The Biden administration is going “all in” on electric vehicles (EVs) as the solution to the world’s greatest threat – climate change. Putting aside for a moment the question of whether climate change is truly our greatest threat, EVs are not the solution. At least not now. The claim that EVs are “zero emission” vehicles is inherently false. And while EV technology may be ready, the nation’s power grid is not. Pushing EVs onto the nation’s fragile power grid is a recipe for disaster.
The idea that EVs have zero emissions and are environmentally friendly is patently false. The claim of zero emissions ignores the emissions of the power plants that produce the electricity that charges these vehicles. Today, that electricity comes mostly from fossil fuel plants that emit greenhouse gases. A better description would be “displaced emissions”.
The zero emissions claim also ignores the emissions required to manufacture EVs. The EV manufacturing process produces 68% more CO2 emissions than the manufacturing process for gasoline vehicles. Thus, before an EV has even driven a single mile, it has already emitted more pollution than a gasoline vehicle. EV proponents claim that EVs will quickly offset this initial difference once they are on the road. But this is based on the false assumption that much of the energy used to charge EVs will be from clean sources like solar or wind. More about that later.
The claim that EVs are environmentally friendly completely ignores the battery life cycle. EV batteries are made of rare metals and minerals, primarily lithium, nickel, and cobalt. These materials come from mining and processing operations that can significantly impact the environment. And most of the world’s supply is controlled by China, which does not have a great track record on environmental stewardship. End-of-life disposal is also problematic. You can’t just throw a battery in the trash. The energy required to dispose of these batteries will also produce CO2 emissions.
The biggest downfall to EVs right now is that the nation’s electric power grid cannot handle the demand that is required to charge millions of EVs. Our power grid cannot even handle short term emergencies like the increased demand caused by the recent cold snap that swept across the United States.
In Tennessee, utility companies implemented rolling blackouts because they could not meet the daily demand for electricity. For the past 20 years our electricity production capacity has remained flat. If we make the switch to EVs, where will the additional electricity come from? Building new power plants takes many years and we have insufficient transmission lines to carry the new electricity even if we could produce it.
While the notion of powering our new EVs with solar and wind power is nice, it is also impractical given the state of these technologies today. The two critical factors that prevent solar and wind from being viable alternatives to fossil and nuclear power in the near term are power density and power input requirements.
Power density is how much land area is required to produce a given amount of electricity – in other words watts per square meter of land. It takes about 2000 times as much land for a wind farm to produce the same amount of electricity as a gas or nuclear plant. And it takes about 200 times as much land with solar. When you look at the electricity demand for EVs, we would have to cover several states with solar panels and wind farms to produce enough electricity to power our EVs. And that will take decades to build, even if we were OK with giving up all that land.
The other roadblock for wind and solar is their energy input requirements. It takes energy to make energy. Or another way to look at it is that some of the energy that is produced must go back into creating more energy, rather than being available to customers. This ratio of energy produced to energy required is only 3.5 to 1 for solar and wind, as compared to 30 to 1 for oil and gas and 100 to 1 for nuclear. Given the poor return on energy investment for wind and solar and the long regulatory timeline for new nuclear power, the only realistic means to add the new generating capacity quickly is fossil fuel. And that’s the very thing the Biden administration is trying to avoid.
The reality is that EVs arrived a decade or two before their time. America must first solve its energy production issues before switching to EVs. Today’s push to convert the nation to EVs is going to create more problems than it solves.
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As last week’s bitterly cold temperatures rolled through the Bluegrass State, Kentucky Utilities and Louisville Gas and Electric instituted one-hour service cutoffs, to ration demand. Now, I’m not sure just how that works, because if you shut off the heat for an hour, the HVAC systems are going to be working that much harder when the sparktricity is restored, to bring the place back up to temperature.
There are very few electric vehicles in Kentucky, and most of them are going to be in liberal Lexington and Louisville . . . where the power cutoffs were most obvious. But there’s another factor: half of Kentuckians heat their homes with something other than electricity, and if the left get their way, and everyone has to go to some form of electric heat, the state’s power generating capacity would have to increase to meet that demand.
Electricity is our most weather-vulnerable utility. Water, sewer, and natural gas are delivered underground, and a heavy snowstorm doesn’t shut them down. But electric service is delivered primarily via overhear wires, which are vulnerable to heavy snowstorms, icing, high winds, and the like. The more dependent we become upon electricity, the more vulnerable everything is to service interruptions.