Is the US EV market dead?

In My Humble Opinion
321

This is terrific. Thanks for sharing!

Also, the EPA has (for now) an interactive calculator for estimating your specific car’s emissions based on where you live:

Like for me, it shows:

All things considered, EVs are generally and usually better for the environment.

But I’m going to play devil’s advocate here for a sec, anyway, just because it is complicated.

Speaking at the “macro” level, as a nation, US electricity production is largely via fossil fuels… 60% of our electricity comes from natural gas and coal:

(from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3)

This is called the “grid mix” (or energy mix/fuel mix/etc.), and it varies a lot between regions. DesertDog’s map shows it at the local level, and Power Profiler | US EPA has it at the subgrid level.

The EPA actually has an entire page dedicated to EV mythbusting: Electric Vehicle Myths | US EPA

And generally speaking, all of this is true — EVs are almost always cleaner and better. However, where it gets tricky is that a lot of these forward-looking projections and assumptions, e.g.:

Are assuming “progress” over time, as in sane policy combined with good engineering, planning, politics, science, etc.

But that isn’t necessarily the road we are headed down any longer.

EV cleanliness is a function of the national grid mix. If the grid mix gets cleaner (as was previously hoped for and assumed), EVs get cleaner. But now we’re facing a possibility of the grid getting dirtier over time due to factors like:

  • US politics steer us back towards fracking (natural gas is cleaner than coal, but dirtier than renewables)
  • Large-scale hydro being built less, and in some cases removed (due to environmental justice/tribal fishing concerns, their impacts on local ecosystems, water rights, etc.)
  • Nuclear struggling to regain a foothold after Fukushima (although this is changing a bit now)
  • AI data centers requiring massive amounts of power 24/7, even while solar isn’t producing
  • If EVs take off, a further strain on the electrical grid
  • Conservative and anti-technology pushback on smart grids technologies, like smart meters, managed appliances, vehicle-to-grid charging, etc.
  • The availability of essential battery manufacturing materials, i.e., if we have to start going to war over it like we did for oil, that will drastically increase the human and environmental toll

We are already starting to see some slight evidence for this, e.g.: Chart: How the US electricity mix changed last year | Canary Media

Solar went up 30% year-over-year, but coal went up 12% in the same time period. This will probably get worse if Republicans keep winning.

It also has the side effect of moving pollution from one area to another. Tailpipe emissions are at the point of use, whereas EV emissions are at the point of generation. This means that as more and more cars become EVs, air pollution will generally move away from urban areas (which are often bluer and richer) to redder and poorer areas (where electricity generation, especially fossil fuels, happens). Cities will get cleaner but the rural areas will see an increase in air and noise pollution — this is already happening quite a lot with AI data centers being built in smaller towns and places with cheap land and power, and whose residents cannot organize well enough to fight back (or whose politicians can be more easily bribed). So from an environmental justice perspective, EVs have this way of hiding pollution from us the same way our recycling does, by outsourcing it to places we don’t see day to day and care less about.

None if it had to be this way — the whole idea was that EVs would go hand-in-hand with more renewables and a smarter grid — but if those don’t happen, EVs will get correspondingly dirtier over time.

I don’t have the math handy, but I think if coal becomes a significant enough portion of the grid mix again, EV emissions could start to creep up on ICE emissions… burning coal is dirtier than gasoline, but ICE engines are much less efficient than big power plants. There might be a break-even point where, say, BEVs on the worse grids are more polluting than an efficient hybrid-ICE car on a cleaner grid.

322

You left out: US politics killing wind plants.

323

Both people invested in fossil fuels and those useless, filthy, stinking, pinko bird-lovers. Like me :slightly_smiling_face:.

I viscerally dislike wind power installations generally because the direct macro impact on certain specific bird populations is problematic. Fuck clean power if it kills even a single extra Ferruginous Hawk!

Well, not really…but when I’m feeling particularly hyperbolic I can sorta lean that way. Everything is a trade-off. The impact of a large, early wind farm in an area I’m fairly well-acquainted with has been pretty bad. Thankfully people are still actively working the problem.

