4 Energy Metals and Power Storage: A Global Perspective
4.1 Why Are Energy Metals So Important? Globally, the energy sector is undergoing major transformation driven by a range of push and pull factors including:
Global climate agreements Urbanisation City air pollution Functionality
Costs Technology developments
Resource scarcity Energy portability
As populations grow, there is increasing energy demand for electronic devices including phones and mobile devices, computers, power tools, air-conditioning, water pumping, electric vehicles and other industrial applications. Technological advances in renewable energy generation combined with the dramatic increase in the number of portable devices has increased the demand for batteries while also improving distributed generation, usage and network synchronisation of electricity. Battery technology innovation and improvements in economies of scale promise to deliver cost-competitive stationary storage. A virtuous technology and market development spiral has taken hold, which is rapidly transforming how we generate, use and manage energy. Key pillars of this transformation include:
Power generation
Energy storage and consumption
Converting electrical energy into kinetic energy is the reverse of generation and uses the same principals – using more rare earth based permanent magnets. Power consumption for transport, industry and trading
“On demand” – energy materials, primarily lithium, that are chemically and physically assembled into battery cells for recharge and discharge on demand.
Rare earth elements (in combination with iron and boron) become the permanent magnets that convert kinetic energy from turbines (driven by wind, gas combustion, water flows, steam, etc) into electrical energy.
Research undertaken by MIT show the metals most impacted by new technology (Figure 6 ). As can be seen, tin, lithium and cobalt are the main metals affected across all new technologies while current battery storage technologies most impact lithium, cobalt, vanadium and graphite. As will be shown later, the most significant growth is seen to be associated with lithium-ion batteries due to electric vehicles and power storage.
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