Where is the best place for batteries in the future?

Just last year, there were more than 2 million electric vehicles in the world. The international energy agency estimates there will be 140 million electric vehicles in the world by 2030 if countries meet the "climate agreement targets" agreed in Paris. Ajay Kochhar, chief executive of li-cycle, a battery recycling company in Canada, said: "We can't be the ones who don't buy our pants. You know, we're going to make 11 million tons of spent lithium-ion batteries for the planet by 2030.

■ the grim situation in the face of more than a decade will face the challenges, the pace of human change is urgent. 

But even in the European Union, where environmental technology is now relatively advanced, only 5% of lithium-ion batteries are recycled. The other 95 percent of lithium-ion batteries, if damaged, release toxic gases from their core components such as lithium and cobalt, which could lead to water pollution and other irreversible environmental damage. However, as far as I can see, most of the old lithium-ion batteries in cars are shelved in the warehouses of the car companies, the batteries in electronic products are put in the drawers of our homes, and some of them are buried as rubbish. Don't relevant departments and agencies realize the harm? Of course, they know, but the appeal is free and the operation is unprofitable.

■ the main way to dispose of used car batteries nowadays

1) store it in a unified warehouse and put each battery into a chip to check its status in the warehouse. If there is an alarm, the robot arm will automatically take out the battery and destroy it in the landfill.

2) puncture: puncture the old battery with mechanical tools. This method is difficult to ensure that it will not cause pollution to the environment, because most of the used batteries still have electricity. The solution in the battery pack also causes damage to the environment and poses a potential explosion hazard.

3) landfill: as the name suggests, the battery is buried in the ground. This is the cheapest way to do it, but the batteries dissolve slowly and do the most damage to land and the environment.

4) layering: this is the way most battery factories use it today. There is plenty of room for obsolete car batteries, which will be broken down and sent to other fields to be used as carriers.

Umicore, a Belgian company, has been one of the few companies dedicated to recycling lithium-ion batteries since 2006 by smelting and soaking them to extract recyclable chemical metals. Now, miuco has made the recycling of old EV batteries one of its most important projects in preparation for a possible "electric-vehicle battery replacement frenzy" in 2025. Of course, I don't mind if you think of Miko as a "national money loser" because if the plan works, they will be "counting the money cramp" by 2025. The biggest problem is that lithium-ion batteries in electric cars around the world are chemically complex and do not have an international standard, making it expensive to recycle them properly. This is a graceful branch's most difficult problem, it also is the crux that not many people want to do this.

■ how much are the batteries of these electric cars worth?

It's no secret that batteries are the most important part of an electric car. Getting rid of an old battery in the most environmentally friendly way is no longer technically difficult. How do you reduce the cost of disposing of old batteries? "Quickly reducing the cost of new batteries" may be a crude solution. Lithium-ion batteries sold for $273 per kilowatt-hour in 2016, compared with $145 per kilowatt-hour for Chevy Bolt today. Countries aim to reduce the cost of lithium-ion batteries to $100 per kilowatt-hour by 2025. That would keep the cost of each battery pack at around $4,000, which would be good news for electric cars, and lower the cost of properly handling old batteries. Of course, battery price and battery pack price are two different concepts. The battery pack includes the battery, support structure, cooling system, and battery management system. Do you want to know the price of a Tesla battery? I'll give you a cool number -- $190 per kilowatt-hour. But as tesla Nevada's Gigafactory production increases, that price could change at any time.

▲ Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada, USA

■ where is the best place for batteries in the future?

Marc Grynberg, chief executive of Melco, has his own ideas: "car makers should take responsibility for the batteries they make, and they can be recycled and reused. With the number of old batteries expected to grow in the future, it's not always a good idea to keep them in your backyard. There is also a simple landfill for batteries, should be sentenced!" The European Union now has laws that make all battery manufacturers "responsible for collecting and disposing of spent lithium-ion batteries". The government will provide basic subsidies for the disposal and recycling of used batteries. The move has led to good partnerships between carmakers and battery recyclers. It has invested 25 million euros in an industrial pilot plant in Antwerp to recycle lithium-ion batteries and has worked actively with tesla and Toyota to refine and recycle precious metals such as cobalt and nickel.

■ are entrepreneurs really willing to pay to go green?

Do entrepreneurs pay for the environment? How is that possible? I'd rather believe they're all greedy vampires. Francisco Carranza of Nissan energy services, a no-frills firm, once said: "the cost of recycling used lithium-ion batteries in electric cars will drop to 1 euro/kg in the future, but the value of the raw material after recycling is only a third of 1 euro. What entrepreneur is willing to pay for this?" After Francisco Carranza's comments, Nissan teamed up with Eaton power management. Instead of recycling batteries, the two are talking about reprocessing car batteries for use in a home's energy reserves. "I'm glad Nissan is doing it, but the cost of recycling is still a big hurdle," Carranza said. "the return has to be higher than the cost of recycled materials. Only in this way can it be carried on for a long time."

■ does battery life really degrade?

 First, let's look at the data related to battery aging. Taking Tesla Model S as an example, we extracted 519 test cars for testing, driving a total of 22518,195 kilometers, and each car ran an average of 28,200 kilometers per year. The data shows that these tesla cars lost 5% of their power at about 80,000km, and then the degradation of their batteries began to slow down, while some tesla batteries lost less than 8% at 160,000km! The test cars contained more than half a million battery packs, and nearly 80 percent of them were still operating at more than 80 percent capacity after the test.

■ what factors affect the battery life of electric cars?

To understand how this affects battery life, it's important to understand how it works -- electric car batteries are basically lithium batteries, and when they're charged and discharged once (we call it a "cycle"), the battery capacity decreases. With the increase of cycle times, the capacity of the battery will decrease irreversibly. The 80 percent capacity of a battery is the standard of wear and tear generally accepted by the automotive industry. High temperature, overcharging or charging with high voltage, deep discharge or over low voltage, high power discharge... This is a major factor in battery life loss.