@Peter, I didn’t say charging at home with local solar and battery storage is practical in terms of life cycle cost, only that I believe its the objective of our local bureaucrats, in a sunny climate. It frees them from spending money on the grid, and allows them to rationalize the continued dismantling and neglect of existing electrical power plants – which is another part of the associated ideology, at least until enough people’s air conditioning overloads the system in summer.
Regardless, the vast majority of energy worldwide is sourced from hydrocarbons and will be for the foreseeable future. So if the world were to transition to EVs, the majority of them will in reality (as opposed to fantasy) be powered by burning hydrocarbon fuels. Notable exceptions are unique situations in countries like e.g. Norway and Switzerland (hydro) or France (nuclear). Some local areas of the US have simIlar situations. As others have already noted, nuclear probably is the best bet in other areas for generating electricity without burning anything, except that the developing world that is burning an increasing amount of fuel can’t generally be trusted with it. And upgrading the grid remains a very expensive problem.
I was BTW fascinated with the circa-1966 French tidal power program when I was a kid 
Tidal power is still going and very successfully too, especially in the last year or so. Although expensive to build at the time it is now proving to be very economical.
Having read that article Silvaire posted it never ceases to surprise me all the reasons that can be found not to do something. It was the same with nuclear power (or at least it became that way). Now with a war in Ukraine, even the greens are shouting that we need more nuclear power and calling it green technology. Wind turbines on land were the answer for the greens, despite knowing the reliability problems, now they are a nuisance. The same goes for all energy technology. It will be the same if commercial fusion becomes a possibility.
It always reminds me of an old song. It goes something along the lines of "There’s a hole in my bucket dear Lisa dear Lisa. Well fix it dear Henry dear Henry, fix it. With what shall I fix it dear Lisa dear Lisa…. " and so on.
Not that it solves the problem of energy storage and not that 2MW is a lot, but still nice to see that in my neck of the woods other renewables than solar are picking up. But of course there are a lot of calm days here..
https://www.portadriano.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Port-Adriano-Ed-May-2022.pdf
Barcelona’s port has kms and kms of quays, and if you add all other ports of Spain, it becomes more than a drop in the ocean.
I’m less pessimistic than Silvaire when it comes to the speed of transition to renewables. The political will is there, there is a lot of money sloshing around. And Big Oil of course realizes that in order to survive long term they have to become real energy companies. Not just in name (“Beyond Petroleum”) but in deeds. Of course we have a major problem in the short term caused by Putin and there will be investments in oil & gas, but it’s just a prelude to a massive shift to renewables. Thanks Putin!
Great thread, and don’t change the name. This way we get all the car geeks, probably many of them here, to participate 
dutch_flyer wrote:
What emissions do they produce? The process of manufacturing them creates emissions, and they consume power, which may or may not be associated with the creation of emissions depending on the source. But the car itself produces no emissions.
One of the main emissions is tire “dust” which is a real pollutant. It is bad for our lungs, it kills fish and/or ends up staying in their bodies (which we then eat and ingest), etc. See e.g.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/25/tyre-dust-the-stealth-pollutant-becoming-a-huge-threat-to-ocean-life
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/03/tire-particle-pollution-may-be-harming-freshwater-and-estuary-ecosystems/
https://earth.org/tyre-pollution/
Since EVs are heavier than comparable size/class ICE vehicles, they also emit more tyre dust.
I expect they also emit some burnt or “mist” small droplets of oil/grease (their moving parts must be lubricated, are they not?), small pieces of their air filters (the filter for outside air used to ventilate the cabin) and whatever material the ducting is made of, specks of whatever forms their air-contact layer (paint? lacquer?), small pieces of the cabin flooring material (which gets eroded by your shoes on it), etc.
And wouldn’t the less-than-perfect electrical connections (in the meaning that nothing is perfect except the “spherical cows” of physicists) recombine some ambient dioxygene into ozone (and thus emit ozone), too?
