Which would be relevant if the li-ions in phones used the same chemistries as those in electric cars. Barring the Tesla Roadster (which, FYI, has a pack climate control system), they don't.
Actually, I'm not; I'm just using US figures because I know most of the people at this site are from the US. I actually live in Iceland (did you notice my sig?). And no, automotive-style lithium batteries have no problem with cold temperatures. Most are rated down to -30 or so, and I've seen as low as -50C. You're confusing automotive-style with laptop-style. Each type of cell is optimized towards its particular use.
Voter fraud is basically a non-issue. It's usually somewhere in the range of a few tenths of a thousandth of one percent of votes cast. On the other hand, barring people who should *legitimately* be allowed to vote but are accidentally or maliciously prevented from doing so in the name of preventing voter fraud, is a far more common problem, and can affect, in extreme cases, as much as 10% of eligible voters
I don't get why you in America have to have this be so complicated. What's so wrong with a single national database and everyone with a single *public* ID number as the key, with your contact information in the database? For anything that wants to make sure you're who you say you are, you only need to enter your id number, and they can look up your official contact information and send you a confirmation. And you can automatically get mailed about any major actions taken using your ID number as well, such as changing your contact information. And because the key is public, nobody is stupid enough to try to use it as a password, like Americans do with social security numbers; when the id number is public, you have to use *real* security where security is needed. Overall, it makes identity theft almost impossible and makes it easy for anyone to authenticate you and greatly simplifies the sharing of records (much more convenient). That's what we do here. Is it some sort of paranoia about centralization of records about individuals or about public keys that keeps America from doing something like that?
Yes and no. The problem is that there's not one type of "battery" cell, and there's also a difference between "cells" and "packs" (which nobody mass produces). And the most mass-produced cell types are generally ill-suited for EVs, although Tesla uses laptop-style 18650s... albeit at the cost of making their packs much more complicated and expensive in order to "tame" their issues and get as much life out of them as they can (and due to the huge numbers of cells to deal with).
The thing about when you hit 700 miles or so is that you no longer need fast charging; it becomes pretty much irrelevant to everyone except 24-hour courier services and the like where they want to keep the vehicles moving at all times.
And modern electric cars do loose half of the battery capacity in cold climate
That's simply not true. As GM points out, most of the winter difference, which isn't as dramatic as you make it out to be (25-30 miles instead of the average/nominal 40 miles, with 45-50 in spring) has nothing to do with loss of battery capacity, and is simply that it takes more energy to drive a car of any fuel source in the winter, between increased tire losses, snow, harsher driving cycles, interior cabin heating, etc. In case you didn't notice, your gasoline car also gets worse mileage in the winter. Also, the Volt unfortunately doesn't have a reversible heat pump, just a standard resistive heater, which is a big hit. Most future EVs should be expected to have reversible heat pumps for climate control, with the motor and/or battery pack as the "hot" reservoir.
Are you really not aware of the fact that much more power is used during the daytime than at night?
And lastly the range of current electric vehicles isn't anywhere close to being useful. I live in the city where GM developed the EV. you barely see the cars in the summer and never in the winter as the range just isn't there
Clearly that has nothing to do with there being *incredibly small numbers produced so far*, heavens no...
100 miles sounds good in theory but if you turn on the air conditioning you get 50-60, you turn on the radio and head lights it is cut down even more.
Also outright false. Cruising at 300Wh/mi at 70mph is 21kW of cruising power. Max load for a car air conditioner might be something like 3kW. Maintaining temperature at a steady state even on a hot day will be a small fraction of that, perhaps 0.5-1kW. Headlights are even less, around 100W total, give or take depending on your headlight type. The radio is (generally) even less still.
Just remember that even today, energy density isn't really the issue. It's price per unit energy stored. If you increase the pack capacity 4-fold without dropping the price per unit energy stored, you're actually increasing the pack cost fourfold.
but would 50% electric cars be really taxing on the electric grid?
This has been widely studied. It's actually not the generation side that's the issue; most power plants spend over half their time sitting idle, mainly at night when EVs would be charging (it's a boon to grid operators - selling more product without new capital costs). The part that needs improvement is the last leg, neighborhood distribution. Of course, upgrading neighborhood infrastructure is far from an alien concept, as neighborhoods grow and change normally.
Wouldn't it be easier to have replaceable battery pack.
No, it would not.
