which is why it's hilarious to hear the CEO of Molycorp waving American flags in various quotes
Seemed to me that he was implying that opening these mines in the USA is only good for the Japanese companies funding the project and bad for the USA who is stuck with the cleanup costs.
Any substantial investment into the USA is a good reason to wave the flag, especially in a state with 12.5% unemployment.
Uh, how is exporting raw materials (many of which will end up in electronics back on our shores) bad for America?
Sure, it would be better if those materials were used in local manufacturing facilities, but opening a source of those raw materials will make it more financially viable to do so.
Yep, there's really no point in installing a super-high powered charging station at home. The existing infrastructure to and at most homes won't handle more than 20 kW at most - and even then with significantly lower charge rates, many homes (especially older homes) will need to have some sort of significant upgrade to handle the power.
The J1772 standard allows up to 240VAC 80A charges - 19 kW. Given that your typical EV will travel about 4 miles per kWh, one hour of charging at that rate is good for about 80 miles.
So unless your home happens to be in the middle of a round trip, it makes much more sense to place the high power quick chargers near commercial centers which already have infrastructure to more easily handle those types of electrical demands.
The vast majority if the time, people are driving well under 100 miles per day using about 25 kWh. A 240VAC 3.3 kW charge will take care of that in 8 hours - that's less power than what your typical electric dryer/water-heater/stove sucks down when in use.
If you are going on a longer trip, you probably want to charge a LOT faster than what the infrastructure at your typical house can handle (50kW+) - and when you want to charge, you'll be far away from home. So installing high power quick chargers should be done along transportation corridors where people need that type of functionality most often.
Wherever you have currently have a gas station is probably a good location to consider installing these high power quick chargers.
From what I've been able to dig up, the battery pack holds about 115 kWh.
In any case, your typical EV these days goes about 4 kWh/mile, which matches up nicely with their 375 mile trip.
So if you want to fill the car with 100 kWh in 6 minutes, you'd need about 1000 kW (ignoring charging losses).
Your typical house in the USA has 240V service with a main panel size ranging between 100A-200A - or 24-48 kW. There is no way you're charging this battery in a short amount of time at home unless you use some sort of buffer.
Your typical EV today uses a Level 2 J1772 EVSE - of which the J1772 specification will handle up to 240V AC at 80A or 19 kW. But the first mass produced EVs on the market (the Leaf/Volt) will only be able to charge at 3.3 kW or so using that standard.
The Tesla Roadster can charge at up to 19 kW, but still uses a slightly different plug (Tesla came before the J1772 standard, but existing Roadsters are expected to be converted over).
"Gas" stations to sustain Level 3 charging (meaning anything that spits out high current DC) are currently being deployed with chargers that will push out a max of 50 kW or so. The Leaf will be the first car to use those chargers and can charge it's 24 kW pack to 80% in 20-30 minutes.
I suspect that some sort of local battery buffer will be needed in most locations to support 1000 kW chargers - or you'll need to be very close to electrical substations and transmission lines.
Your typical income earner under the median income has all of their taxes deducted out of their pay-check. Come tax season, their rebate is simply the return of some (or all) of that money.
If you consistently collect a big rebate check every year, you should reduce your withholdings so that you keep that money in your savings account instead of loaning the money to the govt.
It is highly unlikely that the primitive 1970s amorphous silicon technology-- about 1% efficient-- provided any meaningful amount of power.
First of all - the solar panels on the roof of the White House that were installed in the 1970s were not electricity generating, but water heating. The efficiency of those types of panels don't usually vary by that much - all you have to do is throw something on the roof to catch the heat from the sun and they'll work just fine as long as they don't leak.
Secondly, PV panels made in the 1970s work just as well as panels made today. Any commercially sold solar panels made then were made using crystalline panels (you know, using wafers kinda like the silicon ones that power your computer) - and even then those panels were about 15% efficient - the same as most commonly available panels you'd buy today. Many people have even performed long term tests on those 30 year old PV panels and found them to generate nearly the same amount of power today as they did when new - having only degraded a couple percent at most.
