A terrifying incident occurred in Korea on August 1, 2024, as an electric vehicle exploded in an underground parking garage, injuring multiple people and damaging over 140 cars. Watch the security footage revealing how quickly the fire spread and learn about the critical safety measures that failed. Discover the truth about lithium-ion battery hazards and what can be done to prevent future tragedies.
Starting out this post is a long excerpt from ACE OF SPADES…. a site I recommend highly, BTW. In it we see how a country is realizing the risk of allowing Electric Vehicles (EVs) into parking structures. In this case, not because of the weight, but fire hazard:
While electric vehicle sales may not amount to more than a single-digit market share, the numbers on the road are now significant enough that there is a growing conversation over whether EVs should be allowed in parking structures. Part of that discussion is about how the owners of buildings that contain parking structures can protect and insure against an unknown number of potential bombs that may be parked there at any given time.
This awful story from South Korea is likely to be repeated with growing frequency, and it is fueling the discussions I just referenced.
South Korean officials met on Monday to discuss electric vehicle safety and whether to require car firms to disclose battery brands amid growing consumer concern after an EV blaze in an underground garage extensively damaged an apartment block.
It doesn’t matter what brand of battery is in the EV, what matters is that it’s a lithium ion EV battery, which by nature is prone to runaway thermal fires.
The fire on Aug. 1, which appeared to start spontaneously in a Mercedes-Benz EV parked below a residential building, took eight hours to put out, destroying or damaging about 140 cars and forcing some residents to move to shelters.
I have previously joked about requiring a prominent warning label on the hood of EVs, cautioning about the fire hazard EVs pose to their drivers and to those nearby. Maybe it’s time to stop joking.
Images published in media of dozens of charred cars with only their metal frames remaining in the parking lot fire have fuelled consumer fears about EVs, likely exacerbated because so many people in South Korea live in apartments, often with parking lots below.
An Automotive News piece a few days ago titled “Lithium ion battery fire regulation could help heal industrywide black eye” acknowledges that consumers are becoming scared of lithium batteries, therefore help is needed from the federal bureaucracy to issue regulatory decrees that will somehow make lithium batteries safe. The piece also notes that in 2023, in New York City alone, there were 268 fires started by lithium ion batteries on various transportation devices, resulting in 18 deaths and 150 injuries. Of course, the federal government can no more mandate that lithium ion batteries stop combusting than it can mandate that straw be spun into gold.
Instead, I’d recommend that the government simply ban EVs from being allowed in any parking garages or covered structures. (And yes, that is somewhat counter to my anti-regulation ethos, but remember, Team EV tried to use the power of government to take away my gasoline-powered car, so I have every right to retaliate with the same powerful weapon.)
Here is a short video of the electric Mercedes exploding. Please note that it goes from barely smoking to a fiery explosion in just 21 seconds.
This Fortune piece dated 8/07/2024 reports that ”Several office buildings [in South Korea] have now banned EVs from entering and parking, according to notices on social media.” That’s wise.
Last month I inquired in one of my pieces about how insurance companies are dealing with the growing menace of EV fires, especially regarding all the collateral damage they can cause when they spontaneously combust. I received an email response from a gentleman named Bill Schneider who has a depth of experience at integrated facilities management, including the insurance aspect. I received this prophetic email from Mr. Schneider just four days before the Korean EV disaster.
Consider a potential BEV [“Battery Electric Vehicle”] fire in either scenario:
1.“3 plus 1” mixed-use building, where the parking deck is on the bottom floor, and that floor is below ground (so there is no way to easily remove BEVs from anything else combustible), and there are residential apartments and commercial shops/offices above the deck…or…
2.Multi-story parking deck at, say, a major airport (think one of the parking decks at DFW) where a cluster of BEVs are parked together and a fire breaks out.
Guess what? Parking deck suppression systems are nothing more than sprinklers with water in them – water that is hopelessly inefficient to quench a burning lithium battery.
Plus, with [internal combustion vehicles] gasoline is at least dispersed when sprinklers are activated – but BEV batteries are buried deep inside the vehicle chassis, meaning that when sprinklers activate, they cannot get water to the source of the fire.
Imagine the inferno if a cluster of 30 BEVs were parked next to each other in the center of the Terminal A parking deck, on the fourth or fifth floor, right in the middle of the structure. Or on the bottom floor, near a wall.
I presented this scenario to the SME [Small/Medium Enterprise] – and the industry has NO. ANSWER. This isn’t the FLS [Fire/Life Safety] industry’s fault – rather, it’s based on the constraints of fighting BEV fires, where the battery burns far hotter, and all three elements of the Fire Triangle are present in the battery (and remain present, not being able to be dispersed), and the batteries are buried so deep inside the vehicle chassis that suppression liquids cannot reach the source of the fire.
Fire marshals who become aware of the risk? They simply forbid BEVs from being parked inside a structure. Because that’s all they can do.
Fire Marshalls are empowered to limit the number of people who may enter a building for fire safety reasons. They should also be able to limit the number of EVs that may park in a building’s garage. I’d recommend the maximum number of EVs allowed in a parking garage be limited to zero. ….
An EV phobia appears to be spreading across South Korea following a mysterious explosion of an electric car.
Sky News host James Morrow, Rita Panahi and Rowan Dean discuss residents in greater Seoul moving to ban electric vehicles from underground parking lots after a parked Mercedes-Benz sedan recently caught fire.
“This is actually a real nightmare situation. This is in the car park underneath an apartment block. These things are impossible to put out,” Mr Morrow said.
“This fire torched at least 40 other cars and damaged a whole bunch more, a bunch of people in the building were taken for smoke inhalation and other injuries. Thankfully, nobody was even worse injured with this.”
AN OLDER POST
EV Car FIRE HAZARDS
Electric vehicles are on the rise across the country, and while that’s a step forward for the environment, firefighters are raising safety concerns. They say electric vehicle fires pose a number of risks, not only to the community, but also to firefighters themselves.
The truth about EVs and fire risk in our cities | Auto Expert John Cadogan
SPONTANIOUS COMBUSTION!
Ford shut down production of the popular electric truck for five weeks following a fire in Dearborn in February. When the fire was out, all that was left was soot and damaged paint. Fire departments nationwide are in training as they learn how to put out fires for electric vehicles. But an EV fire is a dramatically different and far more dangerous problem for them.
A Mercedes-Benz EQE Sedan caught fire and burned to a crisp inside a Florida homeowner’s garage last week, severely damaging the building.
The 2023 Mercedes-Benz EQE 350+ Sedan was in the garage when it caught fire on July 19. According to Jennifer Ruotolo, the EV was a loaner from Mercedes-Benz while her own car was getting serviced. She told News4Jax that the luxury electric sedan wasn’t even charging when it burst into flames – she doesn’t own a home charging unit.
“It was parked in the garage, about 22 hours and then it caught fire. I was at work. About 8:30 and my husband heard a hiss and a pop, and he went into the garage full of smoke. It engulfed in flames and exploded,” the Nocatee, Florida resident said…..
A battery fire has destroyed both of Speed ONE Racing’s electric Lancia Delta World Rallycross cars, Carscoops reports. The two Lancia Delta Evo-e race cars were reportedly in the paddock at Lydden Hill Race Circuit in the UK on Friday morning when a fire originating in one of the cars’ battery packs spread and consumed the team’s road tent, taking both cars with it. The fire shut down the World Rallycross Championship event while race authorities attempted to ascertain the cause of the fire. [….] “The fire began just before 08:45, with fire crews working hard to bring it under control and extinguish it as swiftly as possible. Regrettably, the entire Special ONE Racing area was burnt down, including both of their RX1e cars. …
Undamaged EVs are alread terrifying enough (there is no way would I ever allow one to be parked in my garage) but if an EV was in a wreck or otherwise damaged, where the heck do you store it knowing that it could erupt in flames at any time. If I were a wrecker driver I would not want to ever tow a damaged EV.
Back to Nikola, you may recall that I put it at the top of my “EV Manufacturer Dead Pool,” predicting it would be the next to go out of business, following Lordstown Motors’ bankruptcy.
