about life, the universe and everything. to you the answer? well, in give it here. the answer to almost everything. in a word document 3, series with clever, crazy ground breaking questions. can we go and see after life? are we getting dumber? how can we feed every 140 to the answer to almost everything. starts january 15 on d w. ah ah, they've been powering not on the go lives for tickets and healed the key. the fleet, the world from fossil fuels, lithium,

ion batteries are central to the green energy revolution. but the aunt without drawbacks to the only goal india. we explore ways to make the most of their shelf life. hello and welcome. i'm son that i'm now lithium, ion battery is power. everything from tools and toys to electric vehicles and energy storage systems. when the useful life comes to an end, they can pause a hazard to our health or environment. if not properly managed. you are an india one company is working to ensure that these batteries don't end up as pollutants. ah. m j gama buzz expertly gets down to dismantling another electric battery. he's been working in the recycling plant for the past 18 months. the former day laborer is proud of his job and they will be plenty to keep him busy for years to come. ah,

l m l for the people use commute using gasoline vehicles, hot volume it smoke and cause lots of pollution that causes health issues. electric vehicles don't cause any kind of pollution or emissions for a growing number of people in india. and 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. it's 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. me brody is about $15000.00 tons of lithium i invest in the country. very little offered actually get 3 cycle. it's 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 leach into the ground water wire landfill sites. at the same time, the lithium ion batteries are full of valuable raw materials that india has historically had to import from all over the world. that's created a completely new industry for about 3 years now, the terror company has been recycling lithium, ion batteries, bringing their competent parts back into their own material cycle with goes into the shredder, shattered properly. then the back. what the do, the black powder inside the battery is color black. you separate that from the casing of the battery. and then the black mas refining process is a further, we're using different high energy and it through what you need to extract, michael,

like bite with his sheet nickel, magnesium, copper, lithium cabinet, and other compounds are also recalled from the old. battering is, 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 a more minerals from miles around the world. that people often walk under atrocious conditions. we call the 2nd tosses mining because we extract the fame medicine come from the mine, but we actually don't physically, they don't. we are taking vist that is generated by consumers and industrious around the world. numerous companies like taro, recycling lithium, ion batteries. 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 a bit of student that 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 it didn't have enough for new know, we need huge, large volumes to be able to fix their process. and even globally, i think we're still in the, we are in the beginning stages. from 2035 india plans to limit sales of new vacant da 0 emissions models. only experts believe that by the end of the current decade, more than half of all new vacancy that already be all electric. back as recycling is an thought and factor in achieving the complete switch to e mobility in india. and if possible, under conditions that are both financially and environment in sound electric vehicle sales in india have almost triple, echoing a global search. that's good news for efforts for thought emissions, but also been the prospect of a multi 1000000 ton heap of discarded batteries. a bank 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. ah, when the sun goes down in rural, with the british st. life usually fades 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 in finally, bengal. dean ovation enables street windows to peddle their snacks late into the night. by moving her light is the greatest jennifer gone libya? barbara, i can do my work so much better now. thanks to the light for

a 2 hour drive of the engine, at least one of the batteries is delivering energy to electric sewing machines. this makes it possible for seamstresses at the vehicle to 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 couldn't work for long periods, and i had to constantly stretch my legs. but these electric machines and i don't have that problem, i can work for as long as i want to center that we used to come to work at 9 am. now we can come an hour later, i've 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 strategy and doesn't moodle buck founded noonan in bengal on for their goal was to harness the last remaining energy from use batteries. and that meant experimenting

in what was still a relatively unexplored feed. oh, usually they used between a 100 to 8275 percent. that's where in the 1st life 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 1st life application it doesn't get used, which is not very efficient, right? i mean, is like, you have one little water water, you drink, hopefully to a neutral 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 st lenders, for example, for around 2 euros a week. the 2nd big project after the laptop, batteries are used. batteries from electric cars div come from a german,