Mine will even charge my batteries slowly on a clear night when the moon is full.
Complete BS. Moonlight radiates about 1 milliwatt / sq/m. On your panel of 18" x 48" (848 sq/in or about 0.55 sq/m) which is probably about 15% efficient overall at full sun (1000 W / sq/m), would generate about.08 milliwatts in full moonlight.
Good luck powering your solar powered calculator with that let alone charging a battery to any significant degree.
There is also no way that your panel (perhaps rated at 80W in full sun) would be enough to do anything but provide anything but a tiny dent in anyone's electricity bill - it might generate 125 kWh/year in the southwest desert - most households would use that amount of electricity in a matter of days (average household energy consumption ranges between 500-1000 kWh/month depending on where you live).
As to how well a solar panel works when it's cloudy, let's look at my very own solar panels (I have 18 180W panels / 3240W of solar on my roof with Enphase microinverters).
On a clear sunny day this time of year, my system will generate about 14-15 kWh. PVwatts estimates that my system will generate about 327 kWh in a typical October, or about 10.5 kWh/day. So it's pretty clear that clouds will have a large effect on energy production. Looking at the past 7 days, none of which have been ranged between completely cloudy/rainy to mostly sunny (no 100% clear days), energy production has ranged between 3.0 kWh to 14.4 kWh with an average of 7.8 kWh/day.
So stating that they work "quite well" when it's cloudy is being quite optimistic at best when clouds can cut power generation by 80%.
Look - I'm a huge proponent of solar power (I have them on my own roof!), but overstating their abilities does not help promote them.
Yep - that's exactly what they've designed and what the two plug-in vehicles (Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt) will be sharing.
The SAE J1772 charging protocol uses a standard port and allows for basic communication between the EVSE and vehicle to determine the maximum safest charging rate up to 19 kW (though EVSEs on the marget are currently limited to 7.2 kW).
How quiet the heatpump/AC is depends on how quiet they can make the compressor. Modern units can be a lot quieter thanks to additional sound-deadening.
I do know that some of the mini-split type systems (typically made in Japan) are very efficient and also very quiet (though still not silent). They are typically designed for heating/cooling smaller areas - say up to 1000 sq/ft and not entire houses as they are ductless.
Yep, they aren't exactly silent like resistance heating. But if you have AC - a heatpump is just an AC unit that can run in reverse - the noise is the same.
Not only that, but you can get a 3x improvement in efficiency by replacing those inefficient electrical resistance based heaters with a heat-pump.
A standard 90% efficient gas furnace will also be more energy efficient than electrical resistance heating (since the best power plants are only about 60% efficient and most of our electricity currently comes from burning fossil fuels.
Now - if you life in an area where most of your electricity is generated from renewables or nuclear - that changes things a bit.
Gas saving tires have a lower rolling friction. That also means that along with getting better gas mileage, the also reduce the effectiveness of your brakes and reduce your ability to make emergency evasive maneuvers. Pretty shitty trade off if you ask me.
They are available aftermarket. I checked tire rack and they have 3 choices available in the OE size for a 03 civic hybrid.
Wait - so you apparently put a LOT of importance on cornering/braking ability and bash any so called "low rolling resistance tires"?
If I am to understand your argument, the GP should not have bought the Civic in the first place - a sports car would be much better - screw fuel economy.
The amount of energy and resources and toxic chemicals involved in the car manufacturing process FAR outweighs any "statement" you make with a hybrid.
The "amount of energy and resources and toxic chemicals" is not significantly different whether you buy a hybrid or a non-hybrid.
About 85% of the energy in a vehicle is burned by fueling it up directly. So reducing the amount of energy a vehicle consumes over it's lifetime has a significant effect on it's overall resource consumption.