Well, Nikola is getting closer. It just suspended all sales of battery powered trucks and recalled all those on the road.
Nikola said on Friday it was recalling all the battery-powered electric trucks that it has delivered to date and is suspending sales after an investigation into recent fires found a coolant leak inside a battery pack as the cause.
[….]
I have an obligation to acknowledge when I get things wrong. As noted above, I predicted that Nikola would be the next EV manufacturer to go bankrupt. I got it wrong, it was actually a Biden-touted electric bus maker that was next in line.
Proterra, an electric bus maker that has been lauded by President Biden for its U.S. manufacturing operations, has become at least the third electric-vehicle business to file for bankruptcy in roughly the past year.
[h/t to Mr. CBD for bringing this one to my attention. I think Proterra was his entry in my EV Dead Pool.]
I know! I know! [Buck waves hand furiously in the air.] I know the answer to this one!!
It’s when lithium-ion batteries are used as a power source for a vehicle rather than using a gasoline powered engine.
You’re welcome, GM.
[….]
I believe that others on the blog have already covered this next story, and I am not going to joke about it, because this awful EV conflagration took a man’s life.
A burning car carrier off the Dutch coast has been towed to a new location away from shipping lanes as part of an operation to salvage the ship, the Dutch public works and water management ministry and local media said on Monday.The freighter, which was travelling from Germany to Egypt when the blaze broke out on July 26…
Ship charter company “K” Line said on Friday there were 3,783 vehicles on board the ship – including 498 battery electric vehicles, significantly more than the 25 initially reported.
EV lithium-ion batteries burn with twice the energy of a normal fire, and maritime officials and insurers say the industry has not kept up with the risks.
Shipping companies and insurance companies have a day of reckoning coming regarding EVs. They are under pressure from the eco-left to embrace electric vehicles, but EVs are explosively dangerous, they are almost impossible to extinguish when they catch fire, and they are so fragile that the slightest damage to an EV will require it to be totaled.
WFAA reports that in the early hours of Friday morning in Plano, Texas, a Tesla vehicle unexpectedly caught fire, raising fresh concerns about the safety of electric vehicle batteries. According to the car’s owner, the incident occurred shortly after midnight in the residential area of the 2700 block of Sacred Path Road. The owner reported hearing a hissing noise from the vehicle’s battery, which had been installed just the day before. Upon checking the car, they discovered flames shooting out from the battery. (BREITBART)
TOXIC FIRES
A car catches fire every two minutes in the United States, and firefighters are well-versed in how to respond. But they face new hazards and challenges when that fire is in an electric vehicle or EV. Nearly 2 million EVs are already on the road and many believe they’re the future of driving. Though EV fires aren’t necessarily more common than standard car fires, they require a different approach from first responders (more from LOCAL 12)
Here an EV bus takes minute to fully engulf, luckily it was next to a steel and glass building and not a wood structure.
Can you imagine these fires with the amount of battery cells long-hauler trucks have?
ANOTHER PAST POST
Battery Storage Fire Flares Up For Sixth Day
From the time of the above interview, firefighters are planning on camping out there for a month!
… As of this past Tuesday, CalFire was still pouring water on and into the building while coming to the realization that “water” around lithium-ion batteries was a double-edged sword. Like Ramius tells Ryan in Red October, “Most things in here don’t react too well to bullets.” In the batteries’ case, they don’t react well to water.
…Pascua said things began to reignite Friday night.
“You have to put water on it to keep the fire confined, but that water damages the batteries also allowing them to arc starting another fire. We’re just trying to keep the public safe and keep the fire contained to the building,” he said.
The chain reaction can happen when a lithium-ion battery creates heat faster than it can dissipate. That rapid increase of temperature can then turn to fire.
But water’s all they’ve got, and, as of yesterday, they were well into multiple millions of gallons flowing without having put the fire to bed.
San Diego Firefighters have flown in experts to the Otay Mesa Battery Storage site to study the fire because they don’t know how to extinguish it. The 🔥 has already consumed 5 million gallons of water, and firefighters estimate it will take an additional 7-10 days to control,… pic.twitter.com/sVi71XW1Vy
…The firehas already consumed 5 million gallons of water, and firefighters estimate it will take an additional 7-10 days to control, using a total of 15-20 million gallons. LETHAL amounts of Hydrogen Cyanide were present in the air for 3 hours after the fire began…
All that and, as of this morning, still en fuego. ….
Although the electric vehicle market has seen significant growth over the past few years, there are signs that the exponential growth will slow down, with automakers like General Motors reducing electric vehicle sales and production targets. In fact, it appears as though even some EV owners themselves are yearning for a return to ICE-powered models.
According to a report from Automotive News, consulting firm McKinsey & Co. found that 46 percent of U.S. respondents who currently own an electric vehicle are likely to buy an ICE-powered vehicle as their next car purchase, with charging concerns standing out as the largest hindrance toward the gradual transition to all-electric vehicles.
Beyond this, McKinsey & Co. also found that 29 percent of electric vehicle owners worldwide are likely to switch to gasoline vehicles, citing the same concerns.
“I didn’t expect that,” McKinsey & Co. Center for Future Mobility Leader Philipp Kampshoff remarked. “I thought, ‘Once an EV buyer, always an EV buyer.’”
[….]
Interestingly, electric vehicle owners appear to be experiencing buyer’s remorse due to inadequate public charging infrastructure, high ownership costs, and limitations with long trips.
“Overnight, we’re looking at 36 miles of range,” he told Insider. “Before I gave it back to Ford, because I wanted to give it back full, I drove it to the office and plugged in at the charger we have there.” — BUSINESS INSIDER
….Standard home outlets generally deliver 120 volts, powering at a level EV experts call “Level 1” charging, while the higher-powered specialty connections that can pump up to 240 volts into electric cars is known as “Level 2.”
The difference is night and day, according to the researchers. Of those who switched from EVs back to gas cars, over 70 percent lacked access to Level 2 charging at home, and slightly less than that lacked Level 2 connections at their workplaces.
“If you don’t have a Level 2, it’s almost impossible [to keep an EV],” noted Kevin Tynan, an automotive analyst for Bloomberg. Tynan used to own a Ford Mustang Mach-E, a battery-electric crossover SUV. Plugging it into his home outlet for an hour could give the Mach-E just three miles of range.
“Overnight, we’re looking at 36 miles of range,” he said. “Before I gave it back to Ford, because I wanted to give it back full, I drove it to the office and plugged it in at the charger we have there.”
For comparison, it takes an average of three minutes to fill up the gas tank of a Ford Mustang, which has enough range to go about 300 miles before needing to refuel.….
1 in 5 EV Buyers Switch Back to Gas-Powered Cars: Study (THE DRIVE | Apr 30, 2021)
Electric vehicles are poised to become a mainstay of transportation in the United States and abroad. Many countries are banning the sale of new internal combustion-powered vehicles around the year 2030, and with nearly every automaker having launched or already launching new EVs, the writing is on the wall.
But according to new research from Nature Energy, not everybody who takes the leap and buys an electric car sticks with the decision. In fact, around one in five people—or 20 percent—switch back to gasoline-powered cars. Why? Well, it’s for a variety of reasons, as it turns out.
The research, to start, was conducted with a sample size of 4,160 people. All of them purchased an electric vehicle in the state of California between 2012 and 2018, so this data is already a few years old now, and as we know, things have changed a lot since 2018 when it comes to EVs. But in any case 1,840 of those 4,160 people had made a decision about purchasing their next vehicle, which is how Nature Energy gathered the data for the “one in five” claim. It gathered other data about these people as well to learn more about their decision.
Those who were least likely to stick with electric vehicles were the ones who depended on them for their only means of transportation—so essentially people who only had one car, and the EV was it. People who lived in places where home charging was difficult also abandoned electric vehicles at higher rates, which is a good segue into the types of people EVs still aren’t right for: those who make less money.
