Toyota's decision is based on their calculation that there wont be enough electricity produced to meet the demands of electric cars on a large scale, IIRC.
"Does the electricity grid have enough capacity for charging EVs?
The most demand for electricity in recent years in the UK was for 62GW in 2002. Since then, the nation’s peak demand has fallen by roughly 16% due to improvements in energy efficiency.
Even if we all switched to EVs overnight, we believe demand would only increase by around 10%. So we’d still be using less power as a nation than we did in 2002 and this is well within the range of manageable load fluctuation.
The US grid is equally capable of handling more EVs on the roads – by the time 80% of the US owns an EV, this will only translate into a 10-15% increase in electricity consumption.1
A significant amount of electricity is used to refine oil for petrol and diesel. Fully Charged’s video Volts for Oil estimates that refining 1 gallon of petrol would use around 4.5kWh of electricity – so, as we start to use less petrol or diesel cars, some of that electricity capacity could become available."
There may have been increases in production, but it would have been shocking if we'd had rolling blackouts this year, given how mild the summer has been. Other parts of CA are warmer than SV, but AFAIK (having family in Sacramento and LA) this summer has been cooler than last summer all over CA.
Anecdotally, my A/C energy usage (compared to last year) far outweighs my energy usage in an EV.
https://rga.lis.virginia.gov/Published/2022/RD216/PDF
If you scroll to page 66 of the PDF, it’s insane how much more demand is needed for datacenters. It completely dwarfs forecasted EV power usage.
There was a huge fire that was caused by a power line slowly mechanically wearing down its connector. OVER A HUNDRED YEARS. Nobody bothered to check or replace it.
Also you have exceptions for oil and gas pipelines. 1-2 permits on a high level and the land owners can pound sand if they complain.
For power lines you need levels on a dozen different levels and even after that everyone who can even see the power poles has the irrefutable right to veto said wire or at the very least sue and slow it down to a crawl...
B) the US electricity grid is uniquely unreliable for a developed country.
Japan’s electrical grid has some unique challenges that explain why they are so interested in hydrogen. An article about the UK isn’t all that relevant for that,
Talking about the US electrical grid as a single entity doesn’t make a whole lot of sense when it’s not a single, nationwide market. There can definitely be local problems as we saw in Texas and California.
Blackouts can happen, but EV normally charge when power is cheapest and demand is lowest.
To Japan, Battery Tech would force them to be reliant on China or the US due to lack of natural lithium deposits, which makes the whole energy reliance aspect of battery tech moot.
To combat this, the Japanese government felt Hydrogen would be the best bet due to
1. An early lead in hydrogen technology, so first mover advantage in technology exports and hydrogen infrastructure deals (already happening in India and Australia for example)
2. A large LNG capacity that could be revamped for Hydrogen fuels
3. Good relations with cheap coal producers like Australia and India to produce brown hydrogen (ie. Hydrogen fuel from carbon resources)
4. The economics and logistics of hydrogen fuel cells can mimic that for Natural Gas, meaning a quicker ramp up.
These are a good overview -
1. Japan’s Hydrogen Industrial Strategy - https://www.csis.org/analysis/japans-hydrogen-industrial-str...
2. Japan Hydrogen Basic Strategy - https://www.whitecase.com/insight-alert/japan-hydrogen-basic...
3. Basic Strategy for Hydrogen (the actual strategy paper. It's in Japanese) - https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/enecho/shoene_shinene/suiso...
Hydrogen will be needed for industrial processes as electric power can't generate temperatures high enough and hydrogen in the form of ammonia makes a pretty good energy storage system that does not need any special metals to use for power in a modified ICE. The sweet spot for ammonia engines seems to be long haul container shipping where batteries would be infeasible.[2]
[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01195-x
[2]https://gcaptain.com/man-reaches-milestone-with-successful-t...
That said, this paper does look promising and it kind of reminds me of the heavy water electrolysis process used in Nuclear Energy.
Using saltwater instead of fresh+distilled water would be great, though I'm curious about the cost of productionizing this, as the kind of cost and energy outlay needed for this at scale might not be efficient.
That said, I am not a ChemE or Physicist so I could be wrong
> Seems green hydrogen is the ultimate strategy.
Yep, but that will take time to build, hence the idea to use brown hydrogen in the meantime.
Incidentally, I can't see how being dependent on the US is such an issue for Japan. They are completely and utterly dependent on the US for their national security, without any remaining meaningful popular movement to divorce themselves thereof. The Japanese Socialist party had some language about getting rid of the Anpo treaty, but hilariously, they backed out immediately when they came into power; the Japaense journalist / commentator Akira Ikegami wrote a (Japanese language) book [2] about this era that I thought was pretty enlightening.
[0] Fair notice: the person who runs the channel is an MA and former UI/UX engineer, so YMMV with how far you trust the content.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zG-ZrC4BO0
[2] https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/%E6%B1%A0%E4%B8%8A-%E5%BD%B0-e...
