EV Battery Factory Will Require So Much Energy It Needs a Coal Plant to Power It | Hacker News Reader

EV Battery Factory Will Require So Much Energy It Needs a Coal Plant to Power It

cowboystatedaily.com

16 pointsrmason34 comments

> A 15-pound lithium-ion battery holds about the same amount of energy as a pound of oil.

After you burn the oil, you can't do much else with it. On the other hand, you can't do much with the battery without an energy source. Comparing the weight of oil to a battery is apples and oranges.

> “That electricity has got to come from somewhere. It’s not going to come from solar farms and wind turbines,” he said.

Maybe not today. But in time, I see no reason why most of it can't come from renewable sources.

This "article" definitely has a point of view. The alternative isn't really explored. What if we shut the coal plant down today, and just didn't run the battery plant? Then we'd have less batteries, and presumably more ICE vehicles burning fuel. It doesn't do the full analysis. It's just a spicy headline.

>> “That electricity has got to come from somewhere. It’s not going to come from solar farms and wind turbines,” he said.

>Maybe not today. But in time, I see no reason why most of it can't come from renewable sources.

If only a certain state near Kansas, say a "Cowboy" state, hadn't worked so hard to deny tax breaks to renewables that they readily gave to coal and gas. If only that policy hadn't so completely changed the economics of planned wind projects that the companies planning them hadn't canceled them, taking thousands of jobs away during the midst of a national recession and mini-bust. Then they could be selling wind energy to an EV factory in Kansas. Instead, it delayed the industry by a decade or more, and now easy customers like this have to push for coal production.

More "we'll burn our grandchildren for warmth if it costs less right now" bullshit from Wyoming's landed wealthy. I love that place, but man, the people in it are a major reason I don't live there anymore.

Also that pound of oil gets shipped around the world (or pipelined across half the continent), refined, and then trucked some more.

I could never get the exact numbers but wouldn't be surprised if takes 3+ pounds of oil to get that 1 lb into the car's tank.

I recall someone figuring out the math after everything you said is figured in. Comes to about 20% in terms of its left over energy after all is said and done.

In the beginning of the game factorio, and probably lots of other games like it, everything you build is the "burner" version because those are the first things you have available. You build them and feed them with coal to make them work. They produce lots of pollution and the bugs attack you for it. You don't use them forever; you quickly upgrade to electric/non-burner stuff, but you still have to use the burner stuff to build the more advanced electric structures. Once you have enough, you replace all the burner stuff and maybe keep some around as some kind of fallback.

We're still building the necessary non-burner stuff, and the reality is that we'll probably have to use more coal than we thought for a little while longer. But I just don't see that as an issue, I see it as an annoying transition phase as we build out the new technology we're steadily unlocking.

The only sources quoted in this article are the CEO of the American Coal Council and a single politician.

Those of us actually working on the energy transition will be aware that behind this issue is the interconnect queue backlog. There’s plenty of renewable energy capacity in the US ready for construction that would help solve issues like this, but the approval and permitting process for connecting those renewables to the grid is so onerous, it’s become the major bottleneck for getting renewables on the grid.

Here’s a recent episode from the consistently great, technically in-the-weeds podcast Catalyst, on this subject: https://www.canarymedia.com/podcasts/catalyst-with-shayle-ka...

Renewable energy FUD sells ads, and there’s a lot of money to make if you just ignore it and learn what the real issues are, so that you can go to work on them.

Also worth pointing out that new solar has been cheaper than existing coal for at least several years: https://energynews.us/newsletter/renewables-are-now-way-chea...

Yes, and 45% of the global polysilicon supply that solar panels are made from, comes from the Xinjiang region of China, according to Bloomberg.

If you don't mind that it possibly comes from concentration camp labor, it's great.

Unfortunately, solving the many problems of this century requires us to walk and chew gum at the same time. Oil and gas extraction also leaves an enormous amount of social destruction in its wake, such as the massive increase in homicide, drug abuse and sex trafficking in the Bakken Shale region in North Dakota during the boom in the 2010s. Social issues created by resource extraction are not unique to renewable energy, and highlighting those problems only when they relate to renewables is deeply intellectually dishonest.

Sorry, roughnecks voluntarily spending their money on prostitutes and drugs is an entirely different thing from state-run forced labor camps.

> deeply intellectually dishonest.

Umm... okay.

Why is this not "whataboutism?"

It's okay if it happens again because it happened previously?

