The future of EVs? Maybe not so bad?

[jmauld]

Partly my deep-rooted nerdism, partly low cost of operation (34¢ for 80 miles/full recharge), and a lot of hoping for some really crazy looks from other drivers (no, I'm not normally quite so narcissistic) I have one on order. It was originally supposed to be here this March, but, with all the shipping woes, who knows?

https://sondorsx.com/pages/metacycle

I like this a lot. I get dirty looks when I show it to the admiral though.

 

[Nater Potater]

Looks pretty cool. A moped with attitude.

Watch that moped crap! Just kidding... It's actually considered a full-on motorcycle, as it doesn't have any pedal assist as an electric bike/moped might. Consequently, it's subject to all the registration and insurance fees as any other gas-powered motorcycle would be. On top of that, Idaho charges an additional $140 because it's an EV and won't be paying any fuel taxes. The old Norton registration costs me a whopping $33 annually, so I'll be paying $173 every year for the privilege of owning an EV.
Idaho currently charges a fuel tax of 33¢ per gallon, meaning I'd have to burn 424 gallons to match the $140. Figuring 65 mpg with the Norton, I'd have to put over 27,000 miles to pay that much in fuel taxes, and that would have to happen every year since that $140 is an annual fee. Figure that I've never racked up more than 5000 miles in any one year on the Norton, and you can see where I'm getting the short end of the stick. Maybe I should try pushing the local legislature to re-think that tax to at least adjust it based on vehicle size/weight...

 

[jmauld]

NC has that tax as well. $135/yr for the EV privilege. It should be reduced for motorcycles

 

[jmauld]

That tax is one reason that I don’t register my golf cart as a neighborhood car. It’s retarded to penalize me for driving an electric golf cart. We aren’t required to register them. It just reduces the amount of places we can travel.

 

[Blueone]

That tax is one reason that I don’t register my golf cart as a neighborhood car. It’s retarded to penalize me for driving an electric golf cart. We aren’t required to register them. It just reduces the amount of places we can travel.

Why the government hasn’t embraced golf carts is beyond me…. They went totalitarian in our neighborhood….it made no sense and subsequently didn’t change a thing

 

[Brent Nutting]

Read this and thought it was interesting and wanted to share. Food for thought.

What is a battery?' Probably, Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That's important. So what does it cost to “Go Green?”


They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.


Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?"


Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.


There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.


Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.


All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.


In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.


But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs."


Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.


In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.


The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.


Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.


A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.


It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just - one - battery."


Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?"


I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.


The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.


Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.


There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzz words, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.

 

[jmauld]

Now figure up how much it costs to deliver 7000 gallons of gas, 20 gallons at a time.

 

[firecadet613]

Now figure up how much it costs to deliver 7000 gallons of gas, 20 gallons at a time.

They don't. It's delivered by a big truck to a gas station which I stop by throughout my day, I don't make a special trip to get gas...

 

[jmauld]

They don't. It's delivered by a big truck to a gas station which I stop by throughout my day, I don't make a special trip to get gas...

One doesn’t make a special trip to recharge an EV either. It happens in one’s garage.

But you clearly understand the absurdity of counting a power plant workers lunch as an expense. It’s the same as counting the lot lizards pack of smokes at the local truck stop as an expense for gas cars.

 

[km1125]

Right now, most charging is done for free (municipal chargers), or at discounted rates. Even home charging can frequently benefit from time-of-use charging, where rates are artificially lowered at night to encourage off-peak charging.

How much do you think actual charging is going to cost when folks are reliant on the charging stations?? I'll bet it will be similar to ATM machines, which were FREE when first introduced but now carry all kinds of "additive" charges. A couple dollars here, a couple dollars there. Most won't even notice the added charges because they're automatically tagged onto your cc bill or deducted directly from your account.

"Off peak" will no longer be a 'thing' when there's enough draw around the clock, so those benefits would disappear too.

What's your best guess on how much electricity will cost when the bulk of transportation requires it?

 

[highslice]

Read this and thought it was interesting and wanted to share. Food for thought.

What is a battery?' Probably, Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That's important. So what does it cost to “Go Green?”


They do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.


Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?"


Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.


There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.


Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.


All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.


In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.


But that is not half of it. For those of you excited about electric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive embedded costs."


Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. I will explain embedded costs using a can of baked beans as my subject.


In this scenario, baked beans are on sale, so you jump in your car and head for the grocery store. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for $1.75 a can. As you head to the checkout, you begin to think about the embedded costs in the can of beans.


The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plow the field, till the ground, harvest the beans, and transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.


Next is the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining taconite, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the grocery store. Finally, add in the cost of the gasoline for your car.


A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size of a travel trunk. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.


It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just - one - battery."


Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost of driving an electric car?"


I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not! This construction project is creating an environmental disaster. Let me tell you why.


The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.


Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.


There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions. I predict EVs and windmills will be abandoned once the embedded environmental costs of making and replacing them become apparent. "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal and are easily espoused, catchy buzz words, but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.

Interesting read. Without knowing all the detail provided here, I have often said that the environmental impact of "going green" would significantly outweigh the benefits. Just in pollution around disposing of the batteries and windmills. But what do I know?

 

[Blueone]

The math proves a windmill can not pay for itself in its lifetime…… and this is the path we choose

 

[ttmott]

Interesting read. Without knowing all the detail provided here, I have often said that the environmental impact of "going green" would significantly outweigh the benefits. Just in pollution around disposing of the batteries and windmills. But what do I know?

That's what they said about the lead acid batteries....
I believe within the next 10 or so years that the bulk of the LI batteries will be profitable to recycle.

 

[jmauld]

What's your best guess on how much electricity will cost when the bulk of transportation requires it?

What’s your best guess at the cost of gas this summer?

I can invest in the equipment to generate my own electricity if the cost concerned me. I can never control the cost of a gallon of gas. That is completely out of my hands.

 

[jmauld]

Speaking of all this.

Look what showed up today.

Now I just need the car to be built, so I can use my fast charge adapter.

 

[Nater Potater]

Speaking of all this.

Look what showed up today.

Now I just need the car to be built, so I can use my fast charge adapter.

That's a helluva tease they threw your way! I just got an update about my motorcycle; sometime in June. Well, as long as they leave me some Summer riding time...

 

[DWABoat]

As long as they make gas for cars with big V8’s I will be driving them. Just like many, many people still enjoy riding and keeping horses, I don’t think our love of the rumble of a classic Corvette will go away (I have 3).

 

[km1125]

As long as they make gas for cars with big V8’s I will be driving them. Just like many, many people still enjoy riding and keeping horses, I don’t think our love of the rumble of a classic Corvette will go away (I have 3).

So this might be real scene after all?

 

[Nater Potater]

So this might be real scene after all?

Would you expect anything less from Captain Kirk?

 

[Creekwood]

As long as they make gas for cars with big V8’s I will be driving them. Just like many, many people still enjoy riding and keeping horses, I don’t think our love of the rumble of a classic Corvette will go away (I have 3).

That sound is why I love the sound of start up of my 454s in the boat before the mufflers fill with water and muffle that beautiful music. Not quite the lopey idle of an aggressive cam in a big block street car, but a nice sound.