Batteries

Containing and controlling the release of energy gives humans a huge advantage. While at first we simply burned available dry wood, now we safely carry ‘personal energy’ containers. We know them as batteries; industry knows them as cells. Though invented barely over a century ago, these items in their primary form get produced at tens of billions every year with probably the same amount thrown away by us every year as garbage.

The beauty of cells is their relatively safe and benign state. Though they have very little energy within (thousands of Joules), they have become such an aid that they are nearly completely ubiquitous. Batteries come in two types; primary and secondary. Let’s say we make about 20 billion primary batteries. At about 5000 Joules each this makes for 5e12Joules of personal energy stored per year. This is an appreciable but somewhat small amount in the global diaspora.

Secondary batteries differ from primary in that they can be recharged. These have a much longer useful life thus compensating for their higher cost. While many people use them with many small portable household appliances like portable phones, the big new entry is electric vehicles. Today nearly 120 GWh of battery storage gets made a year (or 4.32e14 Joules a year) with close to 6 GWh increase annually all for transportation. It’s large but only about 0.0001% of our global energy consumption.

Whether primary or secondary, we know that batteries require a large amount of energy just to fabricate. An estimate for NiMH batteries is that about 700 times the energy goes into its production than comes out as personal energy. Can we continue to afford this ratio as our energy sources deplete?
Rabbit