It's an issue the same way the US being dependent on Taiwanese Foundries even though they're an ally of our's.
Should some sort of a global commodities crunch occur (eg. hypothetically, China banning all exports of Rare Earth Metals), then prices are going to skyrocket in the global market because it will take 5-7 years for production to scale up in Australia, Bolivia, and the US.
For critical technologies, it's important to have some level of self reliance. This is why the US is now a net energy exporter, after getting burnt by the spike in commodity prices in 2005-2009 leading to a massive bipartisan push for fracking, natural gas, solar, Athabaskan oil sands projects w/ Harper's backing, etc.
Other large countries with limited rare metal supplies like Germany and India have modeled a hydrogen policy similar to Japan for this reason.
Also, Japan's economic recovery after 2008 was heavily at risk due to the spike in Oil prices, as well as a similar near recession that arose in the aftermath of the OPEC Embargo. Memories of both still resonate in Japanese policy circles.
> Nickel-Hydrogen batteries for grid storage; there are nickel deposits in Japan, so if they really are viable, Japan would not be dependent on anyone for grid storage
I'm not a MatSE or Physicist so I can't speak to the viability of that. That said, I can assume that rolling out any sort of mining and refining infrastructure would take time to scale out.
For example, it took China 15-20 years and an extreme amount of Govt protectionism to become a leader in the rare metals space. It's not that China has more deposits than other countries - it's just that it wasn't cost effective for most other countries to match the prices China was providing.
The BIG difference for lithium batteries is that you need to import lithium only ONCE then you reuse/recycle.
And yes there's big big money at play, so lots and lots of FUD around lithium and geopolitics, the obvious difference with oil is nearly never mentionned thanks to oil money.
Also : https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-to-subsidize-half-of-c...
I brought up the oil aspect in my comments below, but because this was a battery tech related convo I decided to bring up the (relatively minor) lithium portion. Though the battery tech issue did play a role in Toyota's decision to develop the Prius and the Mirai
Japan's hydrogen strategy is definetly a reaction to oil shocks a la 2008 and 1973
Wow that's some FUD, I didn't expect this one...
https://electrek.co/2023/03/02/tesla-cofounders-redwood-show...
"These packs weighed a total of half a million pounds, and Redwood managed over 95% efficiency in recovering important metals from them. This is incredibly high efficiency – especially compared to the 0% recycling efficiency of gasoline, the energy storage device for competing vehicles."
Note: I just took the first one from https://www.recyclingstartups.org/top/battery/
> The batteries are valuable and recyclable, but because of technical, economic, and other factors, less than 5% are recycled today.
https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...
And the redwood process is in production since last year with so "no such process has been implemented yet" is just a blatant lie. Quantities are modest because number of BEV being scrapped is tiny due to their yound age.
Article you cite is from 2019, we're in 2023 in case you don't know.
And the BEV world moves really fast.
You should just stop continuously spreading FUD about BEV in all HN discussions, this is boring...
Also, the battery chemistries and pack structure are wildly different between different cars. One of the reasons why lead-acid batteries are recycled is because they’re always the same design. But it’s the Wild West in the BEV world. Nothing is the same between any two car models. How the recycling process could even work is not at all explained.
We heard this story before with plastic recycling. But then we found out that only pristine plastics can be recycled. The rest is just trash. In the li-ion battery world, you’re guaranteed to get a giant mishmash of different chemicals and metals in the end. It’s almost literally just battery shrapnel because they have to grind it all up to get at the metals. So it sounds a lot like the stories of plastic recycling.
Here is what the DOE experts think about scaling up battery recycling with a cool 2 billions dollars:
https://www.energy.gov/lpo/articles/lpo-offers-conditional-c...
"Redwood Materials will use both new and recycled feedstocks—comprised of critical materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt—to produce approximately 36,000 metric tons per year of ultra-thin battery-grade copper foil for use as the anode current collector, and approximately 100,000 metric tons per year of cathode active materials"
"At full production capacity, the project’s anode copper foil and cathode active material output is anticipated to support the production of more than 1 million EVs per year,"
And this is only for one plant...
I'll believe any time DOE experts to judge wether an existing proven process is scalable or not over a continously FUD spreading forum poster.
And for your information lead-acid batteries are not all the same, see various electrolytes in AGM (fibers...), Gel, ...
There's no evidence anything of significance being recycled. All of this is projections of future recycling achievements.
Like I said, it's the same story as plastic recycling. No one should believe any of the claims made.
AGM and gel lead-acid batteries are recycled in a separate pathway compared to flooded lead-acid batteries. This is okay because there aren't that many variations and the chemistry is basically the same. Li-ion batteries on the other are effectively hundreds of different chemistries spread across many different packaging methods. It is a complexity nightmare and no one has given any answer as to how it will all be solved.
