Author cites Hannah Ritchie who insists on comparing billions of tons of raw fossil fuels vs. millions of tons of REFINED metals. Not vs. raw metal ores - that would be half the tonnage of fossils already. It is handwaved away in the discussion below the Ritchie's article as "armchair concerns" and "minor part" and "we don't know exactly". I think such serious topic deserves more intellectually honest analysis.
> Nor are those worries solely the province of cranks and ideologues — Simon Michaux of the Finnish Geological Survey has actually done extensive research
On the contrary, Michaux tripped a few of my crank alarms, mention of EROEI being one of them.
"ERoEI is unimportant and is being used incorrectly"
> In this article I will show that ERoEI is unimportant by itself. It usually does not matter if ERoEI is increasing or decreasing. ERoEI provides no guidance about which sources of energy we should pursue, nor does it offer any guidance about how much net energy will be available to us in the future. By itself, ERoEI is a useless figure, unless it is lower than 1, which it almost never is. Although different sources of energy (such as coal or solar PV) have different ERoEI ratios, this means nothing important.
More specifically, Michaux seems unaware that renewables have overtaken fossil sources in terms of EROEI so even if you think it's a useful measure, you need to use really out of date sources to calculate that renewables lose on this metric:
Michaux's paper starts with the assumption that it would take about 4 weeks worth of batteries to survive the Finnish winter, and therefore every grid in the world will need 4 weeks worth of batteries.
Despite a writing a hundred page paper covering basic details of existing power generation technologies, he devotes only about a paragraph to establishing that assumption.
Additionally, there is a section dedicated to ocean shipping. Routes are currently chosen to minimize costs, traveling long distances on bunker fuel. Running those same routes on batteries would be prohibitively expensive. Instead of concluding that in the future we will do ocean shipping differently because the cost minimization will work out differently, Michaux simply adds that to the tab of batteries that we would need to decarbonize.
One of the now classic crank moves in analyzing a renewable grid is assuming batteries are the only storage technology. It's so common I have to feel it's intentional. Using batteries for rare event backups is an incredibly stupid design. E-fuels such as hydrogen are much better. For intermediate term storage (up to, say, a week) there are other options, such as thermal storage.
I only skimmed it but didn’t see any mention of the argument that our electrical grid is not reliable and resilient enough to support a massive uptick of EVs.
At least in CA, where the power company likes to preemptively turn off power so that fires don’t start, that’s a big concern for families with only one car, or considering replacing their second car with an EV.
Gas as in gas (that you heat your house with), or gas as in petroleum (that you put in your car)?
For both in the UK I don't think there were "shortages" where it wasn't available. Both just shoot up in price (like they always do at the merest hint of supply shortages or whalesale cost increases ..)
Why does the UK call gasoline petroleum? Every context I've ever heard it used in, including technical, petroleum is crude oil, which DEFINITELY doesn't go in your car.
Well equally why does the US call the liquid you put in your car gas? :)
No one calls it petroleum - petrol is what anyone on the street would call it. Diesel is different and just called diesel. I don't know why or how this started - guessing some old thing that wasn't-quite-right but which stuck around regardless
Fair point, it is also confusing, but gas and gas are two different words. One is a phase of matter and the other is a shortened form of gasoline, much like petrol/petroleum. However, gasoline does actually go in the fuel tank of your car.
'The term is thought to have been influenced by the trademark "Cazeline" or "Gazeline"', then becoming 'gasolene' before ending up as 'gasoline', shortened as 'gas'.
Gas as in petroleum. In the UK, this was caused initially by a constraint on having enough drivers for the trucks, which lead into a few local shortages. The fear came into that and people rushed to fill their tank. The system being not sized for this, this ended up creating actual shortage with a positive feedback loop.
Similar issue in France: strikes were happening leading to local constraints, which was then amplified by people rushing to fill their tanks. In both cases, the situation comes back to normal after a few weeks.
This is the toilet paper shortage, or the bank run, all over again.
Yeah, there are week long outages by accident or design every year. It may not hit you every year, but no one is immune. This year there was a 4+ day outage that hit Atherton, and you can imagine they have more political pull than virtually anywhere.
Food in the fridge goes bad, there is no HVAC (mostly an issue for AC, since it happens when it’s not that cold), but we have water.
I've been going in range-anxiety circles with my dad for over 10 years. He insists he needs a car that can take him hundreds of miles into the wilderness for camping. I ask whether he's ever done that. He says no, but he intends to.
He's 84.
EV manufacturers should offer the 500-mile-range vehicle, but as an option. Pay $X for a car with 250 miles range, and an extra $20,000 for another 250 miles range. Most people will look at that price difference and conclude that their need to drive 8 hours without a pee break is and always will be aspirational.
Believe me, I'd love to talk with my dad about something else. But if it's not the 1950s, getting a new car, or what my mom is most recently wrong about, he's not interested.
I think this is pretty much what they all do already? Seems like most manufacturers offer a "long range" version? Perhaps not 250 Vs 500, but certainly like 150 to 250 sort of order of magnitude
right, businesses love opportunities to create market segmentation, and they seem to already do this to the extent it's reasonable with battery capacity. I think the limiting factor here is that the battery pack already makes up a large fraction of the total mass and volume of the vehicle. once you've designed a chassis and suspension suitable for a 500 kWh battery pack, it doesn't really make sense to offer it with half or less of that capacity. you can't offer it at the discount that people would expect.
I think you're making statements rather than asking questions.
Yes, but still not as long range as the longest-range gas cars. Tesla extinguished the "is it a real car?" questions by offering the 2014 P85D, which was briefly the quickest production car on Earth (though it cost $140,000). You don't hear anyone talking about slow EVs the way they did 10 years ago when Nissan Leafs were going 53 mph on highways.
If there were an equivalent EV but for range rather than acceleration, the discussion would no longer be about range. Charging time and availability would still be legitimate (but diminishing) issues, as sig points out.
I couldn’t convince my parents to get a plug-in hybrid Prius (to replace their old Prius) because it didn’t have a spare tire in the back. They ended up getting a hybrid Camry, which gets much, much worse mileage for their use case. It’s still pretty good in the grand scheme of things, but it was silly that they wouldn’t consider a car without a spare tire considering where they drive and that they have AAA.
