RE: Rise of the econuts29 Apr 2019 00:55
anovas, yes I did see that zerohedge article. I also read the German report it is based on, and another Swedish one that that one cited. I take it with a very large pinch of salt. The Swedish paper is Romare & Dahllöf (2017): The Lifecycle Energy Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Lithium-Ion Batteries. It gives the CO2 impact per kWh of Li-ion battery capacity. The German paper (Buchal, Karl und Sinn, 2019: Kohlemotoren, Windmotoren und Dieselmotoren: Was zeigt die CO2-Bilanz?) then takes that number and sticks a finger in the air to estimate battery life and thus a CO2 number per kilometre driven. The thing is, they estimate the battery life at 150,000 km (10 years x 15,000 km) whereas there are Nissan Leaf batteries with more than 80% charging capacity after half a million kilometres. It's quite likely that well-managed Li-ion batteries can hit the million km mark. Now the 90-110 g CO2/km becomes 15-20. Add in the CO2 from electricity production and your EV still has half the emissions of the most efficient diesel. And let's not forget that the German CO2 cost of electricity itself is unflattering, since the Germans have replaced 170 TWh/yr of carbon-free nuclear electricity with filthy brown lignite after Fukushima.
In short, while I think the econuts should be challenged on their zany assumptions, I see no mileage in making tenuous claims about the dirtiness of EVs just to score points. There are many other challenges with rollout of EVs that mean they are not a panacea for emissions reductions. Meanwhile the econuts are indeed a scary bunch. The ones who besieged Westminster the other day had among their demands: a limit of one short haul and one long haul flight per citizen per year, and a one child policy. Come back Chairman Mao -- all is forgiven!
Personally I believe the world will continue to use more energy, not less. It is is vital to the aspirations of billion in developing nations, to whom activists glueing themselves to a road in London might as well be aliens from another planet. The hundreds of millions lifted out of poverty just in the last two decades owe it in no small part to the availability of cheap energy. Those of us in more privileged settings owe all our creature comforts to it. I just converted the units on my last electricity bill into kilocalories. It works out at 6,200 kCal per day. That's the energy consumption of the invisible slaves that cook my food, wash my dishes and clothes, mow the lawn, keep the lights on, provide the entertainment, and all the other things that previous generations could only dream of unless they were among the tiny few that had actual servants to that stuff (at far more than 6,200 kCal).
If we are serious about emission reductions we need to get serious about nuclear. And we need to use bridge fuels like natural gas to keep the lights on while we apply our ingenuity to developing cleaner nukes. What we don't want to do it crash the economy with econut policies.
Sign In
Follow the stocks
