(06-07-2017, 09:30 AM)welshpug Wrote: indeed, Run has nailed the thing they have forgotten, I have a friend that works for western power and he said the grid has nowhere near the capacity required for the country to go electric cars.
they are getting there insofar as there's far less reliance on fossil fuel, there's always a bit of wind and the tide never stops, they need to work harder on harnessing these forces.
one thing I'm still not convinced of, all these precious metals and chemicals going into the batteries, is producing and transporting these (currently by using fossil fuels) any less harmful than the pretty clean fossil fuel engines we have these days?
and what happens when the batteries reach the end of their lives? can they be recycled efficiently and be financially viable?
Not to do with fossil fuel reliance - we've got shitloads of it if we can be arsed to get at it. It's all to do with air quality at the moment (read: the air quality people are bitching the most). Lithium we have an abundance of and it isn't difficult to mine - it's found as a salt, it's also reasonably abundant at 17ppm of the earth vs 10ppm of Lead for example.
The main one we have problems with is copper - but we probably use almost as much in combustion engines as we do in EVs and other materials are coming to be used in EV manufacture. It's coming whether you like it or not - there's no denying it now! The recycling of all of these is totally viable and we've been doing it for years. The energy used in the whole cycle still less than an IC car could ever hope to achieve and it resolves the air pollution at source - not to mention from here-on in it's only going to get better. We've been trying to resolve IC engine emissions for 30 years and look what happened in the end. Treating the emissions out of a 100 coal fired power station is easy in comparison to fixing the emissions out of billions of IC cars.
The grid is totally f*cked though - they cannot hope to get the infrastructure there in time. Our country was electrified in Victorian times and became widespread very early on, it's a complete shitfest already, let alone moving transport onto that too. There's gonna be some stonking transformer fires lol!