On average I have a flat tire probably once every 3 years and if the difference is being able to change a tire with 30 mins of effort and be back to wherever I am going plus slightly decreased MPG vs waiting a couple of hours for a tow truck, being towed to a tire place, waiting a couple of hours for a new tire plus somewhat better MPG. I’d go with the Camry too.
>drive 8 hours without a pee break is and always will be aspirational.
Which is why I think that once you get to a range of around 300 miles, the most important metric shifts from range to charge rate. None of us should probably be driving for more than 4 hours straight. But we also don't need those breaks to be an hour long. If we can get to the point in which 10-15 minutes of charging gives us 4+ hours of driving, then I think most serious complaints about range anxiety disappear.
Which is what hydrogen cars offer. An EV with very fast refueling.
What people are missing is that there is no reason that all cars must be battery powered. It's a weird myopia that is antithetical to Silicon Valley thinking, despite being widespread in SV.
Because hydrogen cars are less efficient, more expensive, more dangerous, and require more infrastructure than EVs. The speed of refueling isn’t enough of a justification to pursue hydrogen cars. They only really make sense if the raw materials for batteries become too scarce.
You are just repeating the marketing spiel of battery car makers. Of course, it would be very convenient for them if the problems of the competition are insurmountable and the upside totally pointless. There’s enormous incentive for them to convince people of that.
The basic problem here is that fuel cells EVs literally are EVs. They work in incredibly similar ways. Any sort of fundamental analysis would lead you to the conclusion that if BEVs are possible, then so are FCEVs. Any differences are going to be minor, not substantial. Also, a lot of the criticisms are just pure FUD, like claiming hydrogen is more dangerous than lithium (both are very flammable materials). And finally, battery car makers really want you to think that every single car in the future will be a BEV, with not a single exception. That’s a pretty crazy claim, and people should recognize how ridiculous it sounds.
A lot of driving is local, BEVs excel at that since people can charge at home. Hydrogen has a chance in long distance trucking and maybe aviation, where the lightweight energy density is a big win, although they’ll need to do something about volume for aviation.
Unless we figure out fusion, producing hydrogen is going to primarily come from hydrocarbons, mainly natural gas. For Europe, that means they need to get it mostly from Russia, and Japan has to boat all their supply of that in.
In recent news (past five years), Australia mining magnates have invested in doubling the current global hydrogen production via green means (no hydro carbons) and have formed partnerships with Germany (part of Europe) to supply hydrogen.
If they can do it, it might be a nice replacement for NG. Transportation of both is about the same (assuming it can only be compressed so much?).
Nuclear power might be ideal for hydrogen production as well (using excess of peak power to make hydrogen to store in huge tanks rather than charging a battery or pumped reservoir?).
Those involved are making bank on some 800 million tonnes of iron ore sales per annum shipped to China and hold leases on significant (as a percentage of global supply) Lithium deposits and Australian land in the millions of acres (a lot of sunlight).
They understand industry at scale, the use of automation to deliver volume, the draw of large economies to sunlight abundant areas for processing and refining, etc.
Transport is planned via Ammonia (hydrogen + nitrogen) - with an excess of sunlight and rapid improvements in domain of electrolysis making seawater as a basis economical, energy losses due to conversion can still be covered to turn a profit delivering bulk ammonia for fertilizer, power generation, and other applications to Europe.
FFI (offshoot of FMI (Fortescue Metals)) has a handwaving set of web pages:
People are repeating the same kind of rhetoric that was used against wind or solar. That we will never have cheap green energy and the future will always be fossil fuels. Those claims are now the source of mockery.
Green hydrogen will be one of the cheapest energy sources available in the near future. It will be made from excess wind or solar and will cost nearly nothing to produce. This will be the next big fundamental error by anti-green energy skeptics.
It primarily comes from natural gas now because it is easy to extract from it. Refining via electricity alone is incredibly expensive (20-30% lost), and that is in top of 10% lost due to compression and 30% lost going back to electricity again (assuming a fuel cell vehicle). If the energy isn’t cheap (coming from natural gas), then how does this make sense economically?
BEV is attractive because electrify goes straight to the battery, energy is only lost once. But hydrogen can make sense for some applications given its weight (but it’s volume is a problem and compression only goes so far).
Same story as solar still. People accused solar of being too inefficient, but it got extremely cheap anyways. That is the upside of something with almost zero input cost. Hydrogen is the same.
BEVs need huge batteries to function. It is easy to see how that totally undermines the value of BEVs.
BEVs need huge (and more importantly heavy) batteries to function, but those are at least cheaper than the fuel cell and even huger compression tank needed to make a hydrogen car viable. Also, forget about having a frunk.
> BEVs need huge (and more importantly heavy) batteries to function, but those are at least cheaper than the fuel cell and even huger compression tank needed to make a hydrogen car viable.
Wrong. Fuel cells and tanks will be vastly cheaper than batteries once produced at scale. They have very low resource requirements. They will likely match or beat internal combustion cars at cost. This is an unbeatable advantage compared to BEVs with any sort of range.
Do you know that conventional gas is delivered to homes around the country, currently, on a semi-annual basis to supply total heating needs, by truck?
The infrastructure is nill for fuel cell vehicles.
Battery vehicles will be wildly burdensome to the electrical infrastructure if widely adopted. Trucking via EV is currently completely unacheivable with the energy capacity available. No discussion of charging capacity. Also, it adds tons (actual tons) of weight to the non-cargo load
Exactly, range anxiety is mostly a psychological disorder at this point. People feel anxious. But there's no good rational reason for it.
I come from a small country where realistically, you leave the country before your battery runs out pretty much from any point in the country. Despite this, a lot of people who definitely don't leave the country very often feel very anxious about range. It's completely irrational. There's always the weird uncle who somehow has to drive hundreds of miles every day while never stopping for lunch, restroom breaks, etc. that has this imaginary need to do all of that without stopping.
