Somewhat-Reticent
Basically he’s talking about how silly it is to use gasoline, a product that we have to dig up, and then you can use exactly once and it’s gone forever. Batteries combined with solar panels, which can last for decades. The higher upfront cost is easily made up in the long-term.
He also goes on to explain how if you simply swapped the land that is currently used for corn grown to make ethanol, not corn being used for food, and made that all solar panels, you would have more than double the US’s current power needs. That was also using Chicago area as a reference, and extrapolating for the whole us. Obviously quite a bit of the US is in sunnier areas, so you would get even more power.
Solar panels have become incredibly cheap over the last decade, and they themselves are 90 plus percent recyclable, as are the lithium batteries that they’re usually paired with.
He talks about how initially we need to dig up a bunch of lithium to make all these batteries, but then as the recycling flow is established there will be very little need to mine new lithium, because you can just use the same material over and over again in new batteries, it doesn’t degrade. Lfp batteries already don’t use the rare earth metals that come from troublesome places like Cobalt.
