By 2025, the world will be in the grip of a critical #Lithium shortage.
#ecars are snatching lithium from solar, wind, and battery farms required for the #NetZero grid.
We are building our society on the lie of lithium. What happens when it’s gone?
‘By far the greatest lie is the promise of lithium. Renewable energy and ecars both contain lithium and act as competing industries for a vanishingly rare resource. The more ecars on the road, the more power is needed to charge them, which means we have to build more wind turbines, solar panels, and battery farms. It is an equation that gets out of control immediately when it comes to the sheer volume of mineral required to meet demand. It is a nonsense waste of a valuable resource that the rest of civilisation needs for phones, computers, and all manner of electrical system.
We are wasting lithium on power generation and ecars when other technologies exist – better technologies – and worse, we are using public money to force a transition that the market clearly doesn’t want.
This is not some kind of Climate Change wishy-washy apocalypse with a shifting end date, critical lithium shortages are expected by 2025, long before the Net Zero 2030 targets come into effect.
Car manufacturers admit that there is only enough lithium for 14 million ecars while the World Economic Forum says the world needs 5 billion to get to Net Zero.
The lithium shortage is about to make phones, computers, TVs, fridges, and all household electrical goods extremely expensive. If you think the cost of living is bad now, wait until the lithium dries up. Lithium used to cost $6,000 per tonne in 2020, in 2022 that figure sits at $78,032 per tonne. And what then? Solar panels, wind turbines, and battery farms have a best-case lifespan of 20 years. Everything that lithium was wasted on is headed for landfill leaving the power grid to be ripped up and replaced by – well – probably nuclear but it will cost more because of the lack of lithium.
As Stuart Crow, chair of Lake Resources, said: ‘There simply isn’t going to be enough lithium on the planet, regardless of who expands and who delivers, it won’t be there.’’
