- Joined
- Sep 11, 2024
The worst part is that he's not even wrong about lead-acid batteries. They are incredibly recyclable, which is part of the reason why they're used in cars even now: even when they reach their useful lifespan, you can recover the vast majority of the active components. Except for the plastic. Nobody talks about the plastic.I stopped watching his solar panel video when he started talking about how batteries were infinitely recyclable, I didn't even know there was a full on spergout about ICE and Drumpf at the end of the video wtf.
People's opinion on wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear energy are the ultimate litmus test.
But to think that the same is going to apply to lithium-ion batteries anytime soon just because they're also batteries is pure lunacy. They're a completely different chemistry with completely different manufacturing that is utterly unlike the dip-plates-in-sulfuric-acid layout of a lead-acid battery. You cannot unwind a lithium-ion cell, or anything of the sort, without irreversibly destroying it; and neither can you simply "pour out" all the lithium and scrap the, uh, ions? No, you have to shred them and leach them in a bin, similarly to how gold is recycled from expired electronics. There is no physical reason why the recyclability of lithium-ion cells couldn't one day reach nearly 100% reuptake one day... but today is not that day, and technologies that would allow that simply have not been researched yet. Current technology that can theoretically do it like Supercritical Water Reactors are essentially the nuclear option to recycling, and are economically unfeasible just because of the energy and pressure requirements of maintaining a high-pressure vessel full of 700K water at several megapascals. But it would probably dissolve anything organic, lithium cells and their plastic layers included.
Doesn't help that Alec doesn't seem to realize the reason why there's multiple solar farms in the rural middle of cloudy nowhere is, most likely, subsidies from his beloved Biden/previous Democratic administration, not because of actual free market resources. He also very conveniently glosses over the fact that solar does not work during the night, when people still need electricity, and the sheer monumental effort required to build up enough battery storage to somehow move all that energy from the daytime to the night time, not even including the horrid amount of grid instability that (cheaper) grid-following digital inverters add (which was the entire cause of the Spanish grid failure a few months back), nor the fact that transmission lines are nowhere near as simple as he makes them out to be, nor the several times more solar you need in case on imperfect, non-sunny weather. And if another Tonga explosion happens and leads to a volcanic winter when you have an electric grid made up primarily of solar... wave goodbye to electric power for several years. Wind would also be harshly affected by a global dimming event, as solar energy is the primary component of convective forces. Solar is very much a short-term thinking globalist's wet dream, incredibly bad without major infrastructural investment in the medium-term, and perhaps mandatory only in the very, very long-term (on the timespan of tens of thousands of years).