Adopters who were most likely to ditch EVs were generally younger, were more likely to rent their living spaces and were less likely to live in a standalone house. This makes it very difficult to secure 240v fast charging where these people live, so they’re completely dependent on public charging stations. Women also switched back to gas-powered vehicles at higher rates than men, although the paper offered no concrete suggestion as to why that might be.
The study also found that improvements to public charging infrastructure didn’t really matter to these people, implying that they perhaps only travel short distances in their vehicles and take fewer long trips. This suggests that investments in public charging infrastructure may not be the simple one-size-fits-all solution that EVs need to gain popularity…..
One Out Of Five Electric Car Buyers Return To Gas-Powered Cars (POST MILLENNIAL | Sep 5, 2023)
Drivers cited “dissatisfaction with the convenience of charging” as a reason to return to gas-powered vehicles.
A new study has revealed that one in five early adopters of electric vehicles are going back to using internal combustion engines leading to a fall in the price of electric vehicles (EVs).
According to the study published in Nature, of those early adopters of EVs in California from 2012 through 2018, 20 percent of those who opted for plug-in hybrids have returned to gas-powered vehicles, while 18 percent of EV drivers returned to internal combustion engines with their next vehicle purchase.
One demographic is those who moved to a new place with no Level 2 chargers, which could be related to migration away from urban centers to more suburban and rural areas during the Covid pandemic.
Drivers also cited “dissatisfaction with the convenience of charging” as a reason to return to gas-powered vehicles.
Additionally, households with fewer vehicles were more likely to opt for a return to gas-powered vehicles, as well as any household that bought an EV but kept at least one less efficient vehicle.
Women were more likely to return to a gas-powered vehicle than men, according to the study.
In June it was revealed that over one thousand employees of the Ford Motor Company would be losing their jobs as a result of a significant loss of revenue due to electric vehicle investment efforts. Additionally, the automaker is expecting to lose $3 billion in electric vehicle operating profit in 2023, and the company’s current operating costs are $7 billion to $8 billion, higher than any other competitor, which has forced the company to lay off employees, along with other cost-saving measures…..
… As of this past Tuesday, CalFire was still pouring water on and into the building while coming to the realization that “water” around lithium-ion batteries was a double-edged sword. Like Ramius tells Ryan in Red October, “Most things in here don’t react too well to bullets.” In the batteries’ case, they don’t react well to water.
…Pascua said things began to reignite Friday night.
“You have to put water on it to keep the fire confined, but that water damages the batteries also allowing them to arc starting another fire. We’re just trying to keep the public safe and keep the fire contained to the building,” he said.
The chain reaction can happen when a lithium-ion battery creates heat faster than it can dissipate. That rapid increase of temperature can then turn to fire.
But water’s all they’ve got, and, as of yesterday, they were well into multiple millions of gallons flowing without having put the fire to bed.
San Diego Firefighters have flown in experts to the Otay Mesa Battery Storage site to study the fire because they don’t know how to extinguish it. The 🔥 has already consumed 5 million gallons of water, and firefighters estimate it will take an additional 7-10 days to control,… pic.twitter.com/sVi71XW1Vy
…The firehas already consumed 5 million gallons of water, and firefighters estimate it will take an additional 7-10 days to control, using a total of 15-20 million gallons. LETHAL amounts of Hydrogen Cyanide were present in the air for 3 hours after the fire began…
All that and, as of this morning, still en fuego. ….
In this episode, we uncover the shocking story of Lucas Turner, who faced a staggering $20,000 bill for a hybrid battery replacement in his used car. The key takeaway: buyers must prioritize pre-purchase inspections for hybrid and electric vehicles to avoid unexpected expenses.
We discuss the discrepancy in replacement costs, the importance of understanding warranty limitations, and the need for consumers to research alternative sources for more budget-friendly options. This cautionary tale serves as a reminder for listeners to stay informed and prepared for potential challenges in the world of hybrid and electric car ownership. Drive safely!
Here is an update [of sorts] to EV costs and normal repair costs, and the faltering sales of EVs as people realize they are shite! But first, because I use some sites that I do not recommend wholeheartedly, I feel the need to preface this post:
BTW, even though I go to this it, I do not recommend it – Liberty Daily. Having been immersed in the conspiratorial view of history for years, I know what red flags to look for. The owner/contributors are big Alex Jones fans… and Alex is a disgrace to real news. What I tell my boys is “if you find a story that goes back to Prison Planet, Infowars, or Alex Jones in any way. Don’t use it. Find other sources for the article or news piece.
All that said, there are links below that I have not checked out in full. I can say that Discern Report is another shite site, but like Liberty Daily, there are topics and stories that are good and do not get into bat-shit-crazy stuff and are useful info for the reader. That said, enjoy the critique I pull together here by others hard work… this is a good post to branch out from. Here is my canned response for when I post stuff on Facebook:
While I like their rants (Paul Watson, Mark Dice, and others) and these commentaries hold much truth in them, I do wish to caution you… he is part of Info Wars/Prison Planet and Summit News network of yahoos, a crazy conspiracy arm of Alex Jones shite. Also, I bet if I talked to him he would reveal some pretty-crazy conspiratorial beliefs that would naturally undermine and be at-odds-with some of his rants. Just to be clear, I do not endorse these people or orgs.
I will offer red marks to designate which sites deal in conspiracy issues in other arenas of politics. I will throw in an “I don’t know guy 🤷♂️for sites that I haven’t checked out. No marks mean the site is just about oil/fossil fuel outlooks, the automotive industry, etc, or political sites I trust.
Okay, the EV “revolution” is meeting the free market… and even with the attempt to route the market through legislations and tax-payer funded incentives, people are not having it. So at some point he car manufacturers and dealers will have to bow to what the consumer wants, or else face bankruptcy. Legislation is another issue, government will have to physically enforce these failed policies… which… if you are a student of history, is not that far-fetched.
This story has surely changed to include more disgruntled EV buyers: 1 in 5 EV Buyers Switch Back to Gas-Powered Cars: Study (THE DRIVE | Apr 30, 2021) And this story about costs of repairs and downtime of the customers car doesn’t help the outcomes either: Repair costs, turnaround times higher for EVs. This is all factoring into decisions such as these three stories:
Ford said on Thursday that half of all 1,550 Ford dealers chose to sell electric vehicles in 2024—down from two-thirds that said this time last year that they would opt in to sell EVs for 2023.
The other half of Ford dealers will sell—and service—ICE and hybrid models. “EV adoption rates vary across the country, and we believe our dealers know their market best,” Ford spokesman Martin Günsberg told the Detroit Free Press. …
There is a very mature statement by corporate! “we believe our dealers know their market best” Amen! Buick, on the other hand, is not so intelligent as to understand the market. And I assume that corporate is just wanting the hand-outs from the Feds for such changes (BREITBART):
According to GM, almost 1,000 of its nearly 2,000 Buick dealerships across the U.S. chose to take buyouts from the parent company rather than investing potentially millions into retooling and prepping dealers to service and sell EVs.
The buyouts mean that GM will now have just about 1,000 Buick dealerships across the nation as the automaker moves forward with adhering to President Joe Biden’s green energy agenda.
Dealers who are taking the buyout would give up the Buick franchise and no longer sell the brand, he said. The dealer can continue to sell other GM models, such as Chevrolet or GMC, that often account for a higher percentage of sales. [Emphasis added]
The Journal reported in late 2022 that the automaker planned to offer buyouts to its U.S. Buick dealer network. The move came after the Detroit automaker gave them a choice: Invest at least $300,000 to sell and service EVs, or exit the Buick franchise. The investments would cover electric-vehicle chargers and worker training, among other initiatives. [Emphasis added]
The move comes as U.S. car dealers are so concerned with EV sales that they are urging Biden to abandon his EV mandates and carbon emission regulations that would effectively force all-electric cars on consumers.
