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Comment by telchar | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit this article describes a much less bad system than what I envision when someone mentions compressed air energy storage.

On a side note, I wonder what the state of research is on reducing the embodied energy in li-ion battery production. The mentioned figure in the article is surprisingly high (2-10 times the total energy the battery will store - presumably they mean over its lifetime), which now that I think aboute it, squares with what I have seen elsewhere on the embodied energy of electric car manufacture.

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>2-10 times the total energy the battery will store - presumably they mean over its lifetime

Their number is the reciprocal of this.

i.e. the total energy stored/discharged by the battery over it's lifetime = 2-10x the energy required to manufacture the battery.

Which still seems a bit conservative. The corresponding number they quote for their storage system is 240.

The factory producing batteries pays for power just like everyone else. Whatever energy is consumed in production ends up built into the price of the finished product.

Simple economics puts the lie to outlandish claims intended to manipulate markets.

Except price of energy currently doesn't fully account for the ecological damage the energy production causes. In consequence, "simple economics" can't work in the long-term.

The 1126 MJ / kwh given at https://www.mdpi.com/2313-0105/5/2/48 puts it at about 312 charge cycles.

Certainly not 10 times the total energy the kwh of battery capacity will store. Probably not more energy than the battery will store.

That doesn't sound right to me.. the amount of energy a Tesla battery could store over its lifetime is up in the hundreds of megawatt hours range.

I'm highly skeptical of those figures, and considering that there are trillions of dollars of corporate interest wanting grid storage and electric cars to fail, maybe you should be too.

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