324

You may be happy to hear that the POTUS is doing everything he can to ensure the continued existence of coal power plants, including requiring that the Department of Defense make long-term agreements to buy power from them. For this and other reasons, he was given an award as the “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal.”

325

Right!?! How can one compare large, hideously intrusive wind installations with the sweet, seductive, glistening velvet beauty of pure anthracite? Well, okay one of my grandfathers did die from cancer that almost certainly started with black lung from his youthful days as a miner back in good ole’ Export. But other than him, everyone loved coal!

Cognitive dissonance in environmental policy has always been an issue for me and many others I expect. Every time I see a push for say a massive solar installation in some place like the Mojave, I wince. Because I like the desert and I know how fragile of an ecosystem it can be (never mind the aesthetics - solar plants are hideous eyesores pasted across a formerly lovely vista). That solar installation is absolutely going to do serious damage to the local environment. That fish-farming project is absolutely going to pollute the immediate waterway. That desalination plant is 100% going to cause some significant ocean pollution.

Is it worth it? Often, yeah - unfortunately so. Not always, but often. But I’m aware enough of the tradeoffs that it makes me wince. Because there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. It’s one of the major issues that swung me around on the potentials of nuclear power. Decentralized small footprint power sources is what I would prefer, the smaller the better.

But we’re not there yet, so painful tradeoffs are sometimes required.

326

Environmental policies are necessarily a delicate balance of various tradeoffs (and concessions, and bribes, but…). I don’t think there is ever a “right” answer to “which is more important, the last 100 members of this endangered species, found only here, that three biologists really care about, or generating a few hundred more kilowatts of cleaner power to slow down climate change by 0.000012%”.

However, decentralize that, and you get to do it a million times over. On one hand you probably end up with more resilience to disasters and blackouts, but on the other hand you also end up with a million times more environmental surveys and public meetings, with only local expertise on both sides.

With a huge-scale project, the environmental assessments will take years of careful examinations and planning, with input from the big national (or international) environmental NPOs and probably hundreds if not thousands of expert eyes.

It is much easier to get away with local projects when you only have a few county officials looking over the report provided by two part-time environmental consultants stating “no significant impact” — probably the same people who see each other at the supermarket and pub, none of who happened to care enough about that rare bird, especially if it risks their retirement. Granted, the damage is probably lesser there too just from the smaller scale, but it’s not always easy to even identify those damages upfront, much less enforce them over the decades. The country is littered with brownfields and superfund sites that somebody somewhere OKed decades ago.

Localized regulations also makes it easier for developers to go “shopping” between different states to find the most favorable and least regulated states (e.g. companies moving from California to Texas), or courtrooms, to find the judge most sympathetic to their cause when they inevitably get sued later on.

Sadly, in the US, “local governance” almost always means “tiny local governments and NPOs exploited and dominated by giant multinational energy conglomerates”. They don’t have the economies of scale to effectively oversee and regulate every project that comes their way.

It can also work the other way (as in NIMBYism), when a group of local homeowners/fishermen/birders/whatever doesn’t want some good-for-the-state, good-for-the-country project to impact their rural mansion viewscape.

I don’t think the average US person, including those working in county and city governments, would really have a good grasp of electricity OR environmental fundamentals. Our environmental regulations are hard-won lessons written into law written 50 years too late, in an effort to prevent ill effects another 500 years from now. I’m not sure that small-scale hyperlocal democracy is really equipped to consider that on a case-by-case basis…

(Edit: But then again, it goes both ways too. Nowadays it’s the states and local groups fighting back against federal environmental inaction / purposeful destruction.)

327

Huh, this claim from your link surprises me:

large raptors usually fly too high to hit windows

I’ve seen (and heard) a Cooper’s hawk fly into my window as i was watching. Startled the heck out of me. I think it survived, at any rate, i didn’t find a body under the window.

Maybe that counts as a small raptor, not a large one?

I’m not surprised that raptors are killed by wind turbine at a much higher rate than corvids. Corvids are smart. Raptors tend to be dumb killing machines.

