 1" diameter aluminum
would be almost $5000. Depending on where you pull your numbers from..

Same could happen with lithium.. OR.... Battery technology will move on to different things.. OR..
We won't even be using batteries..

Remember in the 80's when everybody said "Bull Shit" when a few people said that in 20 years everybody
would have a computer in their pocket.. Well... My computer in my pocket has 750 THOUSAND times
more memory than my first computer, and it fits in my pocket, and I don't even have to know how to
type, I can just talk to it.. And in just a matter of seconds, it can tell me (it talks too) information
that it obtained on the entire opposite side of the globe..

I am aware that at one point aluminum was more valuable than gold. We're many decades past that point in the context of Lithium.
 
just look at what the price of memory has done in 30 years. I used to pay $56 for 32K of static ram (that's wholesale) Now I can get 64Gb for $12 at office depot. So if there's a huge demand for lithium, there will be a huge demand for the technonly to extract it

So... 32K at $56.. or 64K for $112...

So... 64 megs would have cost you $112,000

And to buy 64 gig would have cost you

$112,000,000

One Hundred and Twelve MILLION dollars, and now you can get it at Office Depot for $12..
$8 anywhere else.

Yep... Technology NEVER advances, and nothing ever changes...

Its just so cool.
 
So... 32K at $56.. or 64K for $112...

So... 64 megs would have cost you $112,000

And to buy 64 gig would have cost you

$112,000,000

One Hundred and Twelve MILLION dollars, and now you can get it at Office Depot for $12..
$8 anywhere else.

Yep... Technology NEVER advances, and nothing ever changes...

Its just so cool.

I knew a guy who was working on a project, he needed to build a memory bank that would hold an entire CDs worth of music. The bill for the memory was 1/2 million. This was around 1984
 
Imagine if cars obeyed that trajectory. $1.98 Tesla goes 1000 miles on a AA cell....

=)

That is easy to imagine, but probably goes outside of the realm of the chemical fuels / energy storage. Now let's work through the numbers...

Average EV power consumption is 300Wh/mi. So for 1000mi we need a 300kWh power source, assuming the weight of the final package is comparable.

Average AA battery weighs 26g, or 0.026kg (now switching to proper units), so we need 29,220kWh (29,220,000Wh) /kg as our [specific] energy density.

Wiki has a convenient energy density table here : Energy density - Wikipedia

So highest chemical is Liquid Hydrogen, at 39,405Wh/kg, which is 1000 times less than necessary. Then the lowest nuclear is Plutonium-238 at 621,900,000Wh/kg, so some 20 times more than necessary, thus a hypothetical car would basically have be refueled only a dozen or so times in its lifetime.
 
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The obvious problem there is that the car would be so tiny ,you would never be able to find where you parked it ,and and a common insurance claim might be for a car being stepped on.
 
just look at what the price of memory has done in 30 years. I used to pay $56 for 32K of static ram (that's wholesale) Now I can get 64Gb for $12 at office depot. So if there's a huge demand for lithium, there will be a huge demand for the technonly to extract it

I still remember paying $400 to have a 40 megabite hard drive on my first PC, a 286 clone which I still have. That was in 1989.
 








 
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