It's the Netherlands, if you are wondering. And for those few people that actually live up north there in say Groningen and actually do want to regularly drive all the way down to Maastricht, that would be about 230 miles. And this is about as long as it gets in terms of journey length "inside" (the fastest route is actually via Germany) the country.
The point is that you can do that on a single charge with most decent EVs. Of course you'll need a charge to get back. And probably a few other things like a rest room break, stretching your legs, or taking care of whatever it was that caused you to drive that far to begin with. Great opportunity to plug in in while you do all of that. It's called destination charging.
The extra battery is heavy, you hit diminishing returns quickly, like extra fuel on a plane.
I have an EV and just cross some trips that we might want to do outside of our range. The big one is Seattle to anchorage which while possible using RV parks, isn’t very easy ATM.
My father's 87 (88 later this year, he was born in 1935).
He still drives hundreds of miles here in Western Australia to maintain several sections on three different walking tracks (eg, two thirty KM sections on the thousand km long Bibbulmun Track [1]).
Tell your dad to pull his finger out and just do it.
My dad is exactly the same. Range anxiety!!! so I show him the map of level 3 chargers in north america and ask if he's driving to the arctic circle or something. Obviously not.
Now 'his friend' bought a f150 lightning and towed max weight 100km and it used 200km range! So his friend returned the truck right away!
The actual thing happening is proving that arguing with anyone is literally pointless. You can never convince anyone of anything. You can never teach anyone anything.
Yeah, this entire article has a single mention of "charging infrastructure", and even that's a passing reference. This doesn't address all the arguments against an EV. The fact of the matter is, if I don't have a Tesla and rent my apartment, I won't be able to reliably charge this vehicle. Even for someone with a house, long trips face unreliable charging infrastructure.
Conversely, if I own my home, with an attached garage, and especially if my spouse has a gasoline vehicle we would use for long trips, then charging infrastructure and range over ~80 miles are largely irrelevant to me.
Being a perfect vehicle for 2/3rds of the population is good enough for now.
Much of Europe doesn’t have free street parking like the states does, a lot of those people don’t have cars or are paying extra to have their cars garaged.
Teslas are pretty expensive and charging infrastructure is very cheap. If you can afford a Tesla you can afford to rent a parking space and get it outfitted with a charger. If this sounds impractical to you it's not because the charging infrastructure is too expensive, it's because the parking space is too expensive.
It does not matter if building cost is cheap, when charging prices are more expensive than taking petrol into ICE. Of course if you can get the charge at the first place, because having car with CCS connector and having charger with CCS connector does not mean they are compatible with each other.
You can pay to install a charger to your own electrical meter, at which point the cost is just the cost of electricity. And with the cost of public chargers, yes, this pays off very quickly.
I'm a permanent apartment-dweller (houses are far too expensive in my area and I will never need/justify the space and expense), this is exactly it. I might get an EV when I have a personal (guaranteed) at-home charging spot.
Not likely to happen, so I'll probably drive hybrid cars for the rest of my life. That's OK with me, though.
The article is just a big fantasy. It makes the fundamental mistake of assume current trends will just continue into the future without regard to technical limitations. People have at various times made similar predictions about how diesel cars are the future, or ethanol and biodiesel powered cars, or even compressed air cars, just by looking at short-term trends. Battery cars are just the next stage of this charade.
"There is emerging evidence that tyre wear particles and other particulate matter may contribute to a range of negative health impacts including heart, lung, developmental, reproductive, and cancer outcomes."
One could postulate that cars in general aren't all that great for the environment and in this topic, no matter the power source. Replacing 1:1 gas to EVs is maybe a lateral move.
Maybe what we need to do is have less cars, and drive those cars less.
basic physics intuition suggests that a relatively heavier vehicle with much more torque available from rest would abrade away more tire material in daily use. maybe this could be mitigated with special tires for EVs, but it seems like a pretty reasonable starting assumption. while it would be nice to link an actual study on this, I'm pretty comfortable putting the burden of proof on the position on the opposing position.
The article is also using research based on estimations based on weight. No actual data. So another BS argument.
Fact: EVs usually run LRR tires that release less particulate. Also regen braking allows for smoother transitions. EVs because of software controlled acceleration, almost never spin out when starting off the line.
If LRR tires are so beneficial, it seems like ALL cars would use them, regardless of power source. But they're not, are they?
Also remember that the most popular US cars sold today are large trucks or SUVs. Would LRR tires make sense to use on those more than just not driving such a big, useless truck everywhere?
Again, perhaps the more useful move is to drive less cars, less (and have those cars BE less), than work on other more marginal points, like power plant.
Particles from tires could indeed be a problem, but it appears this is because of specific chemicals used. The solution would be to identify and replace those chemicals (like that one, 6PPD, that on exposure to ozone became highly toxic to salmon.)
(I'll note that ozone will go down too with widespread adoption of EVs.)
For warm climates in urban areas, I can agree, but here are things never fully covered anywhere:
1. Heat in the winter, this will reduce you range, some just a little, but in places like Minnesota in Feb, a lot.
2. Stuck in traffic. If you are stuck in grid lock, that will cut in range, there have been cases were gridlock could last hours. Granted maybe EV stop power usage in this case. But under very hot or cold weather, you will lose AC and Heat. So if you have health concerns, TFB.
3. Battery recycling and disposal. Once EVs become common, I can see people being charged disposal costs for old batteries. In this case, I can see old batteries being tossed out backyards in rural. Anyone remember piles of tires sitting in people's yards 40+ years ago ?
4. Old EVs may need battery replacement, I can see this being very expensive for poor people
To me, better off moving to very good public transportation. Up until say the 1960s, people would travel via buses and trains, even for long distance. Now that is impossible. My Aunt (90+ years old) would take a train from a very rural town to the local small city on weekends for dancing and things like that in her teens/20s. That town no longer has public transportation anywhere even though its population is 30x times the size now. Time to bring that back everywhere.
For a somewhat decent system (to not as good as 70 years ago), see NY State Train routes. People still use that to get to NYC from rather long distances.
> Stuck in traffic. If you are stuck in grid lock, that will cut in range, there have been cases were gridlock could last hours.
