Electric cars are NOT the future, are they?

[Isometimeswonder]

I am genuinely torn. I need want a new car but really don't want electric.
But so few smaller petrol cars are made now.
I haven't got a place to charge a car at home.
AIBU I should accept electric is the future.
AINBU I should get petrol. (Please recommend a small city car)

@Alexandra2001

I go through moments of quite negative thinking too, particularly with Trump doing everything he can to help his fossil fuel buddies, and now launching a war with no aims except destruction, that coincidentally or not is helping Russia - higher oil prices and lifting of some sanctions to allow oil sales to India is exactly what Putin needs to keep his own war economy churning.

But I’m not yet at a point where I think things are hopeless.

China's emissions have stabilised but only because a down turn in their economy..... the USA is going in the opposite direction, India still burns wood and coal and Europe is heading away from net zero.

I think China’s emissions have stabilised not just because of a slowdown in property investment etc., but also because there is a definite turn away from oil and coal as they rapidly expand renewable energy and electrify transport - we think we’re doing ok having 2,000 BYD buses on London’s roads, but they have 300,000 of them in China.

People will point to China building new coal plants, but fail to realise that China uses the coal plants it has more like we use gas - to cover for times when renewables cannot cover demand. For that reason, their average utilisation is below 50% now. For all these reasons analysts believe that China has reached peak carbon emissions, 5 years earlier than they promised (under promising and over delivering is a feature of China’s green transition).

China and India have two of the largest populations and carbon emissions in the world, for sure, but they are also both exceptionally exposed to the impact of climate change. And India is now beginning to deploy solar power and batteries at a scale that is causing their own coal expansion to stall. Analysts have pointed out that at a similar point in development China burned coal, but India is benefiting from the huge cost reduction in solar and battery costs to leapfrog that.

And don’t forget that coal burning is horribly dirty at a local level, regardless of how bad it is for the climate. There is an incentive for countries to move away from it and towards solar power just to improve air quality.

There is one fact that I reach for when pondering about the future. It is that energy from the sun is free. Zero bills are sent from that million km diameter fusion reactor safely 93 million miles away. Once capital investment is made in the infrastructure to harvest that energy and transmit it to where it is needed, it’s marginal cost is virtually zero.

That is important, because all the environmental challenges we face can be boiled down to an energy problem. If the marginal cost of something is near zero, then solutions that we cannot even imagine now will become possible.

There are two analogies to bear in mind when thinking about energy costs. Telecoms companies used to make money based on call distance, but the internet removed that and made the marginal cost of voice calling essentially zero, at any distance, so they had to transform their businesses to selling broadband services or die. New services to make use of virtually unlimited data have grown to make use of that - Netflix exists because the marginal cost of transmitting data is near zero.

And Kodak used to make money selling film, and buried its invention of the digital camera, since it would mean zero marginal cost photography. And the result for Kodak wasn’t good - the use of digital photography and video has exploded, and Google makes huge amounts of money swallowing and regurgitating Terabytes of content in YouTube every day.

Right now, fossil fuel companies make money on every gram of fuel they sell, and the marginal cost of electricity generation or any other use of their product can never approach zero. They are fighting hard to avoid being the next Kodak or old-school Telco.

But they will lose. The economics of solar, wind, batteries and electrolysis are brutal as those charts I posted prove (as long as we keep expanding EV usage and other demand on battery production). At the end of the day, the sun’s energy is free, and the marginal cost of utilising it is rapidly approaching free (there are already solar power + battery installations that can deliver power at < 2p/kWh).

And nothing can compete with free.

And nothing can compete with free.

I forgot to mention that there is a real-life experiment happening right now on this - The Australian government has mandated 3 hours of free electricity in the middle of the day, precisely because there is now so much rooftop solar power installed.

And people are installing batteries at huge pace to take advantage of that.

So the economics of burning fossil fuels are being upended, since peak hours electricity prices will be pulled down as people use batteries to power air-conditioning into the evening, when the sun has gone down.

All the naysayers about renewables (“it doesn’t work when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing”) are finding their arguments undermined as much as Boris Johnson’s “wind power doesn’t generate enough power to pull the skin off a rice pudding.”

We are talking about the future here, rather than the present, and I see what is happening in the whole world and not just in the UK. The future is electric, and with energy costs at much lower levels. It’s already here in some places and will spread more rapidly than nearly everyone can imagine.

@Ayebrow Its not that i think things are hopeless, its that i think the worlds climate needs to get to such a point that people will be forced to change, now it may well be too late by then, if its not already.

We are heading for a 2.6 'C rise, thats devastating, EVs Batteries etc isn't going to change this, perhaps it will stop further increases..... but by then, we will have reached a tipping point of no return, we might already be there....

@Alexandra2001

I’m probably a “glass half-full” person, based on what I have seen over a (long) time watching technology developing.

This is a useful starting point:

Humanity heating planet faster than ever before, study finds

It found global heating accelerated from a steady rate of less than 0.2C per decade between 1970 and 2015 to about 0.35C per decade over the past 10 years. The rate is higher than scientists have seen since they started systematically taking the Earth’s temperature in 1880.
^^
“If the warming rate of the past 10 years continues, it would lead to a long-term exceedance of the 1.5C (2.7F) limit of the Paris agreement before 2030,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study.