A battery pack is not like a little AA battery sitting in your car. It's a massive structure weighing hundreds of kilograms. It's a key structural element of your vehicle, a key part of the load balancing. Every vehicle has a different optimal placement, location, and geometry, depending on the other aspects of vehicle design. Different vehicles also have radically different power consumption needs (compare an electric moped with an electric semi). High-end vehicles will want much higher capacity packs than low-end vehicles. And to top it all off, it's a moving target; battery tech is constantly changing, rapidly. The powertrain needs to be engineered to pair with a given battery.
It's really just a stupid idea. It's like saying "we're going to have the gas tank in a gasoline car attached to the engine block and part of the chassis, and we'll swap that all out at the gas station for someone else's whenever you need to fuel up". Only worse.
Hydrogen nowadays barely beats electric in terms of range, the fueling times aren't actually what you think they are**, it takes 2-4 times as much energy per mile (if you use fuel cells, worse if you use a H2 ICE), and both the fuel and the drivetrain cost an order of magnitude more than their electric equivalents. Not even getting into issues of safety and lifespan here (yes, automotive EV batteries have notably *longer* lifespans than fuel cells). H2 is a total non-starter.
** H2 fueling stations come in low pressure and high pressure varieties. The high pressure ones are, honestly, rather scary (plus a lot more expensive=. These are the ones that can deliver "fast" fills, although at 3-5 minutes, they're still notably slower than gasoline. The low pressure varieties generally take 20-30 minutes. But while battery charge times are dropping, hydrogen fill times are rising. One, the more hydrogen you want to store, the longer you need to fill (duh), and two, the methods used to increase hydrogen density (higher tank pressures, use of h2 storage mediums) decrease the fill rate. But as for electrics, the more capacity your battery pack has, the faster it can take current, and the advancing chemistries can take stronger charging currents per unit capacity. Even today, the Leaf's rapid charge port is for 30 minute charges, and they (and many other companies) are experimenting with 10 minute charges for next-gen vehicles.
Indeed, as I show elsewhere in the thread, 10 hours of charging at 90A is enough to drive 700 miles a day in a typical efficient EV.
For one's average daily driving, you can probably get that even on a 15-20A 120V socket overnight. A dryer socket (30A 220V) or range/RV socket (50A 220V), easily.
My favorite approach is the towable range extender, like the self-steering AC Propulsion "Long Ranger" trailer in its streamlined aeroshell. Seems an awesome concept - you have a generator when you need it but don't have to haul it around when you don't. A single trailer could be shared among a couple dozen people (aka, borrowing one from a neighbor like one might with a lawnmower, or a trailer-sharing service, or a rental service, or so forth).
A common misconception is that it's only the batteries that are expensive right now. But actually, the drivetrains are pretty darn pricey too right now, almost as expensive as the battery packs. It's simply a mass production issue on that front.
Battery EVs were dropped in the past because they were competing against early gasoline vehicles which hadn't been refined yet, wherein you couldn't trust that gasoline from one vendor would work in your vehicle, where you had to crank start, where the engine was constantly dying, where it was horribly loud and the exhaust untreated and nasty, etc. That's the only reason early EVs had a prayer of competing. Once gasoline got past this, they were easily left in the dust.
Gasoline's current problem is that while there are still improvements being made, it's not even in the same ballpark as the rate of advancement of battery technology.
Indeed, I think what needs to be seen for near-universal adoption of pure EVs is 700 miles highway-speed range at an affordable price. That's 12 hours of driving per day at an average speed of 60mph (most driving being faster, but people stop for breaks, food, etc). When you factor in that you can charge during breaks, you push that figure up a couple hundred miles per day. And lets say that you only have 10 hours plugged in at your destination before you have to leave again. With an efficient vehicle getting 250Wh/mi, that's 175kWh to charge, or about 200 after accounting for losses. You need to charge with a 20kW source. That's 90A at 220V. High power, yes, but doable. Most breaker panels being installed in the US today are at least 200A, and most of that power is free at night. If EVs start to become standard, I'd expect to see that upped to 300A.
Basically, you could drive all day, plug in, enjoy your evening, wake up, and drive all day again. At 1/3rd the fuel cost, cleanly, without worrying about fuel scarcity, with 1/10th the moving parts, and with the convenience of filling at home. Who wouldn't go for that?
700 miles may sound like a lot, but it's only a 3.5x improvement over a Tesla Roadster and a 7x improvement over most "low end" 100-mile EVs. With the multi-decade trend of 8% increase in energy density per year, that's just over 16 years and 25 years, respectively, before you hit that.
