It's really weird to think that lead-acid batteries are generally considered more eco-friendly than large lithium batteries of equivalent capacity....
The reason is that lead-acid batteries can be almost entirely recycled; recycling the lead isn't very different from extracting lead from its ores in the first place, and thee acid can also be cleaned up for reuse
-F
@Felthry also lead is quite often a by-product of other ore refining processes like silver forging, so it's not like it's particularly sparse. only downside is that it's heavy as all hell, and in the event of a car crash, you're going to have a lot of lead in the environment that ideally shouldn't be there
@Felthry i suppose that's two downsides. but really there's multiple; it's heavy, toxic, degrades quite quickly when charging and recharging often... really lead acid is great but it's very much got the shit end of the stick
@pearshapes yeah, it's not the best battery chemistry but it's cheap, pretty tolerant of sloppy recharging circuits, and can deliver tons of current pretty easily
-F
@Felthry mhm. and i mean, if lead acid batteries WERE implemented in electric cars, we'd see a massive lowering of the entry bar, but it would need a lot of ironing out. like, ideally you'd have to go with VLRA batteries as used on motorcycles, but bigger than ever before
@Felthry sorry, VRLA, valve-regulated lead-acid. these terms are new to me
@pearshapes oh, yeah, i don't think that's very feasible for electric cars... NiMH is probably the least complicated battery chemistry you want to use and even then lithium is probably better
Because it's not just weight but also lead-acid batteries are physically very large for the amount of energy they store, compared to lithium or NiMH. I think they're even worse than alkaline primary batteries but I'm not 100% sure on that
-F
Tbh we love the idea of lead-acid used as a backup battery. The kind of thing you pull out in the rare event of a power outage, that can accept recharging off a "noisy" generator if need-be, and is only getting used once in a blue moon and almost never fully cycled so it can last a while.
@pearshapes That or people failing to recycle their batteries, though they almost always are as there's good incentives for people to do so
-F