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One thing is announcements, second thing is reality. If nothing changes and we will not have different batteries technology moving all UK cars to electric would

One thing is announcements, second thing is reality. If nothing changes and we will not have different batteries technology moving all UK cars to electric would require "two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper" [1]. And this is just UK. I don't even mention other factors like charging time (during vacation time we have queues on gas stations, where fueling car lasts 2 minutes), extending abilities of electric grid to meet larger demand, fixing last mile electric network to do the same. There are some ideas like bidirectional charging, smart charging, etc. but we don't know if we any of this can be actually applied. Car manufacturers are very happy about EV cars, as they are very expensive, there are no trained non-official repair shops, parts supplirers, so people are forced to use official, overpriced repair channels, so they keep pushing them. [1] https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/06/20190624-uk.html https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/06/20190624-uk.html

Retric 5y ago
Mining isn’t limited by what’s in the ground it’s limited by demand. For example in 2010 28,000 tons of lithium was mined in 2020 that was up to 82,000 tons a 3x increase in 10 years despite Covid. In terms of charging times, many people simply charge at home. On average EV users spend less time at fast charging stations than ICE drivers do at gas stations especially if you include time driving to a gas station. If you’re filling up everywhere you park you only need fast charging on several hundred mile trips.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > If you’re filling up everywhere you park you only need fast charging on several hundred mile trips. The GP does have a point there. A lot of vacation travel in Europe happens by car - the traffic jams at the summer holidays on the route from Munich down to Slovenia and Croatia or from Munich to Italy are legendary, and this one drive and how it works out is what determines the purchase decisions for many Germans. I'd love if the railways could be used - but the network especially in the Balkans is shoddy, international booking is a nightmare, it is about 4-8x (!!!) as expensive as a car ride for a family of four... so yeah.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Summer holidays is a long time period, which means EV charging stations have plenty incentive to build out enough charging stations to meet demand. They can actually be quite profitable with surprisingly minimal demand.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      It's about eight weekends with excessive demand, that's it. No way you can make the build-out for the hundreds of thousands of cars of peak demand worth it.
      - Retric 5y ago
        Even 8 weekends is probably enough. 8 weekends/year * 2 days * 8h/day * 200kW fast charging * 20c/KW premium (over electricity rates) = 5,120$ per year. Fast chargers cost ~50k to install so payback is only 10 years. Granted this assumes higher than normal rates for those weekends, but not excessively so.
        ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        If your math is correct, why haven't some clever forward thinking investors already made the investment to cash in on such lucrative deal? My guess is, IRL it's not as lucrative in practice as your math makes it out to be.
        Retric 5y ago
        Being vastly ahead of EV adoption is simply wasting capital. However, EV fast charging locations along major highways tend to have a lot of unused capacity.
- desas 5y ago
  Lots of people in the UK can't charge at home. Many people live in terraced houses and can't always park on their own street never mind outside their house. In the evening this road will be full, bumper to bumper. There are many streets like it. https://maps.app.goo.gl/Fk68kARYkuxS6FnN8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/Fk68kARYkuxS6FnN8 There are things that can be done about it, e.g. lamp post charging but it's not simple.
  - Retric 5y ago
    UK is funding on street parking: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/grants-for-local-authorities-to-provide-residential-on-street-chargepoints/grants-to-provide-residential-on-street-chargepoints-for-plug-in-electric-vehicles-guidance-for-local-authorities https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/grants-for-local-... This is one of those transition points where charging infrastructure needs to be appropriate for the number of EV’s. Building out massive infrastructure early is simply a waste of money.
audunw 5y ago
> Car manufacturers are very happy about EV cars, as they are very expensive, there are no trained non-official repair shops, parts supplirers, so people are forced to use official, overpriced repair channels, so they keep pushing them. I'm not sure this is a real motivation for them. I know a lot of people with EVs (Norway), and I don't know of anyone who has had a problem with the car unique to EVs requiring repairs. I had a problem with the lead-acid 12V battery, but it was on the warranty anyway. Others with the same model has had problem with the gearbox, because the parking mode engages a bolt in the gearbox that can break if you put the car in park while the wheels are rolling... anyway, that's just because it was not a clean-sheet EV design. It's a hold-over from ICE version of the vehicle. So that's yet another source of expensive repairs that goes away with clean-sheet EV design. Most issues with battery pack is still within warranty on most cars on the road. So in the short term, issues with the battery must be a huge cost for car makers. Training of repair technicians for EVs is also quickly becoming quite routine here. I don't know how the situation is with non-official repair shops here, but don't think training is the issue there. Meanwhile, service costs are lower than for ICE. So there must be less service/repair revenue in general. Tesla is a bit different of course, don't think there's much non-official repairs being done there, but it has more to do with software, vertical integration and being a new brand, than being an EV. A friend with a BMW (ICE) has had similar problems with being locked into overpriced service/repairs. Edit: > I don't even mention other factors like charging time (during vacation time we have queues on gas stations, where fueling car lasts 2 minutes), extending abilities of electric grid to meet larger demand, fixing last mile electric network to do the same These are mostly "fixed" in Norway, and it has taken less than 10 years (most development has been in the last 5). I regularly drive 2h trip to a cabin in 27kWh Kia Soul EV. I've driven cross country in a 70kWh Tesla Model S. In both cases the charging I've needed has taken exactly 0 extra minutes of my time, because in the first case we need to buy food on the way, and in the second case we took way more breaks than we spent waiting for fast charging. There can be queues at specific times on some congested charging stations. But it's getting better as EVs get bigger batteries (people can drive farther without fast charging) and more people get charging in their garage or street-side charging. Charging stations often have more chargers than fuel stations have fuel pumps, and they're not as burdened by people charging/fueling for their daily needs, since most people charge at home for that. Studies indicate that you wouldn't need to produce much more electricity if there's a bigger effort to make buildings more energy efficient, and the grid doesn't need expansion if most charging is done at night.
cure 5y ago
> "two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper" [1]. And this is just UK. That report seems dubious. The math simply doesn't add up. For instance, the report claims that to replace all the cars on the road in the UK, it would take "... 2,362,500 tonnes of copper... [which is ] at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018." But the world produced 16,890,000 tonnes of copper in 2020 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_copper_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_copper_pr...). From that same page, it seems that the annual copper production has not changed much in the last 5 years. So it's not half of annual production, it's more like an eight. Secondly, to replace all the cars on the road in the UK (~33M units), at the current replacement rate of ~2.5M/year (https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/uk-total-auto-industry-sales-figures/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/uk-total-auto-industry-sales-f...) would take about 13 years. So now we're talking about about one eight of annual copper production spread over 13 years, which would be about 1% of annual production per year. Of course ICE vehicles also require quite a bit of copper... It seems not unreasonable that replacing all vehicles in the 5th largest economy in the world would take ~1% of the copper output of the world (assuming zero recycling!) over a period of 13 years.
nickik 5y ago
Those numbers are by 2050 and assume a single type of cell do do it all. It assumes no increase in energy density. And worst of all it doesn't account for recycling. Lithium exists in huge amounts and projects are underway all over the world. Literally in every continent. The lithium market is growing like crazy. There are also many cobalt, nickel and graphite projects underway. I think the article might have mixed up copper and nickel. This doesn't account for the huge amount of lower tier cars that will use LFP or High-Manganese cathodes. Or for the fact that even high nickel cathodes will basically remove cobalt as well. Switching to high density anodes such a Li-Metal or Silicon will massively reduce the materials requirements per car on the cathode side as well. Not to mention that sometimes in the next decade we might go away from the transition metals completely. > Car manufacturers are very happy about EV cars, You clearly don't know anything about car industry.