I think the real reductions in emissions will come if automatic driving makes our roads safer. It would be easy to make a small car (1 or 2 seater) that is far more fuel efficient than anything you are likely to find on the roads today. It’s hard to make a lightweight car that will also be safe in a collision with a much larger one, and in recent years the trend has been towards larger heavier vehicles, which largely offsets any improvements in efficiency. This limits both IC and electric vehicles, in terms of how much their emissions can be reduced.
A family of 6 going camping will always need a large car for that particular journey, but if it wasn’t for the safety aspect I think we’d see a lot of small efficient vehicles on the roads. A lot of my colleagues commute 40 miles each way, as single occupants of 5 seater cars. The fuel costs are crippling.
lionel wrote:
Since EVs are heavier than comparable size/class ICE vehicles, they also emit more tyre dust.I expect they also emit some burnt or “mist” small droplets of oil/grease (their moving parts must be lubricated, are they not?), small pieces of their air filters (the filter for outside air used to ventilate the cabin) and whatever material the ducting is made of, specks of whatever forms their air-contact layer (paint? lacquer?), small pieces of the cabin flooring material (which gets eroded by your shoes on it), etc.
And wouldn’t the less-than-perfect electrical connections (in the meaning that nothing is perfect except the “spherical cows” of physicists) recombine some ambient dioxygene into ozone (and thus emit ozone), too?
Yes, but it’s going to be a matter of degree. Electric vehicles emit less brake particulates due to regenerative braking. They tend to use electrical switching rather than brushed motors, so are not going to produce ozone. If you look inside the engine on my VW aircraft, there is a pool of oil in the engine case swooshing around all the moving parts. Gas from the cylinders bleeds past the seals into the engine case, and is ejected through the breather tube – along with a proportion of the oily foam that the cranks have thrown up. In contrast, an electric drivetrain can be more or less sealed from the environment and uses a much smaller amount of lubricants. Both types of cars likely have a filter for the air conditioning, but only the IC car will have an air filter for the engine (which is likely to breathe much more air than the inhabitants of the car). IC engines also produce N2O and other pollutants.
I agree partly with your point about tyre particulates.
kwlf wrote:
I agree partly with your point about tyre particulates.
But those do not affect the climate.
More info on that burnt out cable. The genuine item is not available, two 3rd party versions are reportedly poorly made and give a lot of trouble, and when another cable was located and obtained, the public charging point across the road went offline. So they are pretty well stuffed.
Weird that a “cable” should be such a problem, but you get the same with Gamin dashcams and the “cables” for those, which contain a voltage regulator, but the dashcam is extremely sensitive to the supply voltage, and even a small voltage drop in the cable stops it working.
Clearly more R&D is needed
@gallois, the problem with ‘doing something’ to solve all the problems of the world is that we only have so many arrows in the quiver. In expending resources on an intractable problem we can’t use them elsewhere, in areas that provide a better net effect for human well being. Forcing people to spend their discretionary resources on EVs that will run their entire life cycle on natural gas and coal because there is no technology or funding to make it otherwise, is not a particularly good idea.
The real energy issue in Europe is energy security and that has been the case for a long time – I could dig up my own posts here making that point long before Putin invaded Ukraine. However, while meanwhile accepting over population and living beyond available natural resources, prior to Russian aggression ‘nobody’ in Europe wanted to admit it except maybe the French with their long term nuclear program. So the solution is to promote a horror story of biblical proportions to motivate local reductions in fossil fuel consumption, and a lot of people lose their perspective on what is actually possible or proper worldwide. I think it would be better if Europe had concentrated on its own regional energy security problem first, in an honest and effective manner utilizing all the tools in the toolbox, and if that generated useful renewable energy technology that others could use for an overall betterment for their own populations later on, great.
The opposite approach has created a bunch of wacko ideas and priorities, in my opinion, that will not serve mankind well over the next say 200 years without a realignment to reality. And if one really did want to reduce the amount of CO2 in the environment over a few centuries the way to do it in reasonable fashion, without harming millions of people is to cut the world population in half – which might be more reasonably possible than supporting a huge, increasingly energy hungry world population on non-carbon energy.
