Curious (2023 Update)

That is news to me - and yet another reason not to use GG (or to encourage them to fix the client - there's no reason why they couldn't make an online web-based Usenet client that worked well according to common Usenet practice).

Of course selecting, copying and pasting will work. But URL's written appropriately - with angle brackets - will work with a single click from any decent Usenet client, any browser, any desktop OS, regardless of how line-breaking is done.

For short URL's the risk of line breaks is much smaller, and thus the usefulness of angle brackets much less. And giving the real URL, rather than a "tiny" URL, is a lot more important than the brackets.

It does not even dent my argument, much less destroy it. It is unreasonable because you are trying to count it twice. You are suggesting that you can get 400,000 miles out of the battery before it wears out, and then the battery can be reused despite being worn out. (Almost no lithium from batteries is recycled. Individual cells from old batteries are sometimes reused, but not if they are worn out.)

Re-use is only possible when the cells haven't been worn out - i.e., you haven't got your 400,000 miles out of them.

I agree that lithium recycling from old batteries is likely to increase, and that will change the environmental economic equation. (As I have said all along, I think the situation is bad /now/, but that it is a necessary stage towards a better future. However, a key factor is that we should understand the costs of the current solutions so that we know that we need something better.)

Fair point.

Unfortunately, a large proportion of even slightly damaged electric vehicles are "turned into rubbish", rather than "turned into scrap parts". (It happens for non-electric vehicles too, more and more, but it is worse for electric vehicles and a higher proportion get scraped rather than repaired.)

Some parts get recycled - most of the steel in cars gets recycled, AFAIUI. But a lot ends up in landfills or burnt. Very little gets re-used as complete parts. Maybe this will change in the future, but there is such a high turnover for models and such specialised parts that re-use is difficult. A motor, battery or other part from a two-year-old electric car will often not fit in this years' model. (Again, this is also a problem in newer non-electric cars.)

Yes indeed - but we do have to understand the present, so we can get a better future.

If only the bean counters took the price of putting dikes around every continent into account, then nuclear numbers would make sense to them too!

They don't need to outperform lithium - they just need to do well enough, when combined with fast enough charging and enough charging stations. (The charging stations themselves can use cheap and bulky batteries for local storage to avoid huge peaks on their local power connections. Apparently potassium batteries could be good here, if their problems could be solved, since they have very efficient charge/discharge cycles.)

Aluminium has a significantly higher energy density for batteries (my understanding of the chemistry here is very far from complete, but basically you get 3 electrons per aluminium ion compared to 1 per lithium ion). They are apparently used in military applications, but there are all sorts of complications and issues to be solved before they would be practical for common use.

There is nothing that can do better than lithium for car use today, but there are many potential candidates if the technology can be improved. And it is today's lithium-powered electric cars that provides the economic incentive to invest in this research.

For biomass (ideally algae or single-celled organism, or waste biomass - certainly not corn or other food grown for biofuel!) I think ethanol would be the right target. Fuel-cell based cars could use it efficiently, but the real gain is that it could run the majority of the existing car fleet directly.

As for hydrogen, the efficiency of generating it by electrolysis is still a bit low but has been improving - if it gets good enough, hydrogen is potentially a way to store and transport energy. Another method of producing it is methane pyrolysis from natural gas - you lose some of the energy from the natural gas in the process, but the carbon falls out in solid (and therefore easily storable) form rather than CO₂ in the atmosphere.

I think hydrogen has potential as an energy transport for the near future, until better long-distance grids with high voltage DC give a more efficient energy transport.

A PHEV is quite a good balance at the moment. They are certainly very practical for people (and practicality for owners and users must always be a big consideration). Their batteries are much smaller - it is only a minor part of the environmental impact of the car. So for short journeys, that lets you get the benefit of electric use with little of the cost. You generally charge them at home, so you don't have the cost of charging stations or the infrastructure needed for the very high peak currents, and charging is at night when there is often an excess of electricity rather than peak times during the day. You can have lower pollution in town driving while using petrol outside of towns. CO₂ emissions are important, but they don't cover everything.

