by Will Wainwright

ELECTRIC CARS 

their Batteries & Motors and the
DRAIN on OUR SYSTEMS and RESOURCES


Toyoda Akio, CEO of Toyota, agrees with Elon Musk of Tesla when he said,  “We dont have enough electricity to electrify all the cars”. 


This Just in: 40 second video of Tesla charging station at the Madonna Inn in San Luis Obispo, Calif.


Another update: Rivian CEO Warns of Looming Electric-Vehicle Battery Shortage.


Latest Update California Congressman Tom McClintock Addresses Natural Resources Committee (4 min video) on the contradictions of 'raw material need, versus supply'. It's at bottom of the page.


Many companies are doing more than just talking about electric cars. VW has committed to going all electric, and just recently so has GM by 2035, the same year California is banning the sale of Gas Engines in cars. This has got me to thinking, and prompted these questions.


1) Imagine at some point, half our cars are electric. The increased drain on our power grid will be tremendous and in no way will solar or wind energy make up the difference, plus wherever the extra power comes from, it still has to travel over the same grid. So where will that extra power come from and will the grid handle it? And at the local level?


2) What about the batteries - Billions of them will be needed. Yes, that is Billions. 


In an electric car, the “battery” is actually made up of  thousands of smaller batteries, usually the cylindrical type that look like oversized AA cells. The Tesla for example uses a 85 kWh battery pack weighs 1,200 lb and contains 7,104 lithium-ion battery cells with optional higher capacity battery packs available. Multiply those numbers for just the half of the 280+ million vehicles on the road. That’s a hell of a lot of batteries and a hell of a lot of time needed to charge.


3) Where will all the batteries come from? Will we be able to fill our domestic needs?  And the minerals needed to make them? And what will happen to all those used batteries? Will the chemicals used in them become the evil fossil fuels of the future?  Will depleted batteries be buried or will there be recycling plants set up? How efficient and what percentage of the chemicals will be recycled? And most importantly, can the U.S. be free of dependency on others for our battery raw materials, like the element of choice which is at the moment Lithium, the bulk of which is imported from Chile.


And Speaking of raw materials, what about those rare earth metals (REE's), we need for the magnets in our motors? Not only those in cars but for the wind turbines needed for clean power generation. There are even rare earth metals in your iPhone's speaker. Guess where they come from - China. For these minerals to go from a hole in the ground to an electric motor, you need vast skills and expertise, which barely exist outside of China. Today China mines over 70% of the world’s rare earths, and is responsible for 90% of the complex process of turning them into magnets. Will new massive new mining operations spring up, needed for our domestic battery and magnet needs? By the way, it takes 100 tons of rare earths needed to make magnets for 6,000 Toyota Prius vehicles and Toyota sold almost 2 million electric and hybrid vehicles in 2019. Do I see a new world order formula in this?

See: Lithium Prices Soar, Turbocharged By Electric-Vehicle Demand and Scant Supply 12/13/21)

Obtaining a Rare Earth minerals mining permit would take years of bucking the environmentalists. Then a regular supply of rare earth metals would take another 7-8 years, for digging and excavating the mine, setting up a supply chain and and finally building factories for processing. The total process could take up to 12-13 years.

See: U.S. Faces Uphill Climb to Rival China’s Rare-Earth Magnet Industry  


4) What will replace the road use tax in Gasoline? You know the answer to that.  You’ll be assessed a milage tax using some as of yet arbitrary formula accounting for of course, distance and allowing for type of travel - recreation, commercial, long haul etc etc.


5) On the grand scale, there is the National security issue, especially when we have autonomous cars. Have you thought about that? Say a Chinese hacker or even a recluse in a basement in Hoboken shuts off a regional grid or hacks into the navigation systems - GPS and otherwise. Add to the list of awful, unimaginable things that would happen during a blackout. You better hope you car has enough charge to escape your area. These are issues not generally talked about in our approaching the “all electric society”, most of which are not encountered with the internal combustion engine.