BTW - if you're really concerned about "toxic" chemicals in batteries - every single car on the road has 20-50 lbs of toxic batteries in them already - and nearly 100% of those batteries are successfully recovered and recycled - just like hybrid batteries are.
Both Nissan and GM have both specifically mentioned that some amount of loss of capacity will be regarded as normal and excess loss will cause the pack to have "failed".
When you buy a vehicle with a specific range, you expect it to maintain close to that range for the length of the warranty. If it doesn't, it's not operating within specifications.
Nissan for example will have a capacity gauge built into the central computer/display - you will be able to see for yourself right there when the capacity starts degrading.
GM on the other hand has over-engineered their battery pack so much that pretty much any loss of EV range would be a failure - they are only using 8kWh out of 16kWh of battery capacity - the pack could wear to the point where half the capacity is lost and it will still be operating within specifications. That should not happen until you are well outside the warranty period unless a single cell is defective in which case they swap out the pack, then send the old pack in for refurbishing where they replace the weak cell and then use that refurbished pack for future warranty replacements.
Initially all packs will have to be sent back to the factory for refurbishing, but after there are enough vehicles on the road and failures become common enough, they may train the dealers to do that servicing.
I don't really expect that to happen - after 10 years of selling hybrids with millions of them on the road now, no Toyota/Honda dealerships do anything except swap batteries out - it's cheaper/easier to simply replace the pack with one from a salvaged car. There is only one 3rd party company that I know of that refurbishes hybrid battery packs to "like new" specs using components from packs that have been determined to have "failed".
And that warranties exactly what? Cell/pack failure? Loss of capacity? If loss of capacity, how much loss is required before it kicks in? Is that portion of the warranty transferable?
Unfortunately those details aren't yet available, but it's expected that if capacity falls below 80% of the original capacity, the pack will have been determined to have "failed" and should be replaced.
So if you're looking at a $40,000 electric vehicle which has depreciated to something like $20,000 after three years and still requires $10,000-$15,000 of new batteries for the next owner, I don't understand why they expect a used market to develop at all. Which likely means, for a used market to develop, depreciation is likely to make that $40,000 vehicle worth more like $5,000 - $10,000 after three or four years; with a second owner looking to acquire at something like $15,000-$25,000 for a three to four year old vehicle, and before a dealer has a mark up. Ouch. Which in turn means, I don't see much incentive to buy new. Which quickly turns into a classic chicken and egg scenario.
The two major electric vehicles (Nissan Leaf/Chevy Volt) launching later this year have much longer warranties on their batteries: 8 years / 100,000 miles.
When the batteries wear out or break, they'll have lost capacity for one of a couple reasons:
1. There will be one or more weak cells - replace those and the pack will function close to new again. 2. They've lost 20% of their capacity - while this may make them less useful in an EV with 100 miles range, they will still be perfectly serviceable for many people and if not, they will still have a lot of value for the secondary market (think utility company who wants battery storage to help stabilize the grid).
Current cost of the 24kWh Nissan Leaf battery is estimated to be ~$10k. By the time you need a replacement, the cost is expected to dropp somewhere between 25-50% due to advances in technology.
I don't know of any processors that throttle down or disable cores under heavy load unless there was insufficient cooling to begin with. Even then, processors have been throttling down when overheating long before multi-core processors became common.
That said, there are a number of processors which will run at a higher than normal clock speed if enough of the other cores are under-utilized.
Fitting on a new tap while there is flow is pretty tough, not impossible though, and if you stick a cap on it, and the cap bursts you're probably further behind than if you'd just left the partially connected hose.
Good post, but it's not the cap bursting that they're worried about.
They're worried about the copper pipe feeding the cap bursting a leak which is buried underground and if left unchecked will eventually penetrate the surface leading to a completely uncontrolled leak of enormous proportions that will be nearly impossible to stop.
Tesla (like the Solar funds relevant to this article) was granted a low-interest loan.
There are plenty of other subsidies that the govt hands out in the form of tax breaks (look at big agro and fossil fuel industry) that you would be better off complaining about.
Will they be able to prevent thermal runaway in these better than in, say Lithium based batteries?
Unsure - they didn't make any references to thermal stability in the article. Now, since they are talking about improvements to the negative electrode material and not the positive electrode, it's possible it may not have any significant affect on the safety of the battery the technology is applied to since the relative safety is highly dependent on the rest of the cell chemistry.
The safety of existing lithium based batteries when the cell itself is ruptured depends highly on the chemistry of the cell.
For example, A123 lithium cells (lithium iron phosphate) can handle being drilled into with only minor heating and localized damage - no thermal runaway.
Most batteries which are going into the next generation of EV (Nissan Leaf, for example) use similar chemistries with similar thermal characteristics.
These batteries are not at all similar to the lithium poly batteries most people have experience with for their RC cars, phones, laptops, etc, except for the fact that they both have lithium in them. Lithium poly batteries are not stable under severe use/heat and will go into thermal runaway situations. The benefit of lithium poly batteries is that they are very light and hold more energy than lithium iron phosphate and similar batteries.
While methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas, it remains in the atmosphere for a MUCH smaller period of time, so it's effects are only a significant issue if it's emissions are on-going.
Never mind the fact that volcanic eruptions tend to cool the Earth due to particulate and aerosol emissions, anyway.
Actually, it depends on where you are. First of all, in CA they have laws that specifically state that it is illegal to block faster moving traffic if you're in the left hand lane. Therefore it's just as illegal to speed in the left hand lane as it is to drive slow in the left hand lane.
Not that it stops anyone. I can't count how many times I see people merge onto a nearly empty freeway and immediately merge over and park it in the #1 lane - even when there is no reason for them to use the left lanes as there are no cars in front of them.
Uh, I'm pretty sure that the sun's activity was highest in quite some time over the past 20 years (or so). It's recently started to subside, however.
Solar activity has been relatively constant over the past 50 years. We are currently at a decadal solar minimum.
And while evidence isn't the plural for anecdote, I will also add this: myself, and many others, have been noticing how fucking cold it's been this winter, and how mild last summer was. Not just in a specific area, either, but nationwide. Record cold, early on in the year, during the summer.
1. Sea ice extent is not the same as sea ice volume. Extent measures surface area covered, but not the thickness. Survey of the thickness of the arctic sea ice (by both satellite and manually) have shown that the overall ice volume of the arctic is rapidly declining. See here for some data: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/seaice.html
2. Finally, given the amount of noise in the signal and the number of years it takes to make a statistical difference show up, it is impossible to make any determination of current trends using only a few years. Climate trends need to be taken over decades, not a few years. The shorter the time period, the more likely you are just measuring differences in weather and not necessarily climate.
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The GP said:
Seemed to me that he was implying that opening these mines in the USA is only good for the Japanese companies funding the project and bad for the USA who is stuck with the cleanup costs.
Any substantial investment into the USA is a good reason to wave the flag, especially in a state with 12.5% unemployment.
Uh, how is exporting raw materials (many of which will end up in electronics back on our shores) bad for America?
Sure, it would be better if those materials were used in local manufacturing facilities, but opening a source of those raw materials will make it more financially viable to do so.
Yep, there's really no point in installing a super-high powered charging station at home. The existing infrastructure to and at most homes won't handle more than 20 kW at most - and even then with significantly lower charge rates, many homes (especially older homes) will need to have some sort of significant upgrade to handle the power.
The J1772 standard allows up to 240VAC 80A charges - 19 kW. Given that your typical EV will travel about 4 miles per kWh, one hour of charging at that rate is good for about 80 miles.
So unless your home happens to be in the middle of a round trip, it makes much more sense to place the high power quick chargers near commercial centers which already have infrastructure to more easily handle those types of electrical demands.
