The Newsletter You Didn't Subscribe To - Dogs in cars

Your daily dose of nonsense - 14 July 2020

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Are electric vehicles all that green?

The unspoken but nonetheless obvious three laws of engineering (and possibly life) are:

• nothing is perfect; 

• you can’t have everything; and

• you always have to choose between trade offs.

These rules would apply to electric vehicles too. In this write up, we are going to briefly talk about the trades offs that we have made so far with electric cars of today.

Point 1: The amount of carbon emissions are predicated on having clean sources of electricity to charge your electric vehicle

When we are sold the idea of electric vehicles, everyone extols the virtues of how there’s no internal combustion engine, there’s nothing burning, hence there are no carbon emissions. That is true, but remember - where is your electricity coming from? Is it from solar panels, or is it from a coal power plant?

At this point one might opine - “this is a simple problem to solve - we can just replace all power plants with solar and wind, right? Then all of our electricity will be clean.”

Well, not quite. You see the reason we have ‘day’ and ‘night’ is because the sun isn’t always up. Solar panels don’t work in the dark. And the wind doesn’t always blow. So to pick up this slack, many places use ‘peaker’ natural gas powered power plants. These plants are designed to be activated at a short moment’s notice, with little warm up time required.

The problem with these ‘peaker’ plants, though, is that they tend to pollute more per watt than conventional natural gas power plants. This is the tradeoff that we have accepted so that they can respond faster, i.e. when the wind suddenly stops blowing, or when it's cloudy. (They are called peakers because they are activated when electricity demand peaks and are only economical to run when electricity prices are high enough.) According to the New York Public Service Commission, peaker plants around the city of New York emit twice as much carbon dioxide per unit of electricity than regular power plants and 20 times as much nitrogen oxides.

Ideally, we would also want to replace these peakers with something cleaner, such as energy storage solutions that would allow us to store excess solar or wind energy when there’s surplus so that we can use them when it’s dark and not windy. If these solutions prove viable, then it would be possible for us to rely on more solar and wind in our energy mix. For example, here’s a write up of New York City trying to replace these peakers with batteries.

(Also, here’s an article about an experimental solar panel that is not optimised for capturing visible light, but instead exploits the temperature difference between the night sky and the panel to produce electricity so that it can work at night)

But for the present, here’s a 2018 European Environmental Agency’s report on the climate impact of electric vehicles with the current European energy mix. It does look like the European energy mix does allow for electric vehicles to have less of an impact compared to internal combustion engine vehicles:

Point 2: efficiencies matter

It goes without saying that efficiencies matter. For example, let’s say that with the current energy mix, we would be able to cut down 20% of carbon emissions using electric vehicles, assuming that the electricity flows smoothly from the community’s waste-to-energy power plant. But let’s say that routing of the electricity is not completely efficient, and that after discounting for inefficiencies in the wires, in the temporary battery storage etc., it ends up with 50% of electricity wasted. So you need to burn twice as much to save 20% of carbon emissions.

Granted, the numbers above are contrived and are exaggerated. But it is a real area that deserves attention and research too. Here’s a scientific study on efficiencies, and here’s the Vox version of it.

Point 3: Not all pollution is carbon related

So here’s another aspect of the tradeoff that we have made with regards to electric vehicles - Sure, EVs can reduce carbon emissions, but this is at the cost of other aspects of the environment. This is because of how batteries are made.

The standard batteries found in electric cars, mobile phones, laptops and other electronics are made out of ‘lithium-ion’. It has many rare earth metals in it, but as the name implies, the main active ingredient is lithium.

Lithium mining, and mining in general, isn’t the most clean business. This is how a lithium mine looks like:

Separation ponds at SQM Lithium mine, Atacama Desert, Chile.  Souce: Forbes (this link also leads to a good article on the subject)

A large proportion of lithium is found in the brine of salt flats in South America. Here’s a table of global production in 2012 from this write up:

And from the same report:

The salt flats where lithium is found are located in arid territories. In these places, access to water is key for the local communities and their livelihoods, as well as the local flora and fauna. In Chile’s Atacama salt flats, mining consumes, contaminates and diverts scarce water resources away from local communities. The extraction of lithium has caused water-related conflicts with different communities, such as the community of Toconao in the north of Chile. In Argentina’s Salar de Hombre Muerto, local communities claim that lithium operations have contaminated streams used for humans, livestock and crop irrigation.

And that’s just the lithium mining. We still have a whole host of other metals to mine.

In the same 2018 European Environmental Agency’s assessment, it is reported that electric vehicles have a larger negative impact on freshwater sources over vehicles with internal combustion engines:

But we are making progress. Recently, Tesla announced that they are going to use batteries that do not use cobalt. That is one less metal that we need to mine, and it is a technological achievement in its own right.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the next time someone tells you how green electric vehicles are, keep in mind that our current state of electric vehicles and the ecosystem around it is predominantly optimised to reduce carbon emissions. Yes, that is important. But we also have to remember that we still have a long way to go to work on the rougher edges of these technologies. Otherwise, we would just be solving a problem today by creating another one for tomorrow. Oh, and we have not even talked about how the batteries are currently recycled.

Fisker’s public listing

In my previous post, I did briefly mention Bill Ackman’s special purpose vehicle that would eliminate a lot of listing risks for pre-existing shareholders of the company that is to go public. Well here is an example of going public via this route - here is Fisker, an electric car company, going public via Apollo’s Spartan Energy Acquisition Corp at a valuation of $2.9 billion. Here’s the CEO of Fisker: “We’re obviously very excited about getting full financing all the way to start of production.”

Japanese roller coaster riders are told not to scream

Just in case screaming does contribute to the spreading of the virus. Here’s the report, and here’s the video of two people in suits riding the roller coaster with masks but not screaming: