Was listening to a gal on the radio opine about the costs of mining the rare earth minerals needed to manufacture electric cars.
"Rare Earths" are not rare. Marketing stroke of genius named them.
Furthermore the "rare earths" are not consumed. A used battery is a much richer source of materials than raw ore.
To give a frame of reference on building batteries, she said we burn 19 billion gallons of fuel to fly all commercial aviation in one year and said it takes 21 billion gallons of fuel to mine the ores needed to build electric car batteries.
We call this "pulling number out of one's a..." Lets say her numbers are accurate. Then how much petroleum is consumed in refining petroleum?
How much petroleum is consumed mining iron to make conventional cars & trucks?
Put things in proper perspective.
She went on to remind us much of the electric cars are built with plastics, requiring more petroleum to build them.
Golly, as if we never used plastic in an automobile before!
She also reminded the audience that mostly coal and natural gas power plants would need to increase production to charge them. The power plants cannot burn as cleanly as a modern low emissions car.
Coal plants need to stay hot at night to be ready to produce by morning. Nuclear too. There is at least 50% excess capacity at night which is the prime time to charge an EV (the "gas station" model does not work for EVs). Large industrial electrical consumers can get power for pennies/kWh at night due to the excess supply. If the plant has to be kept hot is better to get pennies for that energy than nothing.
T.O.U. billing is being forced on consumers in most of the country explicitly to charge more for electrical power during peak demand, less during low demand, in attempt to shift consumer demand away from prime time. To encourage use of things such as a Tesla Powerwall to charge at night in order to have less expensive power during peak demand.
Coal generated electricity powering a Tesla Model 3 is as clean as a 50 MPG Prius on gasoline. But the Tesla can effortlessly use solar, if that is what is available. Effortlessly use nuclear, hydro, wind, coal, natural gas, oil, whathaveyou. The Prius can not.
She also made note of the human cost and briefly discussed some of the diseases the folks who mine cobalt, she referred to one as being called “Cobalt Lung”.
Boo hoo hoo. Totally preventable. Just as with black lung.
She also said that the average car battery life was about 10 years and as of now, there’s little in the ability to recycle them.
There is a huge recycling effort in place. Minor problem is there are not that many lithium batteries in need of recycling.
She said she thinks the environmental and human costs are not worth it.
is most definitely not worth the government picking winners and losers. EVs were coming with or without government but we have little Napoleons looking for causes to get in front of pretending to be the leader for their own fame, fortune, and aggrandizement.
www.bloomberg.com