The vast majority if the time, people are driving well under 100 miles per day using about 25 kWh. A 240VAC 3.3 kW charge will take care of that in 8 hours - that's less power than what your typical electric dryer/water-heater/stove sucks down when in use.
If you are going on a longer trip, you probably want to charge a LOT faster than what the infrastructure at your typical house can handle (50kW+) - and when you want to charge, you'll be far away from home. So installing high power quick chargers should be done along transportation corridors where people need that type of functionality most often.
Wherever you have currently have a gas station is probably a good location to consider installing these high power quick chargers.
From what I've been able to dig up, the battery pack holds about 115 kWh.
In any case, your typical EV these days goes about 4 kWh/mile, which matches up nicely with their 375 mile trip.
So if you want to fill the car with 100 kWh in 6 minutes, you'd need about 1000 kW (ignoring charging losses).
Your typical house in the USA has 240V service with a main panel size ranging between 100A-200A - or 24-48 kW. There is no way you're charging this battery in a short amount of time at home unless you use some sort of buffer.
Your typical EV today uses a Level 2 J1772 EVSE - of which the J1772 specification will handle up to 240V AC at 80A or 19 kW. But the first mass produced EVs on the market (the Leaf/Volt) will only be able to charge at 3.3 kW or so using that standard.
The Tesla Roadster can charge at up to 19 kW, but still uses a slightly different plug (Tesla came before the J1772 standard, but existing Roadsters are expected to be converted over).
"Gas" stations to sustain Level 3 charging (meaning anything that spits out high current DC) are currently being deployed with chargers that will push out a max of 50 kW or so. The Leaf will be the first car to use those chargers and can charge it's 24 kW pack to 80% in 20-30 minutes.
I suspect that some sort of local battery buffer will be needed in most locations to support 1000 kW chargers - or you'll need to be very close to electrical substations and transmission lines.
If you consistently collect a big rebate check every year, you should reduce your withholdings so that you keep that money in your savings account instead of loaning the money to the govt.
First of all - the solar panels on the roof of the White House that were installed in the 1970s were not electricity generating, but water heating. The efficiency of those types of panels don't usually vary by that much - all you have to do is throw something on the roof to catch the heat from the sun and they'll work just fine as long as they don't leak.
Secondly, PV panels made in the 1970s work just as well as panels made today. Any commercially sold solar panels made then were made using crystalline panels (you know, using wafers kinda like the silicon ones that power your computer) - and even then those panels were about 15% efficient - the same as most commonly available panels you'd buy today. Many people have even performed long term tests on those 30 year old PV panels and found them to generate nearly the same amount of power today as they did when new - having only degraded a couple percent at most.
Complete BS. Moonlight radiates about 1 milliwatt / sq/m. On your panel of 18" x 48" (848 sq/in or about 0.55 sq/m) which is probably about 15% efficient overall at full sun (1000 W / sq/m), would generate about .08 milliwatts in full moonlight.
Good luck powering your solar powered calculator with that let alone charging a battery to any significant degree.
There is also no way that your panel (perhaps rated at 80W in full sun) would be enough to do anything but provide anything but a tiny dent in anyone's electricity bill - it might generate 125 kWh/year in the southwest desert - most households would use that amount of electricity in a matter of days (average household energy consumption ranges between 500-1000 kWh/month depending on where you live).
As to how well a solar panel works when it's cloudy, let's look at my very own solar panels (I have 18 180W panels / 3240W of solar on my roof with Enphase microinverters).
On a clear sunny day this time of year, my system will generate about 14-15 kWh. PVwatts estimates that my system will generate about 327 kWh in a typical October, or about 10.5 kWh/day. So it's pretty clear that clouds will have a large effect on energy production. Looking at the past 7 days, none of which have been ranged between completely cloudy/rainy to mostly sunny (no 100% clear days), energy production has ranged between 3.0 kWh to 14.4 kWh with an average of 7.8 kWh/day.
