3 ms·

Important to note that the lithium does not provide energy, it merely stores it. A lithium battery is equivalent to a gas tank, not to gas itself.

epistasis 5y ago
Exactly, it's such a massive improvement over oil pumping infrastructure, which requires absolutely massive and complex and expensive logistics to move around all that physical material. Pushing electrons is superior in pretty much every way. This weekend had to take the gasoline car for the first time in a long time, and along the way I had to stop and get gas. After months of always having a full charge from the comfort of home, pulling off the freeway to fill up and deal with all that messy infrastructure felt incredibly primitive. Ideally I could live my life with only occasionally driving in a year. Second best will be switching to full electric. Gas cars and gas infrastructure can not die fast enough. It's like steam engines or horses.
- chrisco255 5y ago
  You do realize how much of the world's energy is produced by fossil fuels / chemical energy, right? The electrons don't materialize out of thin air. The energy still has to come from somewhere. And if the world's gas-powered auto fleet were to switch to electric overnight, we'd have blackouts for decades because we do not have the raw power generation capability to make up for that much energy deficit. Nevermind the massive amount of lithium and cobalt mining necessary to do so. That just gets us to square zero. You also need to build nuclear power plants, massively, in order to make up for it. But we're led by complete idiots who didn't see this coming 6 months or 6 years ago. I gotta tell you, I travel 50K+ miles a year, and stopping every two hours for 30 minutes to fill up my car would be a primitive nightmare not much better than riding a horse. I also cannot envision an emergency infrastructure built on electric in its current form. What are you going to do, run ambulances and fire trucks on electric, when the power grid goes out during a natural disaster and people need help the most? At any rate, I'm actually pro-electric hybrids. I think hybrids make the most sense of any tech I can imagine, but no one seems to really want to invest in the concept. My roommate had a Volt for a while and it seemed to be the best of both worlds (charging for inner city transport, with gas as a backup for longer distance travel). Until batteries get probably about 2-3 times more dense in storage capacity, there's no way they can supplant gas cars and diesel powered semi trucks. And we should still be massively expanding nuclear power supply, 10 years ago.
  - imtringued 5y ago
    >I gotta tell you, I travel 50K+ miles a year, and stopping every two hours for 30 minutes to fill up my car would be a primitive nightmare not much better than riding a horse. I've seen people drive 250km per day on a 150km battery with public charging, this is literally the worst EVs have to offer and they are getting better every single year. If anything, it makes even more sense for people like you to get an EV because the saving potential is so high to begin with. Yes, you might need a super fancy EV dedicated to your specific driving pattern but who cares?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - epistasis 5y ago
    It seems that you are just reciting a long litany of pre-canned arguments that have told to you in order to maintain the status quo. For example: > You do realize how much of the world's energy is produced by fossil fuels / chemical energy, right? Assuming I'm ignorant of the current energy infrastructure is a weird thing to say when I point out in my very comment. > The electrons don't materialize out of thin air. The energy still has to come from somewhere. Yes and even passing familiarity with the world of energy shows that electrification of everything is going to be so economically efficient that it's unavoidable. > And if the world's gas-powered auto fleet were to switch to electric overnight, we'd have blackouts for decades because we do not have the raw power generation capability to make up for that much energy deficit. First, the idea of an overnight switch is ridiculous and uninteresting point to make, the entire point of the original article is that we have massive lithium price spikes, and we are barely into the transition. ... ... > Until batteries get probably about 2-3 times more dense in storage capacity, there's no way they can supplant gas cars and diesel powered semi trucks. This is again completer disproven by what's happening in the market right now. Maybe 10 years ago you would have been able to say this with a straight face but you'll need to update your list of talking points now. > And we should still be massively expanding nuclear power supply, 10 years ago. If you look at the nuclear plants we were constructing 10 years ago, and where they are now, you will see that we dodged a massive bullet by not building nuclear then. The time to build nuclear might have been the 1980s, but around then nuclear has already been massive over-ordered, and we would have needed EVs or heat pumps something like that to start shifting more of our load to electric. Since the 1980s, construction productivity has barely changed, whereas manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof. So in 2010, building nuclear, a construction project, was in incredibly risky proposition. And it failed miserably, saddling South Carolina electric customers with something like $20-$40/month extra on their bill for decades, for a project that will never be finished. Nuclear is a dead tech, unless SMRs come in significantly under their projected costs, or if they can somehow drastically cut their manufacturing costs early in the late 2030s or 2040s. By then we will have an extra two decades of cost drops in solar/wind/storage too, so it is hard to imagine SMRs dropping at a faster rate. But you can't count them out entirely.

