How batteries are powering ahead
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2020
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tesla's Elon Musk plans to make some big announcements about batteries that could transform cars, electricity and the fight against climate change.
Justin Rowlatt gets the inside scoop from Seth Weinbaum, journalist at the electric vehicles news-site Electrek. Meanwhile, battery chemist Paul Shearing of University College London and the Faraday Institution explains how lithium-ion batteries made the smartphone possible, and are now set to revolutionise transport.
But electrifying the world's one billion road vehicles is no small task, not to mention building even bigger batteries to stabilise renewable energy sources on our electricity grids. Where on earth will all the lithium come from? Justin speaks to another American tech entrepreneur who thinks he has the answer - Teague Egan of start-up EnergyX.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Picture: Battery charging icons; Credit: Iuliia Kanivets/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to Business Daily with me, Justin Rowland, and today we will be exploring |
| 0:06.2 | what could be the most transformative part of Elon Musk's huge empire. It isn't the rockets or |
| 0:14.0 | the cars, but the boring old batteries. Well, it's a global race on a global scale, and it's |
| 0:19.3 | foundationally important to getting off fossil fuels. |
| 0:23.0 | So it's kind of like saving the world. |
| 0:25.6 | But if batteries are going to power our world, we are going to need a lot of lithium. |
| 0:30.5 | Step forward, Teague Egan, a wannabe Musk-style tycoon, who aims to revolutionize the way lithium is mined. |
| 0:38.7 | When I saw this, I said, you know, this is literally a thousand-year-old technology. |
| 0:43.6 | I mean, there has to be the better way to do it. |
| 0:46.2 | Get ready to discover why batteries are actually very interesting indeed, |
| 0:51.4 | here on Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:59.4 | A video by the Bolivian government promoting the wonders of the Salar de Uyun. |
| 1:16.1 | It's a new hope for the economy bolivia for the major reserve of lithium of the |
| 1:22.3 | lithium of the world. |
| 1:24.2 | It's a giant sparkling white salt flat, high in the Andes. |
| 1:28.7 | If you haven't seen pictures of it, Google it now. |
| 1:31.5 | It is a truly spectacular site. |
| 1:34.5 | It is also the final destination of this program. |
| 1:38.4 | But what has it got to do with energy storage? |
| 1:41.4 | Well, stick with us and you will find out. |
| 1:43.7 | First, our battery power journey |
| 1:46.0 | begins here in lockdown London and a phone call with one of the UK's leading battery chemists. |
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