ttbn,
Nearly half a tonne of lithium for every person on this planet?
I think your calculations are way off!

The calculations are not mine but those of Professor Simon Michaux in a paper 'Assessment of the Extra Capacity Required of Alternative Energy Electrical Power Systems to Completely Replace Fossil Fuel'.

My mistake was sloppy reading and reporting.

The 1.3 billion EV's proposed in Scenario F would require 282.6 million tonnes of lithium.

Michaux's calculations show that "global reserves, let alone global production, may not be enough to resource the quantity of batteries required.

The conclusion is that renewable energy will not work the way it is being planned.

There is information on the enormous wind and solar requirements also, but they are irrelevant to this thread.

Morse,
Small scale only and it helps if you have a property, my eldest son, who owns and runs the place, currently has 40 acres in English Ash coppice for future wood needs and ash has the great advantage of burning green if needs be, and of drying quickly as it has a iow moisture content.

I haven't look at the details of the report you reference but these figures seem way, way off. If I remember correctly a typical EV only has about 10kg of Lithium (order of magnitude- some less, some more than 10kg but none in the 100's of kg). So a billion cars is only 10 million ton. The figure 282 million seems to be out by an order of magnitude.

By-the-way: Many current models of EV's don't have Cobalt nor Nickel in the battery. They use LFP technology- L is for Lithium (Li), F for Iron (Fe) and P for phosphate (PO4). Iron is extremely cheap and abundant (for example, the ore they mine in Western Australia is literally dirt cheap) and phosphate is also cheap (it is a common fertilizer that farmers use by the ton). However, Lithium is expensive- ball park: 100$/kg.

Also, there is really no need to use lithium in solar/wind grid storage- the reason it is used in cars is because it is in a sweet spot for energy-stored/mass and energy-stored/volume. But for large scale grid storage the weight and size of the battery is not an issue since they sit immobile on the ground. Hence engineers can use whatever battery chemistry they like- eg: heavier but cheaper batteries (though with currently available configurations of solar+batteries it is still more expensive than coal).

As the Albanese government blunders on towards the same energy chaos in Europe, the UK government has warned Brits to expect total power blackouts of 3 hours at a time by February next year.

What is it with the idiots in Canberra that they don’t take notice of obvious warnings! The liberal Liberal party can't say anything in opposition because they had the same loony policies of emissions reductions and unreliable energy, along with 'no nuclear'.

ttbn,
The report you mentioned is long, so I haven't had time to look at it in much detail yet, but I did notice (on page 651) that the 282.6 million tonnes is for the total world EV battery mass, not just the lithium.

BTW I apologise for a similar mistake - I wrote "nearly half a tonne" when I should've written "nearly a fifth of a tonne".

Anyway, I think 282.6 million tonnes battery mass may be an overestimate, as in Asia where BAAS (batteries as a service) infrastructure already exists because of the popularity of electric motorcycles, electric cars with smaller (and easily swappable) batteries could well become commercially successful.

As for your later post:
Europe's "energy chaos" is the result of their main supplier refusing to sell them gas. Australia doesn't even import gas, so how do you imagine we're heading for the same chaos?

>the UK government has warned Brits to expect total power blackouts of 3 hours at a time by February next year

Not quite. National Grid warned that IF there's a shortage of gas AND mainland EU countries are unwilling to sell Britain electricity then there's a chance they might have to curtail supply, in which case residents of affected areas would be warned a day in advance that their power could be cut or up to three hours.