Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms I wonder what will come of this news snippet

Nice glib answer.
But the reality is that recycling batteries is a long way off simple. For a start it's massively energy intensive. It's also a hazardous health issue. Thirdly it's known already (and easily confirmed) that the materials used at the moment are unlikely to be ones that are required in batteries in 30 or so year's time. What about the fact that the raw materials (say lithium for instance) are cheaper to obtain new than to extract from old batteries?
Where do all the batteries we use now actually end up (now)? In landfill, that's where.
Nick

Well I know a few who are fully EV and love it -particularly the Tesla Ludicrous chip, however there is nothing green about it in NZ -currently we are importing Indonesian coal to burn in the power stations!

Who cares? If we don't get emissions under control in the next 10 years we're pretty much dead anyway. There's a very good reason why lithium battery recycling isn't well advanced at the moment - we don't need it. The batteries are lasting so well that there aren't enough available for end of life repurposing, let alone recycling.

NZ gets 82% of its electricity from renewables. An electric car makes excellent sense.

https://www.energyresources.org.nz/oil-and-gas-new-zealand/our-energy-mix/

Yes, you're having to import coal at the moment because of the gas failures, fall-off in hydro capacity, and to keep the lights on for a growing population, but I don't think it's entirely fair to paint it as a dirty energy mix.

I care. Mining for the metals is one of the dirtiest processes, just as bad (in fact rather worse) than freeing oil. Ok, we need less of it than oil but if ALL vehicles become electric it will be an enormous enterprise. It's not just the mining. Most mines around the world supplying these metals are desecrating the land around them, much of which is protected land. Forest destruction follows the setting up of the routes to the mine etc. All the info readily available.
Don't think I'm anti EV. I think it's brilliant for removing the pollution from streets to the power station where it can hopefully be managed or to wind/sun etc.
But are we sure we aren't just creating a different problem in different parts of the world? Actually there's a good item in New Scientist this week about it.

As the demand for charging increases it causes a huge amount of energy needing investment. Take street charging.
Lamposts are on average 80 yards apart. What's the average car length, say 3 yards or 4. Clearly the average street in London, say, 100 houses each side, all with at least one car, can't hope to sort that out. The average street lamp is wired for between 35 and 200 watts. 3 phase?I don't think so. Imagine every street lamp tring to charge a car..the existing wiring has no chance of handling the power required.
What will be needed is massive relaying of wiring to rebuilt parking bays..a huge amount of energy to achieve. Etc.etc.
I'm just not sure that in the ten year period you allow, we can cachieve all that without actually adding to the problem, or worse, creating another blind alley.
Nick

There are too many vested interests running alongside each other, and I just don't see many attitudes changing in the next 50 years. It will always be about making money.

EV's won't save the world, and we should be working to get people away from car dependency, not allowing them to think running an EV is a better place to be.
Not only that, but the worldwide dependency on small batteries in every conceivable IT lifestyle choice.

Too many people conspicuously consume not just cars but everything. During my work life I came across a very shady character who was filling containers with old fridges & freezers, and shipping them in thousands to Nigeria. On the one hand you can imagine the metals and plastics being recycled, maybe. But how do you imagine these old fridges were de-gassed?

Volvo have produced a study that shows that production of an EV has substantially more of an environmental impact than production of an equivalent IC fueled vehicle.

They state that it will be between 30k and 60k miles before the EV reaches break-even point and becomes the cleaner option.

Given that Volvo were one of the first to commit to producing EV's it's unlikely that their study will be biased in favor of IC vehicles.

It's difficult not to conclude that in the next ten years the rush to EV's will actually create a negative environmental impact, quite the opposite to what is required. By which time we'll all be "pretty much dead" if Tim is correct

As per Nick above, I'm not anti- EV, I'm just skeptical of the supposed gains they offer, particularly in the next ten years.

We can extract all the Lithium we need from ground water, especially in the UK where there's more than enough. Yes, uncontrolled mining causes enormous environmental damage, but so does oil extraction, so it's not like we'd be making the environment significantly worse off by switching.

Projections based on current levels of car ownership, especially in cities, often fail to take into account that individual private cars in urban environments are expected to become the exception rather than the rule.

People in cities like London don't generally need to use a car every day as there are adequate public transport solutions available, but even if you take the national average commuting mileage of 2,700 miles per year for the 2.5 million cars in London at 4miles per KWh that indicates a need for 675KWh/car/year in charging capacity. Spread that out over say 300 days a year and you get a total demand of 5MWh per night or 1.5GWh/year

This would be spread over the 3.8m domestic meters in London, each of which consume around 3MWh/year. So you're talking about increasing a total consumption of c. 11TWh/year by another 1.5GWh, an increase of around .01% in total energy demand. With decreases in car ownership, increases in home/flexible working, and V2G technology this seems entirely plausible that we can cope. If there were to be anyone shouting about the issue you think it would be the National Grid company and the DNOs but they are happily cracking on with the job.

Sure, there is currently a lack of charging infrastructure, but banging in upgraded cables and figuring out some time-sharing apps to synchronise charging loads is already underway. Our local DNO is putting in upgraded cabling all over the place, sometimes is seems that every road around Stroud has got Western Power contractors working on it.

"Our local DNO is putting in upgraded cabling all over the place, sometimes is seems that every road around Stroud has got Western Power contractors working on it."

Exactly. The environmental impact is huge. All the cables are metals which have to be mined. All the energy used is being used now, that is diesel etc. Non green elec, everything is now. Doesn't that need to be environmentally cost accounted for? There was nothing in my statement to imply we couldn't cope with extra elec supply, my point was about how we achieve that.
Nick
PS hoping your 10 year ultimatum is overly pessimistic Tim

Rats. I was hoping to get to eighty.