I'm nearly up to 90,000 in my 2013 Nissan Leaf. Battery at about %75 of original capacity.
I hear this "EV's aren't as green as you think" trope all the time. People even talk about environmental damage at lithium mines as if drilling for oil is this ultra-clean process that never has any environmental impact. I think people would think twice about using petrol if the pollution was solidified and dumped on their front lawn.
“Lucien Mathieu of Transport and Environment, a European NGO, says that even the biggest EVs have lower lifetime carbon emissions than the average conventional car. That is true even in places with plenty of coal-fired electricity, such as China.”
While there are some differences in the materials used for EVs vs ICEVs, it’s not radically different. Both use a lot of the same elements.
Yes it does take more energy to build an EV but most EVs will offset that by the first 12K miles. After that an EV has a much lower environmental impact. It’s all about efficiency.
The problem is that we have conflated BEVs with all EVs. There is more than one way of making EVs. Most of the problems of EVs will go away once we realize that. But until then, we are stuck in a fantasy that BEVs is the only solution or that it even is a solution.
Any specific attack on BEVs automatically becomes an attack on the concept of EVs, with other types of EVs not even acknowledged to exist. And all of the problems of BEVs are now “necessary evils” because those other types of EVs don’t exist. It just becomes a cult of batteries, where a terrible solution most be accepted because any criticism of it must imply an even worse outcome.
I never really understood this argument to be for or against EVs. Electricity is an universal energy source. It can be created via renewables or fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels are also a limited resources and have the ability to become depleted. Renewables might have a temporal limitation. Infrastructural changes, such as sending excess solar electricity to cloudy locations can offset this via HVAC or HVDC lines.
Since fossil fuels are a limited resource, they should be saved and used when renewables can not. This also improves national security and pushes fossil fuels to be better rationed.
The middle east is also a big investor in solar. Just like a drug dealer, when you consume your own product this reduces ability to sell and make more money. By offsetting fossil fuel for creating electricity with solar, they can make more money by selling oil they normally would be burning.
Wouldn't it also be a better use of energy to charge EVs at night instead of having always on street lamps spending millions to shoot photons into space in order to offset the low user consumption during the time period?
Nobody who wants a Hummer is going to buy a bicycle just because it has the same name. They'll just buy the ICE-powered Hummer instead. But they might buy a Hummer-style vehicle that happens to be electric.
I guess if the bicycle has a cool military look and can carry a similar amount of cargo and passengers in reasonable comfort, and travel long distances at high speeds on roadways and rough terrain, then they might buy it.
This article just rehashes a lot of nonsense and half truths that are being perpetuated by oil sponsored press, ice car lobbies and other interest groups.
Lets' tackle it:
- Lithium and nickel scarcities. Yes production for that stuff is increasing a lot and it's putting a strain on how fast that can be ramped up. However, there's no shortage of either element on this planet. These are not rare earth minerals. Lithium is extremely common on this planet. Refining capability is the bottleneck; we need more of that. That's why Tesla is building a lithium refining plant in Texas. Also, sodium ion batteries are now a thing (no lithium, nickel, or cobalt) and lfp batteries are also a thing (little/no nickel, or cobalt) and already very widely used. In short, there are scaling challenges but they are not and never will be show stoppers. At best, the exponential growth curve might suffer a short term slightly less exponential but still exponential trend. Non issue. Battery production volume growth is not slowing down but speeding up for the foreseeable future. Multiple tens of twh per year very soon.
- Cars are heavy. Yes, the US has had a long and odd relationship with pointlessly big vehicles that predates EVs on the road. And in fairness, they can be fun. I have driven a mustang and I loved it. The noise. The smell. The ridiculousness of it. This was the ice version. Cars don't have to be heavy though. There are plenty of very small and cheap EVs already. Basically glorified golf carts. Very popular in Asia and also starting to show up in European cities. Even the US has some ground roots movement of people using actual golf carts in local communities. Why not? They are cheap, silent, and they work. Why burn gallons of expensive gas when you can do you coffee run in a golf cart? Cars don't have to be big. That's just the local obsession with all things large.
- Cars need to be charged. Very true. This takes energy. Very true. This comes from the grid and strains the grid and boo hoo all the coal. Very much not true. Car batteries are perfect for soaking up excess renewable power and moderating the grid. They can also deliver power back to the grid. A lot of fast chargers are powered by renewables. A lot of EV owners invest in solar panels on their roofs. You could say EV adoption is speeding up conversion of grids to rely more on renewables and less on coal. Hence coal plants are shutting down and gas plants are increasingly relegated to peaker plant role (which makes them relatively unattractive as an investment). Also, the amount of power needed correlates to the amount of miles driven, not the amount of cars or the sizes of their batteries. And of course, using gas or diesel to drive the same amount of miles is not sustainable. Even when you do power them with dirty coal plants, EVs still emit a lot less because they are just more efficient. So, the more EVs we have the less emissions. The more stress we put on the grid, the faster the rollout of renewables progresses.
