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Dutch Government Confirms Plan To Ban New Petrol, Diesel Cars By 2030 (electrek.co)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Today, the new Dutch government presented its detailed plan for the coming years and it includes making all new cars emission-free by 2030 -- virtually banning petrol- and diesel-powered cars in favor of battery-powered vehicles. The four coalition parties have been negotiating their plans since the election in March and now after over 200 days, they have finally released the plan they agreed upon. NL Times posted all the main points of the plan and in "transportation," it includes: By 2030 all cars in the Netherlands must be emission free. While some local publications are reporting "all cars," we are told that it would be for "all new cars" as it is the case for the countries with similar bans under consideration. The potential for the ban has been under consideration in the country since last year. The year 2025, like in Norway, has been mentioned, but they apparently decided for the less ambitious goal of 2030.
I hope you're able to make enough Lithium batteries for 2 billion cars a year.
Nonsense. There aren't 2 billion cars on earth, and even if there were they would not all need to be replaced in one year.
There are about 60 million cars made per year. With the expected shift to on-demand SDC taxis, that could decline dramatically.
Known lithium reserves are about 15 million tonnes. A car with a 300 km range uses about 10kg of lithium. So we have enough for 1.5 billion cars, or about enough to replace every gas car on earth.
Of course, new lithium reserves will be found, and as a fallback we can extract lithium from geologic brine, or even the oceans which contain about 230 billion tonnes (enough for 30 trillion cars).
Parts of them are cheaper. The engine is certainly more simple and if you don't have an internal combustion engine there are other things you can toss out as well. However, petrol-based cars have the advantage in that the fuel is petrol. You just need to break down the hydrocarbons to release the energy and that's entirely contained in the fuel. Electric cars have a more complex fuel system with regard to the batteries and the need to recharge them. If electric vehicles operated under similar principles where you had to chuck the battery after a single use, they'd never catch on. Part of it is just paying for the improved efficiency up front rather than spreading it out over the life of the vehicle as you need to purchase additional petrol.
Because of this, and a few other reasons that don't have a lot to do with cars specifically, the initial electric vehicles are going to be luxury items. The expense in setting up factories and build the new components needed for electric vehicles and the limited production capacity until they can ramp up over several years practically dictates a need to sell at a high price. You can't make mass market consumer products when you have very limited production capacity. Musk at least realizes the need to get to a mass market point, because he saw how Ford was able to reap the rewards of doing just that roughly a century earlier. Until then, it's necessary to add bells and whistles so you can mark up the price even more and target high-end buyers who can afford to pay above raw value in terms of utility.
You and your wife both drive 150-200 miles/day? Like, 60,000 miles/year? While consuming only 11kWh/day for your home? Surely your numbers are off...
Either way, if your home is capable of running a clothes dryer you should be able to re-charge electric no problem. I drive 50 miles a day (which I consider a pretty shitty commute) and recharge off a standard 110v no problem.
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In Netherlands the number of cars per capita is the lowest in highly developed countries. The public transport is very good (easy to do in a country with such a big population density) and bikes are everywhere. People that commute by trains will often have two bikes - one at each station. In Amsterdam it is simply not practical to have a car. You need a parking permit to park it in front of your house (and parking permits are a sparse good), parking in the city center is 5EUR/hour. That being said, I am curious what they are going to do to (Royal Dutch) Shell.
This is a plan from a centre-right government...
Environmentalists have hated corn ethanol from the beginning (they've been more mixed on biodiesel, but most are not fans). Corn ethanol has the support of midwest farmers and their senators / reps, not environmentalists. Direct your complaints to farmers and their reps.
It isn't. Do we really need to go into the endless number of peer-reviewed studies that have been conducted on lifecycle assessments of EVs? The short of it is that while low volume EVs may embody about twice the manufacturing pollution of a gasoline vehicle, a mass-manufactured EV embodies only slightly more (depending on the study and its assumptions, around 15%), and regardless, in both cases, pollution from operation vastly outweighs pollution from usage, and both end up recycled, with about 70% average recovery of embodied pollution on the EV. And all this ignores the fact that many manufacturers are working to have their EV production 100% solar driven.
Sorry, that's not how batteries work; you're thinking of rockets. There is no "fuel and oxidizer" reaction in an EV. Lithium-ion batteries work by the migration of lithium ions across a barrier, either intercalated into graphite and/or silicon on the anode side, or into a mixed metal oxide (such as nickel-cobalt-aluminum oxide) or similar structure on the cathode side. Intercalated = they fill up the interstitial sites in their host compound.
Secondly, you betray a complete lack of understanding of chemistry with your statement. How "dangerous" a substance is is not linearly related to its energy density. Nitroglycerin has an energy density of 6,37 MJ/kg. A block of aluminum has an energy density of 31 MJ/kg. Which one is safer? The volumetric difference between the two is even greater, BTW.
Third, there's an implicit "all else being equal" in your argument. But all else is not equal. In a gasoline car, the fuel is just poured into a big open tank in your vehicle. In an EV, there's a huge array of safety measures - cell expansion space, individual cell rupture isolation, active cooling, passive quench, controlled venting, etc, etc. Rates of EV fires have been much lower than rates of gasoline fires; the packs are so difficult to burn that you can sometimes burn the rest of the car without igniting the pack. And when you do force the ignition of a pack, here's what happens (that's Powerwall, but the tech is the same as in Tesla's vehicles).
Everyone talks of every single fire incident in EVs, while ignoring that ~200k gasoline cars catch fire and burn every year in the US alone. The per mile rate for EVs is much lower.
While it's possible to buy an EV for 100k or more (just like it's possible to buy a $100k+ gasoline car), the overwhelming majority on the market are far cheaper than that.
None of the popular EVs outside China are "Chinese garbage". The most popular are Tesla, GM, Nissan / Renault, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Hyundai, and BMW. There are some additional brands that sell a lot inside China, but almost nothing outside of it.
"If there was an antonym to 'Elon Musk', it would be 'Richard Branson'."