So stating that they work "quite well" when it's cloudy is being quite optimistic at best when clouds can cut power generation by 80%.
Look - I'm a huge proponent of solar power (I have them on my own roof!), but overstating their abilities does not help promote them.
Yep - that's exactly what they've designed and what the two plug-in vehicles (Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt) will be sharing.
The SAE J1772 charging protocol uses a standard port and allows for basic communication between the EVSE and vehicle to determine the maximum safest charging rate up to 19 kW (though EVSEs on the marget are currently limited to 7.2 kW).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAE_J1772
They are still working on a different standard that will allow even faster charging which will likely be agreed upon in the next year.
How quiet the heatpump/AC is depends on how quiet they can make the compressor. Modern units can be a lot quieter thanks to additional sound-deadening.
I do know that some of the mini-split type systems (typically made in Japan) are very efficient and also very quiet (though still not silent). They are typically designed for heating/cooling smaller areas - say up to 1000 sq/ft and not entire houses as they are ductless.
Yep, they aren't exactly silent like resistance heating. But if you have AC - a heatpump is just an AC unit that can run in reverse - the noise is the same.
Not only that, but you can get a 3x improvement in efficiency by replacing those inefficient electrical resistance based heaters with a heat-pump.
A standard 90% efficient gas furnace will also be more energy efficient than electrical resistance heating (since the best power plants are only about 60% efficient and most of our electricity currently comes from burning fossil fuels.
Now - if you life in an area where most of your electricity is generated from renewables or nuclear - that changes things a bit.
Wait - so you apparently put a LOT of importance on cornering/braking ability and bash any so called "low rolling resistance tires"?
If I am to understand your argument, the GP should not have bought the Civic in the first place - a sports car would be much better - screw fuel economy.
The "amount of energy and resources and toxic chemicals" is not significantly different whether you buy a hybrid or a non-hybrid.
About 85% of the energy in a vehicle is burned by fueling it up directly. So reducing the amount of energy a vehicle consumes over it's lifetime has a significant effect on it's overall resource consumption.
BTW - if you're really concerned about "toxic" chemicals in batteries - every single car on the road has 20-50 lbs of toxic batteries in them already - and nearly 100% of those batteries are successfully recovered and recycled - just like hybrid batteries are.
Yes you can. VW, BMW and Mercedes all make and sell diesels that pass California emissions requirements.
For example:
VW Jetta TDI: http://www.vw.com/jetta/en/us/
BMW 335d: http://www.bmwusa.com/Standard/Content/Vehicles/2011/3/335dSedan/Default.aspx
Mercedes R350 Bluetec: http://www.mbusa.com/mercedes/vehicles/explore/overview/class-R/model-R350BTC
Both Nissan and GM have both specifically mentioned that some amount of loss of capacity will be regarded as normal and excess loss will cause the pack to have "failed".
When you buy a vehicle with a specific range, you expect it to maintain close to that range for the length of the warranty. If it doesn't, it's not operating within specifications.
Nissan for example will have a capacity gauge built into the central computer/display - you will be able to see for yourself right there when the capacity starts degrading.
GM on the other hand has over-engineered their battery pack so much that pretty much any loss of EV range would be a failure - they are only using 8kWh out of 16kWh of battery capacity - the pack could wear to the point where half the capacity is lost and it will still be operating within specifications. That should not happen until you are well outside the warranty period unless a single cell is defective in which case they swap out the pack, then send the old pack in for refurbishing where they replace the weak cell and then use that refurbished pack for future warranty replacements.
Initially all packs will have to be sent back to the factory for refurbishing, but after there are enough vehicles on the road and failures become common enough, they may train the dealers to do that servicing.