This is just abjectly wrong. The absolutely best use case for an EV is during gridlock. You can run the heater on a (pre-heat pump) Model 3 for something like 2 days in 15F weather, and people have hypermiled it to 600 miles at 20-30mph.
In gridlock you’re not expending any energy to idle the engine, so there’s no “cut” in range besides from the climate system. Far, far better than idling a combustion engine.
>Better inform the folks in Norway (75% EV share), Iceland (45%), and Sweden (32%):
I was waiting for this, those countries do not get the winter people in Minnesota and Montana get. Far less sever on average. A quick search:
Is Minnesota or Norway colder?
What is this? FARGO — Oslo, the capital of Norway, is located at 60 degrees north. Fargo and Duluth are closer to 47 degrees north. Winter weather in the Dakotas and Minnesota, however, is much colder than in Oslo.
and
They are both northern places although Minnesota has a climate that is much more severe than that of most of Sweden, particularly in the winter months although Sweden is much further north. Stockholm is warmer in the wintertime and cooler during the summer months.
Oslo is both sheltered & pretty far south for Norway. Norway only extends to 58 degrees N. It goes north to 71 degrees N.
I don't actually known what a better comparison is & I don't know the answers, but I'm kind of unsurprised Oslo is so relatively warm. I haven't found good winter temperature maps but indeed the average temperature maps bear this out well.
Interesting data point! I don't know how representative it is, how much it really says, but indeed surprising.
> 2. Stuck in traffic. If you are stuck in grid lock, that will cut in range, there have been cases were gridlock could last hours. Granted maybe EV stop power usage in this case. But under very hot or cold weather, you will lose AC and Heat. So if you have health concerns, TFB.
EV energy usage is linear with speed. The slower you go, the longer the range.
This part doesn't make any sense unless you have something specific to share.
drag actually scales worse than linearly with speed (which further supports your point), but this is only considering power consumption from the drivetrain in isolation. other systems (most significantly: climate control) have more static power consumption that is not related to speed. so there is a crossover point where the speed vs efficiency relation inverts, because the static draw is not offset by reduction in drag. I don't know what this would be for real world EVs, but I'd guess it's somewhere in the single-digit mph range.
Maintaining the temp inside the car is going to pull at most a couple kw. So 2 hours with the heat or AC on even in a very severe climate is going to consume <5kWh. Which translates to a loss of 15 miles in range.
If you got stuck overnight due to snow on a mountain pass maybe that would be an issue. But in that case you have the same issues with an ICE car and all the carbon monoxide that comes along with it. I’d rather be stuck in an EV where I can at least run the seat warmers and climate on a low setting.
> But under very hot or cold weather, you will lose AC and Heat
At least the "hot weather" situation could be remedied by adding a solar roof and possibly hood to the vehicle. While it does not really add much in the way of range extension it does provide power to run AC when it is needed. An average car roof is big enough to provide 400W to 600W which goes a long way in offsetting the power consumed by the AC.
As a Floridian who has always consumed a lot of energy trying to keep cool, I am surprised by: "An average car roof is big enough to provide 400W to 600W which goes a long way in offsetting the power consumed by the AC."
These numbers don't seem correct to me. What are you using for average surface area for a roof, expected solar collected, and AC consumption?
The Aptera is a huge beast of a car designed specifically for solar, and I believe the current figure is that it can get 700W at a nice solar optimum. Big sweeping hood, roof, and trunk of solar.
I doubt many cars can get 400W. I don't think most cars could maintain even 80 degrees on a 100+ day, but that's just a guess.
The Aptera is not "a huge best of a car", it more resembles a seed pod on three wheels. The roof and hood area are quite limited due to this shape which leads to the relatively low solar yield.
Yeah not as bad as I thought. It is Model 3 sized. I'd heard people reviewing it say they were quite surprised just how big it was. And the width is almost 88 inches at the wheel pods which is indeed quite big. But overall really quite ok size. I almost signed up for a pre-order but their site was broken, the car was so wide, and I definitely dont need one (but man it'd be cool).
The total % of solar seems quite impressive to me. The elongated teardrop looks of anything to do quite a good job exposing surface for solar. There is some loss of "fill factor" with cells having some space between them rather than being totally dense.
I'd love to see a car that had more solar. I have a hard time imagining it.
The available roof area of a Skoda Octavia Estate - a common car in Europe - measures 2m x 1m which, given common 21% efficiency PV cells provides 420W at 1000 W/m² irradiance. This is considered a "medium sized" car. Add the hood and 600W is easily reached.
I have read Tesla owners reporting the AC consuming 1-3 kW. I still don't see how a roof of solar panels "goes a long way in offsetting the power consumed by the AC".
400W to 600W is 40% to 60% of that 1kW you mentioned, that is "a long way" as far as I'm concerned. An AC with a COP of 4.5 - a common rating - will be able to remove 1.8kW to 2.7kW of heating power from the vehicle using just solar power.
Put it another way, a 20% efficient PV panel covering most of the vehicle combined with an AC with a COP of 5 should theoretically enable you to negate the total solar irradiance. Since the car is exposed to other heat sources - indirect irradiance, hot roads, hot outside air, warm people inside it - this is not enough to remove all excess heat from the vehicle but it should at least be able to offset direct irradiance.
Vehicle lead acid batteries have a >99% recycling rate. The high rate is mostly due to economic reasons but partly due to regulatory ones. EV batteries will get reused or recycled.
As for range in the winter, on our heart pump equipped Model Y we see a 20% range reduction in the winter at -20C. No big deal. On the other hand we're never sure our gasoline vehicle will start without a boost. Much more annoying.
It should be a huge motivation for hydrogen cars, which are also EVs but without such weaknesses in cold weather. It is very unfortunate that the article just dismisses this idea with just one sentence and zero explanation.
I'm still waiting for the first independent winter test of any hydrogen car. There are a bunch of "tests" where a car manufacturer has invited journalists to drive cars in the north, but the cars are always pre-warmed by the company.
The fuel cell does NOT want to freeze, it can actually physically break if it goes under 0C.
> 1. Heat in the winter, this will reduce you range, some just a little, but in places like Minnesota in Feb, a lot.
