Changing times

Originally posted by offgrid And of course if the equipment was produced using renewable energy to being with then there is zero net carbon production.

Originally posted by StreetSweeper Having worked in the industry in another state I am very familiar with electric generation nationwide. The national grid will not be able to sustain more than a couple EV's per city block no matter when they are charged.

StephenH, there are numerous studies showing that the energy requirement to produce Li EV batteries is around 50-100 kwh/kwh capacity depending on where and how they are manufactured. For a typical 65 kwh EV battery that is roughly 6 months electric consumption for the average US household.

BTW the energy requirement to refine (just to refine, not including extraction, shipment, and delivery) of the gasoline an equivalent ICE car uses over it's lifetime is a similar number.

The 50-100 kwh/kwh means that the energy payback of the battery is around 50-100 battery cycles, out of a lifetime measured in thousands of cycles.

Photovoltaic energy payback is less than 2 years, out of a lifetime of 35 years or more, only around 5% of their production. Wind is less than a year. So no, these technologies don't take "
a lot of energy to produce.

When zero carbon electricity (renewables, nuclear, hydro) are used for the manufacturing of these products carbon production approaches zero. That is very important to understand. The more low carbon electricity in the mix the better things get from a carbon production standpoint, and that is happening rapidly. The point is that together renewables, EVs, stationary batteries and aggregation and dispatch technology form a virtuous circle.

As for negative environmental impacts from manufacturing, certainly those exist. Nothing humans do at an economically significant scale is without impact. And nothing humans do has more significance or impact than energy production and transportation, except maybe food production.

Oil production, refining, and transportation have tremendous negative environmental impact as we all know.

That's not to dismiss the need to improve the extraction and manufacturing processes as much as we can. Of course we should. Just as we did semiconductor manufacturing which was horribly polluting in the early days but is much much cleaner now. I remember being told just to dump TCE down the drain in the processing lab at MIT back in the mid 70's).

Re your articles, one is in a far left publication which tends to never be satisfied unless everything is perfect. The other is in a far right publication which tends to resist any change to the status quo. Neither is where one should look for an unbiased assessment of technical or economic issues.

Re EV range anxiety, that horse has been beaten to death here and really isn't the topic of the current discussion. Either an EV makes sense for your use case or it doesn't. If it doesn't, by all means don't buy one. If it does, by all means consider it, performance, reliability, maintenance, and fuel cost are all working in the EVs favor.   Either way stay tuned, range and charging system access are increasing rapidly, and prices are decreasing as volume increases and competition among the manufacturers heats up.

There are some YouTub videos that are sponsored by the viewers via Patreon, or so they say, that present a series of topics on renewable energy, storage of electricity, and other technical innovations.  Watching them give me some hope that we'll not run into the concerns expressed by S.Sweeper.  Here's the link:  https://www.youtube.com/c/JustHaveaThink  What is especially encouraging is that there are electron storage systems for large scale storage use that don't run into the complications of lithium/nickel.  

Lithium certainly has a jump start on other electron storage systems, but there are other ideas being developed.  Here are a few of some other storage possibilities: