The Electric Car Program is Backwards
We are exhorted every day to get with the times and use electric cars to save the planet. The Federal Government sponsors the ads and gives buyers financial incentives to buy them. The State of California has already ruled out use of fossil fuel-using combustion engines after 2035. All of this is wonderful and supposed to save the planet from global warming, or climate change, or whatever the current term is. The problem is emission of CO2, a greenhouse gas that reflects heat back to earth. The supposition is that it will cause melting of the glaciers and inundate coastal areas and doom the planet.
I’m not going to argue the science, because Anthropogenic Global Warming, whether correct or not, has become a religion. I can’t argue with someone’s religion. I can argue with someone’s mathematics, and that is where the electric car program is backwards.
The Importance of Sin
Electric cars don’t emit carbon dioxide, so they’re great, right? Wrong. The whole model is inverted. Electric cars don’t generate their own electricity. The exception is the hybrid, which uses a fossil-fuel-powered internal combustion engine to charge the batteries. Hybrids, unfortunately, successfully reduce CO2 emissions, but reduction is still a sin. But a sin in the Woke Church of Electric Vehicles is unacceptable. There must be complete agreement with the entire body of theology. Only elimination is acceptable. The electricity required comes from the US grid and is generated largely by fossil fuels. The only generating plants that don’t emit CO2 are hydroelectric and nuclear. Environmentalists who want electric vehicles are the same people who show up every time someone suggests building a new dam, because there is inevitably a trade-off between generating power and the river’s wildlife. The same happens with nuclear plants. It takes a dozen to twenty years to build a nuclear power plant because of all the regulatory hurdles. Even if environmentalists stopped protesting nuclear power immediately, there is no chance to have any reasonable help from nuclear power in time to make a difference.
I liken the environmental protesters who demand that we do away with fossil fuels immediately, but who protest the same best ways to do that, to a dog that wishes to get outdoors. The dog is always the greatest impediment to getting the door open.
Step One: Infrastructure
The first thing that has to be done is to build the electricity transmission lines from the place where wind or solar might be able to work. After that build the generating plants and start putting energy into the network. The transmission lines are built while the owners/investors are determining if the promise of generating potential is real. Most of the places where carbon-free wind or solar plants can be built are distant from where the power is used. The best, informed, opinion I’ve read about time and cost to complete creation of sufficient generating capacity from wind and solar is ten years at $4.5 trillion per year. That is $45 trillion in a decade. The inflationary effects are incalculable.
Step Two: Generating Capacity
There is a better source of power if we are prepared to tap it. It is wave energy in the seas. In addition to wave energy, there is serious power available from tides. For example, the twice-daily tides in the Bay of Fundy in Canada are incredibly powerful. In 2015 I wrote a fiction novel that included a 35% design of an energy recovery system taking the power from waves. Finding Closure: Book Three of the Finding Series - Kindle edition by Treble, Mark. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. I’m not a design engineer, but I believe it will function as described.
The U.S. used 97.33 quadrillion BTUs of energy in 2021, according to the US Energy Information Agency. Of that, about 80% is generated by fossil fuels. Eight percent is generated by nuclear plants, and it takes at least a dozen years, often two to three decades, to build a new plant. There is no short-term help from nuclear. It usually draws the same environmental protesters that demand clean energy from “renewables.” The remaining 12% comes from renewables. Of that, 40% comes from organic sources (meaning that it emits carbon dioxide when burned), about 20% from hydroelectric sources (dams) that draw the identical environmental protesters. All that remains are the Holy Grail: wind and solar. And they simply can’t do it.
Step Three: Charging stations
After we have the generating capacity and the transmission capacity, we’re still faced with building electric vehicle charging stations throughout the country. The longest-range EV today is from Lucid Air and can go a claimed range of 520 miles and a cost of $87,400. That may be a viable solution to the limousine liberals supporting the green new agenda; it does little for the rest of us.
More Typical is a range of 250-300 miles. Since charging stations cost at least $1,000 each plus land plus hooking them up to the public electricity net plus maintenance, at a range of 500 miles we need at least 5,000 charging stations; at the more typical 250–300-mile range we need at least 10,000. The cost is mostly irrelevant. We have a labor shortage; supply chains have been decimated by the pandemic'; and a Department of Transportation that understands nothing. We’re screwed.
-- Legislate bread for the masses. I promise to plagiarize that line repeatedly.
It's even more fundamental than that: there's not even enough materials for us all to have electric cars.
Hint: That's a feature and not a bug to some people.
https://jalopnik.com/we-may-not-have-enough-minerals-to-even-meet-electric-c-1820008337
Global demand for cobalt and nickel, two of the essential elements in electric car batteries, has never been higher.
Reuters and Bloomberg both have stories out today on the metals and, as Reuters reports, while demand for nickel keeps increasing, half the world’s nickel supply is too low in quality to use for car batteries.