Electric Vehicles Leading Us Down Road Impossible To Navigate

makeorbreak

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The rise of the electric vehicle is upon us and it scares the hell out of me. Sure, we need to curb the pollution and greenhouse gases which is destroying our environment but it's too much, too quickly with the way everyone is jumping on the EV bandwagon.

First of all, let's look at the cost of buying and maintaining an electric vehicle as compared to a gasoline powered vehicle. One site I found on the internet did just this and found that over 4 years, the cost of buying and maintaining both is about the same but they didn't take into account one thing. At the end of 4 years, you have to replace the batteries in the electric vehicle which can cost in the range of thousands of dollars. The gasoline power vehicle will need certain components like a starter or a filter changed from time to time but the engine can continue running for many years without replacing the entire engine.

Economics of individual vehicles aside, let's examine the cost of transforming (no pun intended) the roadways of today into the roadways we'll need for the world of tomorrow where electric vehicles are the norm.

As part of Driver.ca, a site called Motor Mouth has posted a series of articles about this very subject. They say that electric vehicles are perfect for about 90 percent of commuters who would travel inside the city limits and charge their vehicles at home overnight, meaning they are charging their vehicles largely during the off hours. That would be fine but what about the 10 percent of commuters, numbering about 300 million, who travel outside the city limits to and from work?

According to Motor Mouth, there is a gasoline refilling station every 80 kilometres along the 401 and each has an average of 16 pumps capable of pumping 30 litres a minute. Every car can fill up with about 500 kilometres of travel fuel in 2 minutes. To do that in an electric vehicle, the two minute recharging would require 100 kilowatt-hours of battery or 3 megawatts. Currently, chargers work at at rate of 50 kW or
1/60th of the charging capacity required. 960 charging stations would be needed to service that many electric vehicles with an average charging time of two hours.

There are 350 kwH chargers which could lower that charging time to 20 minutes each vehicle but each charger generates enough heat to require automation and water cooled cables. Eight of these chargers would be needed to replace each gasoline pump at a cost of $200,000 each or $500,000 each with automation. A typical roadside station could cost $24 and use up the energy of a city of 75,000 people.

All this energy is new energy. It is above and beyond that which is already being generated by our overworked grid. Just think of the brownouts happening during the summer when people use their air conditioning enmasse. Solar panels for each station would cost about $30 million or $40 million for windmills. Remember, all this extra energy is during peak hours as well.

You might say that batteries will be developed to take longer charges and that may be true but the field of generating electricity is a "mature technology" and there's not much room for advancement there. So, can those among us travel longer distances outside the city with confidence their recharging needs will be met? Personally, we have a truck with a slide in camping unit and I would not want to travel to Florida, a 16 hour drive at the best of times, if I had to do so with an electric vehicle. First of all, if I could find an electric vehicle equal to the task ( and I understand they are developing transport trucks using the electric technology), I would not enjoy a trip where I have to stop every couple of hundred kilometres to sit at at recharging station for anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours, and that's not counting the time you might have to sit in a line waiting for your turn. That could easily make the trip to Florida 8 hours longer or even double the length of time, conservatively speaking. That's not even taking into account that some of the chargers might be out of order or a holiday weekend would double or even triple the number of vehicles stopping at a recharging station.

Alternatively, Motor Mouth says that we could reduce greenhouse gases by 75 percent simply by restricting gasoline powered vehicles from city limits. There are still challenges to this solution but it makes more sense than completely restructuring a transportation system which has served us so well in the past for long distance travellers.

Then, consider the number of batteries which will exist and have to be disposed of once there are millions of electric vehicles on the road. They can be recycled, of course, but that adds more energy to do so. Batteries, in the first place, emit higher levels of sulfur oxide emissions into the environment, roughly 22 pounds for each hybrid's batteries compared to 2.2 pounds for a conventional car. The rare earth metals used in car batteries comes mainly from China and it has been noted a number of suppliers from China have likely skipped environmental safety measures in order to provide the amount of rare earth metals required. This can only happen more and more as it becomes more profitable and necessary to acquire these materials. Additionally, it requires more energy to produce an electric vehicle because of the lighter metals like aluminum used in these vehicles.

I'm not saying electric vehicles and hybrids are not a greener choice in the long run but we should not rush ahead without the proper amount of caution so we know where we're headed and what conditions we are building for ourselves along the way.
 
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