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Originally Posted by Solecismic
What's interesting is that you cite a study from a group that exists to lobby governments to get to net zero.
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Our discussion is about emissions, is it not? When it comes to that, a group that thinks lowering emissions is a good idea would seem to be appropriate. It's totally different than one which favors a particular industry. Citing one from the traditional auto or oil or EV side for example is a bias that's on one side of the discussion. The only net-zero bias is 'this is a discussion worth having'.
On the study you cited, a couple of points. One is that it's not recent, it was published a decade ago. We know a lot more than we did then. Secondly, despite that fact it agrees with what I said on almost every point regardless. Even using a very conservative figure for vehicle operational life, it still concluded that EVs come out ahead on total emissions in every scenario except for the worst-case scenario of relying totally on coal. Including scenarios that don't require
any 'greening' of the power grid. And more recent studies show that even in a coal-based power grid still favors EVs.
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Originally Posted by Solecismic
What do you do if EV sales become significant (right now, what, 2% of the cars on the road are EV?) and you need more materials than you could possibly extract? China is clearly trying to control world supplies of some of these materials, what's the price then? But look at the world supply of these rare-earth metals and mining today and extrapolate. At copper as well.
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That's true of basically everything though. I know people on this board don't like my proposed solutions, but countries that aren't friendly to 'us' ... whoever us is defined to be ... are going to try to monopolize resources. As we are on the other side. We aren't saying 'let's stop using oil because it's easy for OPEC to manipulate the price'. If we want to avoid a situation in which any other country can cause problems by controlling resources we need, then we have to backwards at least a literal century in the technology we use, and possibly further than that.
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Originally Posted by Solecismic
All the EV market is right now is wealthy people (almost 80% of EV owners have household incomes >$100k) feeling good about themselves while taking money from the government.
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Early adopters always skew that way though. Only wealthy people can afford to buy new cars, period.
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Originally Posted by Solecismic
Where does the electricity come from for this? That is quite a drain. And as renewables come on line, so do relative dead periods. Already, at 2%, we're starting to see restrictions on home charging. And the Finland example I just gave you. You might spend (or the government might spend) a lot of money to install a charging station at your home (if your insurance company doesn't drop you), and then you can't use it a lot of the time. Once EV use becomes more common, this will only get worse. A lot worse.
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MIT has estimated that the US power grid is capable of supporting 150 million EVs. That's over half the current operational vehicles. We'd need to upgrade some to go all the way, for certain. But a lot of that is infrastructure changes that need to happen anyway. I don't get the point of using examples like Finland. Is Finland having issues because there's no possible way for them to make more electricity? Of course not. It's largely because of how reliant they are on imports. This is a problem, but it is not one without solutions. Certainly EVs need to be accounted for in the electrical grid, but that's no different than needing to account for oil supply for gas-powered vehicles.
That sort of feeds into the points about convenience, getting enough charging stations and other infrastructure, and so on. All of those do need to happen, but similar issues need to be accounted for under *any* forseeable circumstance, including continuing to rely on oil which is not going to be viable indefinitely no matter how much we might like it to be. EVs aren't a perfect solution by any means, but they are best one we currently know of. Hydrogen is far further behind from an infrastructure point of view and is not as efficient, has similar transportation/storage issues to what gasoline has, is expensive to produce from an energy standpoint, and so on. It's better than continuing to rely on oil/gas, but I've yet to see a good reason to favor it over EVs.