comical and a converted into buffalo 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 by a chip and an app. each battery is internet connected. as these back teeth are internet connected, we get unwonted notification at their end of life and pick up these back these 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 gains mean factory in south korea. for further processing. we go over all the available metals, lego bird, nick gill,

lithium manganese groper. and again, we send it to our contract fare like samsung to manufactured near better recycling centers like this. a still pretty thin on the ground in india. but the number of electric cars is growing with electric mobility taking center fit in india, bringing the thought efficiency into batteries become a major factor into our sustainable practices in mobility sector. here at the end didn't due to science in bengal. now the funny antiquity desa range of medina with the aim of increasing battery capacity. he's 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 batting, 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 environmentally friendly 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 don't exist in some of the remote areas and, and bringing that the clarity is, is in itself a big social reform, i think, ah, the same stresses and generally live in small villages nearby. in many cases, they can no longer freed themselves and their families from agriculture alone. they

now have a regular income at the sewing workshop. the batteries mean that they work here and be done at any time of day, which also makes it easier to reconcile work and family life. but one battery 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 miles on the lecture. me has far more ambitious plans in the future. she'd 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 back to these a fall would the rise of renewable energy because we can store it even when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, or given the limitations of lithium ion batteries, massages on federal toyotas. our reporter had to look around before we get into the shiny new stuff, we gotta talk about the lithium ion battery. it's the fastest growing battery segment in the world. scientists started developing the lithium ion battery during the oil crisis of the 1970s. they hope this could wind the west off fossil fuels, but nothing has changed. and it took a while until you could actually buy one engineer stanley, whittingham, a korea yoshi? no. and john be good enough? help develop the 1st garage only available? lithium ion battery that came to market in 1991. that's them winning the nobel prize for that. you work with nice people and they do all

a hard work or new said bergen drives like as much grover's. you go up up up up up . the lithium ion battery is good at giving a lot of electricity and shorter burst. so it's used for consumer electronics and now electric cars. and it's 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 earth's resources are between argentina, libya and she lay mining and consume 65 percent of the regions already scarce. water supply, lithium, ion battery is also typically used cobalt, which is expensive and mind. 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 can't bring them on a plane, you should definitely think twice about

a giant one backing up your grid and they lose capacity. so longevity isn't really there. forte. so lithium ion batteries work, but they can't be the only solution to store energy, especially on a grid scale. according to the i. e. a. we're going to need close to 10000 gigawatt hours of energy storage worldwide by 2040 to meet climate goals. that's 50 times the size of the current market. today. it's 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 romulus swami not on. she's the head of a thermal storage company which we'll get to later. but she has no problem with water. you've got to reservoirs 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 a turbine generator. however,

those products are hartsville, they take a massive amounts of space and need exactly the right geography, 2 lakes, and a hill. a lot of them also work within conventional hydro, electric dams, which need lots of upfront capitol and disrupt habitat. storing renewable energy will need more flexibility than these reservoirs. one, promising alternative that's making headway comes from something you can find right on your kitchen. table salt, much more on the need scanning galaxy, milani's young. same robin, the gregory fable. this is rosa palace seen. she's 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 isn't sensitive to temperature changes. so no issues with blowing up,

but it does have lower energy density, thus heavier batteries, which is why it hasn't commercialized sooner. if it's for the grid though, this won't matter so much since everything is stationary and for right now, time is of the essence away, higher in good knowledge in seattle. oh, so much closer look. well, they're already in the market. analysts expect them to be produced and sale 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 or 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 has roughly the same viscosity here, so it works when there's 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. lithium 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. it's still behind hydro and lithium. the hope is that the market will eventually make a 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 finland's 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, and would resume 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 that's heating con, con path. a southwestern town with a population of 13000. the 100 tons, sam battery, can technically stay hot for months, but they recharged this one in 2 weeks cycles to keep 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 don't 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 needs scale,