Retric 5y ago

Mining isn’t limited by what’s in the ground it’s limited by demand. For example in 2010 28,000 tons of lithium was mined in 2020 that was up to 82,000 tons a 3x increase in 10 years despite Covid. In terms of charging times, many people simply charge at home. On average EV users spend less time at fast charging stations than ICE drivers do at gas stations especially if you include time driving to a gas station. If you’re filling up everywhere you park you only need fast charging on several hundred mile trips.

mschuster91 5y ago
> If you’re filling up everywhere you park you only need fast charging on several hundred mile trips. The GP does have a point there. A lot of vacation travel in Europe happens by car - the traffic jams at the summer holidays on the route from Munich down to Slovenia and Croatia or from Munich to Italy are legendary, and this one drive and how it works out is what determines the purchase decisions for many Germans. I'd love if the railways could be used - but the network especially in the Balkans is shoddy, international booking is a nightmare, it is about 4-8x (!!!) as expensive as a car ride for a family of four... so yeah.
- Retric 5y ago
  Summer holidays is a long time period, which means EV charging stations have plenty incentive to build out enough charging stations to meet demand. They can actually be quite profitable with surprisingly minimal demand.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    It's about eight weekends with excessive demand, that's it. No way you can make the build-out for the hundreds of thousands of cars of peak demand worth it.
    - Retric 5y ago
      Even 8 weekends is probably enough. 8 weekends/year * 2 days * 8h/day * 200kW fast charging * 20c/KW premium (over electricity rates) = 5,120$ per year. Fast chargers cost ~50k to install so payback is only 10 years. Granted this assumes higher than normal rates for those weekends, but not excessively so.
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        If your math is correct, why haven't some clever forward thinking investors already made the investment to cash in on such lucrative deal? My guess is, IRL it's not as lucrative in practice as your math makes it out to be.
        Retric 5y ago
        Being vastly ahead of EV adoption is simply wasting capital. However, EV fast charging locations along major highways tend to have a lot of unused capacity.
desas 5y ago
Lots of people in the UK can't charge at home. Many people live in terraced houses and can't always park on their own street never mind outside their house. In the evening this road will be full, bumper to bumper. There are many streets like it. https://maps.app.goo.gl/Fk68kARYkuxS6FnN8 https://maps.app.goo.gl/Fk68kARYkuxS6FnN8 There are things that can be done about it, e.g. lamp post charging but it's not simple.
- Retric 5y ago
  UK is funding on street parking: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/grants-for-local-authorities-to-provide-residential-on-street-chargepoints/grants-to-provide-residential-on-street-chargepoints-for-plug-in-electric-vehicles-guidance-for-local-authorities https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/grants-for-local-... This is one of those transition points where charging infrastructure needs to be appropriate for the number of EV’s. Building out massive infrastructure early is simply a waste of money.

