All about batteries and energy
So, you are charging your phone. You are powering up your phone with electricity. Now, you ask what type of battery the phone has. Well, let's explore that today.
We will start with lithium which is the most popular batter today.
Lithium-ion batteries (Li-ion) use lithium. They are mostly extracted from Atacama Desert in South America and in Australia. In the Atacama, they are extracted from the underground and drilled out. Then, the lithium is evaporated in pools. This can waste all the precious water of the desert because it almost does not rain often there. In Australia, lithium gets extracted from rocks. Right now, most lithium is mostly mined in Australia. Then, the lithium is shipped to China to make batteries with lithium. The batteries are used in phones, tablets, and laptops.
Although everyone uses lithium-ion batteries on phones, there are two tips that are important.
Firstly, a lithium-ion battery lasts for around 1,000 charge cycles. After the battery is charged a thousand times, your battery has a very short battery life. It may lose a lot of charge in a few minutes. So, to make your device have a longer battery life, only charge when the battery is 20% or lower. Do not charge when the battery has more than 20%.
My other tip is that lithium-ion batteries can last some time with no charge, but it cannot last a year without charge. They could last week or two.
Another type of battery is Alkaline. They are used in many toys like RC cars and drones. Alkaline has a longer life than Li-ion batteries. The problem with Alkaline batteries is that it can only be used once. You can’t recharge that type of battery. Once you are done using it, you throw it in a recycling bin. If you recharge Alkaline, it can explode or leak.
You can create your own batteries with many things with a positive and negative. There are sodium batteries. They explode very fast.
There are bad sources of electricity. Coal is the worst. It can pollute the air. This pollution can lead to respiratory problems. Natural gas is not the worst, but it is bad. Too much natural gas can lead to climate change. We will talk about climate change in other newsletters. A replacement is renewables like solar and wind.
Renewables is electricity from nature. They are solar, wind and water. There is more, but we will focus on solar and wind. So, solar uses solar panels. You can install these panels into the roof. Solar panels turn the sun’s light into electricity.
What if it’s not sunny? So, in order to store the electricity, we need a battery. A battery is required in order to store electricity. Same for wind, except it turns wind into electricity. So that’s why batteries are important for renewable energy.
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