That suggests that we will breach the 1.5°C limit by 2030, 1.85°C by 2040, 2.2°C by 2050 and hit 2.55°C by 2060. So on the face of that evidence you are absolutely right - we’re on course for 2.6°C of warming well before the end of the century, so certainly risk triggering some nasty tipping points.

But why does that lead me to be optimistic? It’s because I have seen what we have achieved in just 20 years, and also what I am seeing happening right now.

The Tesla roadster launched with batteries that cost $1,200/kWh, and at the time people were justifiably sceptical that EVs could ever take the place of ICEVs. The idea that a London bus (with a 532 kWh battery) could ever exist was for the birds.

CATL have announced batteries at the pack level that will cost $10/kWh, so less than 1/100th of the cost of the Tesla’s. There is a reason there are 300,000 electric buses in China already - and with battery tech of the order of $10/kWh there will soon be 3m

And with dirt cheap batteries will come virtually zero marginal cost energy, at first just a few hours here and there, and then in increasing amounts as countries roll out solar, wind and storage.

As I said, the economics of virtually zero marginal cost energy does funny things - any country or business that works out how best to use such abundance will rule the future. Trump is busy throwing away the advantage the US had in developing much of the technology that we will depend upon for the sake of short term greed.

But that doesn’t mean others will be so stupid. It is in the interest of every fossil fuel importing country to wean themselves off fossil fuels as fast as possible, and the US-Israel attack on Iran is only going to accelerate that.

And one place to watch is Africa. This video (by Dave Borlace again) explains why it will most likely transform the outlook for the planet (alongside China, India, Pakistan and South America):

How an African energy revolution could save ALL of us

And one thing matters beyond everything in driving the pace of change we are seeing. The Chinese government is not made up of lawyers and journalists. It is largely made up of engineers (Xi Jinping himself is a chemical engineer). Those engineers can read a spreadsheet and understand the science behind global warming. They’re not beholden to an industry hellbent on wrecking the planet for profit.

They know that the lives of their 1.4 billion people will suffer gravely if they allow global warming to get much worse, which is why they are pouring unbelievably enormous sums of money into transforming their own energy economy and helping others do the same as fast as possible. As I posted before, China made twice as much money last year selling green tech to the world than the US did selling fossil fuels.

EVs are not on their own going to solve anything, but as part of an overall shift to electrify everything they are utterly crucial. They are necessary, but not sufficient.

I may be wrong in all of this, of course, and the fossil fuel industry may win in its fight to delay and obstruct the changes that are coming until it’s too late, but I genuinely do not believe they will. The sheer scale of the renewables + storage revolution going on (even in the US at the state level, if not the federal one) makes all the lies and misinformation they are pumping out seem like the death rattle of an industry that has foreseen its end and just wants to postpone the inevitable a little longer - they cannot stop the future, and the future is electric.

@Ayebrow Just listening to an analyst on energy price rises, ATM UK generates 50% of electricity by gas, then there is nuclear, bio fuels and renewables.

1.5'C increase is devastating for the climate but 2.6'C will make vast areas unfit for human habitation and crop growing.

If we are to have any chance, we need to curb how we live, yes and EVs/Batteries will be part of that but unless we change our ways drastically, we are heading for our destruction.

On the last 20 years, global emissions have soared, there is nothing to be hopeful about.

2.6'C will make vast areas unfit for human habitation and crop growing.

Will it not make other vast areas either fit for crop growing when it's currently not feasible but also increase yields in vast areas that are currently marginal? I believe there is a view this is the case and it "feels" like a likelihood.

It also isn't the temperature rise of 2 or 3 degrees in most areas that will cause the problems for food production, it's changes in rainfall. Large areas of the world are stinking hot by UK standards and very fertile because they have rain.

This is not to minimise how difficult it will be to move populations away from totally uninhabitable areas. But this is happening slowly, not overnight, and given the world's failure to get a grip on the temperature rise, and the probability that we have gone over a tipping point that we cannot come back from, the apocalyptic scenario that the world is going to end, when it's not, is no longer feeling as helpful as it could be. The recent study of polar bears, the western poster boy for ice loss, showed to the shock of the scientists that there are populations of fatter, heavier bears thriving with less ice. Not what anyone expected.

It seems sensible to be working on both removing greenhouse gas production and planning where future crops can be grown and displaced people can live at the same time. Precious little seems to be being done on the latter, unless it just doesn't make the headlines.

Its all fortune telling isn't it? We don't know how the climate will change, who will get rain, sun or drought... its unlikely to be orderly.

We have a world population heading towards 10 or 11 billion, 2 or 3 billion higher than it is now.

There will be huge resistance to population movement as well, so where are these areas in the world that will accept and be able to cope with a trebling in their population? a Europe going from 500m to 1.5 billion....

This is where both sides of the issue fall down. What we need is an adult world goverment that can properly address greenhouse gas emissions and plan for climate change disruption.