audunw 5y ago

> Car manufacturers are very happy about EV cars, as they are very expensive, there are no trained non-official repair shops, parts supplirers, so people are forced to use official, overpriced repair channels, so they keep pushing them. I'm not sure this is a real motivation for them. I know a lot of people with EVs (Norway), and I don't know of anyone who has had a problem with the car unique to EVs requiring repairs. I had a problem with the lead-acid 12V battery, but it was on the warranty anyway. Others with the same model has had problem with the gearbox, because the parking mode engages a bolt in the gearbox that can break if you put the car in park while the wheels are rolling... anyway, that's just because it was not a clean-sheet EV design. It's a hold-over from ICE version of the vehicle. So that's yet another source of expensive repairs that goes away with clean-sheet EV design. Most issues with battery pack is still within warranty on most cars on the road. So in the short term, issues with the battery must be a huge cost for car makers. Training of repair technicians for EVs is also quickly becoming quite routine here. I don't know how the situation is with non-official repair shops here, but don't think training is the issue there. Meanwhile, service costs are lower than for ICE. So there must be less service/repair revenue in general. Tesla is a bit different of course, don't think there's much non-official repairs being done there, but it has more to do with software, vertical integration and being a new brand, than being an EV. A friend with a BMW (ICE) has had similar problems with being locked into overpriced service/repairs. Edit: > I don't even mention other factors like charging time (during vacation time we have queues on gas stations, where fueling car lasts 2 minutes), extending abilities of electric grid to meet larger demand, fixing last mile electric network to do the same These are mostly "fixed" in Norway, and it has taken less than 10 years (most development has been in the last 5). I regularly drive 2h trip to a cabin in 27kWh Kia Soul EV. I've driven cross country in a 70kWh Tesla Model S. In both cases the charging I've needed has taken exactly 0 extra minutes of my time, because in the first case we need to buy food on the way, and in the second case we took way more breaks than we spent waiting for fast charging. There can be queues at specific times on some congested charging stations. But it's getting better as EVs get bigger batteries (people can drive farther without fast charging) and more people get charging in their garage or street-side charging. Charging stations often have more chargers than fuel stations have fuel pumps, and they're not as burdened by people charging/fueling for their daily needs, since most people charge at home for that. Studies indicate that you wouldn't need to produce much more electricity if there's a bigger effort to make buildings more energy efficient, and the grid doesn't need expansion if most charging is done at night.

cure 5y ago

> "two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper" [1]. And this is just UK. That report seems dubious. The math simply doesn't add up. For instance, the report claims that to replace all the cars on the road in the UK, it would take "... 2,362,500 tonnes of copper... [which is ] at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018." But the world produced 16,890,000 tonnes of copper in 2020 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_copper_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_copper_pr...). From that same page, it seems that the annual copper production has not changed much in the last 5 years. So it's not half of annual production, it's more like an eight. Secondly, to replace all the cars on the road in the UK (~33M units), at the current replacement rate of ~2.5M/year (https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/uk-total-auto-industry-sales-figures/ https://www.goodcarbadcar.net/uk-total-auto-industry-sales-f...) would take about 13 years. So now we're talking about about one eight of annual copper production spread over 13 years, which would be about 1% of annual production per year. Of course ICE vehicles also require quite a bit of copper... It seems not unreasonable that replacing all vehicles in the 5th largest economy in the world would take ~1% of the copper output of the world (assuming zero recycling!) over a period of 13 years.

nickik 5y ago

Those numbers are by 2050 and assume a single type of cell do do it all. It assumes no increase in energy density. And worst of all it doesn't account for recycling. Lithium exists in huge amounts and projects are underway all over the world. Literally in every continent. The lithium market is growing like crazy. There are also many cobalt, nickel and graphite projects underway. I think the article might have mixed up copper and nickel. This doesn't account for the huge amount of lower tier cars that will use LFP or High-Manganese cathodes. Or for the fact that even high nickel cathodes will basically remove cobalt as well. Switching to high density anodes such a Li-Metal or Silicon will massively reduce the materials requirements per car on the cathode side as well. Not to mention that sometimes in the next decade we might go away from the transition metals completely. > Car manufacturers are very happy about EV cars, You clearly don't know anything about car industry.