Are we on the brink of an electric car revolution?

[BritDownUnder]

I think Musk will rue the day he put his factory in Germany. Especially as he has spent all his money on that 'pig in a poke' company Twitter just for vanity reasons so he gets to be the one who bans users. Only Twits use Twitter.

[PS_RalphW]

The UK is to introduce annual excise duty (tax) on electric vehicles, at the standard small car rate. This will be retrospective on cars built since 2017. That means my EV will be taxed, but my old, CO2 emitting and NOxious diesel from 2010 will not. (actually it will, but at a much lower level)

[adam2]

Reasonable in my view to tax EVs.
An exemption from road tax was reasonable initially in order to encourage adoption of a then new technology, but now that EVs are mainstream taxing them is fair.
Some charging facilities are provided at the public expense, another reason to tax the vehicles.

[RenewableCandy]

Not a driver and we don't own an EV but I still think back-dating the tax is a bit unfair.

[adam2]

Not a driver and we don't own an EV but I still think back-dating the tax is a bit unfair.

AFAIK, the road tax for EVs is NOT back-dated. That is is it will be payable at the going rate from some near future date. This applies to existing vehicles and IS retrospective in that it will apply to vehicles currently exempt.

[PS_RalphW]

The retrospective tax on my EV will be higher than the retrospective tax on my diesel car.

[Eclipse]

The big surprise for me this week is that I'm more excited by today's Aussie electric trucking firm Janus than the shiny Tesla semi we're being promised in a few years! Why? It carries more, better.

Tesla Semi: 40 tonnes - 800 km range - 30 minute Megacharger for another 600 km.

Janus Semi: 100 tonnes!!! - 600 km range - but 4 minute battery swap for another 600 km! Watch the forklift swap the battery - (but big robot dooverlackies coming soon.) http://youtu.be/aizG265NeII

More at The Driven. http://thedriven.io/2022/02/10/janus-un ... wap-route/

This means if a truck ever runs out of charge somewhere, there could be roadside assistant trucks with robot or forklift doovers that take the old battery out and swap in a new one.

Range

This also means range anxiety is no longer a thing - as both of these are well over what an Australian trucker is legally allowed to drive in one shift. They’re meant to stick to 100 km an hour and have a half hour break in 12 hours. That means a top LEGAL range of roughly 1150 km.
http://www.truckers-trip-planning-app.c ... d-hos-rule

[BritDownUnder]

Interesting thing about the Janus truck but I worry about all the axle weight smashing up the roads - I think road surface damage is proportional to the fifth power of axle weight or something like that. I took the electric car on a jaunt to Quirindi recently and was shocked by just how damaged the New England Highway was, even the resurfaced parts. Better to use rail if possible for freight. And I liked your blog also.

More topical news the Daily Mail has reported queues for Tesla superchargers in both the UK and Australia.

UK Tesla misery

Tesla owners blast Christmas car charging chaos with dozens of electric vehicles forced to wait in THREE HOUR queues at charge stations across the UK

Aussie Tesla Misery

Tesla chaos strikes: Long Christmas holiday queues for charging station reveals the harsh reality of owning an electric vehicle in Australia

[Eclipse]

Yes - rather than range anxiety we're facing 'charge anxiety'. But this is a teething issue.

Having just raved about Janus as a trucking system - and I fully expect EV's to take over from cars - I have to say all the young people in my world are completely against suburbia. I'm a burnt out peak oil activist - but my young adult children are just so much more informed about New Urbanism than I am. They're reading whole books on Movement and New Urban lifestyles and town planning. Amazing. They watch "Not Just Bikes" and just want to be able to walk to a tram or Metro, and play with their phones rather than drive. They would love to adopt the Granny Trolley for shopping rather than buy a car!

Basically the message I take to heart is even though I'm now pretty sure peak oil will be managed by technology - (except I'm still fuzzy about the future of airlines) our kids still want us to fight for better quality Ecocity designs with the best in passive solar tech to help give them comfortable convenient modern living without high energy bills. Cool hey?

[BritDownUnder]

I think not having a garden in most homes is a great mistake. It puts you in a very vulnerable position if collapse happens. While Australia is unlikely to suffer from food shortages in future like the UK might, I for one would feel happier with a garden. There have been labour shortages here recently in the agricultural sector and transport issues could be a future problem. That's where I think suburbia with decent gardens has a future along with working from home. However looking at the new suburbia developments in Western Sydney where the houses are about 1 metre smaller than the parcel of land they sit on is probably not sustainable.

Back to electric cars I managed to charge mine twice at a public charger with only about a 10 minute wait on one of them. Mostly I charge them at home but you would be surprised just how much energy is required.

[Eclipse]

If collapse happens, most suburban blocks do not have the sheer acreage to feed one person, let alone a family of 4.