A lot of people, however, use their PHEV without plugging them in, which loses much of the point (you still get regenerative breaking and the like, but that can be achieved by a non-pluggable hybrid at lower cost).

LOL! So that part of the population is only a little bit pregnant?

If your air is cut to the point where you are only getting 50% of what you need to survive, it's better for you to get a bit more so you have 80% of what you need to survive? Tell that to mother earth.

No man is an island.

Even the part that doesn't drive depends on the other part to get products and food produced and delivered and support their way of life. Even living off the land in Africa people depend on the rest of the world for the things they get from the rest of us, medicine, produced items like clothes, etc.

How many live that sort of life willingly? Very, very... VERY few.

Do you drive?

You miss the point. Brackets are not needed in GG. Just select the multiline text and right click to open the link. Even better than screwing with brackets.

Nobody said anything about copy or paste. Just select, right click and say open!

To some.

You don't seem to understand. Lithium batteries don't wear out. They wear down. Think of surgeon's tools that are no longer good enough for surgery, but are good enough to tie fishing lures. Not many want a battery in their car that only gives them 60% of the original range, but that's plenty good enough for a power wall or other stationary application.

What do you think happens at 400,000 miles? Do they melt down? Do they throw an error flag? They still work... unless they don't at which case they probably didn't make 400,000 miles and are a failed battery, not a worn out battery.

I think that case is vastly overstated. The problematic source materials for most lithium batteries is cobalt which is hard to find other than in problematic regions of Africa. That's why most are designing out cobalt. There's LOTS of research in this area and Tesla currently shipping batteries without cobalt.

Not sure what it means, "drive a lot". All that matters is the total mileage on a car, not how fast it is accumulated. Most cars are driven lots of miles before they are scrapped.

Yeah, I think you are making up facts here. I've never heard anything like this. The battery and motor would be separated. The motor has lots of good copper which is well worth recycling. The body has lots of good metals in it too.

Of course they have to outperform lithium batteries. Lithium batteries have to outperform lithium batteries because they aren't good enough yet for the general market. We need EVs with 400-500 mile range because unlike an ICE vehicle the EV can't use it's full range. A 400 mile range is needed to drive for four hours before charging. 500 miles is needed so it can do this over the life of the battery.

Someone is proposing an aluminum-air battery, but it's not rechargeable. It has to be replaced every 1,000 miles or something. Then it is not clear if it can be recycled in a useful way. This sounds terrible to me.

Lithium is one of those potential candidates.

How does it matter what crop you use? Burning corn in a car will never compete with food corn because it's not the same crop. Have you ever seen cow corn? Not the same as what we eat either. Not many cars are set up for running 100% ethanol or even 85%.

Yes, a really crappy way that we would have to construct from scratch. It's really hard to compete with EVs when the grid is already adequate. We just need more ways to connect EVs to the grid. Actually, many people can just plug into a 120V outlet which gives you 50-70 miles overnight. The US has never been very good at considering small cars for local driving (99% of what we do), but with those a 120V outlet could give 100+ miles overnight. Much of the rest of the world would manage that quite well. That's a lot of what the Chinese are building.

Yet another unworkable solution to a problem we don't have. Hydrogen has many, many problems and is not needed. Nothing wrong at all with EVs. We can continue to work on the batteries and in 10 or 20 years no one will be giving hydrogen a second thought.

??? Again, solving a problem we don't have. Actually, NOT solving a problem we don't have.

You really do know how to distort facts.

PHEVs do nothing useful for the environment that EVs don't. PHEVs have small batteries that get a full use pretty much every day if used like an EV. That means they wear down in a very few years and create just as much waste batteries as a proper EV. In fact, an EV driven 30 or 40 miles each day and charged to around 50% each night could last 30 years. Chose your poison.

How do you know this? Is this anecdotal?

Not as much as our lifestyle depends on their being paid so little that they won't ever be able to afford to significantly pollute the planet.