The real question, however, will be cost. Battery cost trends are a lot less clear cut than energy density trends. So who knows what the future will bring on that front.
The rare earth thing is a red herring. Tesla, and pretty much all other modern EVs, don't use rare earths. They use AC synchronous motors, which don' have permanent magnets. And anyway, it's not that rare earths are only found in China; they can just produce them a bit cheaper than other parts of the world. The result of the stockpiling is that mines in other parts of the world are starting to be built / reopen (there's one in California, for example, that shut down years ago due to cheap Chinese rare earths that's now reopening).
Battery chemistry seems well poised to continue the 8% energy density increase per year it's been getting for the past couple decades. Price per energy density hasn't really tracked that, but it is going down. But the real question is, will there be a big jump at some point that can, over the course of a decade's worth of refinements, take us far beyond that?
It's not impossible. Even conventional chemical batteries are way far away from their maximum potential limits (their bond energies). But there's a number of types of non-chemical batteries out there. My favorites that I've read about involve using quantum effects to "cheat". For example, if you build an array of nanoscale capacitors, you can prevent them from hitting voltage breakdown until you reach extremely high voltages because current is quantized, you can't discharge an arbitrarily small amount of current at once. Another one is basically making an array of nanoscale cyclotrons, with electrons orbiting around carbon nanotubes. Normally the particles in cyclotrons lose energy rapidly through cyclotron radiation, but again, this is effectively prevented by quantum limitations at these scales.
Battery life is the big killer. Who would buy a second hand electric car? They are only good for land-fill. They are massively less "green" than mechanically injected diesel vehicles which have a life of a million miles or more with a bit of low cost (potentially DIY) maintenance
None of this is true.
1) Cost is the killer, not battery life. Most EV from major manufacturers are coming with 8-10 year warranties on the packs. Toyota and Honda have had no problems maintaining long lifespans on their hybrid packs, and hybrid packs are put through a *lot* more stress than EV packs (far more charge/discharge cycles, at faster rates)
2) They are not "only good for landfill". "End of life" is usually defined at about 80%, but you can obviously drive it beyond that. And even when they're not used for cars any more, you better believe that power companies would love to get their hands on cheapo used EV packs with 50-80% capacity left in them, to buffer the grid. Battery buffers are often useful for things you wouldn't even think of, not just the obvious ability to use more intermittents or deal with sudden losses in generation or surges in demand. For example, one of the rattlesnake lines out in Utah, which runs from Moab through Castle Valley and onward, has very limited capacity, but they keep getting new requests to hook up to it that they couldn't handle during peak times. Well, what do you do - build a brand new, expensive line in the middle of nowhere? Nah, they just built a big battery buffer halfway down it, which they load up during off-peak times and unload during peak times. Batteries are incredibly useful for the grid, but oftentimes these days, they're too expensive for a lot of tasks they'd be great at. Hence...
3) Automotive-style li-ions (which pretty much everyone except Tesla and their partners are using) are of chemistries that are so eco-friendly that you can literally dispose of them in with municipal waste after discharging in most localities. The CEO of BYD likes to show off his batteries by drinking the electrolyte from them for reporters.
4) Even algae is grossly, grossly inefficient compared to solar panels on the same land, orders of magnitude difference. And way too expensive.
Not just a little less efficient, but way less efficient. The best yields reported in the literature so far are something like 0.5 gallons per square meter per year - and good luck getting near that in a real-world plant. But even that is 18MJ/m^2/yr. By comparison, Ausra's proposed CLFR plant would produce 177MW per square mile, and their pilot plant had a capacity factor of 27%, so using that number, we get 582MJ/m^2/yr. And to top that all off, your average gasoline car operates at about 20% average efficiency and your average diesel at about 25% efficiency (note the word "average" - don't complain and then write a post where you cite peak efficiency numbers, because that's not what you get in real-world driving). Your average EV gets about 75% generator-to-grid-to-wheels efficiency.
