lithium

And if that car maker makes electric cars and needs lithium for the batteries, and greece doesn't have any lithium reserves, local production isn't an option.

It's also worth pointing out that we've had non-rechargeable batteries that exceed lithium's energy store potential for quite a while, in the form of lithium-thionyl chloride [3].

Birds do not come with exploding lithium batteries or large metal bodies like brushless outrunner engines do!

You still have the issues of (possibly heavy) drones falling to the ground, and lithium batteries in a fire.

Burying a lithium battery in your yard seems like a pretty terrible way to dispose of it.

How much experience do you have with the lithium polymer batteries commonly used on hobbyist drones?

All lithium-ion batteries have a nominal voltage of 3.7V, like how all alkaline batteries have a nominal voltage of 1.5V.

Is there actually going to be enough lithium to build the many millions (billions?) of kWh of batteries to do this?

There are lithium polymer batteries with a peak discharge rate (usually a few seconds) of 100+ times their capacity (C rating).

If Tesla wasn't producing cars and somehow found itself wanting to build batteries for homes, still, it may not have gone lithium-ion.

Actually I found some numbers too, about 500g of lithium metal for every 1 kwh of storage.

I also didn't mention that batteries are only about a third of total lithium consumption, so there's that, too.

And before anyone jumps in and says "lithium batteries self discharge!" Yes, yes they do.

The salt, however, can be mined for Lithium!

Lithium batteries bloat, explode, etc...