Evidence about recycling taking place has been given multiple times, you just choose to ignore it.
Ah then there's different lead acid battery recycling methods, you said the contrary in the post above ...
And since you obviously didn't read or learn anything about lithium battery recycling you make a fool of yourself.
Again, no evidence that this recycling is happening at scale. And given the enormous complexity of the problem, something no one has even bothered analyzing, it seems unlikely to be solvable anytime soon.
At this point, I can just proclaim that plastic recycling is 95% effective with the same amount of evidence. You’d have no choice but to believe me on this since you already believe the same thing about li-ion batteries.
Yes, and that's where it will stay in the future. Unfortunately, we need solutions that exist in the present.
If you are having a widespread, long term power outage, those gas pumps will not run due to not having electricity.
Do you live in an area that has frequent power outages, then maybe this would be a concern, but in most areas an outage is pretty rare and are short term. If your area has unreliable power, perhaps they should be putting more power transmission lines underground?
Defeatism never accomplishes anything.
Personally, I've never found gas stations to be the beacon of reliability. They go down quickly in any kind of shortage situation. During the last ice storm here the local station ran out of gasoline in a couple days and diesel right after that. But I was able to buy propane without interruption, so that was good -- it doesn't rely on electricity to be dispensed. This is why my portable generators are now all dual fuel.
Toyota is just not delivering on the EV front at all. They could be cleaning up by stealing some of the Model Y customers back by selling a ton of RAV4s, especially the Prime versions.
A) improving the eMPG (or is it MPGe?) of more cars on the road to reduce their fossil fuel consumption is better than giving a few cars zero-emission powertrains, courtesy of the 80-20 rule. (Hence the riddle about you having two cars you use equally and someone offering to magically take one from 40mpg to 1000mpg or the other from 10mpg to 40mpg - you are better off financially with taking the latter option.)
B) The infrastructure for fossil fuel mining is here but scaling up lithium mining is going to add new horrors to the environment and the developing world.
> The Innovator's Dilemma is the title of an excellent book by Clayton Christensen. The dilemma itself is the fact that though large innovators have some motivation to innovate, they also have a strong disincentive from doing so as new products will undermine their existing ones.
I don't think the biggest markets will mandate EVs in under a decade. More importantly, it's possible the bigwigs at Toyota don't think so either, and they will act on what they think, even if it happens to be wrong.
Electric cars require much less assembly time, have a much smaller supply chain, and require much less maintenance.
Japan is literally propped up by its auto industry - they make it prohibitively expensive to own a vehicle more than a few years in order to artificially create a market for newer cars. The other result in a huge used vehicle export to most of the world except for the US.
I don't think the average non-Japanese understands that owning an old car in Japan is a significant status symbol.
Also, did you notice that damn near every model year of Japanese car has different headlights, taillights, and bumpers? And small narrow bits of the lights now extend well into the quarter panels with unique shapes? You think it's coincidence that parts most likely to be damaged even in a minor collision are year-specific and thus more expensive and harder for non-OEMs to keep up with manufacturing compatible parts?
The lights extending into bumpers and quarter panels aren't just a styling thing, they're physically keying the parts. They even do unique rest-of-world vs US styling to make it even more difficult for third party parts.
It also lets them keep cranking out models people think are new and exciting...when in reality the underpinnings rarely change. The Corolla is a perfect example, using largely the same underpinnings for nearly two decades.
In some states some developments aren't even hooked to the gas network, and the homes standards are such that electrification is the default.
You have to measure electricity demand over years, not months, because seasonal changes and or weather can really corrupt your data.
Do you remember news about the California grid straining under the heat wave in 2022? The governor sent text messages to every Californian asking them to minimise their power usage? Power consumption across the state* reached 52GW.
Every April, by the rules of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, each state receives submissions of new projects that people want to build and connect to the grid. Each of these is called a "Cluster". In April 2021, cluster 14 included a proposed 110GW of new power generation. This was so many submissions that the state couldn't even finish their legally mandated analysis of all of the proposed projects in time for the new submissions for April 2022, so they pushed Cluster 15 back to 2023 (approved by FERC). It's past April 2023 and Cluster 15 projects proposed 354GW worth of power. If we take that CA can produce 50GW now, and add clusters 14 and 15, that's a little over 10× our current maximum power generation. You could argue that maybe some of these projects won't get built, that always happens in every cluster, but the number of withdrawn applications is a smaller percentage than usual.
Estimates are that EVs will require us to double our current power generation.
The glut in new power construction is not a California-specific phenomenon. https://www.ferc.gov/news-events/news/ferc-proposes-intercon...
* technically across the California Independent State Operator, https://caiso.com , which is about 80% of California and also includes a tiny bit of Nevada for geographical reasons.
... every two weeks.
Yes, that’s nameplate capacity, so you can’t count on solar to delivery the power to get us over the line by itself. But we are nearly on track to the net zero goal when you add in …
… wind.