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One of the reasons is that a lot of these downsides are overplayed, based on long-obsolete data or false altogether. For some examples: - electric cars are st

• tpxl 4y ago
  > lithium is more common than lead on Earth Lithium isn't a rare earth mineral.
  • ajuc 4y ago
    It was about cobalt before, now that batteries switched to LFP without cobalt the naysayers switched to complaining about lack of lithium :)
  • hwillis 4y ago
    I'll note that neodymium is, and is used in very small amounts (much less even than lithium) in most EV electric motors (specifically, the reluctance types that are currently most popular). It's not essential, but it does increase range by a few percent. Neodymium is also one of the most abundant REEs- there are basically two groups of REEs, some of which are rare and some of which are >10x more abundant. Neodymium is in the latter. It's also not that supply is restricted (eg, how it all comes from china)- the demand is so low that the cost means it is not mined even where it is easy to harvest. There are large mines in the US and elsewhere that are shut down because China just does it cheaper.
• thrown_22 4y ago
  >- electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't) No they don't. When you add the efficiency of the grid, the charging station, charging the battery and discharging the battery burning a lump of coal to power your Tesla has _no_ advantage over burning a bottle of petrol for your non SUV. This is a lot like the meme that solar is cheap - the part that's always left out: "At noon".
  • da768 4y ago
    Of course, on the other side, there's never any pollution involved bringing fuel to the gas pump.
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      Or to bring coal to the power plant.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • Schroedingersat 4y ago
    You forgot to include the other liter of fuel spent extracting, refining, and shipping the first one. Hence 2x. Also coal has double the emissions of oil per kWh so on an energy basis it's 1/4th
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      Keep moving the goalposts bud. OP made a blatantly false claim. She was wrong. That's it.
      • Schroedingersat 4y ago
        Pointing out you're equivocating lifecycle emissions with tailpipe in response to an assertion about energy is just pointing out you haven't reached the goalposts even after moving them. A tesla 3 (top selling ev) uses about 170Wh/km. From a very low efficiency coal plant including transmission and charging losses (you don't get to double count discharge loss) this would be about 0.6kWh (thermal) or about 170g of CO2e. From a natgas plant it is 90g. A CX-5 (top selling car) is a bit lighter and gets about 8L/100km. This is about 1 kWh or 2kWh including drilling/refining or roughly 250g of CO2e. You could correctly argue that teslas are replacing smaller, lighter cars with bigger heavier ones, and that the smaller ones they displace have marginally lower CO2 emissions in spite of using double the energy because oil is lower CO2 than coal, but that's about as far as you can push it. If that was your argument then the solution is LEVs, transit, and bike lanes which is what the environmentalists you're straw manning want instead of most cars.
• ilyt 4y ago
  > - electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't) So do hybrids. Burning fuel at power station isn't 2x as efficient as burning it in ICE engine; most of the savings come from not wasting power while braking
  • lolinder 4y ago
    Burning fuel at a single power station that is reasonably distant from populated areas is far better from a health perspective than tens of thousands of small, poorly-regulated engines burning fuel within 10 yards of people's homes. I would take electric over ICE even if it were 1-to-1 on fuel consumption, just to feel like I can safely breath outside again.
    • 8note 4y ago
      As long as they're still cars, you should keep holding your breath. Tires and breaks still give off the polluting dust, not to mention the noise
      • lolinder 4y ago
        Noise from electric cars is practically non-existent compared to cars (particularly trucks, SUVs, and motorcycles). I'm sure the pollution from tires and brakes isn't great, but that's like saying that if we cured cancer people would still die. Duh, but we should still cure cancer.
        • acdha 4y ago
          I agree with the general point, but the answer for livable cities still has to be fewer cars. Lower speed limits help a lot: there's a point around 30mph where the greatest source of noise goes from being the engine to the tires, so we have a lot of room to make cities better by getting people onto e-bikes or into smaller low-speed vehicles which use orders of magnitude less energy.
• VBprogrammer 4y ago
  It seems with electric cars there is always another compaint. First came the long tail pipe argument, I think even the most ardent of naysayers have realised that that one is bullshit. Then the batteries were going to be scattered about the countryside. Except most of them are still in cars, the demand for batteries from crashed damaged cars is high and the life even in early models appears to exceed expectations. The reality is that Tesla has replaced the Ferrari as the car to aspire to. Nissan have even started producing their e-power cars who's main advantage is that they drive like an electric car (using a petrol engine as generator). Electric cars are going to be a thing, the only limit it battery tech and to my mind that only changes the eventual market share, if some of the battery tech pans out it could be close to 100%. I'm expecting more 60% or so, battery tech will be good enough for most people.