Scandinavia here.
I've owned gasoline powered cars, I've owned diesels, I've owned hybrids (Priuses) and cars with additional fuel heaters.
My current EV absolutely demolishes every single one of those in the speed of heating up the cabin. It got down to -30C a few winters ago and I had to drop off my kid at school so that their face wouldn't freeze solid (we don't do "snow days" here). I actually timed it, ~2 minutes from a weekend-long -30C weather to 20 degree air blowing into the cabin. The only ones that got close were the fuel heater (8kW heating power, no emissions standards applied btw) and Priuses.
Yes, it takes a bunch of electricity to heat up the cabin at first, but the upkeep is a few kWh using the heat pump.
Also: My EV has _never_ failed to start in the winter, no matter what the situation. All of the above (except for the Priuses) have failed or given me extra heart palpitations during colder days.
> 2. Stuck in traffic.
I know people first hand who have _literally_ camped in their EVs multiple times. 5-10C outside, car keeping itself at a comfy 20-22C and the battery drain is negligible. Heat pumps with high COP are fun!
Unless you get in a China-style 10 day traffic jam[0], you'll be just fine. Better than people in ICEs.
> 3. Battery recycling and disposal.
Do you know why we don't have a multi-million battery recycling industry? Because the damn things won't break. Decade-old Teslas and even Leafs with their completely botched thermal management are still mostly (>90%) running on OG batteries.
And even if an EV battery is too degraded to be practical in a car, a 100kW battery that's degraded to 50% capacity is still a 50kW battery. That's enough to run a _house_ for a few days or a small cabin for weeks.
Remember the Three R's of recycling: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Very few batteries will get to the last R where they are actually broken down to their base metals.
> 4. Old EVs may need battery replacement
Old cars tend to need expensive repairs, the difference is that an EV has less moving parts to break. The only big thing is the battery, but that tech is moving too fast to make any kinds of predictions.
It's possible _today_ to get an old Leaf battery swapped for one with 50% more capacity than the old one.
Sorry, degrowth is a nonsense, unless you want to see millions of people dead due to mass famine thanks to deindustrialization which needs to go hand in hand with degrowth.
Why would the number of cars grow by 5% for the next 100 years? Currently there are 1.4 billion cars. Projections say the world population will peak at 10 billion. Even if everyone would have a car, that’s only a sevenfold increase.
I must concede: 1000x increase in driver count is too far fetched.
Though if forever growth is assumed, and goal post is moved to co2 total instead of per km, then some options exist to eat up that 1000x saving:
Owning more than one vehicle per person, buying new automobile more frequently, moving to bigger, better and powerfuler cars.
Here's the biggest and most important reason (besides the obvious ones like grids, energy, etc.): most people >cannot< afford an EV compared to say, a SH good(and often better) vehicle. EVs are not even competitive to their equivalent fossil-based cars that are new.
Idealists should often take their heads out of their asses and understand most people don't have their privilege, ironically the most privileged ones screech about privilege while ignoring their own. Go ahead and tell developing countries to switch to EV-only, setting them back at least 10 years in terms of industry and economic growth.
As an owner of BEV, this is correct. I was able to afford Enyaq for cca 60k EUR. And if you can't charge at home, then you are charging on public chargers for _more money_ than you would be taking gas in similar ICE. And on top of that you are subjected to stupid applications and waste much more time to actually get the charge. You are essentially paying premium to get less. And idealists are surprised that people ain't thrilled from BEV future.
What people forget in these calculations is that many (not all) countries can produce the electricity for EVs themselves.
Very few countries can produce gasoline and diesel in-house so to speak. The actual raw oil needs to be bought from a dictator somewhere (or Norway), processed by a company that takes their cut and transported all the way to their country + distributed everywhere, every step adds more cost and most of the money doesn't end up in the country buying the gasoline/diesel.
You can make electricity anywhere and it's not that hard to store on a small scale and the people moving the electrons pay taxes to your country, as do the companies employing them. Less money going abroad, more staying in the country is good for everyone except oil companies.
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I, for one, can afford my EV because I can offset my loan payment from the money I save from not having to spend around 200€/month on gasoline (it's ~2€/litre here). Instead I charge it at home with electricity that has cost 0-10c/kWh for the last few months. I went from 10€/100km to ~1,5-2€/100km in driving costs.
With a bit of code (or a service like Gridio), I can optimise that to only charge the car when the electricity is the cheapest.
It is not just that most people can’t afford an EV, but they don’t have home charging! The article doesn’t even mention this problem and just assumes that everyone has that privilege. Most people in developing countries park their cars roadside. And many people live on rent in apartments. The owner and the renter, neither want to pay for the charger installation.
Gasoline has a higher energy density than lithium ion batteries meaning that you will have less weight to carry around giving you a more nimble vehicle. It also lets you accelerate faster from the same engine torque since you have to accelerate less mass. With electric vehicles you have to carry a battery for you entire range and it is not easy to swap out.
That's partly balanced out by the greater engine efficiency, 90-95% versus 30-35-40%. Also regenerative braking. Oh, and much better engine efficiency at low speeds.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] thread> https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/all-the-arguments-against-evs-... has a security policy called HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS), which means that Firefox Nightly can only connect to it securely. You can’t add an exception to visit this site.
On the contrary, Michaux tripped a few of my crank alarms, mention of EROEI being one of them.
"ERoEI is unimportant and is being used incorrectly"
> In this article I will show that ERoEI is unimportant by itself. It usually does not matter if ERoEI is increasing or decreasing. ERoEI provides no guidance about which sources of energy we should pursue, nor does it offer any guidance about how much net energy will be available to us in the future. By itself, ERoEI is a useless figure, unless it is lower than 1, which it almost never is. Although different sources of energy (such as coal or solar PV) have different ERoEI ratios, this means nothing important.
More specifically, Michaux seems unaware that renewables have overtaken fossil sources in terms of EROEI so even if you think it's a useful measure, you need to use really out of date sources to calculate that renewables lose on this metric:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-11-10/eroi-of-re/
and the paper that the above podcast discusses:
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/12/7098/htm
Despite a writing a hundred page paper covering basic details of existing power generation technologies, he devotes only about a paragraph to establishing that assumption.
