Majority of vehicles on road being EVs

Factual Questions
41

Canada’s “nickel belt” produces cobalt too. It’s mixed in with the nickel.

What I read about lithium production was there is plenty of it in the ground, but refining it can be environmentally difficult. So absent high demand, it’s cheaper to get it from the third world where the companies are facing less demand to limit the mess they make of the surrounding environment.

There was a notable book in the 1970’s called The Limits to Growth and one of its points was that there were not the mineral resources to sustain our lifestyle into the 21st century. This too failed to account for technology reducing the demand for many resources. (think copper for communications vs. silicon fiber optics). It did not take into account deep sea drilling and fracking setting back peak oil several decades. My laptop is far more powerful that the room-filling IBM 370/138 I used to be an operator for… with 1TB of disk space that was the size of 3 refrigerators, and a giant freon-filled air conditioner to keep it running. My current car has two engines and all-wheel drive, and still has trunks front and back… uses no gas, I “fill 'er up” overnight at home for a couple of dollars.

42

While some will switch for the good of the planet the majority will switch to electric when either it is cheaper, or much more conveniant to have an EV or if it is not possible to have an ICE vehicle.

The cost of petrol (gasoline) is far more expensive in Europe, and while electricity is also more expensive the amout you save running an EV is greater in Europe. This needs to be compared with the increased capital costs, I don’t have the data but I suspect the mark-up is similar between Europe and the US.

Countries like the UK have committed to banning the sale of new ICE cars from 2030. Unless this is repealed and with a n average life expectancy for cars of about 14 years you would expect very few ICE cars from the mid 2040s. It is also likely that by around 2040 the reduced demand will mean petrol / gas stations will be much further apart than today and the government are likely to offer scrappage schemes to encourge those driving the last ICE cars to switch (they pay you to have the car scrapped)

43

Bechtel (people who built Hoover dam) is starting construction on the first phase of a Lithium project in 2023 for Lithium Americas at Thacker Pass, Nevada. They anticipate making about 40,000 t/y (tons per year) of battery-quality lithium carbonate in its first phase. Bechtel wins EPCM contract for Lithium Americas' Thacker Pass project - International Mining

Tennessee Lithium is another lithium company starting construction in 2023 and expected to make about 30,000 t/y. https://piedmontlithium.com/projects/tennessee-lithium/

Here is a map of world’s known lithium resources. The map tells you the location of lithium, the size of the resources and the type of resource. Sure China has a lead, but South America, Africa, Australia and even the US are fast catching on !! LiFT – Lithium for Future Technology | Global Lithium Deposit Map

44

If I only could remember who said it… Doesn’t matter, I believe it to be true

We will fix climate change. Just don’t expect that to fix the rest of the world’s woes. Those won’t go away.

45

SJ0004 - Phasing out new electric vehicle sales by 2035.

Paraphrasing, “whereas oil and gas are awesome, and batteries use scarce resources, and suck, we want to stop the sale of electric cars”

46

Next up, bringing back witch trials for mouthy goodwives and rules regulating the training and licensing for haruspication.

Stranger

47

okay, folks–this is the Sdope, so let’s tell the truth:
Did any of you not have to google that word?
:slight_smile:

48

No. I did not have the guts.

49

The limited radius of action of EVs, and the long distances in the US, mean that I can’t see them replacing IC engines anytime. Not without radical improvements in battery storage and charging rate. Hell, there isnt the charging infrastructure HERE, in England, to go anything more than local journeys without doing enough planning for D-Day.

50

The West Coast of the US has plenty of charging infrastructure. No real planning required. Most cars will lead you to the appropriate charger. I have heard, however, other parts of the country are not as developed.

51

Or you get led to a charger only to find it is out of service, and you don’t have enough battery to get to another one. Sucks to be you. Or, the chargers have been throttled by the electric company due to lack of electricity and your 20 minute charge turns into two hours or more.

And availability of chargers might be great along major roads and interstates, but many people work in the backcountry where even gas stations are few and far between. A look at any map of chargers will show you long stretches of roads where there are no chargers at all for stretches of over 100 miles.

In Canada it’s far worse, and yet we have an even more stringent EV mandate. And yet, here in Alberta Edmonton to Fort McMurray is one of our busiest roads, and there isn’t a single EV charger along its 435 km route. The same with the highway to Peace River, 489 kilometers with no chargers. We used to make a regular trip from Calgary to Saskatoon - I just checked, and the road we used to take has a 405 km section without any chargers.

Then there are the many, many people who work in rural areas. My grandfather was a hail adjuster and would have to drive hundreds of miles every day between farms, mostly on back roads. An EV never would have worked for him. Canada is full of such workers. We’re a gigantic, spread out country with a small population.

The decisions for all of us are made by people living in Southern Ontario and Quebec, where half of Canada’s population lives in a tiny section of the country along the US border. What works for them will not work for the other half spread out across the second largest country in the world.

