Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, report says

Re:Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, r... by ggm on Thursday December 06, 2018 @02:56PM (#18621501)

There is significantly more extractable lithium than needed at any rational forseen rate of ramp-up. The impact of mining has to be borne by all real goods which depend on mines, not just this one.

You are adopting implied reductionism around the "cost" side without having done the work (in my opinion) to justify that this concern outweighs the upside benefits of ceasing to use coal.

PS a lot of the minable lithium which isn't in Chile, is in Australia. So, we have low-miles lithium!

Erlich/Simons anyone?

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Re:Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, r... by photojosh on Thursday December 06, 2018 @06:58PM (#18623783)

There's some interesting politics going on wrt lithium in Chile. Seems like the regulators don't want to increase output as lithium extraction uses a ton of water, and the Atacama is one of the driest places on Earth.

Presumably that is why the same company is trying to kick off in Australia as well, even though we have higher regulatory and labour costs here.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-albemarle-exclusive...

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Re:Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, r... by hfiuehgge on Thursday December 06, 2018 @04:21PM (#18622359)

Lithium is number 3 on the periodic table.

Human ingenuity not going to stop finding extractible sources anytime soon.

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Re:Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, r... by Fomite on Thursday December 06, 2018 @11:55PM (#18625239)

...is here where I mention the building potential of a helium shortage?

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Re:Tesla's giant battery saved $40M during its first year, r... by ggm on Friday December 07, 2018 @05:51AM (#18626601)

We need more gas Wells to extract helium from!

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