“The reality, however, is that electric vehicle demand today is not keeping up with the large influx of [EVs] arriving at our dealerships prompted by the current regulations. [EVs] are stacking up on our lots,” the car dealers write:
With each passing day, it becomes more apparent that this attempted electric vehicle mandate is unrealistic based on current and forecasted customer demand. Already, electric vehicles are stacking up on our lots which is our best indicator of customer demand in the marketplace. [Emphasis added]
At the same time, a bombshell Consumer Reports survey recently revealed that EVs spur nearly 80 percent more problems for car owners than gas-powered cars using traditional combustion engines.
So, Democrats wax-long about being for the little guy, the small business, and the like. But their policies push the little guy into going out of business or selling to the large corporation. But some companies do see the warning of the market and respond to it. Audi for one, is reading the tea-leaves properly (🤷♂️ SLAY NEWS):
German automaker Audi has announced that it is slashing production of electric vehicles (EVs) and halted future plans as demand for the products has plummeted.
Audi, which is owned by auto giant Volkswagen, revealed that demand for expensive EVs has now fizzled as consumers are put off by high prices and poor infrastructure.
The company says consumers are instead choosing gas-powered vehicles.
As Slay News has reported, car and truck dealers across America have been warning that their lots are stacking up with EVs that they can’t sell.
Thousands of American auto dealers have signed a letter to Joe Biden, urging the Democrat president to scrap his electric vehicle (EV) mandate….
So, here is a good article by a site I do not recommend as a whole… but this article excerpt is decent ( LIBERTY DAILY):
In the early days of the push for electric vehicles to replace gas-powered vehicles, they were novelties used for virtue signaling. As the push from government leftists ramped up quickly, millions worldwide jumped onboard willingly or reluctantly as it appeared that an EV future was inevitable.
Now that the market has matured, challenges are evident. Electric vehicles are unreliable. They are expensive to repair. The infrastructure to power them is insufficient today even though they only make up a tiny percentage of what’s on the road. Behind all of these roadblocks is an underlying reality: Far fewer people are joining the climate change cult than the powers-that-be had hoped.
Force-feeding us through regulations, incentives, and massive ESG bullying campaigns have failed miserably. Now, the chickens are coming home to roost for a fearmongering industry that couldn’t deliver on any of their promises. Is the “Electric Vehicle Revolution” dying?
Below is an article highlighting the worst indicator of them all: Lack of used EV enthusiasm. Vehicles with staying power enjoy popularity through all stages of existence. They sell well when they’re bought or leased new. They then sell well again as program vehicles, certified pre-owned, or plain old used cars. Some, particular trucks, enjoy extended usefulness as owners sink money and effort into keeping them on the roads for decades. With EVs, none of those scenarios are panning out. The results have been predictable as EV graveyards have started popping up across the western world. Here is the article generated from corporate media reports by Discern Reporter…
Half of Ford and Buick dealers balk at investing in EVs, citing high costs, underperforming sales
Experts say that automakers and the federal government grossly overestimated consumer interest in the vehicles. “The government can’t really dictate everything it wants to dictate to the market. Seems to me we have to learn this lesson in the United States every 10 to 20 years,” said energy writer and analyst David Blackmon.
…..Energy expert Robert Bryce has been documenting Ford’s losses on its EV lines over the past year. In the third quarter of this year, the company lost $62,016 for each of the 20,962 EVs it sold during the period. It was an improvement over second quarter losses, Bryce wrote, which were more than $70,000 for each EV it sold.
Despite the hits Ford took on its EV lines, Ford posted Q3 net income of $1.2 billion compared to an $827 million loss in the same quarter in 2022. The profit was the result of strong outcomes in its Ford Blue line, which includes gas-powered and hybrid vehicles, which are vehicles that have a gas engine that can power the car or charge the vehicle’s battery. Some of the cars in that are designed to attract sports car enthusiasts and others who want high-performance vehicles…..
This is really a story about a GOVERNMENT INDUCED SHIT SHOW. The artificial inflation of a segment of the market that will “trickle-down” (so-to-speak) to many aspects of our lives. And so, with billions given to EV production from the Inflation Reduction Act will accomplish the exact opposite of what the Democrats promised it would do. Of course we all knew this, I am just pointing out the EV connection. As one article notes below,
The automakers are still healing from the chip shortage, which we talked about in one of our previous articles: Chip Shortage Puts a Brake on Automotive Production. They are now faced with lithium supply constraints which are not expected to ease down for a couple of years. And then there is also a looming threat of a shortage of other minerals such as graphite, nickel, cobalt, etc., which are also critical for the production of EV components.
It will take years for economists to sift through the wreckage of Big-Government edicts and messianic proclamations to “save the planet.” For now, all I can do is sound the alarm bells, in my own corner of the WWW.
QUOTE w/MEDIA
This is a FLASHBACK that originally aired on the radio Jul 2, 2013. Dennis Prager interviews George Gilder about his new book, “Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World.” I found this small bit on Dodd-Frank interesting as it leads to government interference creating a business atmosphere that nets zero information — or — creativity, entrepreneurial investment, or new growth and business.
“A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge” | George Gilder(The Fuller Interview Is Here)
EDITOR’S NOTE: this is how the USSR ended up with warehouses FULL of “widgets” (things made that it could not use or people did not want) no one needed in the real world. This economic law enforcers George Gilder’s contention that when government supports a venture from failing, no information is gained in knowing if the program actually works. Only the free-market can do this.
Why the posting of this key idea, or, rightly called an economic law. There are two stories I wish to share that brought me to think about this old audio I uploaded to my YouTube, and just fixed and reuploaded to my RUMBLE.
The United States is making $12 billion available in grants and loans for automakers and suppliers to retrofit their plants to produce electric and other advanced vehicles, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told reporters Thursday.
The Biden administration will also offer $3.5 billion in funding to domestic battery manufacturers, Granholm said.
For the advanced vehicles, $2 billion of the funding will come from the Inflation Reduction Actwhich Democrats passed last year, and $10 billion will come from the Energy Department’s Loans Program Office, Granholm said…….
EV share of the new-vehicle market flattened out at 7.1 percent across the first half of the year after growing steadily in 2021 and 2022, according to U.S. new-vehicle registration data from Experian.
Is the party over? Hardly.
But in the fast-growing U.S. market of the moment, as microchip supplies improve and the production of popular gasoline-engine autos returns in force this summer, EVs are no longer outpacing the rest of the car business — at least for now…..
ALSO:
EVs sat at dealerships for an average of 92 days in the second quarter of 2023 versus 36 days for the same period in 2022. (U.S. NEWS and WORLD REPORT)
However, the push by governments to replace fossil fuels will increase production of these EV vehicles, reducing inflation will be impossible as prices of all sorts of items will greatly increase. 2-billion wasted and doing just the opposite of what Democrats say it would do.
The below articles will deal primarily with Nickel, but the overuse of this material as well as others in battery production due to this artificial inflation by governments will create interference in knowledge to be produced allowing the market [people] to make choices based on supply and demand.
What this means is that a shit show will trickle-down the supply chain. To the cost of stainless steel, to other ingredients key to electronics and all batteries. In other words,
Nickel is a chemical element and a transition metal. It is mostly used for high-grade steel manufacturing, and increasingly so, in batteries. Global production of nickel from mines was estimated to amount to a total of 3.3 million metric tons in 2022. The major countries in nickel mining include Indonesia, Philippines, Russia, and New Caledonia. Home to the world’s two largest nickel mines based on production in 2022 was Russia, with the Kola MMC Mine’s production amounting to 151,030 metric tons and the Sorowako Mine producing 77,270 metric tons of nickel. Indonesia has the largest reserves of nickel, tied with Australia, and followed by and Brazil in third place. Interestingly, nickel reserves are among the metals and minerals with the least remaining life years, however, because nickel is a highly recyclable material, this poses less of a problem.
Nickel Mining Companies
The leading companies based on nickel production worldwide as of 2022 were Tsingshan Group and Delong from China, Nornickel from Russia, and Jinchuan Group from Hong Kong [China]. Tsingshan Group alone accounted for a 20 percent share of global nickel production that year. The world’s leading nickel producing companies based on market capitalization as of July 2023, however, were a different cohort: BHP from Australia had the leading market cap, at 155.2 billion U.S. dollars. The Brazilian company Vale came in second, with a market cap of nearly 62 billion U.S. dollars…..