And yet, we are mandated to be 20% EV by 2026 (never happen), 60% by 2030 (ditto), and 100% by 2035. Not just cars, mind you, but all passenger vehicles. Trucks, buses, you name it.

As it is, the average wait list for an EV in Canada is now 11 months, the average cost of an EV is $82,000, and 7% of passenger cars sold in 2022 were EVs, and 0% of light trucks. and yet somehow 20% of all passenger vehicle sales including light trucks have to be EV in three years, and 60% in seven years.

To see how improbable this is, roughly 70% of the vehicles sold in Canada are light trucks. There isn’t a single EV light truck available to take home right now in Canada, and they have 2 year waiting lists. Trucks, with their gigantc batteries are especially bad in winter, as the energy needed to heat the battery is higher. The Ford F-150 Lightning apparently loses 20% of its range when you put on winter tires, and 50% more if the temperature is below zero. Also, if you leave one out on the job site all day in winter (which everyone has to do), the vehicle will need to warm the battery again, killing the range you have left. Try to tow something in winter, and you’ll be lucky to make it 50 miles. These things just aren’t ready for commercial work, and yet we are being forced into them.

If we have to get to 20% of all passenger vehicles being electric in 2026, without trucks 75% of our car sales will have to be electric. Not gonna happen. To get to 60%, 100% of cars would have to be electric, and 50% of light trucks. That won’t happen either.

52

You act like charger availability is just some fixed thing and that it isn’t trivial to install new ones. Sorry to break it to you, but Edmonton to Fort McMurray probably isn’t at the top of the priority list for Tesla or the other networks. When there’s some degree of demand, whether from mandates or just natural, chargers will get installed. It’s trivial, and can be done anywhere with electrical service. It’s getting more trivial, too–Tesla just started deploying modular Superchargers that bundle 4 chargers with an electrical box, and that can be trivially daisy chained. Doesn’t even require pouring concrete. You could install a 16-bay setup in a day with a handful of people.

53

And how are you going to get power to that 16 bay setup? Maximum charge rate for a Tesla is 250kW. A 16 bay supercharger installation could draw as much as 4MW. That is not a trivial amount of power. And you’ll need serious cable runs for what, 175A at 800V or so? That’ll cost a fortune to pull out to rural areas. Cables to carry that kind of load run $50m or so, or $50,000/km minus bulk discounts. And the price of copper is going up.

And can the grid handle it? We’re already having periodic ‘grid emergencies’ and the spot price of electricity is going as high as $1200/MW. At that price, charging a 133 kWh truck battery would cost you $160 plus whatever profit the charging station demands.

We will miss all the government’s targets, probably by a lot, and that’s a good thing. Canada is nowhere near ready to transition to 20% EVs by 2026, 60% by 2030 and 100% by 2030. I’d be surprised to see us get to 20% by 2030, and 100% approximately never.

Have you seen what happens to the range of an EV truck in -20 weather and deep snow? It gets colder than that here a LOT. It’s -18 here right now. How many work trucks sit outside in the cold all day? Most of them. How much range do you lose having to re-warm the battery? As much as 27%. One Lightning owner let his truck cold-soak overnight, then plugged it in to charge. He couldn’t, because the battery was too cold. He had to,wait for an hour or two for the battery to,warm up on the charger before the battery would even take a charge.

Ford recommends leaving the truck in a garage and plugged in when not using it, and pre-warming the battery. Those are not options for many people here, especially those working on remote job sites. And a standard Canadian garage will have a hard time fitting an F-150. There are a lot of trucks in my neighborhood, and almost all of them sit outside on the pad.

Canada is truck country. 70% of our light duty vehicles sold are trucks. Current percentage of EV trucks in Canada? Zero. Next year? Zero, because none will be available by then. In 2025 there might be some available, but I would bet our uptake of trucks will still be in the very low single digits. Also, the base price of the Lightning in Canada is now $80,000, which is above the median income. It’s a rich person’s toy right now. Optioned out units with the long range battery easily go,over $110,000.

To hit even 20% of light vehicles sold by 2026 being EV, roughly 75% of our passenger cars sold would have to be EV. Last year that number was 7%. This year will likely be lower because of lack of availability and the economic downturn and higher interest rates.

54

No, it’s more like 1.5 MW for 16 bays (you can watch this video, though I don’t recommend it since it’s not that well done, but it does actually show off the sites in person). The box for each 4-cluster is 350 MW, IIRC. You don’t size the thing for absolute peak load, because the battery can’t take the full 250 kW for very long. When one car starts dropping off, it shifts the load to another. Same idea as your internet connection, which is oversubscribed by 10x or even 100x. Even with every stall occupied, you’re never pulling close to full load.

You don’t run at 800 V incoming, either. You have a stepdown from 7.2 kV or 14.4 kV or whatever the medium transmission voltage happens to be locally. You put the main transformer right next to the modules, so there’s no need for long runs at low voltage. And you run aluminum, not copper (overhead lines are aluminum-wrapped steel, and there’s no reason to use copper for the buried lines between modules, either).