Biological processes are just so lossy. And algæ has lots of problems of its own. Namely, you can either grow it in open ponds or closed ponds. If you grow it in open ponds, you can't keep it species-pure and thus get predatory microbes, insects, etc which you can at least try to control, and competing algæ species which you generally have no chance of controlling. Since biofuel microbes are highly optimized, your production rate drops like a stone. Hence most companies don't pursue this and are instead looking at various forms of closed systems. Closed generally means plastic film, as the cost of thick plastic or glass would be absurd. But when you're dealing with such low yields for a given amount of area (small fractions of a gallon per square meter per year), even plastic film gets expensive, especially when you consider that the UV in sunlight tends to destroy plastic film very effectively (polyethylene-film greenhouses generally replace their film annually, polypropylene greenhouses every 2 years).
And that's hardly the only issue. To get your fuel out, you have algæ interspersed in water. You have a lot more water than algæ, but need to get dry algæ out. There are a lot of different processes out there, but at its most basic level, it's generally a very costly, energy-intensive process. And this says nothing of preventing fouling of your systems by algæ, of maintaining purity in even closed systems, of refining the dried algæ, and so forth. Or the fact that in general, extremely sunny / cloud-free areas typically have water shortages as well, and the most productive algæ are freshwater species who only yield their high figures in very controlled circumstances pertaining to what's in the water.
But when I run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, I just push my car to the nearest farmhouse and plug my gas tank into the gas socket to get enough gas to drive to the next refuelling station. Can't do that with electricity!
That's not the big problem the problem is the batteries.
The one true statement in this paragraph, but not for the reason you think.
we just haven't had any true battery breakthough in years
Remember what cell phones looked like 20 years ago? Remember that giant brick of a battery? Compare that to the battery on your smartphone today. Now look at what your smartphone is wasting power on beyond just maintaining a cell signal.
It's a common but utterly false myth that batteries haven't advanced much. They've been advancing dramatically and show no signs of stopping. Now, increasing power *consumption* on electronics tends to waste a lot of this, but as for storage, it's had a pretty consistent 8% energy density by mass gain per year. Power density has risen even faster.
and lithium batteries just don't take extremes in heat and cold like a lead acid does.
Most automotive-style li-ions are rated for much more extreme temperature curves than lead-acid. I've seen some rated for as low as -50C, although -30C is more common. Ever tried to start a lead-acid vehicle in -50C weather? Yeah, that's what a block heater is for. And guess what? The block heater concept works with EVs, too. And yes, the same applies on the upper end of the temperature spectrum.
The average temp in the south has been over 100F, ever leave a lithium battery in a car in this kind of heat? Say goodbye to more than half your capacity.
Again, automotive-style li-ions (which are a different chemistry than laptop-style li-ions, they're more akin to the li-ions in power tools) don't do this; they're amazingly durable. Something you don't seem to get is that there's not just one chemistry available in each family. Battery manufacturers have an array of tradeoffs they can make in chemistry selection, chemistry details, DOD (depth of discharge), and so forth. This radically alters the ratios between price, energy density, power density, and lifespan. For most consumer electronics, they're thought of as disposable. Hence price and energy density are typically highly optimized at the expense of power density and lifespan. For vehicles, lifespan is fixed at a target (usually something in the 7-10 years to 20% capacity loss range), power density is fixed at whatever the demand is (high for hybrids, medium for plug-in hybrids, low for pure EVs - basically, the more batteries you have, the less power you need per cell), and then the price/energy density tradeoff is adjusted for the vehicle's particular market niche.
for giving away batteries there simply won't be a used market, nor will those that buy one want to keep the vehicle once the batteries die out of warranty, they'll end up scrapped.
Simply not true. Grid operators are dying to get their hands on used batteries from the EV industry which they could snatch up at bargain-basement prices. As if they care that they're only 80% capacity or less; energy density is practically irrelevant when your batteries sit in a warehouse in a fixed location, and 50-80% of the density of a li-ion is still way more than a lead-acid anyway.
The problem with this statement Musk makes, is the countries electric infrastructure can barely keep up with the demands and it is falling apart, it will take close to 20 years to get the systems to where it has been upgraded and added onto so it is not getting maxed out.
This is simply not true. The DOE and other groups have studied this over and over again. There is no problem generating enough power to switch over almost all of the US's vehicles to electricity, except a small shortfall in the pacific northwest** if everything was switched. The issue is that power plants spend most of their time sitting idle (in order to be able to meet peak demand), while EVs predominantly charge in off-peak hours. The net result is that EVs increase power plant utilization percentages and are thus a huge boon to grid operators (who unsurprisingly are big supporters of electric vehicles), as they get to sell more power without having to build new plants, and the power that they're selling is a nice even, steady draw.
