I know that the popsci media can overblow this, but wasn't there some optimistic results for super-capacitors that wouldn't rely on any of these rare-earth metals? I'm seriously asking, since looking this up tends to bring up links to crap-sites like IFLS and whatnot, so I don't know if the hype is warranted.
Supercapacitors are the thing that halves the requirement for these lithium iron batteries that we are supposed to be running out of. The good news is that fantastic work is being done in this area, making those Tesla things rather quaint old technology.
It is all going on in Estonia and you are well advised to watch this recent episode of Fully Charged to see what a wonderful place Estonia is and why it should be where you next go on holiday:
So, 'spoiler alert', a supercapacitor in a vehicle compliments the battery and stores the energy from re-gen and gets you away from the lights at super fast speed without having to have some huge Tesla-esque American sized battery providing the oomph. It is win win as the vehicle is lighter.
The other benefit of supercapacitors is that they can also be used to provide smoothing of electricity supply, e.g. when the cup final is on and everyone goes to turn their kettle on at half time.
As mentioned, watch the Fully Charged episode about Estonia and what lovely people there are there, including a few doing great things with supercapacitors.
> Supercapacitors are the thing that halves the requirement for these lithium iron batteries that we are supposed to be running out of.
That's patently false, though. Skeleton claims they have legitimately impressive power/weight ratios, but that's totally irrelevant to vehicles. The current batteries can push short bursts of well over 2 kW/kg. Even the smallest cars (the Smart FourTwo has a 50-100 kW engine) can be powered by tiny batteries (10-15 kWh). Cruising range is the deciding factor in battery size, and capacitors are totally irrelevant to that. The electric FourTwo could be fitted with a 10 kWh battery, but nobody really wants <35 miles of range. At that point it makes far more sense to have an electric bicycle.
To really drive the point home, there are readily available batteries that have 5x the specific power of the batteries used in EVs, and only ~20% less capacity. They aren't used, because the extra power is not required.
There are also optimistic results for batteries, because li-ion batteries do not and never have used rare earth elements. Cobalt and nickel are not rare earth elements and as other people have pointed out the global resources of both are far higher than the article suggests.
You probably have difficulty looking up alternatives to batteries with rare earth elements because the only sites that say they have rare earth elements have negative knowledge about the subject.