If collapse happens, the cities will burn and crumble and the population will flee out into the countryside looking for something to eat.

If collapse happens, there's not enough tinned food and ammo and local militia to keep anyone safe - even your most hardened village of peak oil survivalists.

So let's work towards collapse not happening.

Also, while we are discussing electric cars - in my very lay person way I just ran some basic numbers on how much lithium we have for the world.

RESERVES: You have to find it before you can mine it. If the discovery rate starts to peak and decline, then we know the production rate will peak and decline sometime after. So how's the discovery rate going? Volkswagen reported that in January 2018 the USGS estimated the world to have only 14 million tons of lithium. http://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/sto ... issue.html#

But then just 4 years later the same organisation the USGS estimates the world reserves at 89 million tons. http://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs202 ... ithium.pdf

It's gone up 6 TIMES in 4 years. We're still finding more than we can mine. Discovery rates do not seem to have peaked yet. We shall see in a decade or so what discovery looks like.

But how much lithium is 89 million tons? Well, last year Tesla announced half their cars use LFP batteries. (Without any pesky cobalt or nickel - just lithium, iron and phosphate.) An LFP battery uses 6kg lithium. http://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-usi ... -produced/

So 89 million tons of lithium = 89 BILLION KGS of lithium = enough lithium for 14.8 BILLION cars. We only need 10% of that to replace the world's cars. There's already more than enough.

Also, please don't worry about grid-scale metal batteries. Some countries are building them - but the market will soon sort this out. The cheapest source of grid-scale storage is off-river pumped hydro - not metal batteries. And most continents have several hundred TIMES more off-river PHES sites than they need. https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/phes/

Disclaimer: I'm a New Urbanist and don't really like cars. I wish they didn't play such a dominant role in our lives. I only explain the above to show we have more than enough lithium to meet our needs for now.

[kenneal - lagger]

The real electric car revolution will come when we start building smaller, lighter, non metallic, slower electric vehicles which will have either much greater range on the same size batteries or the same range on much smaller batteries. The full transport revolution will be when we stop driving so far, work from home even more and use public transport for longer journeys while working on buses and trains.

There are other battery technologies under development especially for static uses so lithium will only be used for static situations if the batteries are second use before being sent for recycling. Recycling of lithium batteries is being looked at very carefully already with at least one start up in this country already as lithium can be reused almost indefinitely.

Lithium will be only be a problem if we treat it like we have treated other resources in the past, as a single use, throw away commodity. Hopefully we will have learned how to live a one planet life before the climate crisis kills us all!

[BritDownUnder]

Regarding Lithium I think I did some calculations a few years ago that the UK could use all the worlds lithium production to provide itself with a day's storage. So things have changed since then.

I think there will be ever more lithium sources. Some from brine below the Salton sea have been mentioned.
Note that the Lithium price has gone up about six times as well in the past few years due to demand and maybe hedge funds buying some.
A worry that the Chinese have cornered the market in Lithium processing and battery manufacturing may be a bigger worry.

As for feeding oneself on a household garden you are probably right but I reckon one raised bed will provide a family of four with a day's food. Better to have ten days food than no days food in your garden. Gardens in houses in the UK during WW2 had a significant effect on the need to import food. You are right that it is better to stave off collapse rather than survive it and I think Australia is better placed than most countries in terms of food production.

Going off topic the only PHES project underway in Australia is the government Snowy 2.0 which is backed by an entity with deep pockets. All of the planned PHES sites in South Australia have been abandoned now. Genex has lost its billionaire backer. Snowy 2.0 will also need a new transmission line to be built in the face of severe NIMBYist opposition.
As far as I know there is Oven Mountain PHES in NSW at the planning stage. It seems like the capital cost of PHES compared with batteries is keeping the private sector out at the moment.

[johnny]

Hopefully we will have learned how to live a one planet life before the climate crisis kills us all!

Hope in one hand...fecal matter in another...etc etc. As far as what kills you, it is most likely to be the usual stuff for us old farts.

Do you feel that coming up with something else to assign blame to, that still results in one of the few guaranteed, perfectly natural and expected consequences of life, makes it easier to accept? I certainly don't, dying is dying, and us old farts are going to do it in all the usual expected ways is my bet. It won't make any difference to me if the tornado that wipes me out on the Great Plains one day while exploring the byways of America is a F3 instead of an F2. The obituary won't even read "killed by climate change", and I certainly won't care that my body is crushed being thrown into a telephone pole at 120 mph instead of 110 mph. Would it matter to you, to have "climate change" on your death certificate rather than "killed by tornado"?

[Catweazle]

Won't make a difference to me either, cancer will probably kill me, but then I didn't plant my orchard for my benefit. My children and grandchildren will be eating the fruits of my labour, I hope.