There is one weakness in the link, but it has nothing to do with generation, or even bulk distribution. It's the final leg of the journey, neighborhood distribution. Several studies have shown that once neighrboods hit 10-20% penetration or so (which is still a long time from now!), you can start having problems with too much load on the local circuits. But this is nothing extraordinary; local circuits are upgraded all the time as neighborhoods grow and power usages change.
** - The pacific northwest, due to its heavy use of hydropower, doesn't have as much idle capacity sitting around at night as other regions. Hydropower doesn't care whether you use it during the night or the day; it's generally energy-per-year-limited, not peak-power-limited.
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Which would be relevant if the li-ions in phones used the same chemistries as those in electric cars. Barring the Tesla Roadster (which, FYI, has a pack climate control system), they don't.
Actually, I'm not; I'm just using US figures because I know most of the people at this site are from the US. I actually live in Iceland (did you notice my sig?). And no, automotive-style lithium batteries have no problem with cold temperatures. Most are rated down to -30 or so, and I've seen as low as -50C. You're confusing automotive-style with laptop-style. Each type of cell is optimized towards its particular use.
Voter fraud is basically a non-issue. It's usually somewhere in the range of a few tenths of a thousandth of one percent of votes cast. On the other hand, barring people who should *legitimately* be allowed to vote but are accidentally or maliciously prevented from doing so in the name of preventing voter fraud, is a far more common problem, and can affect, in extreme cases, as much as 10% of eligible voters
A shibboleh of fatuity?
I don't get why you in America have to have this be so complicated. What's so wrong with a single national database and everyone with a single *public* ID number as the key, with your contact information in the database? For anything that wants to make sure you're who you say you are, you only need to enter your id number, and they can look up your official contact information and send you a confirmation. And you can automatically get mailed about any major actions taken using your ID number as well, such as changing your contact information. And because the key is public, nobody is stupid enough to try to use it as a password, like Americans do with social security numbers; when the id number is public, you have to use *real* security where security is needed. Overall, it makes identity theft almost impossible and makes it easy for anyone to authenticate you and greatly simplifies the sharing of records (much more convenient). That's what we do here. Is it some sort of paranoia about centralization of records about individuals or about public keys that keeps America from doing something like that?
Yes and no. The problem is that there's not one type of "battery" cell, and there's also a difference between "cells" and "packs" (which nobody mass produces). And the most mass-produced cell types are generally ill-suited for EVs, although Tesla uses laptop-style 18650s... albeit at the cost of making their packs much more complicated and expensive in order to "tame" their issues and get as much life out of them as they can (and due to the huge numbers of cells to deal with).
The thing about when you hit 700 miles or so is that you no longer need fast charging; it becomes pretty much irrelevant to everyone except 24-hour courier services and the like where they want to keep the vehicles moving at all times.
That's simply not true. As GM points out, most of the winter difference, which isn't as dramatic as you make it out to be (25-30 miles instead of the average/nominal 40 miles, with 45-50 in spring) has nothing to do with loss of battery capacity, and is simply that it takes more energy to drive a car of any fuel source in the winter, between increased tire losses, snow, harsher driving cycles, interior cabin heating, etc. In case you didn't notice, your gasoline car also gets worse mileage in the winter. Also, the Volt unfortunately doesn't have a reversible heat pump, just a standard resistive heater, which is a big hit. Most future EVs should be expected to have reversible heat pumps for climate control, with the motor and/or battery pack as the "hot" reservoir.
Lastly, a pet peeve of mine...
Tell it to the DOE and PNNL.
Are you really not aware of the fact that much more power is used during the daytime than at night?
Clearly that has nothing to do with there being *incredibly small numbers produced so far*, heavens no...
Also outright false. Cruising at 300Wh/mi at 70mph is 21kW of cruising power. Max load for a car air conditioner might be something like 3kW. Maintaining temperature at a steady state even on a hot day will be a small fraction of that, perhaps 0.5-1kW. Headlights are even less, around 100W total, give or take depending on your headlight type. The radio is (generally) even less still.
Just remember that even today, energy density isn't really the issue. It's price per unit energy stored. If you increase the pack capacity 4-fold without dropping the price per unit energy stored, you're actually increasing the pack cost fourfold.
This has been widely studied. It's actually not the generation side that's the issue; most power plants spend over half their time sitting idle, mainly at night when EVs would be charging (it's a boon to grid operators - selling more product without new capital costs). The part that needs improvement is the last leg, neighborhood distribution. Of course, upgrading neighborhood infrastructure is far from an alien concept, as neighborhoods grow and change normally.
