Is there enough lithium to make batteries for EVs to get to net zero? | Hacker News Reader

Is there enough lithium to make batteries for EVs to get to net zero?

weforum.org

The article mixes co.parisons a little bit. The size of a battery is taken from the USA, but globally electric car batteries are smaller than the ones here. On top of that, cities are getting better at catering to pedestrian and bike traffic, which means we won't actually need as many cars in the future.

This is not how progress works. We will need much more EVs than ICEs because cost of operation is cheaper. Unless you want to be the first to give up your car, and the cars your parents own?

Of course, I have given up one (of two) already, and as my parents near retirement they are looking to move somewhere where they could downsize their cars as well.

The main problem is generating the energy to charge those EVs

I dont really see it that way. Its not like every EV is going to get a full recharge every day. People drive less than they think.. few drives require even a tiny bit of a full EV range. And EVs use less energy per mile than gas cars by quite a bit.

Even if they don't recharge at the same time, they will still need the same amount of energy.

No, they use less energy than gas cars, but the point remains that there is more electrical load. peak load is what drives the need for upgrades. It’s becoming easier with software to avoid having your average electric car charging at peak. It would be easy to incentivize aligning charging with non-peak or surplus energy creation (solar and wind) times.

For an average 45 mile day, only about 10-15 kWh of charging is required. The rate of growth of EVs in a grid is so small, that even if it were to increase 10-fold, most grids would accommodate them with currently planned expansions.

Exactly.

This is the one thing everyone is ignoring.

The US needs to double its entire power generation and distribution system in order to support a full transition to EVs.

We currently produce about 1200 GW. We need to double that.

Imagine taking the entire power system, from generation to distribution and more --something that took, I don't know, a century or more to develop-- and doubling it in just a few years. It won't happen.

Years ago I wanted to understand this better as I launched into building a 13 kW solar array on my property and was planning on getting a couple of Teslas. One of the questions on my mind was: How much power will we need to fully electrify ground transportation. I could not find any answer to that, so I wrote a simulation to get an estimate.

The answer I got was 900 GW to 1400 GW. Which, effectively, means we need to double our power system. Years later I was able to confirm that my simulation produced a fairly accurate answer to the question.

To get a sense of proportion, a nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. This means we need over a thousand new nuclear power plants. No, solar can't do it. As much as that would be a nice concept, solar has huge problems, not the least of which being that it isn't reliable. In order to deliver the kind of output produced by a conventional power generation plant, you have to over-build solar by over ten times of the required steady-state output. This isn't the solution. We need nuclear.

Therein lies the problem with electrification. We (the US, not sure how it is elsewhere) have become incapable of making big decisions and executing large infrastructure plans efficiently. It would probably take fifty years to build a single nuclear power plant. Building a thousand is simply unthinkable, not even in a century.

Today, those driving electric cars enjoy the advantage of not being in the majority. Even with that, in the last couple of weeks the government of California has been asking electric car owners to please not charge their cars during certain times of the day. I can only imagine just how bad the power situation will become as more and more electric cars are pushed onto the streets without getting brutally serious about rapid expansion of our power generation systems, and, in particular, nuclear power.

In short, I have no clue how this dream of two electric cars on every driveway becomes reality.

EDIT:

BTW, the issue is power not energy. It is very easy to come up with a hand-wavy "we have so much energy" thought, yet, power is what we need.

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