Recycled lithium might cost 5x more. Not that the disposal cost of a battery is 5x the purchase price.
If the battery pays for its purchase price in 2 years and the disposal cost is 1/2 the price of a new battery (doubt it's anywhere near that), then the it would still pay for the total cost of ownership in 3 years.
From what I understand, used-up lithium batteries are fairly non-toxic and can be safely dumped in a landfill. Still not zero-cost, but probably about as low as you can get. And they can probably recover some of that cost by recycling some of the other metals from them.
EV batteries can be repurposed for small-scale grid storage applications, and therefore can have a second life for many years before they are finally broken down to raw ingredients for recycling:
This always makes me nervous. If I have some old laptops lying around, how worried should I be about them exploding? Does it only apply if they're in use?
I believe they experience all of those. But yes, there are many secondary uses, especially in situations where high energy density isn't required.
After the last economically viable use for electricity storage, however, there has to be an economic incentive to actually recycle the raw materials. Presumably this is when value of the raw materials exceeds the cost of their reclamation.
>> Do aged lithium batteries lose charge efficiency, discharge efficiency or capacity?
> I believe they experience all of those.
Hmm...would that explain the CPU performance loss of an aging cell phone battery? Lower discharge efficiency = less power available for the CPU = CPU throttles itself to lower power usage?
This is always misreported. It's true that we can't distinguish between two adjacent rgb values (in most cases, on most displays...), which is where this comes from. But as you say, displays only cover a portion of the space.
The easiest example I usually give is with blacks-- computer monitors just can't reproduce the absence of light well.
But the cost to his ego for not meeting a milestone which receives even more publicity because of the big price tag is a big motivator (or at least one could argue)
So even if the utility of the funds isn't consequential, a package like this might be one if the few ways to further incentivize a CEO like Musk.
Maybe some people are infinitely incentivizable, because they can always figure out a way to do something useful with the money.
Bill Gates for instance, although his model seems to be give it all away to good causes he believes can accomplish good. Elon still seems to believe more in his own capabilities to accomplish worthwhile things with it.
I expect he too has a little txt file somewhere on his desktop, with various amounts as milestones to unlock the next project.
Maybe at $22 billion he can afford to start asteroid mining and in orbit construction or something that would top his current accomplishments.
Asteroid mining and orbital construction would require trillions in investment, and years of focused work by a number of institutions. As far as I can tell, Musk uses that rhetoric for PR, and it works. So far an electric car company and rockets suited for LEO don’t add up to grand space adventures.
But shifts in the market aren't independent random events. You can definitely find examples of dramatic, real shifts in valuation but in the vast majority of cases business value is created over time. That rate of growth might be slightly faster or slightly slower, but you can be certain it's within reasonable bounds. So when speculation or scare drives the price higher or lower, you can be sure it will find its way back.
Probably not as expensive, but still much more expensive than it need be.
We've got a bunch of perverse incentives where it's cheaper for the patient to choose the option that's more expensive for the payer. Straightening those out would be a small first step, but complexities of the system and incumbent powers have made it pretty difficult.
Sure. Why don't I hear more about Americans doing medical tourism then? Is there some kind of information asymmetry, because it sounds to me as if there ought to be a lot of money to be saved if the sick people knew where they could purchase the medicine they require.
I can sympathize with this because I remember needing a medical procedure that I was forced to travel to a different country to solve, it wasn't even about the money but a case where I the patient was given poor information and then ignored, I actually took the doctor to the board over it in the end, and they ultimately provided a correct solution but it was easier in the end just to travel abroad to fix it.
Hi there! The preceding review is from my sister who has a very similar sounding username (amoothy12 vs. amoorthy). Still, I'm thrilled to have her as a shill for CivikOwl :)
Looking forward to some non-biased reviews on our product. HN users have given us great feedback in the past - blunt and thoughtful.