In a sweeping long-term agreement, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, the two most powerful autocrats, challenge the current political and military order.
n their matching mauve ties, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping last week declared a “new era” in the global order and, at least in the short term, endorsed their respective territorial ambitions in Ukraine and Taiwan. The world’s two most powerful autocrats unveiled a sweeping long-term agreement that also challenges the United States as a global power, nato as a cornerstone of international security, and liberal democracy as a model for the world. “Friendship between the two States has no limits,” they vowed in the communiqué, released after the two leaders met on the eve of the Beijing Winter Olympics. “There are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.”
Agreements between Moscow and Beijing, including the Treaty of Friendship of 2001, have traditionally been laden with lofty, if vague, rhetoric that faded into forgotten history. But the new and detailed five-thousand-word agreement is more than a collection of the usual tropes, Robert Daly, the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States, at the Wilson Center, in Washington, told me. Although it falls short of a formal alliance, like nato, the agreement reflects a more elaborate show of solidarity than anytime in the past. “This is a pledge to stand shoulder to shoulder against America and the West, ideologically as well as militarily,” Daly said. “This statement might be looked back on as the beginning of Cold War Two.” The timing and clarity of the communiqué—amid tensions on Russia’s border with Europe and China’s aggression around Taiwan—will “give historians the kind of specific event that they often focus on.”….
…One of the key commodities to realizing this ambition is nickel. Unlike other battery materials such as cobalt and lithium, nickel is unique in not being primarily driven by global battery demand. About 70% of the world’s nickel production is consumed by the stainless steel sector, while batteries take up a modest 5%.
S&P Global Market Intelligence forecasts global primary nickel consumption to rebound year-on-year due to stainless steel capacity expansions in China and Indonesia. Demand outside China is expected to be the main driver of global growth in volume terms in 2022 and global consumption is forecasted to rise at a compound annual growth rate of about 7% between 2020 and 2025.
The battery sector’s nickel demand is also expected to accelerate substantially, with many predicting it to near 35% of total demand by the end of the decade….
With more electric vehicle orders than ever, can our international supply chain keep up with the demand? Or can the U.S. constrict its own battery plants in time?
Consumers have never been more interested in electric cars and climate change goals. But with automakers scrambling to produce more EVs than ever, we could be facing a problematic shortage in the near future.
Jerry, your favorite super car app, breaks down why the predicted lack of inventory could be much worse than the current computer chip shortage.
A Storm Is Brewing
With a looming battery shortage, carmakers are doubling down on mining raw battery materials like lithium, nickel, and cobalt. The shortage would affect not only sourcing materials but processing and building the actual batteries as well.
Some companies are taking battery manufacturing into their own hands and constructing exclusive battery plants.
Rivian Automotive Inc. Chief Executive RJ Scaringe said, “Put very simply, all the world’s cell production combined represents well under 10% of what we will need in 10 years,” according to Market Watch. Essentially, at least 90% of the necessary supply chain to keep up with demand does not exist.
…CNN notes that “the United States sources about 90% of the lithium it uses from Argentina and Chile, and contributes less than 1% of global production of nickel and cobalt, according to the Department of Energy. China refines 60% of the world’s lithium and 80% of the cobalt.”
No Ev Battery Plan For The Long-Term
We all know about Biden’s goal to ensure that at least half of all vehicles will be electric by 2030. We’re talking a $7.5 billion electric vehicle charging infrastructure. California even pledged that by 2035, all cars must be zero-emission vehicles.
Though the Biden administration has pushed for more EV production in the short term, there aren’t long-term plans pertaining to electric batteries. Did you know it can take at least seven to 10 years to set up a mine?
Unfortunately, the U.S. is very dependent on foreign countries that have the manufacturing capacity and raw materials that we don’t.
If for political reasons China shut down the world’s electric vehicle transition, what happens then? It’s also possible that China could restrict “exports of lithium hydroxide to give its domestic electric battery and vehicle manufacturers an advantage,” according to CNN.
As you can imagine, the price for critical battery metals has shot through the roof. According to CNN, “Some automakers like Tesla have made deals with suppliers of raw materials recently, which may help insulate them from shortages.”
If you’ve looked into buying an electric car recently, you’re very familiar with the federal tax credit awarded to EV car owners.
According to CNN, “The government has offered subsidies for electric vehicle purchases and charging infrastructure, but the mining sector hasn’t seen similar support, the battery metals experts say.”
Electric vehicle battery costs soared in 2022. But that doesn’t seem to have slowed the pace of automakers planning to adopt ever larger battery packs to satisfy ever-higher EV driving range claims.
As Bloomberg recently calculated, using EV models from the U.S., Europe, and China, the average pack size is now around 80 kwh, from in the vicinity of 40 kwh in 2018, and the growth trend is expected to continue for some years.
Meanwhile, average global EV range is now at 210 miles—up dramatically versus the average range of 143 miles in 2018.
That also means average EVs are less efficient, the byproduct of a shift to larger EVs.
EV driving range has been increasing at a rate of about 10% each year. Bloomberg sees the market finally reaching a ceiling in its demand for more range at 250-310 miles depending on the size of the EV, with the smallest city cars well below that range.
[….]
According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the Silverado EV’s pack, topping 200 kwh, represents $25,000 to $27,000 of direct cost to GM. That happens to be as much as a well-equipped 2024 Chevrolet Trax crossover, or a base 2024 Chevrolet Trailblazer SUV.
The Chevy Silverado EV won’t even have the biggest battery among full-size electric trucks. Ram plans a gigantic 229-kwh pack for its upcoming Ram 1500 REV.
The Silverado EV’s battery pack has more than twice the capacity versus that of the top Lucid Air that can go more than 500 miles on a charge. It’s also enough to power an average American house for almost three weeks, based on the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2021 household daily average of 10.632 kwh.
Ford isn’t going to go to 600 miles of range and thinks the sweet spot is around 350 miles. Mazda has said that long-range EVs aren’t the future…..
Global sales of electric cars are set to surge to yet another record this year, expanding their share of the overall car market to close to one-fifth and leading a major transformation of the auto industry that has implications for the energy sector, especially oil. That’s according to the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) recent report, “Global EV Outlook, 2023”, accessible here [as a PDF], which, in its 142 pages, shines a bright light on the remarkable dynamics that have unfolded in the field of battery demand for Electric Vehicles (EVs). This gallery summarizes the IEA report to navigate six compelling sides of the industry’s transformative journey. It begins with a surge in battery demand for EVs, outlining how, in 2022, it soared by approximately 65%, reaching a colossal 550 GWh from 330 GWh in 2021. This growth, fueled by a 55% increase in electric passenger car registrations, is a global phenomenon, yet it finds its epicenter in China and the United States.
[….]
1. Battery demand by mode and region, 2016–2022:
IEA’s report states that the demand for lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries in the automotive sector surged significantly in 2022, rising by approximately 65% to reach 550 GWh, up from about 330 GWh in 2021. This remarkable growth was primarily attributed to the increasing sales of electric passenger cars, which saw new registrations rise by 55% in 2022 compared to the previous year.
In China, the demand for batteries in the automotive industry experienced an even more substantial increase, exceeding 70%. This coincided with an 80% increase in electric car sales in 2022 compared to 2021. However, this upward trajectory in battery demand was somewhat tempered by the rising prevalence of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs).
Meanwhile, in the United States, the demand for vehicle batteries also witnessed robust growth, expanding by approximately 80%, even though electric car sales only saw a comparatively modest increase of around 55% in 2022 relative to the preceding year.
2. Overall supply and demand of battery metals by sector, 2016–2022
The surge in battery demand is spurring the need for essential materials. In 2022, there was still an imbalance between the demand for lithium and its supply, a situation that persisted from 2021. This discrepancy occurred despite a significant 180% rise in production since 2017.