No, it would not.
A battery pack is not like a little AA battery sitting in your car. It's a massive structure weighing hundreds of kilograms. It's a key structural element of your vehicle, a key part of the load balancing. Every vehicle has a different optimal placement, location, and geometry, depending on the other aspects of vehicle design. Different vehicles also have radically different power consumption needs (compare an electric moped with an electric semi). High-end vehicles will want much higher capacity packs than low-end vehicles. And to top it all off, it's a moving target; battery tech is constantly changing, rapidly. The powertrain needs to be engineered to pair with a given battery.
It's really just a stupid idea. It's like saying "we're going to have the gas tank in a gasoline car attached to the engine block and part of the chassis, and we'll swap that all out at the gas station for someone else's whenever you need to fuel up". Only worse.
Hydrogen nowadays barely beats electric in terms of range, the fueling times aren't actually what you think they are**, it takes 2-4 times as much energy per mile (if you use fuel cells, worse if you use a H2 ICE), and both the fuel and the drivetrain cost an order of magnitude more than their electric equivalents. Not even getting into issues of safety and lifespan here (yes, automotive EV batteries have notably *longer* lifespans than fuel cells). H2 is a total non-starter.
** H2 fueling stations come in low pressure and high pressure varieties. The high pressure ones are, honestly, rather scary (plus a lot more expensive=. These are the ones that can deliver "fast" fills, although at 3-5 minutes, they're still notably slower than gasoline. The low pressure varieties generally take 20-30 minutes. But while battery charge times are dropping, hydrogen fill times are rising. One, the more hydrogen you want to store, the longer you need to fill (duh), and two, the methods used to increase hydrogen density (higher tank pressures, use of h2 storage mediums) decrease the fill rate. But as for electrics, the more capacity your battery pack has, the faster it can take current, and the advancing chemistries can take stronger charging currents per unit capacity. Even today, the Leaf's rapid charge port is for 30 minute charges, and they (and many other companies) are experimenting with 10 minute charges for next-gen vehicles.
Indeed, as I show elsewhere in the thread, 10 hours of charging at 90A is enough to drive 700 miles a day in a typical efficient EV.
For one's average daily driving, you can probably get that even on a 15-20A 120V socket overnight. A dryer socket (30A 220V) or range/RV socket (50A 220V), easily.
My favorite approach is the towable range extender, like the self-steering AC Propulsion "Long Ranger" trailer in its streamlined aeroshell. Seems an awesome concept - you have a generator when you need it but don't have to haul it around when you don't. A single trailer could be shared among a couple dozen people (aka, borrowing one from a neighbor like one might with a lawnmower, or a trailer-sharing service, or a rental service, or so forth).
A common misconception is that it's only the batteries that are expensive right now. But actually, the drivetrains are pretty darn pricey too right now, almost as expensive as the battery packs. It's simply a mass production issue on that front.
Battery EVs were dropped in the past because they were competing against early gasoline vehicles which hadn't been refined yet, wherein you couldn't trust that gasoline from one vendor would work in your vehicle, where you had to crank start, where the engine was constantly dying, where it was horribly loud and the exhaust untreated and nasty, etc. That's the only reason early EVs had a prayer of competing. Once gasoline got past this, they were easily left in the dust.
Gasoline's current problem is that while there are still improvements being made, it's not even in the same ballpark as the rate of advancement of battery technology.
Indeed, I think what needs to be seen for near-universal adoption of pure EVs is 700 miles highway-speed range at an affordable price. That's 12 hours of driving per day at an average speed of 60mph (most driving being faster, but people stop for breaks, food, etc). When you factor in that you can charge during breaks, you push that figure up a couple hundred miles per day. And lets say that you only have 10 hours plugged in at your destination before you have to leave again. With an efficient vehicle getting 250Wh/mi, that's 175kWh to charge, or about 200 after accounting for losses. You need to charge with a 20kW source. That's 90A at 220V. High power, yes, but doable. Most breaker panels being installed in the US today are at least 200A, and most of that power is free at night. If EVs start to become standard, I'd expect to see that upped to 300A.
Basically, you could drive all day, plug in, enjoy your evening, wake up, and drive all day again. At 1/3rd the fuel cost, cleanly, without worrying about fuel scarcity, with 1/10th the moving parts, and with the convenience of filling at home. Who wouldn't go for that?
