But they arent without drawbacks to the only going yeah, we explore ways to make the most of their shelf life. Hello and welcome. Im some of that. Im now lithium, ion battery is power every ping from tools and toys to electric vehicles and Energy Storage systems. But when the useful life comes to an end, they can pour the hazard to our health or environment if not properly managed. Here in india, one company is working to ensure that these batteries dont end up as pollutants. J gama buzz expertly gets down to dismantling another electric battery. Hes been working in this recycling plant for the past 18 months. The former day laborer is proud of his job and there will be plenty to keep him busy for years to come. Ah, l m l hooker that people use commute using gasoline vehicles, hot volume it smoke and cause lots of pollution that causes health issues. Electric vehicles dont cause any kind of pollution or emissions for a growing number of people in india are now switching to electric vehicles. Experts estimate that this your sales will almost triple the previous years demand, instead of gasoline or diesel electric vehicles, run on batteries, which at the moment are mainly lithium ion based. Its an environmental conundrum because they usually only have a lifespan of 5 to 7 years. Motion monte, from the center for science and environment in new delhi, explains the problem. We produce about 50000. 00 tons of lithium i invest in the country. Very little closer to actually get recycled. Its only now with even coming into the picture and the government setting up these recycling rules, like the Waste Management rules. This is just the beginning. The most serious issue is that the toxic substances in the discarded batteries can lead into the ground water via landfills. At the same time, the lithium batteries are full of valuable ro, materials that india has historically had to import from all over the world thats created a completely new industrial for about 3 years now, the Material Company has been recycling lithium, ion batteries, bringing their competent, bought back into their own material cycle. Goes into the shredder, shattered properly, then the back my we what we do is the black powder inside the battery is color black. You separate that from the casing of the battery. And then the black mass refining process is a further about where using different high energy and it through what you need to extract michael like or by because she needs you. Copper, lithium cabinet and other compounds are also recalled from the old batteries. These Raw Materials can then be used in the production of new batteries, a solution that saves money and makes more environmental sense than extracting more minerals from lines or on the wall that people often walk under atrocious conditions. We call every 2nd profitable mining because we extract the fame medicine come from the mine, but we actually dont physically think about we are taking vist that is generated by consumers and industrial around the world that a Numerous Companies like taro. Recycling, lithium, ion battery is, however, the volume of batteries currently being recycled is still very small, especially given the amount of least expected in the future. Battery recycling is something that the entire world is still trying to figure out better. Student needs to be a lot more, i think investment into thought in be that is one important thing. And the other thing also is that if they dont have enough for new, know, we need huge, large volumes to be able to take the process and even globally, i think were still in the event in the beginning stages. From 2035 india plans to limit sales of new vehicles to 0 emissions models. Only experts believe that by the end of the current decade, more than half of all new vehicle smith already me all electric batteries. Cycling is an important factor in achieving the complete switch to e mobility in india. And if possible, under conditions that are both financially and environmentally sound. Electric vehicle sales in india have almost tripled. Echoing a global search. Thats good news for efforts for thought emissions, but also means the prospect of a multi 1000000 ton heap of discarded batteries. A bang lobby start up has developed an Energy Storage system that runs on 2nd life lithium ion batteries and is making a world of a difference to people in places where power is unreliable. When the sun goes down and really put up a dish street life usually feeds away together with the days dying light. But these 2nd life batteries allow long stretches of road to be lit up after duck. Ah, one of these batteries is also in service. And finally, bungalow dean ovation, enables street windows to peddle their snacks late into the night. By noon for her light is the greatest gift of our com. Rubio, barbara, i can do my work so much better now. Thanks to the light. Go. A dwell a driver, li engine, at least one of the batteries is delivering energy to electric sewing machines. This makes it possible for seamstresses at the vehicle livelihood center. One more as the appeal of b street. But article of clothing they produce and not having to manually operate the machines means less of a physical burden. Ah, let go under the microphone, might always get pain and my legs at work. And i know i couldnt work for long periods, and i had to constantly stretch my legs or not. But these electric machines, i dont have that problem. I can work for as long as i want to kill something that i that we use to come to work at 9 am. Now we can come an hour later. Ive been back then we had managed to say 2 or 3 dresses a day. With the electric machines, we can do a lot more and we work as long as we want to manage to get everything done. Pradeep saturday and doesnt veto butcher founded newnan in bangalore. We got their goal was to harness the last remaining energy from used batteries. And that meant experimenting in what was still a relatively unexplored field. Its usually there used between a 100 to 8275 percent. Thats where in the fall live people are usually using it and between that 75 percent and 50 