clean energy – The Health Care Blog

Batteries All Around

Jun 26, 2024

By KIM BELLARD

Quick question: how many batteries do you have? Chances are, the answer is way bigger than you think. They’re in your devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets, laptops, ear buds), they’re throughout your house (e.g., clocks, smoke detectors), they’re in your car (even if you don’t have an EV), and they may even be in you. We usually only think about them when they need recharging, or when they catch fire. They can be an environmental nightmare if not recycled, and recycling lithium-ion batteries is still problematic.

So I was intrigued to read about some efforts to rethink what a battery is.

Let’s start with some work done by Swedish tech company Sinonus, a spinout of Chalmers University of Technology and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The company is all about carbon fiber; more specifically, integrating structural strength and storing energy.

It seeks to make things multipurpose: “Just think of your smartphone, today it seems farfetched to use a single purpose phone, camera and mp3 player when you can have them all in one. In the same way we can transform single purpose materials, such as structure materials and batteries, through our multipurpose carbon fiber composite solution.”

Or, as TechRadar put it, “how the laptop could become the battery.”

The Pathway to Health Leads Through Clean Energy Technology

Dec 16, 2020

By MIKE MAGEE

Health reporting this week is rightly dominated by the challenging worldwide distribution of the Pfizer vaccine for Covid-19. Bringing the virus to bay is job #1, not only to preserve human life but also our global economy. But this week, on the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, we are reminded that our long term human health, including clean air and water, mitigation of weather-related human disasters, and regulations that lessen our chronic burden of disease, depend as much on energy policy as they do health policy.

Nowhere is this more evident (though largely hidden from sight) than in our planet’s positioning to address global warming. The Paris Agreement, the climate accord signed by 195 nations, was abuptly dismantled by Trump four years ago. But President-elect Biden has signaled that his first order on January 20, 2021, will be to rejoin the agreement.

As Trump patronized his fossil fuel funders, and promised that “we’re going to have clean coal and we’re going to have plenty of it,” the oil and gas industry wrote down the value of its assets $170 billion in the first 6 months of 2020.

Acknowledging as much this past week, a cabal of energy investors, with combined assets of $9 trillion, signaled a shift in their strategy with a pledge to harmonize their investments with net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Those investors haven’t suddenly “discovered religion.” No. They’re looking at the numbers.

Clean energy options like solar and wind, combined with the latest battery technology, are now 79% cheaper to produce than US coal production. Investors realize that 90% of the new energy capacity generated worldwide in 2020, as reported by the International Energy Agency, has come from clean energy.