This chart shows that in 2022, EV batteries accounted for approximately 60% of the demand for lithium, 30% for cobalt, and 10% for nickel. In contrast, just five years prior, in 2017, these proportions were roughly 15%, 10%, and 2%, respectively.
The transition to Electric Vehicles (EVs) is picking pace with concentrated efforts to achieve the net-zero carbon scenario by 2050. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that global EV sales reached 6.6 million units in 2021, nearly doubling from the previous year. IEA projects that the number of EVs in use (across all road transport modes excluding two/three-wheelers) is expected to increase from 18 million vehicles in 2021 to 200 million vehicles by 2030, recording an average annual growth of over 30%. The estimation is based on policies announced by governments around the world as of mid-2021. This scenario will result in a sixfold increase in the demand for lithium, a key material used in the manufacturing of EV batteries, by 2030. With increasing EV demand, the industry looks to navigate through the lithium supply disruptions.
Lithium Supply Shortages Are Not Going Away Soon
The global EV market is already struggling with lithium supply constraints. Both lithium carbonate (Li2CO3) and lithium hydroxide (LiOH) are used for the production of EV batteries, but traditionally lithium hydroxide is obtained from processing of lithium carbonate, so the industry is more watchful of lithium carbonate production. BloombergNEF, a commodity market research provider, indicated that the production of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) was estimated to reach around 673,000 tons in 2022, while the demand was projected to exceed 676,000 tons LCE. In January 2023, a leading lithium producer, Albemarle, indicated that the global demand for LCE would expand to 1.8 million metric tons (MMt) (~1.98 million tons) by 2025 and 3.7 MMt (~4 million tons) by 2030. Meanwhile, the supply of LCE is expected to reach 2.9 MMt (~3.2 million tons) by 2030, creating a huge deficit.
There is a need to scale up lithium mining and processing. IEA indicates that about 50 new average-sized mines need to be built to fulfill the rising lithium demand. Lithium as a resource is not scarce; as per the US Geological Survey estimates, the global lithium reserves stand at about 22 million tons, enough to sustain the demand for EVs far in the future.
However, the process of mining and refining the metal is time-consuming and not keeping up pace with the surging demand. As per IEA analysis, between 2010 and 2019, the lithium mines that started production took an average of 16.5 years to develop. Thus, lithium production is not likely to shoot up drastically in a short period of time.
Considering the challenges in increasing the lithium production output, industry stakeholders across the EV value chain are racing to prepare for the anticipated supply chain disruptions.
[….]
The automakers are still healing from the chip shortage, which we talked about in one of our previous articles: Chip Shortage Puts a Brake on Automotive Production. They are now faced with lithium supply constraints which are not expected to ease down for a couple of years. And then there is also a looming threat of a shortage of other minerals such as graphite, nickel, cobalt, etc., which are also critical for the production of EV components. While the world is determined and excited about the EV revolution, the transition is going to be challenging.
So challenging in fact that GOOGLE years ago admitted the problem:
We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
[…..]
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
Google Joins the Common Sense Crew On Renewable Energies ~ Finally! (RPT)
Here’s what could happen if demand outstrips supply.
The automotive industry could be in for a shock, with a new report predicting that a lithium shortage is on the horizon. Citing BMI, a research unit of Fitch Solutions, CNBC reports that by 2025, demand will outstrip supply. The BMI report puts this down to China’s soaring appetite for the alkali metal.
“We expect an average of 20.4% year-on-year annual growth for China’s lithium demand for EVs alone over 2023-2032,” reads the report. Lithium is an essential component in electric vehicle batteries. It is used in most battery packs, including those found in popular vehicles such as the Tesla Model S. According to Euronews, the electric sedan uses approximately 26 pounds of lithium in its battery pack.
While China’s lithium demand will increase by 20.4% year-on-year, the country’s supply will only grow by 6% over the same time. It’s worth noting that China is the world’s third-largest lithium producer after Australia and Chile…..
The weight issue for bridges, street infrastructure (such as sewer lines and asphalt wear and tear, etc.), and fire risks not only affect EVs in general, but especially Semi-Trucks that are EVs. In a previous post I noted the dangers of EV cars added weight for parking structures and deaths. But now you have these monsters hitting the road… what are firefighter options as well? Will they have to get new rigs with a foam to stop these fires? More hazmat options for the toxicity of these fires? I don’t know
WEIGHT
WEIGHT RELATED TO TOW CAPACITY AND CARGO LIMITS
A semi-truck can weigh up to 80,000 pounds. Its battery can take up to a fourth of that weight.
An electric long-haul truck in 2030 could be up to 5,328 pounds heavier than a regular diesel truck, experts predict.
Heavy batteries could eat into trucking’s already-slim margins.
American truck manufacturers like Freightliner and Tesla are already delivering the electric trucks that the industry needs to pivot away from gas engines.
New legislation, like the Inflation Reduction Act, is encouraging the change through credits for green commercial vehicles, but the weight of massive batteries is still standing in the way.
A semi-truck including its cargo can legally weigh a maximum of 80,000 pounds. A battery for an electric truck can be up to 16,000 pounds, according to recent reporting by CNBC. That’s nearly a quarter of the total weight of the truck.
The eCascadia electric semi-truck, which was released last year by truck manufacturer Freightliner, weighs up to 4,000 pounds more than a regular diesel truck, for example.
That’s heavy, but less overall weight than the average electric semis, which a University of California study estimated will be more than 5,000 pounds heavier than their carbon-spewing counterparts by 2030.
That’s more than 5,000 pounds less cargo on the truck. In terms of cargo, that’s space for nearly 17,000 t-shirts, 16,000 apples, or one full car less than a non-electric semi-truck could carry. ….
Road wear and tear… “A new study shows EVs put 2.24 times more stress on roads than petrol vehicles”
Electric vehicles (EVs) cause twice as much stress on roads compared to petrol vehicles, potentially worsening the pothole crisis in the UK, according to a study.
The research conducted by data journalists at The Telegraph revealed that the average EV exerts 2.24 times more stress on roads compared to a similar petrol vehicle and 1.95 times more stress than a diesel vehicle.
The impact is even bigger with larger EVs, which can lead to up to 2.32 times more damage to road infrastructure, according to the report.
In an analysis, 15 popular EVs were compared to their petrol counterparts, revealing an average weight difference of 312 kilograms.
The increased weight of EVs can be primarily attributed to their heavy batteries, which can weigh up to 500 kilograms.
Scientists note that this heightened stress on roads results in the increased movement of asphalt, leading to the formation of small cracks that can eventually develop into problematic potholes.
A previous report by the Asphalt Industry Alliance estimated that this cost could mean that nearly £61,700 needed to be spent for every mile of a local road in England and Wales.….
Andrew Boyle, co-president of Massachusetts-based Boyle Transportation and first vice chairman of the American Trucking Associations, told Congress the trucking industry was committed to further reducing emissions but that regulations must be technically achievable, national in scope, and set on a realistic timeline.
Here is an example using cars… now imagine the issue for long-haulers. I have seen articles with battery pods that can just be switched out {plugged in and out so-to-speak}, but this will triple battery production and add even more stress on power grids. Are these people dumb!
INFRASTRUCTURE
One fleet tried to electrify just 30 trucks at a terminal in Joliet, Illinois. Local officials shut those plans down, saying that would draw more electricity than is needed to power the entire city. Another California company tried to electrify 12 forklifts. Not trucks, but forklifts. Local power utilities told them that’s not possible. If the product, charging infrastructure, and power is not available to comply with these unrealistic timelines, then regulators are setting trucking — and the American consumer — up for failure.
MORE
FIRE HAZARDS
Electric vehicles are on the rise across the country, and while that’s a step forward for the environment, firefighters are raising safety concerns. They say electric vehicle fires pose a number of risks, not only to the community, but also to firefighters themselves.
The truth about EVs and fire risk in our cities | Auto Expert John Cadogan
SPONTANIOUS COMBUSTION!