percent threshold, there is still in most cases some Usable Energy which you can still use. But in, in the frost life application, it doesnt get used, which is not very efficient, right . I mean, is like, you have one little water water you drink, hopefully to and you draw a half lead away. The 2 men started out in 2017 with used laptop batteries 1st the batteries taken, but each individual cell is tested for is the energy content. The functioning ones are assembled into a small, portable battery, which has rented out the street vendors, for example, for around 2 euros a week. The 2nd big project after the laptop batteries, i used batteries from electric cars, div some, some german carmakers, and i converted into bol for the 2nd life batteries. Lasting for 5 to 10 years. The laptop batteries, which are also charged with solar energy. Last only about 2 years, no, no monitors them buy a chip and an app. Each battery is internet connected. As these batteries are internet connected, we get unwanted notification at the end of life and pick up these batteries for recycling. While we also provide a new one as the replacement at the end of their 2nd life, the batteries end up in this recycling plant run by some good india, a 100 kilometers not have been glue. The batteries are broken down into their various components, the metallic wrist, mostly aluminum, is sold to metal dealers. The so called black pulp containing the particularly valuable substances is sent to some deals mean factory in south korea. For further processing. We go over all the valuable nor does her lego bird knit gail, lithium ah, manganese proper and again we send it so our contract fair leg samsung to manufactured near better recycling centers like this, a still pretty pin on the ground in india. But the number of electric us is growing with electric mobility taking center feed in india, bringing the thought efficiency into back to become a major factor into our Sustainable Practices in mobility sector here at the end didnt due to science in bengal. Now the funny antiquity desa range of medeas with the aim of increasing battery capacity. Hes the head of the institute steam for advanced Energy Storage research. I see the publishing as parking portion of this ecosystem of electric vehicles and electrification gender. Re purposing batteries really cost me maybe about 10 percent of the cost of recycling a back to the energy cost, the cost and the environment in terms of chemicals are to be used for recycling and, and the costs and the environment in terms of ways that comes out of recycling batteries, the big advantage of 2nd life batteries is that the environmental friendlier than new ones. And they are also much cheaper. So more people can afford them. If i can cut down the cost of shooting at the city to a common man, it probably will bring every Single Person in the country to have the same level of basic amenities that otherwise dont exist in some of the remote areas and, and bringing that the clarity is, is in itself a big social reform. I think the seem stresses and generally live in small villages nearby. In many cases they can no longer feed themselves and their families from agriculture alone. They now have a regular income at the ceiling workshop. Ah, the batteries mean that their work here can be done at any time of day, which also makes it easier to reconcile work and family life. But one bedroom is not really enough. The women are hoping for more in building for their homes. We need that a battery with a battery like this. It would also be possible for my children to do their School Homework and we could use it to power household devices like washing machines. That would help us immensely. We can get the mail on lecture me has far more ambitious plans in the future. Shed like to open a small business, but forcing machines at home then she could take care of her children. While she owns a living. Now batteries of forward the rise of Renewable Energy because they can stored it even when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. But given the limitations of lithium ion batteries, massages on federal dollar drives, our reporter had to look around. Before we get into the shiny new stuff, we gotta talk about the lithium ion battery. Its the Fastest Growing battery segment in the world. Scientist started developing the lithium ion battery during the oil crisis of the 19 seventys. They hope this could win the west of fossil fuels. But nothing has changed. And it took a while until you could actually buy one engineer stanley wedding m a korea yoshi now and john be good enough help develop the 1st commercially available lithium ion battery that came to market in 1991. Thats them winning the nobel prize for that. You work with nice people and they do all the artwork or news at burger drives, like as much grovers. You go up, up, up, up, up. The lithium ion battery is good at giving a lot of electricity and shorter burst. So its used for Consumer Electronics and now electric cars. And its also pretty much the only battery we use for storing, grid scale, Renewable Energy. But mining lithium is problematic. It involves pumping underground water deposits to the surface. This use is roughly 70000 leaders to make one ton of lithium. More than half the earths resources are between argentina, bolivia and she lay mining at consumes 65 percent of the regions already scarce. Water supply, lithium ion battery is also typically used cobalt, which is expensive and mine mostly in the democratic republic of congo. News reports have covered the notoriously exploitive business, which uses child miners and devastates local communities. Lithium batteries can also be flammable. If you cant bring them on a plane, you should definitely think twice about a giant one backing up your grid and they lose capacity. So longevity isnt really there forte. So lithium ion battery work, but they cant be the only solution to store energy, especially on a grid scale. According to the i. E. A. Were going to need close to 10000 gigawatt hours of Energy Storage worldwide by 2040 to meet climate goals. Thats 