Where could millions of EV batteries retire? Solar farms. A Southern California company is showing how repurposing EV batteries for stationary storage can extend their usefulness for several years. To make renewable energy from intermittent sources like solar and wind available when it is most needed, it’s becoming more common to use batteries to store the power as it’s generated and transmit it later. But one thing about the Cuyama facility, which began operations this week, is less common: The batteries sending energy to the grid once powered electric vehicles. The SEPV Cuyama facility, located about two hours northeast of Santa Barbara, is the second hybrid storage facility opened by B2U Storage Solutions. Its first facility, just outside Los Angeles, uses 1,300 retired batteries from Honda Clarity and Nissan Leaf EVs to store 28 megawatt-hours of power, enough to power about 9,500 homes. The facilities are meant to prove the feasibility of giving EV batteries a second life as stationary storage before they are recycled. Doing so could increase the sustainability of the technology’s supply chain and reduce the need to mine critical minerals, while providing a cheaper way of building out grid-scale storage. “This is what’s needed at a massive scale,” said Freeman Hall, CEO of the Los Angeles-based large-scale storage system company. Electric vehicle batteriesare typically replaced when they reach 70 to 80 percent of their capacity, largely because the range they provide at that point begins to dwindle. Almost all of the critical materials inside them, including lithium, nickel, and cobalt, are reusable. A growing domestic recycling industry, supported by billions of dollars in loans from the Energy Department and incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, is being built to prepare for what will one day be tens of millions of retired EV battery packs. Before they are disassembled, however, studies show that around three quarters of decommissioned packs are suitable for a second life as stationary storage. (Some packs may not have enough life left in them, are too damaged from a collision, or otherwise faulty.) “We were seeing the first generation of EVs end their time on the road, and 70 percent or more of those batteries have very strong residual value,” said Hall. “That should be utilized before all those batteries are recycled, and we’re just deferring recycling by three, four, or five years.”              https://grist.org/energy/ev-batteries-stationary-storage/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=beacon

Go hard and go big’: How South Australia got solar panels onto one in every three houses. Households have continued to use state help that was first created more than a decade ago by Adam Morton For a brief period over several weekends this spring, the state of South Australia, which has a population of 1.8 million, did something no other place of a similar size can claim: generate enough energy from solar panels on the roofs of houses to meet virtually all its electricity needs. This is a new phenomenon, but it has been coming for a while – since solar photovoltaic cells started to be installed at a rapid pace across Australia in the early 2010s. Roughly one in three Australian households, more than 3.6m homes, now generate electricity domestically. In South Australia, the most advanced state for rooftop solar, the proportion is nearly 50%. No other country comes close at installing small solar systems on a per capita basis. “It’s absolutely extraordinary by world standards,” said Dr Dylan McConnell, an energy systems analyst at the University of New South Wales. “We’re streets ahead.” There was no overarching plan that made Australia the world leader in household solar PV. Analysts mostly agreed that it was a happy accident, the result of a range of uncoordinated policies across tiers of government. Many were subsidy schemes that were derided as too generous and gradually scaled back, but the most important – an easy-to-access, upfront national rebate available to everyone – endured. It has helped make panels cost-effective and easy to install. Dr Gabrielle Kuiper, an independent energy and climate change strategist, noted Australia was not the first country out of the gate on rooftop solar – that was Germany, which introduced the first subsidy scheme, and “none of us would be here without them” – but said it was one of the first to capitalise on the German model. It began with a natural advantage: more sun than nearly any other wealthy country.  Kuiper said Australia had succeeded at solar for reasons beyond geography. Incentives were a big part of it, but the technology’s rise was accelerated by ordinary people embracing it to have some control over their power bills and, in some cases, play a small part in tackling the climate crisis by reducing the country’s reliance on coal.. There was little planning in how the various incentives fit together and critics attacked it as an expensive and inefficient way to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But it kickstarted an industry of installers, sales people, trainers and inspectors, and quickly made solar a viable option for people beyond the country’s wealthiest suburbs.Today, the feed-in-tariffs have been cut, but the national rebate scheme survives, with bipartisan support despitedeep divisions over other responses to the climate crisis........read on          https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/01/how-generous-subsidies-helped-australia-to-become-a-leader-in-solar-power?utm_source=The+Narwhal&utm_campaign=30a8e2f821-Nov.+2%2C+2023+%E2%80%94+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f6a05fddb8-30a8e2f821-108695820

  What Is Black Lithium? 

