Lithium technology will not completely replace the lead-acid battery, at least in the next three to five years, according to China lead-acid battery maker in Sacred Sun.
Yunkui Gao, the general manager of Sacred Sun told BBB: “The cost of lithium-ion batteries is still relatively high compared with lead-acid batteries, although the price gap is decreasing, but the 98% recovery of lead from lead-acid batteries is still significant.”
However, the Chinese government is throwing olive branches to the lithium battery industry with subsidies and a host of regulations that make lead-acid manufacturing and recycling harder.
Gao said that market behavior determines that lithium batteries can replace nickel–metal hydride batteries because lithium batteries show more advantages in terms of battery cost and performance.
He added that in terms of application, lead-acid batteries were still occupying the standby battery market, such as telecom and data centers, and lithium-ion batteries were still too expensive to dominate in those applications.
But Gao stressed that lithium batteries advantage was in new energy storage when applied in different geographical environments.
He used the example of data center machine rooms built in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou where the cost of land rental is high. “So a relatively smaller volume of lithium batteries with a smaller footprint could be better for the users in these expensive cities,” he added.
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