  • nicoburns 4y ago
    Here in the UK (and I believe most of Europe), they’re planning to ban sales of new ICE cars in I believe 2030. As such, 100% uptake (or close enough, perhaps there will some exceptions for specialised use cases) is almost guaranteed.
    • VBprogrammer 4y ago
      I'm in the UK too. I think the 2030 date is unrealistic. I'm pro-electric cars but we're still a long way away from it being the only option. At the very least we need widespread on street charging for the half of people who don't have the option to charge at home. Rapid charging is ok but not suitable for exclusive use.
      • _carbyau_ 4y ago
        builtInThe70's apartment building. I can't convince the management body to take this seriously. I don't want to install chargers everywhere. I just want a thought out plan. IE have a planned build for the electric backbone sometime in the future, and each owner can build their part and be connected when they wish.
      • 4y ago
• Galaxeblaffer 4y ago
  >- you cannot have 100% renewable power grid because unpredictable production (you can, some countries do - for example Costarica and many countries are very close - for example Portugal and Norway - but it creates different problems than the traditional powerplants - but there are ways to solve this which are getting ever more economically viable - citing data from 10 years ago is about as sensible as citing CPU transitor counts from 1990s when talking about designing a new graphic card) this one is very questionable though and only very specific countries with the right geography can cheaply attain 100% electricity from renewables. Two of the countries you mention are very fortunate to have almost endless possibilities for hydro and Portugal still at 50% gas/coal ? the problems as i see it with renewables is climate change. wind patterns can change, places can become arid. We could even see catastrophies blocking out the sun for days, months or even years. So while renewables are cheap to build right now we shouldn't rely on them completely. We also need to solve the storage part that is major issue for solar and wind even though imo they should only be used for creating synthetic fuels
  • ajuc 4y ago
    Traditional powerplants are big nation-scale projects measured in decades and cannot be moved mid-lifecycle - unlike solar panels. They are also strictly dependent on running water for cooling. In my country (Poland) there has been a week few years back where some powerplants had to shut down because nearby rivers were too low and the water temperature was too high to cool down the powerplants (you cannot heat the water to 60 C cause the river life will die, so the workable temperatures are surprisingly low). If you care about mobility and adjusting to climate change - you should bet on solar more than on anything else. There are problems with renewables, but there are also many solutions, and the criticism usually assumes we change nothing else in our energy grid. For example it's true that renewables are less predictable than traditional powerplants. Which increases costs of energy because we need to keep some overcapacity in production, consumption and transfer capabilities for balancing purposes and that's expansive. But - grid-scale batteries solve a lot of these problems, and they aren't just a cost - they are earning money even in traditional grids by outcompeting peak powerplants without any subsidies. In fact people are afraid of how fast they are "destroying the market" for peaker plants and there are propositions to regulate this against the grid-scale batteries :) Batteries do the equivalent of high frequency trading on energy market and peaker plants have like 15 minutes latency vs batteries sub-second latency - you can imagine how it works out in practice. The Tesla battery in Australia already paid off the investment costs. Another way is to produce synthethic fuel with cheap solar power when it's not used and then run the generators on that. Basically make methane tanks our batteries. There are promising technologies doing that, for example Terraform Industries. Supposedly they can produce natural gas that is cheaper than the peak prices EU paid at the start of the russian invasion of Ukraine. Another way is to simply build a lot more and to use smart pricing to encourage people to use the energy during the peak production. For most people it's perfectly fine to charge their cars at parkings near their office, it's just an organizational problem. Heating houses in the winter can also be done during the day - most houses in Central Europe can stay comfortably hot for longer than a day during the winter. There are a lot of things we could do, but people who don't want anything to change take 1 thing they don't like and assume everything else stays the same so that the change seem impossible.
• derriz 4y ago
  100% isn't the goal.. yet. Nor is it practical for many countries. But, getting to 70-80% renewables with current technology is feasible and economic for nearly all countries. The balance to be provided by modern (natural) gas turbine generation. There's no need to slow down getting to 70-80% renewables because we're unsure how to cover the last 20%. The latter is a problem for future decades.