Still incredible to consider how much material we'll have to dig out of the ground to deliver hundreds of GW of renewable electricity production potential in the form of solar and wind. For grid scale electricy storage, there's not enough Lithium and cobalt in the Earth's crust to build the needed capacity. Maybe widespread deployment of hydrogen can help
> For grid scale electricy storage, there's not enough Lithium and cobalt in the Earth's crust to build the needed capacity.
That’s widely incorrect. How exactly much batteries we need, what their chemistry should be is up for some debate as are exact numbers for commercially viable raw materials etc.
But using the numbers from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... and using the deepest mine * land area of earth gives enough lithium to build batteries to store roughly 200 years world of the total electricity generation of the entire planet.
Clearly we are never going to actually mine that much lithium, but just as clearly we don’t need anything like that much eitehr.
> using the deepest mine * land area of earth gives enough lithium to build batteries to store roughly 200 years world of the total electricity generation of the entire planet.
Strip mine the entire planet to a depth of multiple miles, and the resulting batteries are still few enough to talk about in human terms. This is not good.