Additionally, there is a section dedicated to ocean shipping. Routes are currently chosen to minimize costs, traveling long distances on bunker fuel. Running those same routes on batteries would be prohibitively expensive. Instead of concluding that in the future we will do ocean shipping differently because the cost minimization will work out differently, Michaux simply adds that to the tab of batteries that we would need to decarbonize.
At least in CA, where the power company likes to preemptively turn off power so that fires don’t start, that’s a big concern for families with only one car, or considering replacing their second car with an EV.
How constant and long lasting are your power outages there?
I mean no electricity for a week and all my food in the freezer is gone, no heating in winter due to pumps needing electricity and no water as well.
Sounds really bad over there then?
For both in the UK I don't think there were "shortages" where it wasn't available. Both just shoot up in price (like they always do at the merest hint of supply shortages or whalesale cost increases ..)
No one calls it petroleum - petrol is what anyone on the street would call it. Diesel is different and just called diesel. I don't know why or how this started - guessing some old thing that wasn't-quite-right but which stuck around regardless
Tbh 'gas' is the weird one, it's a liquid.
'The term is thought to have been influenced by the trademark "Cazeline" or "Gazeline"', then becoming 'gasolene' before ending up as 'gasoline', shortened as 'gas'.
Similar issue in France: strikes were happening leading to local constraints, which was then amplified by people rushing to fill their tanks. In both cases, the situation comes back to normal after a few weeks.
This is the toilet paper shortage, or the bank run, all over again.
Food in the fridge goes bad, there is no HVAC (mostly an issue for AC, since it happens when it’s not that cold), but we have water.
And if you don't need it because you have a generator, than you could even charge your car
He's 84.
EV manufacturers should offer the 500-mile-range vehicle, but as an option. Pay $X for a car with 250 miles range, and an extra $20,000 for another 250 miles range. Most people will look at that price difference and conclude that their need to drive 8 hours without a pee break is and always will be aspirational.
Take a look at http://ev-database.uk
Yes, but still not as long range as the longest-range gas cars. Tesla extinguished the "is it a real car?" questions by offering the 2014 P85D, which was briefly the quickest production car on Earth (though it cost $140,000). You don't hear anyone talking about slow EVs the way they did 10 years ago when Nissan Leafs were going 53 mph on highways.
If there were an equivalent EV but for range rather than acceleration, the discussion would no longer be about range. Charging time and availability would still be legitimate (but diminishing) issues, as sig points out.
Which is why I think that once you get to a range of around 300 miles, the most important metric shifts from range to charge rate. None of us should probably be driving for more than 4 hours straight. But we also don't need those breaks to be an hour long. If we can get to the point in which 10-15 minutes of charging gives us 4+ hours of driving, then I think most serious complaints about range anxiety disappear.
What people are missing is that there is no reason that all cars must be battery powered. It's a weird myopia that is antithetical to Silicon Valley thinking, despite being widespread in SV.
The basic problem here is that fuel cells EVs literally are EVs. They work in incredibly similar ways. Any sort of fundamental analysis would lead you to the conclusion that if BEVs are possible, then so are FCEVs. Any differences are going to be minor, not substantial. Also, a lot of the criticisms are just pure FUD, like claiming hydrogen is more dangerous than lithium (both are very flammable materials). And finally, battery car makers really want you to think that every single car in the future will be a BEV, with not a single exception. That’s a pretty crazy claim, and people should recognize how ridiculous it sounds.
Unless we figure out fusion, producing hydrogen is going to primarily come from hydrocarbons, mainly natural gas. For Europe, that means they need to get it mostly from Russia, and Japan has to boat all their supply of that in.
https://germany.embassy.gov.au/beln/hydrogen.html
https://minister.dcceew.gov.au/bowen/media-releases/growing-...
and other links from the Fortescue Metals sibsidiaries and other involved companies abound.
Nuclear power might be ideal for hydrogen production as well (using excess of peak power to make hydrogen to store in huge tanks rather than charging a battery or pumped reservoir?).
Those involved are making bank on some 800 million tonnes of iron ore sales per annum shipped to China and hold leases on significant (as a percentage of global supply) Lithium deposits and Australian land in the millions of acres (a lot of sunlight).
They understand industry at scale, the use of automation to deliver volume, the draw of large economies to sunlight abundant areas for processing and refining, etc.
Transport is planned via Ammonia (hydrogen + nitrogen) - with an excess of sunlight and rapid improvements in domain of electrolysis making seawater as a basis economical, energy losses due to conversion can still be covered to turn a profit delivering bulk ammonia for fertilizer, power generation, and other applications to Europe.
FFI (offshoot of FMI (Fortescue Metals)) has a handwaving set of web pages:
https://ffi.com.au/technology/green-hydrogen/
and have lodged more detailed tech reports for their shareholders via the Sydney, London, and Canadian Exchanges (IIRC).
Green hydrogen will be one of the cheapest energy sources available in the near future. It will be made from excess wind or solar and will cost nearly nothing to produce. This will be the next big fundamental error by anti-green energy skeptics.
BEV is attractive because electrify goes straight to the battery, energy is only lost once. But hydrogen can make sense for some applications given its weight (but it’s volume is a problem and compression only goes so far).
BEVs need huge batteries to function. It is easy to see how that totally undermines the value of BEVs.
BEVs need huge (and more importantly heavy) batteries to function, but those are at least cheaper than the fuel cell and even huger compression tank needed to make a hydrogen car viable. Also, forget about having a frunk.
Wrong. Fuel cells and tanks will be vastly cheaper than batteries once produced at scale. They have very low resource requirements. They will likely match or beat internal combustion cars at cost. This is an unbeatable advantage compared to BEVs with any sort of range.
Some people can charge at home.
Do you know that conventional gas is delivered to homes around the country, currently, on a semi-annual basis to supply total heating needs, by truck?
The infrastructure is nill for fuel cell vehicles.