you guessed it, the grid, chemical technologies, gravity based technology, mechanical technologies, you know, flow, batteries, all that stuff. this is a huge need that we're trying to solve. and i think we're going to need all the truth is, we're 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. it's 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 they've come and how far don't go to africa now, and the laboratory and synagogue very such as a looking at the potential to recycle natural waste. not just and generate energy, but distorted to the aim is to produce scalable batteries, from nothing less than

a local st. full staple. oh, you're wrong these button. so 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 door. peanut shells dot dot hall motion to cbs, transforming this type of biomass into advanced materials is a new field of research, and she says, certain rushes, the scientific community has been working on a for 2 or 3 years just to fix on the ultimate and we were the 1st to initiate this kind of work here in africa. all right, you see on lovely boss, if alma peanut shells are plentiful in synagogue, peanuts are one of the countries for most important exports. more than 60 percent of the rural population grows the popular and energy rich laguna. but this year,

a low harvest of around $1600000.00 tons is expected due to poor rainfall. until now, the shells have simply been thrown away or burned. pure waste says professor ben gum he regularly buys his raw materials at the t lane, central market in jacker avenue and explains to the trader that he makes batteries from michelle's. yeah. other than buying it out of i somebody said uber. oh, i'd never heard of that. i mean, again, it seems, every day you wake up and there's more technology, more developments. but i'm happy to see it happening on both on the low market and that the peanut shells help blue light. i want to live local and get a music for more than 2 years by the d up and gum has been researching the conversion of bio mass into energy with a group of 15 students. so, all my little it's a complicated electrochemical process with 1st the shelves are ground into a powder full and mixed with water. all our listing on good a top,

the whole thing. so for a period of time like this, i don't know, i won't tell you how long of it, because that's one of the crucial parameters while optical, those up and then we filter the mixture. and the result is this liquid whose the as opposed to the lumbering, once we add some more ingredients, we can use it to create the positive charge of the battery was achieved a lot of disclosed. the researchers take advantage of the high carbon content of the shells and extract zinc oxides from them bonding technology globally. when the liquid is radiated with sunlight at high temperatures, the zinc oxide evaporates and is converted into metallic zinc, which in turn can store energy these are environmentally friendly batteries that have the same potential as conventional lithium ion batteries for example. but without the disadvantages. that's because lithium ion battery is contained among other things, cobalt which is often mind by children in dangerous minds in the congo. in addition,

reserves of lithium and cobalt are limited. so the plus points are that the peanut battery is produced without cobalt, easier to dispose of cheaper to produce. introducing these environmentally friendly batteries would be of great help to synagogue. since 40 percent of rural households have no connection to the state power grid. they rely on batteries or alternative energy sources like solar or simply don't have access to any form of energy. there is a huge gap in energy supplied according to this environmental analyst role as a basic up a pasco full. he fulfilled his gas level. i think we have to move toward the development of energy sources like bio mass. labial, mass in his e. l y, a mass energy can be an answer today of the car. because senegal is a major producer of peanuts, with a huge supply of peanut shells, is my and not i'm on can, will that us. gov was a liaison for areas like cause

a mass which has a significant amount of bio mass. and for the development of this energy source will allow us to close a large part of the existing gap. don't go permit that as of a in gun party undergrad. think up a key, exist it all. while we'll see that in preliminary trials, the researchers were able to power remote controls or cell phones would their bio batteries. but their product isn't market ready yet. liz's year, or we now need to further optimize all the processes in the lab to get all the parameters fully under control through the so that the system works properly. total told us, and then it will be ready for market on, for me, dollar machine. the research team and jacker is now sure their batteries work. however, further research and money is needed before they can upscale production, the lupron, so that people in synagogue can actually use peanut power batteries to soccer. so

even innovations for a sustainable future and not without their share of compounding consequences as we've seen today. but accounting for solutions to these problems right from the start is bound to make a huge difference for the better. i leave you with that thought and see you again next week. good bye. and thanks for watching. ah ah, ah, ah ah, ah ah,

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