What's going to happen in the US (and everywhere else) is the influx of cheap, small, mass produced cars. Not in a decade. Next year. China, Vietnam, Korea, etc. they are all starting to get to some very serious production volumes. Import regulations are slowing that down in both the US and Europe. But these small, reasonable cars are coming. Millions of them. It will drive cost and prices down and efficiencies up. My guess is the local car industry will adapt (or disappear). A repeat of the influx of cheap Japanese imports in the eighties in the worst case. However there are a lot of positive things happening: lots of investments in local production capacity, massive employment opportunities all over, cities that are getting cleaner, etc. Even Toyota now has a small electrical car that is apparently popular in Japan. Look! No hydrogen needed after all! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMMq3j8zbjk
Stop repeating BEV propaganda. There are real reasons why BEVs can't work. By suggesting that oil companies are behind these criticisms is a conspiracy theory. Once you realize that those problems you brought up don't have magical solutions to them, you'd figure this out too.
This isn't an argument about EV's being less environmentally friendly than ICE's, it's about bigger cars being less efficient and more costly than smaller cars. Which is both an obvious and naive argument to make (given that it completely ignores consumer needs).
Could you share the numbers you used for that conclusion? It feels like a solar panel will produce ridiculously more power than is required to make it so it seems hard to believe small scale gas combustion engines are more carbon efficient regardless if that initial energy is from a coal or gas power plant. I'm not sure what a reasonable range of numbers for the energy needed for panel production is though so I'm curious what you used.
Nobody but China has a clue how much power it takes to produce a solar panel and nobody has done a recalc but you know it's hardly a net benefit and also here's a link with some numbers? Well which is it, you didn't use a number or you're claiming the numbers in that link?
I'm also not sure I follow what you're saying about Europe's power anyways. Natural gas was never a leader for production, coal used to be 3x the production, it's only in the last 5 years that flipped.
I'm trying to understand what numbers you're basing your claims on because they don't make any sense but you state them very authoritatively.
Let's take your assertion at face value, assume you are correct.
You're saying, WORST CASE, likely with cooked numbers in your favor, that the net benefit of CURRENT manufacturing is equivalent?
Okay, let's ask the next question: With the LCOE of coal being fundamentally noncompetitive with wind and solar, what do you think the future of coal-based production is? Right, coal is being actively phased out wherever possible for wind/solar that is simply plummeting in cost, and likely has a decade of cost drops.
And if they are using a grid, what is the switching cost by the factories to use wind/solar? Oh right, probably nothing, since they just pull from ... the grid.
So let's say natural gas turbine took over a lot of coal? Well, the carbon emissions of natural gas turbine are better than coal in the short run, but solar/wind are now beating natural gas turbine, and natural gas turbine is the absolute last gasp of carbon-based energy production trying to take on wind/solar.
So, even if we accept your proposition that it "doesn't matter", and likely those numbers are already years old and alternative energy adoption is drastically ahead of the IEA's projections in the last decade or so, the fact of the matter is that the ball is rolling in the right direction, and anyone with half a policy brain realizes that.
And again, the coal/natural gas/ICE technologies are played out. They have maximized their efficiencies, and wind/solar/EV is already better than in in most meaningful ways, and the technology for wind/solar/EV in terms of economies of scale, design refinement, fundamental technology like perovskites compound cells in solar and sodium ion/LFP/LMFP/sulfur techs have likely 10-20 years of runway left.
Those scorecards prove my point. One, they don't actually rate or calculate the net coal used to make the panels. Two, the dirty producers market share isn't at all described.
This is Micheal Shellenberg's fossil fuel boosting org.
I know they and he put a small amount of effort into pretending to be "environmentalists" but it's pretty far from convincing unless you want to believe for some reason.
If you're trying to assess the data quality based on the source, rather than the data itself (no shame, I'm doing the same - I don't have time to debunk every half-truth out there), you probably need to go one deeper to the report's author - Enrico Mariutti. I can't find out much about him.
> However, in light of the acceleration of European climate policy, which threatens to condemn Italy to irreversible decline, I feel it is my duty to enable the media to cover this discovery.
Yeah, he sounds like a legit researcher, rather than someone with a blog and a message the fossil fuel lobby finds useful.
