RE:RE:CNC WE HAVE WIND UNDER OUR WINGS>>SX HALTED!!!!!Leo,...no clue either but hoping the MM1s have driven the price down enough that they decided to invest theiir profits in building us up again. lol
In the meantime...from Wealtsimple:
Battery Industry Is Booming, and Canada Stands to Benefit Batteries have made big headlines recently: Tesla delivered its first electric semi; Ford broke ground on a huge battery-production site in Kentucky; and Volkswagen inked a deal to build a battery cell factory in Canada. The Canadian battery industry attracted an unprecedented $15 billion in investments in 2022. Because, in case you haven’t noticed, batteries have become A Really Big Deal, powering everything from phones to bikes to computers to cars. Wherever there’s technology (so, uh, everywhere), smaller and more powerful batteries are making it better. And Canada, with its vast mineral deposits, stands to become a major player in the industry — it could even challenge China’s battery dominance (hence all that investment). TLDR’s Sarah Rieger spoke with economist Noah Smith (author of an excellent newsletter about everything from interest rates to rabbits) about how batteries could become a dominant force in our future — a topic he’s written about extensively.
Why are batteries crucial to the renewable-energy transition?
Batteries let you move energy through space (portability) and through time (storage). Oil was, and is, so important because it’s a way of storing and transporting energy, whereas you can’t easily do that with nuclear, hydro, solar, or wind unless you have batteries.
You’ve called this the “Decade of the Battery.” Why are you so bullish?
Technologies often exist long before they find wide use. It was only when computer chips, for instance, reached a sufficient level of cost and performance that people started putting them in everything. And we’re getting there with batteries. [The price of lithium-ion batteries fell by 97% between 1991 and 2018.] Large batteries will be able to power cars, of course, but also homes, shops, and restaurants. And, as batteries get cheaper, we’ll start seeing little appliances or robots doing everything — maintaining solar panels, mending infrastructure, waiting tables. Which is already a thing at some hot-pot places. [Smith also recently wrote about a company called Impulse, which makes battery-powered appliances, like stoves.]
What’s an obstacle in wider battery adoption?
Mining. You need either cobalt, nickel, copper, or lithium to make a battery, and there’s a supply bottleneck — people aren’t investing in mines and processing facilities fast enough. The other thing is that nearly all these minerals are currently processed in China. But what if China wakes up in a poopy mood? Guess what happens to your battery-dependent economy …
Why is China so far ahead?
Manufacturing batteries has historically been low margin, so, when battery production started taking off a decade ago, North American companies weren’t interested. Plus, at the time, nobody worried that the world might divide into Axis and Allies again, or that they would need domestic production capabilities, so battery production was offshored. Now we’re trying to reverse that.
What can North America do to catch up?
Increase demand for electric vehicles. We’re doing that, but the transition needs to happen rapidly. Obviously, the oil industry isn’t going to disappear — we still need plastics and fertilizer and ship fuel — but we’ve got to go hell-bent on EVs to drive battery demand. One good thing is that batteries are heavy, so it’s not terribly economical to ship big ones from China. But we have to increase demand first with policy.