What we have, as the bombs rain down in the middle East and Ukraine and fighting continues in places all over Africa and Asia ..........

Because they probably have their own charger and are able to feel morally superior with little effort or cost.

I don't have my own charger. Which I've said quite a few times already.

So funny watching people project their own prejudices 😂

Even putting aside the day to day practicalities of charging problems my main issue is battery life and replacement costs. I keep a car for over ten years. Apparently batteries need replacing at around 70,000 miles and are very, very expensive. No thanks.

Same here. It’s a good half way compromise and very efficient

As I said upthread:
Ours is guaranteed for 100.000 miles. After that, the battery is probably less economical but still usable- just needs more frequent charging.

I have a 14yo diesel car that I bought new... currently on 82k. Many Motorway miles several holidays driving to France, Germany and Switzerland, boughtfor a 30 mile commute (did this for 3 years) .... you do the maths on that one!

Unless you drive up & down the Motorway for fun every night, EV's are more than capable to cater for most day to day driving.

Where do you get the idea that the batteries need replacing every 70,000 miles?

We sold a ten year old van that had done that number of of miles and the battery capacity was measured at 86% of new. And that was a very early electric vehicle and battery technology has increased massively since.

@JulietteHasAGun while it's true that some electric cars were sold with the warranty specifying that the battery is covered for 7 years or 70,000 miles whichever is reached first (a) that low a limit is pretty rare now and generally only the cheaper brands, you are more likely tosee warranties thatgo up to 100,000 or 150,000 now as battery technology improves and (b) a warranty period is not the same as a typical lifespan. Manufacturers will set a warranty period such that <2% or <5% (depending how risk-averse they are) will have a catastrophic failure in that period but the remaining 95%+ will go on trouble free for many years more. If you buy a toaster with a 1 year warranty you don't expect it to die after a year, it could feasibly last 5 years or more, it's just that after 1 year you can't moan to the manufacturer about it when it eventually happens.

Exactly. The warranty on my entire Kia is 7 years. I don't expect to go out at 7 years and one day and find it in pieces on the drive.

I'm a bit addicted to checking the Gridwatch site, which shows what sources are contributing to our energy mix in real time.

As of 15 minutes ago, gas was providing six per cent of our energy, wind 51, solar (yes, even in early March) 20.

I've been seeing days like this more and more often since I've been looking at Gridwatch regularly. Eagerly awaiting the very first zero gas moment.

I completely get that the battery would still be usable at 70,000 miles but just need more frequent charging. I’m not expecting the battery to self combust. I have an expensive electric bike so I understand about battery charging and degradation and even getting cells repaired/replaced. But if I need a new bike battery it’s £500 rather than thousands for a car.

I don’t want a car with a battery which only charges to 80%, 70%, 60% capacity.

The capacity it charges to is not the issue. The range it's left with is the issue and if you still have a 100% useful range then you still have a 100% useful vehicle.

I've never had to run a modern car down further than 45%, a battery capacity of 80% would not affect the use of my car at all.

I think they're too heavy tbh

I think a lot more has to change but it won't

The heaviness and the bulk of lithium batteries has also led in the change in car design.

Modern cars (2020+) look identical and hideous.

The added weight is said to be adding to road wear and tear, ie pot holes.

There's still bugger all movement on hydrogen fuel cells that could build resilience as a more diverse transport network

@Lalgarh I agree. I also think a bigger problem is the roads. And wear and tear on whatever the vehicle is. I think we are kidding ourselves that EVs will somehow sort the problem. I think it's actually a total sea change that is needed. But it might take a while because currently EVs are simply a symptom of denial.

@Lalgarh

The heaviness and the bulk of lithium batteries has also led in the change in car design

Oh come on, cars in the UK were becoming larger and heavier for decades before EVs appeared.

Are you seriously suggesting that the Nissan Leaf, BMW i3 and Renault Zoe are heavier and bulkier than vehicles like Range Rovers and other SUVs?

Literally no-one made any comments about the weight of cars going up and up until EVs began to threaten the fossil fuel industry. “EVs are heavy” is a fossil fuel myth.

Yes, there are big and heavy EVs for sure, but there are also very big and very heavy (and dog ugly) ICEVs too.

I think you've been listening to too much oil company PR.

The electric car i currently drive, a Kia EV3 is a small SUV exactly the same size as the VW ID3 I had last which was smaller than the diesel Yeti small SUV it replaced.

The electric mini is the same vehicle as the petrol one. Ditto the electric Smart and many others.

Batteries are being developed lighter with each new generation.

I don't see electric cars looking any different than petrol/diesel ones and they are certain not all identical.

Hydrogen? You won't catch me driving round with a tank full of fuel that explosive. Hindenburg, anyone?

If you can only charge a car to 80% of its battery capacity the range will be less than if you can charge it to 100% of its capacity. 🤷‍♀️. Which will mean needing to charge it more often if wanting to do a longish journey.

If you only drive twenty miles a day and charge every evening then yes it will make no difference to your day to day use. But if you’re towing a caravan 7 hours down to Cornwall you’re going to need to make more stops.