I think there’s a little bit of confusion over the batteries, the actual batteries that drive the car are separate to the normal 12v battery that you find on an ice car, the article regarding the cost of the leaf replacement batteries is seven years old, some of the early electric cars are still running on the original batteries, yes, maybe a reduced range but they’re still going,
Well that puts things into perspective.
It also confirms that we don’t really need to rely on France for our energy needs, doesn’t it? In fact, I was under the impression that at some times we export electricity to them.
Certainly, we should be expanding our nuclear power provision before it’s too late to start thinking about it.
Surely, our coal and gas sources for electricity don’t all come from that one power station, Drax, do they? I also thought that the greenies had convinced the authorities that they should be burning wood chips instead of coal, though how that makes any difference to their ‘global warming’ I have no idea!
Well that puts things into perspective.
It also confirms that we don’t really need to rely on France for our energy needs, doesn’t it? In fact, I was under the impression that at some times we export electricity to them.
Certainly, we should be expanding our nuclear power provision before it’s too late to start thinking about it.
Surely, our coal and gas sources for electricity don’t all come from that one power station, Drax, do they? I also thought that the greenies had convinced the authorities that they should be burning wood chips instead of coal, though how that makes any difference to their ‘global warming’ I have no idea!
I only mentioned Drax because I can see it from here JB, and it’s a Yorkshire Power Station…
Incidentally, the French supplied 4% of our electricity in the example.
Quote:
Drax power station is a large biomass and coal-fired power station in North Yorkshire, England, capable of co-firing petcoke. It has a 2.6 GW capacity for biomass and 1.29 GW capacity for coal. Its name comes from the nearby village of Drax. It is situated on the River Ouse between Selby and Goole. Wikipedia
My SIL’s parents bought a Hyundai Kona EV which has a bigger battery than the Leaf because they wanted to be able to get to Canberra and back without recharging. It is essentially the wife’s car as they also have a Toyota diesel SUV to pull their three tonne caravan.
They don’t charge the car every night but wait until the battery is 50% discharged before charging. They have not installed a fast charger but use the one that just plugs into the normal 10amp household power point. The car is fully charged by the morning.
On one occasion they stopped to use an NRMA fast charger on the Hume Highway to see how it went. The car was fully charged by the time they returned from a coffee and pie at a local bakery, They told me how much it cost but I have forgotten what it was however I remember thinking at the time that it wasn’t that dear and certainly less that filling up with half a tank of petrol (remembering our petrol is half the rice of the UK’s)
The vehicle however cost a lot of money to buy.
He’s still going but largely being pushed-out by the money as I see it.
The technology he uses looks very promising.
One story to give a taster here:
And his website is here:
History,
Push for Diesel (Brown?)
Diesel became cheaper way to go.
Then the plug was pulled.
(No pun there then)
Push for Electric.
Electric seems least damaging to the environment.
Get the Majority on Electric.
Then reveal the cost of batteries, recharging & replacement.
Then pull the plug on Government support.
Moral of this story?
Only go when forced!
Exactly, and if and when electric vehicles become sufficiently widespread, I foresee additional taxes imposed, perhaps on electricity - then we’ll all suffer.
I’ll stick with petrol until I’m forced to do otherwise.
Those who feel that electric is more to their liking can do what they want, but when it’s time to sell their car I think they’ll have second thoughts.
I have a feeling that in time, and when people learn from experience, electric cars will become less attractive.
Once again, a poorly thought out idea by the government.
The NSW Government has already said that when electric cars are popular enough there will be a mileage component added to the rego to compensate for the loss of fuel excise.
They said it would not be imposed until there is sufficient mass of electric cars as they don’t want to slow down the take up.
Some more information about electric cars and the batteries that will be required in the future.
This news item is about an enormous factory being built in northern Sweden to manufacture batteries for electric cars.
[I]"Surrounded by a forest of tall green pine trees, 125 miles south of the Arctic circle, a giant electric battery factory is rapidly taking shape on a site as big as 71 football pitches.
The project will be a gigafactory, a term coined by Tesla founder Elon Musk to describe his first high-volume plant for producing lithium-ion electric battery cells, deep in the Nevada desert.
By 2030, 40% of all new cars sold will be electric according to the latest forecast by the investment bank UBS, rising to almost 100% of the new car market by 2040."[/I]
I’ve bumped this thread up because I’ve been doing a great deal of research into the recyclability of electric car batteries, wind turbine blades and such like because they are all interrelated. The following article was sent to me by an American friend, I do not know who the author is/was, not can I attest to its veracity except where it discusses the mining of raw materials such as lithium (as mentioned by OGF up above), cobalt, etc. I’ll leave my thoughts on this article until later but, for now, here is the article as received:
Quote:
We had some friends who many years ago bought one of the very first Prius electric cars. Once they found out they would need to replace the battery after about 6-7 years at a cost of about $6000.00 they quickly got rid of the Prius!
The information below further explains in some detail exactly how we are being misled about the need to, and attributes of, eliminate fossil fuels.
For those that think fossil fuels should be eliminated…and then the rest of us that know better.
What is a battery?’ I think Tesla said it best when they called it an Energy Storage System. That’s important. 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 flash-light 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 flash-light 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. Silicone 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 buzzwords, 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.
If this had been titled… “The Embedded Costs of Going Green,” would you have read it? Please share if you wish.
End of quote.
I haven’t read the rest of the thread, so apologies if this is addressed earlier.
Are there more cost-effective and environmentally-friendly alternatives if these alternative energy sources are not the way to go?
I’ve done a tiny bit of reading on alternative energy sources, but not much. I haven’t seen many other viable alternatives.
I think that there are a number problems for EVs especially if/when we have them in numbers that are comparable with the existing petrol/diesel vehicles.
The EVs will require energy. Typically that would need about 10kWh per day. That would double the average household energy.
Energy for a an 11kV 1500 kVA distribution transformer can feed several neighbourhoods - at the moment. Double the number of EVs and the transformer won’t anything like like the capacity it needs. Scale that up the entire distribution and you see the problem looming.
And there is the UK network. We simply don’t have enough juice. UK has to import energy NOW. How much more will we need when we all these EVs?
Some excellent reasons why the greenie-government’s idea for widespread use of EVs will not happen, certainly not for several decades.
As far as power generation is concerned, I don’t know about cost-effective alternatives but there are certainly other environmentally-friendly options going right now. First off, there’s wave motion generators that are at pilot-stage evaluation and use the rocking motion of sea waves to generate electricity. Then there are tidal barrier schemes that use the tides to turn turbines and generate electricity that way. I’m of the opinion that Rolls Royce can already build and operate small reactors based on their experiences with naval ships and submarines so, why can’t they build and run small nuclear reactor power stations on the edge of large cities?
With lithium-based battery technology, I did post earlier in this thread that someone had invented a battery, based on sodium-technology, that was far, far less toxic and so cheap you would be able to buy replacements at your local supermarket. These batteries also had the added advantage of being eminently suitable for recycling. I’ve just Googled and found that sodium-technology battery developments are progressing. Here’s the link:
In fact, the technology has progressed far enough for sodium batteries to part replace lithium ones in vehicles starting in 2023:
Interesting stuff. Thanks for the info.
Looks like they are.