epistasis 5y ago

Exactly, it's such a massive improvement over oil pumping infrastructure, which requires absolutely massive and complex and expensive logistics to move around all that physical material. Pushing electrons is superior in pretty much every way. This weekend had to take the gasoline car for the first time in a long time, and along the way I had to stop and get gas. After months of always having a full charge from the comfort of home, pulling off the freeway to fill up and deal with all that messy infrastructure felt incredibly primitive. Ideally I could live my life with only occasionally driving in a year. Second best will be switching to full electric. Gas cars and gas infrastructure can not die fast enough. It's like steam engines or horses.

chrisco255 5y ago
You do realize how much of the world's energy is produced by fossil fuels / chemical energy, right? The electrons don't materialize out of thin air. The energy still has to come from somewhere. And if the world's gas-powered auto fleet were to switch to electric overnight, we'd have blackouts for decades because we do not have the raw power generation capability to make up for that much energy deficit. Nevermind the massive amount of lithium and cobalt mining necessary to do so. That just gets us to square zero. You also need to build nuclear power plants, massively, in order to make up for it. But we're led by complete idiots who didn't see this coming 6 months or 6 years ago. I gotta tell you, I travel 50K+ miles a year, and stopping every two hours for 30 minutes to fill up my car would be a primitive nightmare not much better than riding a horse. I also cannot envision an emergency infrastructure built on electric in its current form. What are you going to do, run ambulances and fire trucks on electric, when the power grid goes out during a natural disaster and people need help the most? At any rate, I'm actually pro-electric hybrids. I think hybrids make the most sense of any tech I can imagine, but no one seems to really want to invest in the concept. My roommate had a Volt for a while and it seemed to be the best of both worlds (charging for inner city transport, with gas as a backup for longer distance travel). Until batteries get probably about 2-3 times more dense in storage capacity, there's no way they can supplant gas cars and diesel powered semi trucks. And we should still be massively expanding nuclear power supply, 10 years ago.
- imtringued 5y ago
  >I gotta tell you, I travel 50K+ miles a year, and stopping every two hours for 30 minutes to fill up my car would be a primitive nightmare not much better than riding a horse. I've seen people drive 250km per day on a 150km battery with public charging, this is literally the worst EVs have to offer and they are getting better every single year. If anything, it makes even more sense for people like you to get an EV because the saving potential is so high to begin with. Yes, you might need a super fancy EV dedicated to your specific driving pattern but who cares?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- epistasis 5y ago
  It seems that you are just reciting a long litany of pre-canned arguments that have told to you in order to maintain the status quo. For example: > You do realize how much of the world's energy is produced by fossil fuels / chemical energy, right? Assuming I'm ignorant of the current energy infrastructure is a weird thing to say when I point out in my very comment. > The electrons don't materialize out of thin air. The energy still has to come from somewhere. Yes and even passing familiarity with the world of energy shows that electrification of everything is going to be so economically efficient that it's unavoidable. > And if the world's gas-powered auto fleet were to switch to electric overnight, we'd have blackouts for decades because we do not have the raw power generation capability to make up for that much energy deficit. First, the idea of an overnight switch is ridiculous and uninteresting point to make, the entire point of the original article is that we have massive lithium price spikes, and we are barely into the transition. ... ... > Until batteries get probably about 2-3 times more dense in storage capacity, there's no way they can supplant gas cars and diesel powered semi trucks. This is again completer disproven by what's happening in the market right now. Maybe 10 years ago you would have been able to say this with a straight face but you'll need to update your list of talking points now. > And we should still be massively expanding nuclear power supply, 10 years ago. If you look at the nuclear plants we were constructing 10 years ago, and where they are now, you will see that we dodged a massive bullet by not building nuclear then. The time to build nuclear might have been the 1980s, but around then nuclear has already been massive over-ordered, and we would have needed EVs or heat pumps something like that to start shifting more of our load to electric. Since the 1980s, construction productivity has barely changed, whereas manufacturing productivity has gone through the roof. So in 2010, building nuclear, a construction project, was in incredibly risky proposition. And it failed miserably, saddling South Carolina electric customers with something like $20-$40/month extra on their bill for decades, for a project that will never be finished. Nuclear is a dead tech, unless SMRs come in significantly under their projected costs, or if they can somehow drastically cut their manufacturing costs early in the late 2030s or 2040s. By then we will have an extra two decades of cost drops in solar/wind/storage too, so it is hard to imagine SMRs dropping at a faster rate. But you can't count them out entirely.