What??? Have you gone off the deep end???

What part of 7 billion do you not understand? No one needs to drive cars or sit in hot tubs to pollute the planet when there are 7 billion of us all working to the same end. Even the process of 7 billion people taking a shit significantly pollutes the planet. Insisting on eating meat adds to that. The list of polluting activities is long and you have to go a fair ways down to find driving cars.

On Tuesday, 21 December 2021 at 01:46:27 UTC-8, David Brown wrote: ...

Do you think it is a meaningful comparison between a luxury 7 seater vehicle (Tesla only uses the 100kWh battery is Model S and X) and a small subcompact with probably the lowest fuel consumption of any gasoline vehicle?

Something like a BMW 730 would be a better comparison at about 10l/100km ...

And oil wells and refining have no negative impacts? ...

kw

On Tuesday, 21 December 2021 at 08:56:34 UTC-8, David Brown wrote: ...

Even with the handicap of the energy required for the battery production the CO2 production over the life of the vehicle is significantly less than a comparable conventional vehicle.

The cost (and energy investment) is predicted to reduce significantly over the coming years/decades.

kw

On Wednesday, 22 December 2021 at 07:46:43 UTC-8, David Brown wrote:. ..

Evidence. The percentage of vehicles that have the battery damaged is exceedingly small.

Again what is your evidence. In this context vehicles that are scrapped with good batteries (or even just some good modules) are in high demand for electrification of conventional vehicles or the modules/cells are sold off separately. Just check Ebay. That manufacturing investment is not wasted. It is rare that cells are scrapped.

..

Most published analyses do not agree.

kevin

On Thursday, 23 December 2021 at 04:24:32 UTC-8, David Brown wrote: ..

Evidence?

I doubt that many scrapped EVs have gone to landfills. There are are so few of them that they are are highly valued. The batteries, motors are associated electronics are highly valuable for intended use even if they are from a previous year's model.

There are also not many EVs that have worn out. The modern EV has only been around for about ten years. Most are still on their original battery and have not had damage significant enough to cause them to be scrapped. They are still being used.

A quick look on Google shows many 2013 Tesla Model S cars available selling for about $38,000 (BMW 5 series from the same year are less than $20,000 so an 8 year old Tesla is considered more valuable than a comparable BMW). ... kw

It is quite possible that what I have been seeing is a local phenomena here in Norway, or at least more of a problem here. We have /lots/ of EV's - I think we have a significantly higher proportion of electric cars than anywhere else. And the cost ratios between buying new and paying someone to repair things is quite different here from many other countries. So the economic cut-off point between repair or replace is different.

No.

Exactly my point. It is intrinsically impossible for all 7 billion to have that.

Everyone should have electricity, clean running water, reasonably comfortable shelter, some sort of communications, transport, a decent diet, basic medical care, access to education, and basic safety.

There is no reason that 7 billion people shouldn't have that. The fraction of the population living in extreme poverty continues to decline.

Quite a few Americans don't. Your access to education was limited by your enthusiasm for concentrating on what you imagined was going to be useful.

But quite a few Americans don't. Your society does insist on treating quite a bit of your population badly. The children of single mothers in Sweden do just as well as everybody else - they don't in the US.

Because somebody is changing the definition of "extreme poverty"?

It declines despite the definition being revised upward. But the reasons for poverty are real, and not ceasing to exist any time soon.

Sure. But the reasons for the real poverty that actually matters - kids not getting enough to eat or being well enough housed to be able to take full advantage of the education they - have been eliminated in Sweden, where the kids of single parents do just as well as the children of couples. They could be in other countries if the politicians were prepared to spend tax-payers money in the same way the Swedish government does, and Sweden collects 55% of the national income in taxes, which is higher than anywhere, without wrecking the economy.

Sweden is a fairly rich country, but richer countries do find all sorts of excuses for being less generous to the poor, and more generous to people with political influence.

The main reason for poverty now is bad politics. Compare the Koreas for example. Compare Venezuela to Costa Rica. Dictators wreck economies.