700 miles may sound like a lot, but it's only a 3.5x improvement over a Tesla Roadster and a 7x improvement over most "low end" 100-mile EVs. With the multi-decade trend of 8% increase in energy density per year, that's just over 16 years and 25 years, respectively, before you hit that.
The real question, however, will be cost. Battery cost trends are a lot less clear cut than energy density trends. So who knows what the future will bring on that front.
The rare earth thing is a red herring. Tesla, and pretty much all other modern EVs, don't use rare earths. They use AC synchronous motors, which don' have permanent magnets. And anyway, it's not that rare earths are only found in China; they can just produce them a bit cheaper than other parts of the world. The result of the stockpiling is that mines in other parts of the world are starting to be built / reopen (there's one in California, for example, that shut down years ago due to cheap Chinese rare earths that's now reopening).
Indeed, and that's the real issue.
Battery chemistry seems well poised to continue the 8% energy density increase per year it's been getting for the past couple decades. Price per energy density hasn't really tracked that, but it is going down. But the real question is, will there be a big jump at some point that can, over the course of a decade's worth of refinements, take us far beyond that?
It's not impossible. Even conventional chemical batteries are way far away from their maximum potential limits (their bond energies). But there's a number of types of non-chemical batteries out there. My favorites that I've read about involve using quantum effects to "cheat". For example, if you build an array of nanoscale capacitors, you can prevent them from hitting voltage breakdown until you reach extremely high voltages because current is quantized, you can't discharge an arbitrarily small amount of current at once. Another one is basically making an array of nanoscale cyclotrons, with electrons orbiting around carbon nanotubes. Normally the particles in cyclotrons lose energy rapidly through cyclotron radiation, but again, this is effectively prevented by quantum limitations at these scales.
None of this is true.
1) Cost is the killer, not battery life. Most EV from major manufacturers are coming with 8-10 year warranties on the packs. Toyota and Honda have had no problems maintaining long lifespans on their hybrid packs, and hybrid packs are put through a *lot* more stress than EV packs (far more charge/discharge cycles, at faster rates)
2) They are not "only good for landfill". "End of life" is usually defined at about 80%, but you can obviously drive it beyond that. And even when they're not used for cars any more, you better believe that power companies would love to get their hands on cheapo used EV packs with 50-80% capacity left in them, to buffer the grid. Battery buffers are often useful for things you wouldn't even think of, not just the obvious ability to use more intermittents or deal with sudden losses in generation or surges in demand. For example, one of the rattlesnake lines out in Utah, which runs from Moab through Castle Valley and onward, has very limited capacity, but they keep getting new requests to hook up to it that they couldn't handle during peak times. Well, what do you do - build a brand new, expensive line in the middle of nowhere? Nah, they just built a big battery buffer halfway down it, which they load up during off-peak times and unload during peak times. Batteries are incredibly useful for the grid, but oftentimes these days, they're too expensive for a lot of tasks they'd be great at. Hence...
3) Automotive-style li-ions (which pretty much everyone except Tesla and their partners are using) are of chemistries that are so eco-friendly that you can literally dispose of them in with municipal waste after discharging in most localities. The CEO of BYD likes to show off his batteries by drinking the electrolyte from them for reporters.
4) Even algae is grossly, grossly inefficient compared to solar panels on the same land, orders of magnitude difference. And way too expensive.
Not just a little less efficient, but way less efficient. The best yields reported in the literature so far are something like 0.5 gallons per square meter per year - and good luck getting near that in a real-world plant. But even that is 18MJ/m^2/yr. By comparison, Ausra's proposed CLFR plant would produce 177MW per square mile, and their pilot plant had a capacity factor of 27%, so using that number, we get 582MJ/m^2/yr. And to top that all off, your average gasoline car operates at about 20% average efficiency and your average diesel at about 25% efficiency (note the word "average" - don't complain and then write a post where you cite peak efficiency numbers, because that's not what you get in real-world driving). Your average EV gets about 75% generator-to-grid-to-wheels efficiency.
