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Originally Posted by JohnnyCanuck
What's missing is the true environmental impact of EV's. Three issues that are completely overlooked: environmental damage from lithium and cobalt extraction/production (everyone just talks about disposal); other environmental impacts such as increased acid rain; and, the substantial increase in carbon emissions from all the coal necessary to fuel the charging network for EV's.
From the MIT Technology Review:
A 2007 study by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that without adding a new plant or transmission line, the U.S. grid could reliably charge 84 percent of the nation’s cars, pickups, and SUVs.
That continues to hold true, but does require managing the grid in more efficient ways, says Michael Kintner-Meyer, a co-author of that study. Notably, utilities will need to employ price incentives or technological tools to ensure EV owners are charging their battery packs during the night—rather than, say, all at once after work.
That load balancing, however, raises an interesting issue: In much of the country, the cheap, flexible power sources at night are often coal-fired power plants. That means you could actually end up with higher greenhouse emissions from a particularly dirty energy source, Carnegie Mellon’s Michalek notes.
And,
The vehicles will only be as clean as the power sources used to charge them, and more than 80 percent of U.S. energy generation still comes from fossil fuels.
I've seen several other references to the same issue. Until credible research organizations (like MIT or any of the other Top 35 Universities) actually give a thorough assessment of the entire environmental picture associated with EV's, as a society we're insane to be blindly pursuing the dream of Hamlin’s Wizard Oil Company as presented by Elon Musk. |
We need to look deeper into this than you think. Refinement of oil takes energy. Transportation of fuel takes fuel. And most of all, oil, gas, and coal are NOT renewable. Some people say we will run out of accessible coal in 283 years . Some say 200. Lets assume the best and say 283. Oil and gas in less than that. And unless we can replace oil and gas with something else, guess what we will use more of to take it's place? Coal. So that 283 figure? It's actually less than that. Doesn't matter though, relatively speaking, 200 and 285 are very very close together considering the millions of years it took for that coal to come to be.
So, purely from a practical standpoint, we need to find alternative fuels to coal, oil, and gas. What do we have so far? Solar, wind, hydroelectric, nuclear, and smaller groups of things like hydrogen, vegetable oil etc. The key here is that, besides hydrogen and vegetable oil, none of these sources are capable of being stored in the car unless it contains a battery. Hence the need for an electric car. 95% of hydrogen is made in a process that uses natural gas. You can make it with solar, wind, etc, but the cost is high and the energy content per unit volume is low. Might as well just use that same power to store it in a battery for the car directly. Besides, you have to transport that hydrogen to the customer, so it's even less fuel efficient. So, unless we find a better way to produce and deliver hydrogen, the electric car is still the best bet.
Will our current infrastructure support the EV? Not yet, but it has to simply because it's going to be the only option once ICEs run out of fuel to power them. Adversity breeds innovation. The dwindling supply of fossil fuels is the adversity, the innovation is the EV. Quite simply, it's the only logical step.
Imagine it's 1886 and everyone is riding horses and carriages to get from point A to B. The morning edition reports of a fuel driven automobile.
You started telling everyone that the automobile will never survive because there are not enough gas stations to get anywhere outside the major cities.
Imagine how foolish that 1886 person looks to us here in 2017. Now imagine it's 2148 and someone is reading your post. How will you look to them?