50 times the size of the current market. Today. Its actually another Technology Pumped Hydro storage that comprises a whopping 96 percent of global storage power capacity. And it basically relies on Pretty Simple gravitational principles. This is ramona swami not on. Shes the head of a thermal Storage Company which well get to later. But she has no problem with water. Youve got 2 rows of worse or leaks one high and one low. And when you have a lot of excess power, you use that exist power to pump the water of pills in a higher reservoir. When you want that power back, you let the water run downstream and turn turbine generator. However, those products are hard to build. They take up massive amounts of space and need exactly the right geography, to lakes and a hill. A lot of them also work within conventional hydro, electric dams, which need lots of up front capital and disrupt habitat. Storing Renewable Energy will need more flexibility than these reservoirs. One, promising alternative thats making headway comes from something you can find right on your kitchen. Table salt and its much more on down and its chemically senior green young. The same, opened up a very fable. This is rosa palace seen. Shes a battery researcher at the institute of material science and barcelona. She says, sodium is the best alternative because it basically mimics lithium ion battery technology. It has also got one valence electron, the number of electrons in the outermost layer. But sodium is a 1000 times more abundant, is 20 to 40 percent cheaper. And is it sensitive to temperature changes . So no issues with blowing up, but it does have lower energy density, thus heavier batteries, which is why it hasnt commercialized sooner. If its for the grid, though, this wont matter so much since everything is stationary and for right now, time is of the essence away, higher in good notice universal, apple. Ah, so much closer look here. While theyre already in the market, Analysts Expect them to be produced at seal and the next few years. Speaking of salt, what if we could store energy in the form of heat and really hot salt swami now tons Company Malta is doing this in the us. We take Electrical Energy our either directly from Renewable Generation like winder solar or just from the grid. And we convert that into thermal energy. Turns out that molten salt is a great preserver of heat. It looks kind of like water and his roughly the same viscosity here. So it works when theres excess electricity generated, the energy is used to heat, a large insulated storage tank of molten salt and very high temperatures. I melting point means the salt can absorb a lot of energy. It keeps for 6 plus hours with the batteries can only manage under for when the grid needs power, the plant re converts heat back into electricity through a turbine. While its material costs are relatively low and its system is pretty scalable, its still behind hydro and lithium. The hope is that the market will eventually make it feasible. You can do something similar with the piles of sand. We mentioned earlier, a couple of fins decided to use some local pilots to solve one of finlands Biggest Energy issues heating, instead of converting the heat back to electricity, they just use it directly to storage, deposit is in the order of 1000 times g m. M. Woodley june buffers, michael, ellen and co founded a company that makes sand batteries return the electricity to heat, ugly gum reg installed cheap lit up. We can bear with the large volumes of energy, how much sand undertones of sand. It can store heat at around 500. 00 to 600. 00 ri celsius for months. This heat then goes directly to warm municipal buildings. Moreover, it could provide heat to one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, the heavy industry sector in comb countries. The solution makes a lot of sense. The Company Currently has one system thats heating con, con path. A southwestern town with a population of 13000. The 100 tons, sand battery can technically stay hot for months, but they recharged this one in 2 weeks cycles to keep it efficient. These are just a couple of solutions. There are dozens of technologies out there right now, each buying for their place in the market flow. Redox batteries, for instance, or another big contender for grid scale storage. They dont function all that differently from lithium ion batteries. And the latter electrons travel between 2 electrodes through a liquid called and electrolyte, creating a current in a flow battery. This liquid electrolyte is stored externally. The larger the tank, the more storage capacity, which means the flow battery can be scaled really easily. And what need scale, you guessed it, thicker it chemical technologies, gravity based technology, mechanical technologies, you know, flow batteries, all that stuff. This is a huge need that were trying to solve. And i think were going to need all the truth is, were not going to quit the lithium ion any time soon. The huge demand for electric cars means that some of the technologies and efficiencies and develop there will spill over to the grid. But the fossil fuel industry is built into the economy. Its a huge challenge to adapt and tire systems, including infrastructure and policy to renewable alternatives. Cost is the biggest limiting factor for new technologies. The market decides how far theyve come, and how far theyll go. To africa now and the laboratory and synagogue very such as a looking at the potential to recycle natural waste. Not just to generate energy, but distorted to the aims to produce scalable batteries, from nothing less than a local st. Food staple. Along these buttons, cell batteries may not look very special until you know the raw material used to make them at this lab and dac, ours shake until d up university interior dall peanut shells. A thoughtful milestone to c. B. Transforming this type of biomass into advanced materials is a new field of research, says 2nd, well, russia, the Scientific Community has been working on a for 2 or 3 years down to fix on the ultimate. And we were the 1st to initiate this kind of