I’m still a fan of wind turbines, and I’m happy to read that cheap interventions, like painting the blades, can help.

328

It’s worth noting that the Audubon strongly and publicly supports (properly sited and mitigated) wind power: Wind Power and Birds | Audubon

There’s more and more tech being thrown at it, too: How New Technology Is Making Wind Farms Safer for Birds | Audubon

Though these days, I think it’s usually cheap solar and not the threat of bird kills that’s really impacting wind.

Besides, probably the most important thing for birds (not specifically raptors though) is to just keep ol’ Fluffy in the catio. Some 70% of human-related bird kills come from cats: Threats to Birds | U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service They kill (quite literally) 10,000x more birds than turbines do.

329

I think most folks refer to them as medium-sized, splitting the difference :slightly_smiling_face:. I think by and large they are referring to the larger soaring raptors that hunt by scanning the ground from high altitudes. Golden eagles and red-tailed hawks are usually pretty high on the list of turbine bird kills. However so are plenty of smaller raptors like burrowing owls and American kestrels that hunt in a similar fashion. I wouldn’t put too much emphasis into the size thing - I’d say it’s a lot more about habitat and behavior.

330

As the Technology Connections video, that’s been discussed in a few threads here, mentions all you have to do is takeover some of the farmland used for ethanol, so instead of disrupting a pristine wild land, your displacing an environmentally harmful monoculture. Or just put them on roofs and over parking lots.

Everything I’ve heard talks about climate change and (possibly climate related) habitat loss being far bigger dangers than the actual turbines themselves. The wind farms are easy to villainize because you can count the dead birds, instead of just a general “40 years ago we used to see hawks here all the time” or whatever.

By far the biggest killer of birds is cats.

Of course it is all tradeoffs, but the split isn’t between a wind farm and nothing, it’s between a wind farm and a coal or gas plant.

There are lots of very well funded groups that benefit by spreading disinformation about renewable energy, so be very careful exactly which downsides of renewables you believe. Expect the same level of proof about the downsides as you do about the benefits.

331

I’m going to guess that turbines kill more red tailed hawks than cats do, and that cats kill enormously more goldfinches than turbines.

332

Or nuclear. If we could ever build another nuclear plant.

333

Anyway, back to the topic… I still see a pretty healthy market for EVs out here in the liberal NE. And China and Europe are buying them, too.

334

Solar panels can co-exist with agriculture; it’s a concept called agrivoltaics. For instance, some crops benefit from being under solar panels (presumably they still get some sun exposure, just not as much).

335

Plus it’s like lighting your home with a candle vs. a lamp with rechargeable battery. With the one you’re constantly buying and consuming new candles.

With gas at $3.50 a gallon I figured with charging at home the cost per mile running the Bolt was about 1/3 the cost of a non-hybrid ICE. Doing DCFC on the road, with most offerings at around 50¢ per kWh the cost is about the same.

Here is a 90(!) minute analysis by Technology Connections on what he terms disposable energy vs. renewable energy. Note that at the one-hour mark he has a phony ending so he can get into the political ramifications.

336

If you have a 220v electric dryer (lots of people do), you can share that circuit with a smart switch that will only power one outlet at a time. Not free, of course, and it’s conceivable that you’d absolutely need to dry clothes and charge your car at the same time, but that seems very much an edge case.

337

You’d still need to be able to park the car close to the dryer, in that case (within reach of the charging cable). If it’s out in the driveway or on the street, it’s probably too far.

And I thiiiiink the EV charging cables are limited by spec/code to be <= 25 feet… previous discussion: Level 1 EV chargers and extension cords? - #12 by Reply

So hopefully you have a garage, not full of stuff, next to your laundry room…

338

Why couldn’t the dryer circuit wiring be extended to the garage?

339

Yes, I may have been unclear. “Not free, of course” in my post wasn’t just the switch but also running wire to wherever you want your charger. My understanding is that the smart switch gets installed near the breaker box and then you run wire to where you want the charger. A wire run isn’t necessarily cheap, but much cheaper than installing a new electric service.

340

nvm, ninja’d