I checked your route and pretty much the whole way is lined with medium or high-tension transmission lines. There are also plenty of industrial power users as well as RV parks and the like (which supply 50 A to maybe hundreds of spots). If you’re really in a pinch, you can use a battery backup to smooth out the load.

I’m not saying anything about whether Canada can hit their EV targets–I genuinely have no idea. But charger availability is something that can be fixed very easily.

55

Let’s do a bit of math. From here, I can see that the WAADT ( Weighted Annual Average Daily Traffic) for Hwy 63 is 3,970 veh/day for 2021. If we assume, conservatively, that all those drivers are going the full distance from Edmonton to Fort McMurray, that’s 1,720,000 veh-km/day, or 72,000 veh-km/h. Multiply by an EV efficiency of 160 W-h/veh-km to get 11.5 MW.

So 11.5 MW average to power all small vehicle traffic for what is in your estimation a reasonably busy road. Peak will be much higher, of course, but on the other hand much of the trip can be handled by home charging. Either way, this seems like small potatoes compared to what an entire city requires. Edmonton surely has multiple gigawatts of power supporting it.

56

I couldn’t find the perfect thread to add this to and didn’t want to start new thread about this, but I thought this was sufficiently interesting to post. So I’ll add it to one of my own threads that’s related (gift link):

The reduction in demand for oil is due pretty much entirely to adoption of EVs. Let’s hope for the sake of the planet that the shrinking is rapid.

57

There’s a spot - Bechawna Bay north of Sault Ste Marie on the road to Wawa - that leg is 200km, so it can be dicey in cold weather for some vehicles, but the chargers are L2 (and only 208V not 240V) because that stretch of the Trans-Canada is deserted. Bechawana has only 1 phase service because a restaurant and rest stop is the only thing there. It would be impossible to put in a supercharger. without a massive expenditure - miles of power lines and a huge transformer or two.

Yes, some of the more “off the beaten path” locations are difficult to access, and doubly so in winter. I can’t take my Tesla to some ski resorts, because there and back to the nearest charge (let alone supercharger) is too far. My estimate is that range is halved for highway driving in minus weather.

However, that does not describe 95% of personal travel. And as demand increases, so will charging options. I expect battery buffering to be a standard part of supercrging in less busy venues, Instead of a vehicle requiring 150kW (or up to 350) pulled directly off the grid, the demand will be supplemented with a battery pack, which will “refill” while the charger is idle. (Of course, this concept breaks down in busy locations, but presumably a place where therre is a line-up of cars to charge will be a locale where there is a decent electrical feed.)

OTOH, an unexplored area is L2 charge. For now, you will find the ocasional L2 charger in a strategic location (Lake Louise ski resort, and the hotel, and the rest stop off the highway all have a few, for example - enough to get you charged up enough to get to Banff.) The problem will come when demand for this exceeds supply, when workplaces or resorts or shopping malls need not a handful of chargers, but rows of them, and a need to manage how long cars are parked once charged.

But consider how ubiquitous gas stations are - then consider a charging station needs a lot less care and management. It does not have an tank that can be siphoned or need re-filling, it does not take cash - just pre-arranged credit; most EV’s (all?) are smart enough not to drive off while plugged in. It’s something that can sit in the corner of any business’s lot and be a revenue generator.

A mor interesting conundrum (some states are addressing) is the lack of gasoline taxes when most vehicles are EV’s.

58

They’re already building early versions of this:
https://electrek.co/2022/09/12/tesla-supercharger-v4-station-megapack-solar-glimpse-future/

This was for a fairly large installation, and the article posits the reason as avoiding demand charges (i.e., very high costs during peak hours). But it would work just as well at a smaller scale to get the most out of a limited supply line.

Every two kilowatts of capacity can refill about a car per day (assuming a charging stop puts about 48 kWh into the battery). So even a modest 100 kW line (not even enough for a single Supercharger stall) could handle 50 cars per day with a battery backup.

59

Another issue is that under the rules of many states (and provinces) other companies cannot resell electricity by the kilowatt-hour - so chargers have to simulate this with per-minute rates, even though when I first plug in, with say, 20% battery, my car charges adding over 1,000 miles per hour, and it steadily drops as it reaches higher charge. By 85% it’s dropping to 300mph or less. The incentive is to add just enough to get to the next charger, rather than a comfortable safety margin. You pay a premium for that extra top-up.

60

There is an Amazon warehouse near me that just installed rows and rows of chargers. Driving buy I can’t really get an accurate count, but “dozens” would be my guess. This is to support their fleet of electric delivery vehicles. The point being, installing lots of level 2 chargers is a solvable problem, and even if the solution is expensive, it’s not going to be a hundred miles of high voltage power lines expensive.

This is one of the places where the law will need to change to a more efficient model. An alternative, which might be agreeable to the utilities, is that the chargers are owned in whole or in a partnership with the utility.