Battery vehicles will be wildly burdensome to the electrical infrastructure if widely adopted. Trucking via EV is currently completely unacheivable with the energy capacity available. No discussion of charging capacity. Also, it adds tons (actual tons) of weight to the non-cargo load
I come from a small country where realistically, you leave the country before your battery runs out pretty much from any point in the country. Despite this, a lot of people who definitely don't leave the country very often feel very anxious about range. It's completely irrational. There's always the weird uncle who somehow has to drive hundreds of miles every day while never stopping for lunch, restroom breaks, etc. that has this imaginary need to do all of that without stopping.
It's the Netherlands, if you are wondering. And for those few people that actually live up north there in say Groningen and actually do want to regularly drive all the way down to Maastricht, that would be about 230 miles. And this is about as long as it gets in terms of journey length "inside" (the fastest route is actually via Germany) the country.
The point is that you can do that on a single charge with most decent EVs. Of course you'll need a charge to get back. And probably a few other things like a rest room break, stretching your legs, or taking care of whatever it was that caused you to drive that far to begin with. Great opportunity to plug in in while you do all of that. It's called destination charging.
I have an EV and just cross some trips that we might want to do outside of our range. The big one is Seattle to anchorage which while possible using RV parks, isn’t very easy ATM.
He still drives hundreds of miles here in Western Australia to maintain several sections on three different walking tracks (eg, two thirty KM sections on the thousand km long Bibbulmun Track [1]).
Tell your dad to pull his finger out and just do it.
[1] https://www.bibbulmuntrack.org.au/
Now 'his friend' bought a f150 lightning and towed max weight 100km and it used 200km range! So his friend returned the truck right away!
The actual thing happening is proving that arguing with anyone is literally pointless. You can never convince anyone of anything. You can never teach anyone anything.
It's gonna take a few more years
Being a perfect vehicle for 2/3rds of the population is good enough for now.
Not likely to happen, so I'll probably drive hybrid cars for the rest of my life. That's OK with me, though.
My understanding was that the particulates from tires are pretty big and don’t really go airborne
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/02/230222210553.h...
“ Some are concerned that electric vehicles tend to be heavier, which might increase tyre wear”
That’s a fact-free argument.
Maybe what we need to do is have less cars, and drive those cars less.
To this date for this assertion - no one has. Could it because the data doesn’t support it?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32689058
Fact: EVs usually run LRR tires that release less particulate. Also regen braking allows for smoother transitions. EVs because of software controlled acceleration, almost never spin out when starting off the line.
Also remember that the most popular US cars sold today are large trucks or SUVs. Would LRR tires make sense to use on those more than just not driving such a big, useless truck everywhere?
Again, perhaps the more useful move is to drive less cars, less (and have those cars BE less), than work on other more marginal points, like power plant.
(I'll note that ozone will go down too with widespread adoption of EVs.)
Road wear is apparently the power of 4 in relation to weight.
And EVs are much heavier, especially for small cars (think everywhere not the US). Small EVs are 30-50% heavier.
A heavy EV doesn't spew the other crap in the air, so the total is still less than an SUV :)
1. Heat in the winter, this will reduce you range, some just a little, but in places like Minnesota in Feb, a lot.
2. Stuck in traffic. If you are stuck in grid lock, that will cut in range, there have been cases were gridlock could last hours. Granted maybe EV stop power usage in this case. But under very hot or cold weather, you will lose AC and Heat. So if you have health concerns, TFB.
3. Battery recycling and disposal. Once EVs become common, I can see people being charged disposal costs for old batteries. In this case, I can see old batteries being tossed out backyards in rural. Anyone remember piles of tires sitting in people's yards 40+ years ago ?
4. Old EVs may need battery replacement, I can see this being very expensive for poor people
To me, better off moving to very good public transportation. Up until say the 1960s, people would travel via buses and trains, even for long distance. Now that is impossible. My Aunt (90+ years old) would take a train from a very rural town to the local small city on weekends for dancing and things like that in her teens/20s. That town no longer has public transportation anywhere even though its population is 30x times the size now. Time to bring that back everywhere.
For a somewhat decent system (to not as good as 70 years ago), see NY State Train routes. People still use that to get to NYC from rather long distances.
This is just abjectly wrong. The absolutely best use case for an EV is during gridlock. You can run the heater on a (pre-heat pump) Model 3 for something like 2 days in 15F weather, and people have hypermiled it to 600 miles at 20-30mph.
In gridlock you’re not expending any energy to idle the engine, so there’s no “cut” in range besides from the climate system. Far, far better than idling a combustion engine.
Better inform the folks in Norway (75% EV share), Iceland (45%), and Sweden (32%):
* https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/02/electric-vehicles-eur...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_the_Nordic_countrie...
> 2. Stuck in traffic. If you are stuck in grid lock, that will cut in range, there have been cases were gridlock could last hours.
As opposed to being stuck in track in an ICE vehicles?
> To me, better off moving to very good public transportation.
Perfect is the enemy of the good:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_is_the_enemy_of_good
If we're stuck with cars (in the short- or long-term), we might as well try to reduce carbon emissions.
I was waiting for this, those countries do not get the winter people in Minnesota and Montana get. Far less sever on average. A quick search:
Is Minnesota or Norway colder? What is this? FARGO — Oslo, the capital of Norway, is located at 60 degrees north. Fargo and Duluth are closer to 47 degrees north. Winter weather in the Dakotas and Minnesota, however, is much colder than in Oslo.
and
They are both northern places although Minnesota has a climate that is much more severe than that of most of Sweden, particularly in the winter months although Sweden is much further north. Stockholm is warmer in the wintertime and cooler during the summer months.
I don't actually known what a better comparison is & I don't know the answers, but I'm kind of unsurprised Oslo is so relatively warm. I haven't found good winter temperature maps but indeed the average temperature maps bear this out well.
Interesting data point! I don't know how representative it is, how much it really says, but indeed surprising.
EV energy usage is linear with speed. The slower you go, the longer the range.
This part doesn't make any sense unless you have something specific to share.
drag actually scales worse than linearly with speed (which further supports your point), but this is only considering power consumption from the drivetrain in isolation. other systems (most significantly: climate control) have more static power consumption that is not related to speed. so there is a crossover point where the speed vs efficiency relation inverts, because the static draw is not offset by reduction in drag. I don't know what this would be for real world EVs, but I'd guess it's somewhere in the single-digit mph range.
