Batteries

12-09-23 00 / episode: 239

Script

Batteries.

I'll bet you're using batteries in some of the devices you have probably you have a smartphone or maybe a smart watch or a regular watch.

Those are almost certain to include batteries.

You might have clocks on the wall that are using batteries, maybe some toys or remote controls that are using batteries, batteries are almost indispensable to modern life.

And yet they're terrible for the earth.

We're using up all sorts of bad, bad metals that we can't get rid of easily.

We have to take them out of the earth, which is a mine and that's a horrible, horrible way to treat the earth mines.

Just do really bad things to the earth and the environment around and the people.

Then when we're finished with all these things, we've got to do something and, and we don't know exactly what to do with them all the time.

There is no really good solution.

Now, the problem is we're going more electric because we don't wanna create more carbon.

There's a big movement to stop using carbon, stop burning fossil fuels.

And so we're gonna go to electricity and that means we need batteries to store the electricity.

So now there's a giant battery boom.

People are making more and more batteries for our electric cars and other machines.

I think batteries are sort of AAA nifty idea, but they're just so terrible for the environment.

On the other hand, I heard about an earth battery the other day.

What's that? That's a place where we can store electricity in just material things.

Let's say a giant block of dirt.

You put the dirt on the ground, use energy to lift the dirt up high into the sky and hold it there.

Then when you need that energy back, you slowly lower the dirt and as it lowers it pulls a rope that turns a turbine and makes electricity.

This is really cool.

There are some batteries that don't use horrible polluting metals and I think that that's gonna be one of the solutions for the future.

What do you think about these things?