Ford shut down production of the popular electric truck for five weeks following a fire in Dearborn in February. When the fire was out, all that was left was soot and damaged paint. Fire departments nationwide are in training as they learn how to put out fires for electric vehicles. But an EV fire is a dramatically different and far more dangerous problem for them.
A Mercedes-Benz EQE Sedan caught fire and burned to a crisp inside a Florida homeowner’s garage last week, severely damaging the building.
The 2023 Mercedes-Benz EQE 350+ Sedan was in the garage when it caught fire on July 19. According to Jennifer Ruotolo, the EV was a loaner from Mercedes-Benz while her own car was getting serviced. She told News4Jax that the luxury electric sedan wasn’t even charging when it burst into flames – she doesn’t own a home charging unit.
“It was parked in the garage, about 22 hours and then it caught fire. I was at work. About 8:30 and my husband heard a hiss and a pop, and he went into the garage full of smoke. It engulfed in flames and exploded,” the Nocatee, Florida resident said…..
A battery fire has destroyed both of Speed ONE Racing’s electric Lancia Delta World Rallycross cars, Carscoops reports. The two Lancia Delta Evo-e race cars were reportedly in the paddock at Lydden Hill Race Circuit in the UK on Friday morning when a fire originating in one of the cars’ battery packs spread and consumed the team’s road tent, taking both cars with it. The fire shut down the World Rallycross Championship event while race authorities attempted to ascertain the cause of the fire. [….] “The fire began just before 08:45, with fire crews working hard to bring it under control and extinguish it as swiftly as possible. Regrettably, the entire Special ONE Racing area was burnt down, including both of their RX1e cars. …
Undamaged EVs are alread terrifying enough (there is no way would I ever allow one to be parked in my garage) but if an EV was in a wreck or otherwise damaged, where the heck do you store it knowing that it could erupt in flames at any time. If I were a wrecker driver I would not want to ever tow a damaged EV.
Back to Nikola, you may recall that I put it at the top of my “EV Manufacturer Dead Pool,” predicting it would be the next to go out of business, following Lordstown Motors’ bankruptcy.
Well, Nikola is getting closer. It just suspended all sales of battery powered trucks and recalled all those on the road.
Nikola said on Friday it was recalling all the battery-powered electric trucks that it has delivered to date and is suspending sales after an investigation into recent fires found a coolant leak inside a battery pack as the cause.
[….]
I have an obligation to acknowledge when I get things wrong. As noted above, I predicted that Nikola would be the next EV manufacturer to go bankrupt. I got it wrong, it was actually a Biden-touted electric bus maker that was next in line.
Proterra, an electric bus maker that has been lauded by President Biden for its U.S. manufacturing operations, has become at least the third electric-vehicle business to file for bankruptcy in roughly the past year.
[h/t to Mr. CBD for bringing this one to my attention. I think Proterra was his entry in my EV Dead Pool.]
I know! I know! [Buck waves hand furiously in the air.] I know the answer to this one!!
It’s when lithium-ion batteries are used as a power source for a vehicle rather than using a gasoline powered engine.
You’re welcome, GM.
[….]
I believe that others on the blog have already covered this next story, and I am not going to joke about it, because this awful EV conflagration took a man’s life.
A burning car carrier off the Dutch coast has been towed to a new location away from shipping lanes as part of an operation to salvage the ship, the Dutch public works and water management ministry and local media said on Monday.The freighter, which was travelling from Germany to Egypt when the blaze broke out on July 26…
Ship charter company “K” Line said on Friday there were 3,783 vehicles on board the ship – including 498 battery electric vehicles, significantly more than the 25 initially reported.
EV lithium-ion batteries burn with twice the energy of a normal fire, and maritime officials and insurers say the industry has not kept up with the risks.
Shipping companies and insurance companies have a day of reckoning coming regarding EVs. They are under pressure from the eco-left to embrace electric vehicles, but EVs are explosively dangerous, they are almost impossible to extinguish when they catch fire, and they are so fragile that the slightest damage to an EV will require it to be totaled.
WFAA reports that in the early hours of Friday morning in Plano, Texas, a Tesla vehicle unexpectedly caught fire, raising fresh concerns about the safety of electric vehicle batteries. According to the car’s owner, the incident occurred shortly after midnight in the residential area of the 2700 block of Sacred Path Road. The owner reported hearing a hissing noise from the vehicle’s battery, which had been installed just the day before. Upon checking the car, they discovered flames shooting out from the battery. (BREITBART)
TOXIC FIRES
A car catches fire every two minutes in the United States, and firefighters are well-versed in how to respond. But they face new hazards and challenges when that fire is in an electric vehicle or EV. Nearly 2 million EVs are already on the road and many believe they’re the future of driving. Though EV fires aren’t necessarily more common than standard car fires, they require a different approach from first responders (more from LOCAL 12)
Here an EV bus takes minute to fully engulf, luckily it was next to a steel and glass building and not a wood structure.
Can you imagine these fires with the amount of battery cells long-hauler trucks have?
Dennis Prager reads from an article regarding concerns over the increased weight of EV vehicles:
Here is the AXIOS article Dennis was reading from:
EVs Are Much Heavier Than Gas Vehicles, And That’s Posing Safety Problems
For example, the 2023 GMC Hummer EV, a full-size pickup, weighs more than 9,000 pounds, sporting a 2,900-pound battery. In comparison, the 2023 GMC Sierra, also a full-size pickup, weighs less than 6,000 pounds, according to Kelley Blue Book.
The average weight of U.S. vehicles has already increased from about 3,400 pounds to 4,300 pounds over the last 30 years as Americans have ditched passenger cars for pickups and SUVs, according to Evercore ISI analysts.
Threat level: Safety watchdogs are raising concerns after the recent deadly collapse of a parking garage in New York City called attention to the challenge of creaking infrastructure.
Traffic safety is particularly concerning. In crashes, the “baseline fatality probability” increases 47% for every 1,000 additional pounds in the vehicle — and the fatality risk is even higher if the striking vehicle is a light truck (SUV, pickup truck, or minivan), according to a 2011 study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“Since we’re seeing pedestrian and roadway fatalities at record levels, the introduction of more weight into crashes via EVs will complicate any attempts to reduce the ongoing fatality crisis that has showed no signs of abating,” Center for Auto Safety acting executive director Michael Brooks tells Axios in an email.
Flashback: In a speech in January, National Transportation Safety Board chair Jennifer Homendy praised the effort to reduce carbon emissions by switching to EVs but warned of the “unintended consequences” being “more death on our roads,” the AP reported…..
Study: Heavy Electric Vehicles Cause TWICE the Road Damage than Their Petrol Equivalents
A UK study led by the University of Leeds found the average electric car puts 2.24 times more stress on roads than a similar petrol vehicle – and 1.95 more than a diesel. Larger electric vehicles can cause up to 2.32 times more damage to roads.
Heavy EVs Pose Threat of Parking Structure Collapses
The safety concern is now front and center in the UK, where, as in the U.S., many older parking structures exist. “I don’t want to be too alarmist, but there definitely is the potential for some of the early car parks in poor condition to collapse,” structural engineer Chris Whapples told The Telegraph. “Operators need to be aware of electric vehicle weights, and get their car parks assessed from a strength point of view, and decide if they need to limit weight.”
If maintenance has not been kept up at these older parking structures, structural flaws are “baked in” according to building supply company Sika’s senior technical manager Steve Holmes. Many Ford F-150 Lightnings come close to 7,000 lbs, while gas-powered F-150s range between 4,000 and 5,700 lbs. So all EVs pose added stresses when combined into one stacked car park…..
Electric Vehicles May Be Too Heavy For Old Parking Garages: Report
The collapse of a parking garage in New York City on Tuesday that killed at least one person has put a new spotlight on aging structures used for vehicle storage.
The five-level building, which has several active violations listed with the city, dates back to 1925 and was first licensed as a garage in 1957 for five or more vehicles per floor, WNBC reported.
The exact cause of the structure’s failure has not been determined, but updates have been made to it in the years since and it is currently licensed to accommodate 276 vehicles.