I don't really expect that to happen - after 10 years of selling hybrids with millions of them on the road now, no Toyota/Honda dealerships do anything except swap batteries out - it's cheaper/easier to simply replace the pack with one from a salvaged car. There is only one 3rd party company that I know of that refurbishes hybrid battery packs to "like new" specs using components from packs that have been determined to have "failed".
Unfortunately those details aren't yet available, but it's expected that if capacity falls below 80% of the original capacity, the pack will have been determined to have "failed" and should be replaced.
The two major electric vehicles (Nissan Leaf/Chevy Volt) launching later this year have much longer warranties on their batteries: 8 years / 100,000 miles.
When the batteries wear out or break, they'll have lost capacity for one of a couple reasons:
1. There will be one or more weak cells - replace those and the pack will function close to new again.
2. They've lost 20% of their capacity - while this may make them less useful in an EV with 100 miles range, they will still be perfectly serviceable for many people and if not, they will still have a lot of value for the secondary market (think utility company who wants battery storage to help stabilize the grid).
Current cost of the 24kWh Nissan Leaf battery is estimated to be ~$10k. By the time you need a replacement, the cost is expected to dropp somewhere between 25-50% due to advances in technology.
I don't know of any processors that throttle down or disable cores under heavy load unless there was insufficient cooling to begin with. Even then, processors have been throttling down when overheating long before multi-core processors became common.
That said, there are a number of processors which will run at a higher than normal clock speed if enough of the other cores are under-utilized.
Good post, but it's not the cap bursting that they're worried about.
They're worried about the copper pipe feeding the cap bursting a leak which is buried underground and if left unchecked will eventually penetrate the surface leading to a completely uncontrolled leak of enormous proportions that will be nearly impossible to stop.
Tesla (like the Solar funds relevant to this article) was granted a low-interest loan.
There are plenty of other subsidies that the govt hands out in the form of tax breaks (look at big agro and fossil fuel industry) that you would be better off complaining about.
Unsure - they didn't make any references to thermal stability in the article. Now, since they are talking about improvements to the negative electrode material and not the positive electrode, it's possible it may not have any significant affect on the safety of the battery the technology is applied to since the relative safety is highly dependent on the rest of the cell chemistry.
The safety of existing lithium based batteries when the cell itself is ruptured depends highly on the chemistry of the cell.
For example, A123 lithium cells (lithium iron phosphate) can handle being drilled into with only minor heating and localized damage - no thermal runaway.
Most batteries which are going into the next generation of EV (Nissan Leaf, for example) use similar chemistries with similar thermal characteristics.
These batteries are not at all similar to the lithium poly batteries most people have experience with for their RC cars, phones, laptops, etc, except for the fact that they both have lithium in them. Lithium poly batteries are not stable under severe use/heat and will go into thermal runaway situations. The benefit of lithium poly batteries is that they are very light and hold more energy than lithium iron phosphate and similar batteries.
While methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas, it remains in the atmosphere for a MUCH smaller period of time, so it's effects are only a significant issue if it's emissions are on-going.
Never mind the fact that volcanic eruptions tend to cool the Earth due to particulate and aerosol emissions, anyway.
Not that it stops anyone. I can't count how many times I see people merge onto a nearly empty freeway and immediately merge over and park it in the #1 lane - even when there is no reason for them to use the left lanes as there are no cars in front of them.
Solar activity has been relatively constant over the past 50 years. We are currently at a decadal solar minimum.
Stop confusing weather with climate.
A number of problems with your argument:
1. Sea ice extent is not the same as sea ice volume. Extent measures surface area covered, but not the thickness. Survey of the thickness of the arctic sea ice (by both satellite and manually) have shown that the overall ice volume of the arctic is rapidly declining. See here for some data: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/reportcard/seaice.html
2. Finally, given the amount of noise in the signal and the number of years it takes to make a statistical difference show up, it is impossible to make any determination of current trends using only a few years. Climate trends need to be taken over decades, not a few years. The shorter the time period, the more likely you are just measuring differences in weather and not necessarily climate.