6) Other unexpected events; The recent winter freeze and black out in Texas that froze wind turbines was an example.  Better hope you have a gas generator to charge your car. Surprise 1; nobody expected the windmills to freeze up. And I for one, never new that Texas of all states, depended so much on unreliable green energy. Surprise 2; the impacted cities that lost their electricity, also lost their water too! (They didn’t speak about the sewer lift stations). 


China Hones Control Over Manganese, the New  Rising Star in Battery Metals. China’s metal industries already dominate the global processing of most raw materials for rechargeable batteries, including cobalt and nickel. Three-quarters of the world’s lithium-ion batteries and half of its electric vehicles are made in China. Recently Chinese firms have joined a cartel-like group to tighten output in key products, spurring prices and rival projects world-wide.

See story by By The Chuin-Wei Yap - WSJ- WSJ   5/21/21


The point being, we need better energy management. We also need new areas of reliable and dependable generation and distribution.  See my story on our eventual loss of power and how easily this could come about below.


You can see the problems. Think of it this way. In our utopian all electric society, anything that moves needs a magnet. And while there will be no drilling for oil and natural gas where will be a hell of a lot of holes in the ground for those rare earth elements and a lot of smelting plants extracting those precious elements we will depend on.


In summery, as you can see there are lots of questions to be answered. Remember also the electric car is just one more thing we add to our dependance on those volts, amps and watts. Electricity is now no less important to our lives as the air we breathe, which wasn’t the case that long ago. Think about this, Abraham Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Robert Fulton , Cornelius Vanderbilt and your great grandparents all lived and achieved greatness without electricity. We’ll be lucky to make it through a week -  but that is another story.


Our renewable energy problems in a nutshell are outlined in this short video

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I Found this on the internet

What's a person to do who has an Electric Car?

Imagine Florida with a hurricane coming toward Miami. The Governor orders an evacuation. All cars head north. They all will need to be recharged in Daytona / Orlando, plus or minus a town or two. And everybody hitting the same charging stations at the same time. Yikes! Now consider the drastic reduction in milage with the air conditioning on. You will not even make it that far. Both heat and A/C come nowhere to the efficiency, milage wise, as compared to a internal combustion engine. (The same applies with heat, up north in an ice storm). .

The storm catches up to you and eventually the regional power goes off. You get stuck on the road all night in traffic. Eventually your battery goes dead. you will have no A/C (heating), windshield wipers, radio, GPS, lights etc. All you can do is try calling 911 to take women and children to safety assuming the police can get to your location. And wont the police cars be electric too?? But they cannot come to help you because all roads are blocked. What about the power at the charging stations it's off. To be fair, it could also be at gas stations. But with gas you could have anticipated the problem and brought a couple extra containers with you.

The final question: how do you charge a thousands cars on the road in order to get them out of a traffic jam? Maybe the cart is way ahead of the horse.

 

A Letter to the Editor

Electric vehicle batteries toxic to planet
John A. Lanzetta, USA Today Regional

An electric vehicle has zero emissions at point of use, achieved by using a storage battery the size of a steamer trunk containing half a ton of toxins and heavy metals.

To extract and process the lithium, cobalt, manganese, nickel, copper, aluminum, steel and plastic required for each EV battery, 500,000 pounds of the Earth’s crust must be churned up in mining operations vastly unfriendly to the planet’s landscape and environment.

An EV battery’s rechargeable life averages eight years, less if fast charged. Being non recyclable, it must be discarded when it can no longer be charged and replaced (for thousands of dollars) to run the vehicle.

Every EV battery will end up in a landfill to degrade and leak its contaminants into our soil and groundwater.

Yet the goal of world leaders is to have 145 million EVs on the road by 2030 and accommodating auto companies are retooling from gas-powered vehicles to electric ones, supported by government subsidies.  

Why isn’t anyone telling us about the physical carnage to the planet, toxic harm to the environment and increased electrical energy usage (primarily from fossil fuel sources) that the production, repetitive charging and disposal of EV batteries will cause?


Calif. Congressman Tom McClintock Addresses Natural Resources Committee on
the contradictions of 'raw material need, versus supply'.






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