Right now our best chance to meet the exploding demand for lithium may come from the fossil fuel industry. Sounds a bit conflicting, but let me show you just how simple it is: Lithium bicarbonate can be found in copious volumes in oil field brines — the very same water that oil and gas companies use to harvest fossil fuels from deep inside the earth. That's why I call it black lithium… because it literally comes from the oil production process. Other than its source, it's the very same stuff that goes into your phone or laptop battery.How much lithium are we talking about? Well, there’s a single property up in northwestern Alberta that contains an estimated 4.3 million tons of the metal dissolved in hundreds of brine ponds spread across 671 square miles. For decades, this property has been the domain of a small Canadian energy company, but just recently, a newly formed lithium company has contracted with the oil producer to process the brine. The technique it's using is new and revolutionary and has the ability to capture up to 97% of the dissolved lithium before returning the brine to the ponds for reuse.  There is no exploration required. No drilling. No 24-month evaporation process. And because this method is so much faster and more efficient, salable lithium can be produced at extremely low prices — about $4,000 per ton.....read on. Note this article is by an investment counselor.....it's posted for interest only and will need further corroboration,    https://www.wealthdaily.com/what-is-black-lithium/ 

Why are we feeding crops to our cars when people are starving?  George Monbiot   What can you say about governments that, in the midst of a global food crisis, choose instead to feed machines? You might say they were crazy, uncaring or cruel. But these words scarcely suffice when you seek to describe the burning of food while millions starve. There’s nothing complicated about the effects of turning crops into biofuel. If food is used to power cars or generate electricity or heat homes, either it must be snatched from human mouths, or ecosystems must be snatched from the planet’s surface, as arable lands expand to accommodate the extra demand. But governments and the industries that they favour obscure this obvious truth. They distract and confuse us about an evidently false solution to climate breakdown. From inception, the incentives and rules promoting biofuels on both sides of the Atlantic had little to do with saving the planet and everything to do with political expediency. Angela Merkel pushed for an EU biofuels mandate as a means of avoiding stronger fuel economy standards for German motor manufacturers. In the US, they have long been used to prop up the price of grain and provide farmers with a guaranteed market. That’s why the Biden administration, as the midterm elections loom, remains committed to this cruelty. As the investigative group Transport & Environment shows, the land used to grow the biofuels consumed in Europe covers 14m hectares (35m acres): an area larger than Greece. Of the soy oil consumedin the European Union, 32% is eaten by cars and trucks. They devour 50% of all the palm oil used in the EU and 58% of the rapeseed oil. Altogether, 18% of the world’s vegetable oil is turned into biodiesel, and 10% of the world’s grains are transformed into ethanol, to mix with petrol.A new report by Green Alliance, an independent thinktank, shows that the food used by the UK alone for biofuels could feed 3.5 million people. If biofuel production ceased worldwide, according to one estimate, the saved crops could feed 1.9 billion human beings. The only consistent and reliable outcome of this technology is hunger. It’s not just a matter of the upward pressure on food prices, great as this is. Biofuel markets also provide a major incentive for land grabbing from small farmers and indigenous people. Since 2000, 10m hectares of Africa’s land, often the best land, has been bought or seized by sovereign wealth funds, corporations and private investors. They replace food production for local people with “flex crops”: commodities such as soya and maize that can be switched between markets for food, animal feed or biofuel, depending on which prices are strongest. Land grabbing isa major cause of destitution and hunger. As biofuels raise demand for land, rainforests, marshes and savannahs in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil and Africa are cleared. There’s a limit to how much we can eat. There’s no limit to how much we can burn. All the major crop sources of biodiesel have a higher climate impact than the fossil fuels they replace.                    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/30/crops-cars-starving-biofuels-climate-sustainable