Paper short abstract:

The lithium batteries transform the continuous flows of RES into scalable and storable stacks of fuel. Despite the changes in the characteristics of the energy source, the battery thus reinforces the existing energy logistics with significant economic, environmental and political implications.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on shifts in energy logistics caused by decarbonization and electrification. While renewable energy sources (RES) such as hydro, solar, or wind power have been historically characterized as unregulated streams or flows (Malm 2013), fossil sources have been extracted and distributed as fuel (Mitchell 2009). Turning the flows into fuel has had significant political implications, permitting large amounts of energy to be stored, delivered, and deployed on demand. RES are usually not captured in the fuel form that would allow such storage and flexibility of use, creating a demand for new energy storage technologies such as lithium-ion batteries. In reaction to this increasing demand, the largest utility corporation in central Europe, ČEZ Group, plans to reopen a decommissioned mine in the inner periphery of northern Bohemia to extract lithium. At the same time, the corporation built a 10MW battery bearing 90 tons of lithium in a traditionally industrial area of Vítkovice while planning to develop additional 300MW of similar storage capacities in other Czech industrial regions by 2030. These batteries are designed to store energy and balance the voltage spikes caused by the streams of RES.

The increasing demand for lithium puts pressure on the (more than human) communities near the mining sites. While the green transition bears promise of undoing the regimes of extractivism, the re-emergence of the fuel form in green energy reinvigorates possibly harmful regimes of energy logistics and reproduces the existing temporalities and spatialities of capitalist production and reproduction.