I think what the GP is saying is that neither thing is okay, but if one is acceptable (in the sense that it's not so terrible that using the resource is untenable) then the other should also be. Sometimes the difference between whataboutism and pointing out inconsistencies can be very small.

If only there was a once great industrial country willing to reverse its trend of outsourcing dirty filthy production factories overseas to the cheapest labour.

That'd stop the disingenuous hand wringing.

If the Chinese don't mind, then why should you?

If it's for a specific factory, can you just... not put it on the grid?

In general, the energy system transition will cause carbon emissions. But without doing the transition we’ll be worse off.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-33976-5

There is always an argument about where it is sensible to place energy intensive industries. For example aluminium smelters in Iceland is one industry in the right place, probably.

The title is different from the article title. They are just delaying the closure of the coal plant which is sad. But it takes very little time to build renewable solar/wind and their output is pretty great.

What will be the long term net impact of this be? It seems obvious the impact of moving many vehicles to electric over their lifecycle is much greater then the one time cost of making the batteries with a dirty power source. But I don't have the time or inclination to quantify it.

Without that figure, this is a very stupid article.

It's really hard to get good info on it, from trying to find sources previously most tend to hide their funding sources, but the best I've found tend to be that even in the US counties with the dirtiest power generation you're breaking even on carbon footprint after a couple years of average use and given how recyclable the batteries are (we really need to ramp up on how much we're actually doing that though) unless there's a fire even if a car is totalled before it breaks even the bulk of the carbon footprint (the battery) can be recycled at a much lower footprint than the initial mining.

what an asinine article. If these were non-rechargeable batteries sure yeah that would be bad. But shocking as it may be to the authors, it’s possible to car batters are not single use like gas and gasp gasp are often owned by people with sole panels on their roof, at least in California

Even going by their own likely biased metrics, the break even is only 25% of the average car lifetime mileage. Or about 50% of the battery warranty lifetime.

Look at the reporters article history...

Nuclear

It takes a long time to build a nuclear plant. You can build several renewable sources during that time with double the output.

> You can build several renewable sources during that time with double the output.

So why hasn't anyone done it?

It takes years to build a solar plant, too, and there aren't very many (if any) solar plants with "double the output".

In the context of the original article, its because regulatory capture of the entire energy industry in e.g. Wyoming (the "Cowboy State" of the Cowboy State Daily) set renewables back a decade or more. I'm 100% certain that nuclear would meet similar resistance, even if the uranium necessary would be mined in Wyoming.

The coal and gas industry lobbied hard for a higher per/MW excise tax on renewable energy in Wyoming, which largely prevented more widespread wind power development in the late '00s. Its only now that renewables have remained dominant over coal and gas that you're seeing more wind projects, and even then, its a constant battle to keep the state legislature from taxing those into cancellation.

I checked. The largest PV power station in full operation is the Bhadla Solar Park in India. Its maximum output is 2.2 GW.

There are at least 70 nuclear facilities that turn out 2.2 GW or more. Some turn out above 7 GW, and they run almost all the time, rather than being offline half the day on average (which makes the solar plant really only equivalent to a a 1.1 GW plant at most).

Yes, so start now. Also, check out Small modular reactor (SMR) Nuclear Tech.

Start now before the base load you already have isn't sufficient.

I agree we need more nuclear, but it takes five years to build a new plant and we need the EV batteries now.

That's ironic. According to BloombergNEF, China's share of the battery-grade Lithium market could be as high as 80%. 55% of China's power is coal according to EIA.gov, compared to 19.5% in the US. So it's not unreasonable to say that about ~40% of electric car batteries are made from coal power. This is especially a problem because, according to E3 Metals (a Lithium extraction company), the US would need more than the entire current global supply of Lithium per year, just to have half of new cars sold there be electric.

It's not just battery-grade Lithium. China also has over 80% market share on new solar panels. It's even been tied to serious human rights abuses as, according to Bloomberg, 45% of solar-grade polysilicon is made in the Xinjiang region primarily known for forced "reeducation" of Uyghur Muslims, but oh well.

lets get on with it and get mini nuclear reactors in the form factor of connex containers going already! Or just more full sized nuclear power plants all around. It's the cleanest power that is useful at full scale loads that we have.

Yes, Small modular reactor (SMR) nuclear technology is the way to go in the future.

Oh, the irony. For everyone wondering how to "fix" this dilemma please research fuel cells and SMR Nuclear Technology. It needs to be priority number one i.e. built out first.

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