Life Cycle Energy Consumption and GH Gas Emissions from Li-ion Batteries [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Life Cycle Energy Consumption and GH Gas Emissions from Li-ion Batteries [pdf]

ivl.se

30 pointsshaqbert16 comments

"This review shows that assuming the current level of emissions from manufacturing, the electricity mix of the production location greatly impacts the total result. This is due to the fact that the manufacturing is a large part of the life cycle, and that most of the production energy is electricity."

If the world's energy systems continue to be dominated by fossil fuels, then manufacturing and transporting goods will continue to generate GHG. On the other hand, if we manufacture lots of Li-ion batteries to electrify our cars and run them on solar- and wind-generated electricity (which we make more useful by incorporating Li-ion batteries for peak smoothing), then their life cycle emissions will decrease.

If you intend to change a system, the system will not yet be changed at the beginning of your effort. Boy you are bad at changing things!

If you are going to count to 10 on your fingers, when you say "1", you haven't counted very far, have you?

The interesting question is what greenhouse gas emissions will look like once transport becomes mostly electrified and electrical generation becomes mostly non-emitting.

It's no surprise that producing batteries in the current carbon-heavy economy emits carbon. The big benefit will come when you can start to close the loop and take advantage of these non-emitting technologies in order to build more non-emitting stuff.

To make a crappy analogy, imagine pushing cars in the late 19th century as a solution to the problem of hose droppings accumulating in the streets. (Which was a real problem at the time.) It might be interesting to look at how many horse droppings are produced just supplying an automobile factory and how that compares to the horse droppings saved by the automobiles they produce, but it doesn't really tell you what the world will look like when automobiles become common, and especially when they can start being used to transport materials and workers to the automobile factories.

Where in the study did it cite 8.2 years as a break even point?

By comparing to a gas car, you would need to calculate the CO2 cost of manufacturing an internal combustion engine, fuel pump, transmission, catalytic converter, etc

I think the headline you posted is quite misleading.

also the CO2 cost of extracting and refining the oil for the gas

I wonder what's better : decentralized burning of oil in heat engine cars or centralized burning of whatever to produce electricity for electric cars...

Centralized burning is more efficient.

TL'DR:

- this swedish government study analyses CO2 emissions from battery pack production

- for a Tesla S3, the emissions at purchase are 17.5 tonnes of CO2

- That means 8.2 years of driving to just break even with an equivalent petrol car [0]

- for the smaller battery Nissan Leaf, it is 5.2 tonnes of CO2 and 2.7 yrs of driving to break even

- vast advances in battery production are needed to have climate impact w/ electric vehicles.

- Or battery production close to abundant clean energy sources.

Additional source: [0]: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

> - Or battery production close to abundant clean energy sources.

Like a gigafactory located close great land-wind resources?

My brother used to state this- and to be honest i did not believe him. The conclusion is- cars should run much longer to wear off there energy debt. A mindset is needed that runs directly contrary to the colour and form frenzy that is capitalism, which is unlikely to change. A compromise would be a car - consisting of a near everlasting baseframe, and a decoration shell, that can be exchanged as often as the heart desires for monetary value.

That and software could continu with constant change, while the hardware remains relatively stagnant.

The argument then is that electricity production needs to switch to low carbon sources. If you reduce the CO2 emissions per kwh by half then the breakeven for a Tesla and Leaf drop to 4.1 and 1.35 years.

Or, that we need to hard-switch to carpooling. It will solve congestion, and emissions problems overnight.

My take away from the ride sharing mania is that cities have woefully under invested in small scale public transportation. Instead of a few 40-80 person buses that stop at every stop, you need a large fleet of 10-20 person buses. And larger buses need to be express buses.

The analysis in your link of this document is very flawed. They only consider tailpipe emissions from a gas vehicle. Without considering the GHG cost of an electric car in total vs cost to manufacture an equivalent gas vehicle in addition to the lifecycle GHG cost of extracting, refining and burning fuel, the time to payback is artificially inflated. An apples-to-apples analysis results in electrics having a much more favorable outcome (I have done this myself in the past).

Also, as more renewable electricity production comes online the numbers will continue to become more in favor of electrics.

Yes, that would seem to be nonsense, the general estimate you see floated around is that the manufacture of an IC engine vehicle generates emissions equal to those from its operation[1]. Clearly the battery pack in an EV / (P)HEV will also create some, but it seems unlikely to be as large a delta as all that.

1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...

The real tl;dr is the same as all of these reports:

Stop using coal. Introduce a carbon fee.

Charging electric cars in certain states causes pollution? Stop using coal power plants!

The electricity for making batteries causes pollution? Stop using coal power plants!

A thousand other little industrial processes dump carbon into the atmosphere as it is an uncosted externality from their perspective? Carbon fee aligns everyone's incentives.

The weird hyperfocus on anything vaguely green is absurd when the whole of modern society is running on those same coal plants and carbon squandering.

Good try Swedes. It'll take more than that to keep me from my sweet Model 3.

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