If you got stuck overnight due to snow on a mountain pass maybe that would be an issue. But in that case you have the same issues with an ICE car and all the carbon monoxide that comes along with it. I’d rather be stuck in an EV where I can at least run the seat warmers and climate on a low setting.
At least the "hot weather" situation could be remedied by adding a solar roof and possibly hood to the vehicle. While it does not really add much in the way of range extension it does provide power to run AC when it is needed. An average car roof is big enough to provide 400W to 600W which goes a long way in offsetting the power consumed by the AC.
These numbers don't seem correct to me. What are you using for average surface area for a roof, expected solar collected, and AC consumption?
I doubt many cars can get 400W. I don't think most cars could maintain even 80 degrees on a 100+ day, but that's just a guess.
The Aptera is not "a huge best of a car", it more resembles a seed pod on three wheels. The roof and hood area are quite limited due to this shape which leads to the relatively low solar yield.
The total % of solar seems quite impressive to me. The elongated teardrop looks of anything to do quite a good job exposing surface for solar. There is some loss of "fill factor" with cells having some space between them rather than being totally dense.
I'd love to see a car that had more solar. I have a hard time imagining it.
Put it another way, a 20% efficient PV panel covering most of the vehicle combined with an AC with a COP of 5 should theoretically enable you to negate the total solar irradiance. Since the car is exposed to other heat sources - indirect irradiance, hot roads, hot outside air, warm people inside it - this is not enough to remove all excess heat from the vehicle but it should at least be able to offset direct irradiance.
Not going to happen. Old tires have negative value. Old EV batteries are worth over $1000 apiece.
Vehicle lead acid batteries have a >99% recycling rate. The high rate is mostly due to economic reasons but partly due to regulatory ones. EV batteries will get reused or recycled.
As for range in the winter, on our heart pump equipped Model Y we see a 20% range reduction in the winter at -20C. No big deal. On the other hand we're never sure our gasoline vehicle will start without a boost. Much more annoying.
The fuel cell does NOT want to freeze, it can actually physically break if it goes under 0C.
Scandinavia here.
I've owned gasoline powered cars, I've owned diesels, I've owned hybrids (Priuses) and cars with additional fuel heaters.
My current EV absolutely demolishes every single one of those in the speed of heating up the cabin. It got down to -30C a few winters ago and I had to drop off my kid at school so that their face wouldn't freeze solid (we don't do "snow days" here). I actually timed it, ~2 minutes from a weekend-long -30C weather to 20 degree air blowing into the cabin. The only ones that got close were the fuel heater (8kW heating power, no emissions standards applied btw) and Priuses.
Yes, it takes a bunch of electricity to heat up the cabin at first, but the upkeep is a few kWh using the heat pump.
Also: My EV has _never_ failed to start in the winter, no matter what the situation. All of the above (except for the Priuses) have failed or given me extra heart palpitations during colder days.
> 2. Stuck in traffic.
I know people first hand who have _literally_ camped in their EVs multiple times. 5-10C outside, car keeping itself at a comfy 20-22C and the battery drain is negligible. Heat pumps with high COP are fun!
Unless you get in a China-style 10 day traffic jam[0], you'll be just fine. Better than people in ICEs.
> 3. Battery recycling and disposal.
Do you know why we don't have a multi-million battery recycling industry? Because the damn things won't break. Decade-old Teslas and even Leafs with their completely botched thermal management are still mostly (>90%) running on OG batteries.
And even if an EV battery is too degraded to be practical in a car, a 100kW battery that's degraded to 50% capacity is still a 50kW battery. That's enough to run a _house_ for a few days or a small cabin for weeks.
Remember the Three R's of recycling: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Very few batteries will get to the last R where they are actually broken down to their base metals.
> 4. Old EVs may need battery replacement
Old cars tend to need expensive repairs, the difference is that an EV has less moving parts to break. The only big thing is the battery, but that tech is moving too fast to make any kinds of predictions.
It's possible _today_ to get an old Leaf battery swapped for one with 50% more capacity than the old one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Highway_110_tra...
Lets say number of cars in total follows exponential progression, 5% growth per year.
It follows that after 100 years due to growth co2 gets back to original level. (Log100/log1.05=94)
EVs are required bandaid, but degrowth will come eventually. (Possibly due to climate change supply will decrease and so will consumption)
Though if forever growth is assumed, and goal post is moved to co2 total instead of per km, then some options exist to eat up that 1000x saving: Owning more than one vehicle per person, buying new automobile more frequently, moving to bigger, better and powerfuler cars.
Idealists should often take their heads out of their asses and understand most people don't have their privilege, ironically the most privileged ones screech about privilege while ignoring their own. Go ahead and tell developing countries to switch to EV-only, setting them back at least 10 years in terms of industry and economic growth.
Very few countries can produce gasoline and diesel in-house so to speak. The actual raw oil needs to be bought from a dictator somewhere (or Norway), processed by a company that takes their cut and transported all the way to their country + distributed everywhere, every step adds more cost and most of the money doesn't end up in the country buying the gasoline/diesel.
You can make electricity anywhere and it's not that hard to store on a small scale and the people moving the electrons pay taxes to your country, as do the companies employing them. Less money going abroad, more staying in the country is good for everyone except oil companies.
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I, for one, can afford my EV because I can offset my loan payment from the money I save from not having to spend around 200€/month on gasoline (it's ~2€/litre here). Instead I charge it at home with electricity that has cost 0-10c/kWh for the last few months. I went from 10€/100km to ~1,5-2€/100km in driving costs.
With a bit of code (or a service like Gridio), I can optimise that to only charge the car when the electricity is the cheapest.
And I live in an apartment building.
Gasoline has a higher energy density than lithium ion batteries meaning that you will have less weight to carry around giving you a more nimble vehicle. It also lets you accelerate faster from the same engine torque since you have to accelerate less mass. With electric vehicles you have to carry a battery for you entire range and it is not easy to swap out.