Biological processes are just so lossy. And algæ has lots of problems of its own. Namely, you can either grow it in open ponds or closed ponds. If you grow it in open ponds, you can't keep it species-pure and thus get predatory microbes, insects, etc which you can at least try to control, and competing algæ species which you generally have no chance of controlling. Since biofuel microbes are highly optimized, your production rate drops like a stone. Hence most companies don't pursue this and are instead looking at various forms of closed systems. Closed generally means plastic film, as the cost of thick plastic or glass would be absurd. But when you're dealing with such low yields for a given amount of area (small fractions of a gallon per square meter per year), even plastic film gets expensive, especially when you consider that the UV in sunlight tends to destroy plastic film very effectively (polyethylene-film greenhouses generally replace their film annually, polypropylene greenhouses every 2 years).
And that's hardly the only issue. To get your fuel out, you have algæ interspersed in water. You have a lot more water than algæ, but need to get dry algæ out. There are a lot of different processes out there, but at its most basic level, it's generally a very costly, energy-intensive process. And this says nothing of preventing fouling of your systems by algæ, of maintaining purity in even closed systems, of refining the dried algæ, and so forth. Or the fact that in general, extremely sunny / cloud-free areas typically have water shortages as well, and the most productive algæ are freshwater species who only yield their high figures in very controlled circumstances pertaining to what's in the water.
But when I run out of gas in the middle of nowhere, I just push my car to the nearest farmhouse and plug my gas tank into the gas socket to get enough gas to drive to the next refuelling station. Can't do that with electricity!
The one true statement in this paragraph, but not for the reason you think.
Remember what cell phones looked like 20 years ago? Remember that giant brick of a battery? Compare that to the battery on your smartphone today. Now look at what your smartphone is wasting power on beyond just maintaining a cell signal.
It's a common but utterly false myth that batteries haven't advanced much. They've been advancing dramatically and show no signs of stopping. Now, increasing power *consumption* on electronics tends to waste a lot of this, but as for storage, it's had a pretty consistent 8% energy density by mass gain per year. Power density has risen even faster.
Most automotive-style li-ions are rated for much more extreme temperature curves than lead-acid. I've seen some rated for as low as -50C, although -30C is more common. Ever tried to start a lead-acid vehicle in -50C weather? Yeah, that's what a block heater is for. And guess what? The block heater concept works with EVs, too. And yes, the same applies on the upper end of the temperature spectrum.
Again, automotive-style li-ions (which are a different chemistry than laptop-style li-ions, they're more akin to the li-ions in power tools) don't do this; they're amazingly durable. Something you don't seem to get is that there's not just one chemistry available in each family. Battery manufacturers have an array of tradeoffs they can make in chemistry selection, chemistry details, DOD (depth of discharge), and so forth. This radically alters the ratios between price, energy density, power density, and lifespan. For most consumer electronics, they're thought of as disposable. Hence price and energy density are typically highly optimized at the expense of power density and lifespan. For vehicles, lifespan is fixed at a target (usually something in the 7-10 years to 20% capacity loss range), power density is fixed at whatever the demand is (high for hybrids, medium for plug-in hybrids, low for pure EVs - basically, the more batteries you have, the less power you need per cell), and then the price/energy density tradeoff is adjusted for the vehicle's particular market niche.
Simply not true. Grid operators are dying to get their hands on used batteries from the EV industry which they could snatch up at bargain-basement prices. As if they care that they're only 80% capacity or less; energy density is practically irrelevant when your batteries sit in a warehouse in a fixed location, and 50-80% of the density of a li-ion is still way more than a lead-acid anyway.
This is simply not true. The DOE and other groups have studied this over and over again. There is no problem generating enough power to switch over almost all of the US's vehicles to electricity, except a small shortfall in the pacific northwest** if everything was switched. The issue is that power plants spend most of their time sitting idle (in order to be able to meet peak demand), while EVs predominantly charge in off-peak hours. The net result is that EVs increase power plant utilization percentages and are thus a huge boon to grid operators (who unsurprisingly are big supporters of electric vehicles), as they get to sell more power without having to build new plants, and the power that they're selling is a nice even, steady draw.
There is one weakness in the link, but it has nothing to do with generation, or even bulk distribution. It's the final leg of the journey, neighborhood distribution. Several studies have shown that once neighrboods hit 10-20% penetration or so (which is still a long time from now!), you can start having problems with too much load on the local circuits. But this is nothing extraordinary; local circuits are upgraded all the time as neighborhoods grow and power usages change.
** - The pacific northwest, due to its heavy use of hydropower, doesn't have as much idle capacity sitting around at night as other regions. Hydropower doesn't care whether you use it during the night or the day; it's generally energy-per-year-limited, not peak-power-limited.
Horse oil.