[….]
The incident occurred after a recent study raised concerns that many older parking garages may need to be re-evaluated due to the increasing average weight of vehicles, particularly electric models.
The report from the British Parking Association noted that some electric cars weigh more than double what popular models in the same segments did in the 1960s, due in part to their heavy battery packs. This also often applies to contemporary cars.
For instance, a Tesla Model S weighs over a thousand pounds more than a gas-powered Mercedes E-Class, while a 9,000-pound GMC Hummer EV is 2,400 pounds heavier than the similarly-sized Hummer H2 that was last sold in 2009…..
EVs Are Too Heavy for Current Road Weight Limits, Car Haulers Say
The car hauling industry is lobbying various departments of the federal government to increase weight limits on U.S. highways in order to accommodate the transportation of electric vehicles.
According to Reuters, the industry says current weight limits on trucks roaming around U.S. roads are outdated and not equipped for the imminent pivot to battery-heavy EVs. Currently, federal highway safety standards restrict trailers to 80,000 pounds gross vehicle weight. This standard was set back in 1975, back when a Honda Civic weighed 1,570 pounds, or roughly half what one weighs now.
Per EPA figures, the average car or truck on U.S. roads has swollen from 3,200 to 4,200 pounds over the last 40 years. EVs carrying very heavy batteries—the 9,000-pound GMC Hummer EV attributes almost one-third of its weight to just its cells—stand to raise that figure even higher. And while electric cars are a relative minority today, the government aims to have half of all new vehicle sales be of electric vehicles by 2030…..
In an excellent post linking to a German documentary (30-minutes) and study showing the devastation to Chili of lithium mining, we find the following:
German ZDF public television recently broadcast a reportshowing how electric cars are a far cry from being what they are all cracked up to be by green activists.
The report titled: “Batteries in twilight – The dark side of e-mobility” [now not available] shows how the mining of raw materials needed for producing the massive automobile batteries is highly destructive to the environment. For example, two thirds of the cobalt currently comes from the Congo, where the mining rights have been acquired by China. Other materials needed include manganese, lithium and graphite.
Every electric car battery needs about 20 – 30 kg of lithium.
The mining of the raw materials often takes place in third world countries where workers are forced to work under horrendous conditions and no regard is given to protecting the environment. When it comes to “going green”, it seems everything flies out the window….
The production of lithium through evaporation ponds uses a lot of water – around 21 million litres per day. Approximately 2.2 million litres of water is needed to produce one ton of lithium. (EURO NEWS)
AGAIN… here is a Facebookpost of the same thing regarding Lithium Fields:
This is a Lithium leach field.
This is what your Electric Car batteries are made of.
It is so neuro-toxic that a bird landing on this stuff dies in minutes.
Take a guess what it does to your nervous system?
Pat yourself on the back for saving the environment.
Chile, 2nd largest lithium producer, is having water-scarcity problems as this technology takes so much water to produce battery-grade lithium. 2000 tons: 1 ton.
And the current version of the “inflation reduction act” wants 100% of EV battery components produced in the US.
Lead, nickel, lithium, cadmium, alkaline, mercury and nickel metal hydride.
Batteries are a collection of things that are extremely deadly.
Alternative fuels/energy is a DIRTY BUSINESS… but the left who live in the seclusion of the New York Times and MSNBC would never know this. I can show a graph showing skyrocketing carbon emissions worldwide for the past decade and that the temperature has dropped during this time by a small amount, and it is like showing them instructions to build an IKEA bookcase with instructions written in Gaelic!
What about the impact and supply of the materials needed to produce batteries? TreeHugger has a good post that mentions some of these environmental pitfalls. These issues involve many devices we use daily (cell phones, lap-top computers, rechargeable batteries, etc.), but add to this burden a mandated or subsidized car industry:
…lithium batteries take a tremendous amount of copper and aluminum to work properly. These metals are needed for the production of the anode & the cathode, cables and battery management systems. Copper and aluminum have to be mined, processes and manufacturing which takes lots of energy, chemicals and water which add to their environmental burden.
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First of all, this study emphasizes that there would be less Lithium available than previously estimated for the global electric car market. It also states the fact that some of the largest concentrations of Lithium in the world are found in some of the most beautiful and ecologically fragile places, such as The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. The authors note:
“It would be irresponsible to despoil these regions for a material which can only ever be produced in sufficient quantities to serve a niche market of luxury vehicles for the top end of the market. We live in an age of Environmental Responsibility where the folly of the last two hundred years of despoilment of the Earth’s resources are clear to see. We cannot have “Green Cars” that have been produced at the expense of some of the world’s last unspoiled and irreplaceable wilderness. We have a responsibility to rectify our errors and not fall into the same traps as in the past.”
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The report estimates that there would be less Lithium available than previously estimated for the global electric car market, as demand is rising for competing markets, such as cellular telephones and other electronic devices. At the same time, due to a great concentration of Lithium found in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina (70% of the world’s deposits), the United States and other developed countries needing the material will be subject to geopolitical forces similar to those they have already encountered from the member countries of OPEC…
Click HERE to go to larger file (use mouse wheel to zoom in)
In an excellent article we see the projected demands on other metals involved in the battery and transit goals:
….Regarding the demand for the different minerals, in the case of aluminum, according to our results, the demand for minerals from the rest of the economy would stand out, with the requirement for batteries having little influence. Copper would have a high demand from the rest of the economy, but it would also have a significant demand from vehicles, infrastructure and batteries. Cobalt would be in high demand because of the manufacture of batteries with the exception of the LFP battery that does not have this mineral, in the case of its demand from the rest of the economy it can be stated that it would be important but less influential than the demand for batteries. Lithium would have very high requirements from all the batteries and with a reduced demand from the rest of the economy. Manganese would have an important but contained demand coming from LMO and NMC batteries, since the requirements for this mineral would stand out in the rest of the economy. Finally, nickel would have a high demand from NMC and NCA batteries, but its main demand would come from the rest of the economy.
The batteries that would require the least materials are the NCA and LFP batteries. The NMC battery has been surpassed in performance and mineral usage by the NCA. The LiMnO2 battery has a very poor performance, so it has been doomed to disuse in electric vehicles. In addition, the LFP battery, the only one that does not use critical materials in the cathode (other than lithium), also has poor performance, requiring very large batteries (in size and weight) to match the capacity and power of batteries using cobalt.
Charging infrastructure, rail and copper used in electrified vehicles could add up to more than 17% of the copper reserve requirement in the most unfavourable scenario (high EV) and 7% in the most favourable (degrowth), so these are elements that must be taken into account…..
Are Electric Vehicles really clean? | They run on dirty energy and blood of children as young as 6. | Electric cars drive human rights abuse and child labour. | China is one of the villains in this story. | Are electric carmakers equally guilty too? | Palki Sharma Upadhyay tells you.
TO MAKE MATTERS WORSE….
…. lithium is also not the only battery ingredient with a dark side. Perhaps the darkest of all is cobalt, which is commonly used, alongside lithium, in the batteries of many electric vehicles.
Worse still, UNICEF estimates 40,000 of the workers in these mines are children under the age of 18, with some as young as 7 years old. Cobalt mining also comes with serious health risks. Chronic exposure to dust containing cobalt can cause the potentially fatal lung disease “hard metal lung disease.” Many fatal accidents have also been caused by mines not being constructed or managed safely.
Clearly then, in the face of such widespread environmental damage and human rights abuses, the ethics of electric vehicles is far more complicated than the expensive car adverts and glowing newspaper headlines would have us believe…..
Typical gasoline-powered auto engines are approximately 27% efficient. Typical fossil-fueled generating stations are 50% efficient, transmission to end user is 67% efficient, battery charging is 90% efficient and the auto’s electric motor is 90% efficient, so that the fuel efficiency of an electric car is also 27%. However, the electric car requires 30% more power per mile traveled to move the mass of its batteries. (See more here)
GREEN ENERGY GRID
But manufacturing the famous gasoline-electric hybrid can be a dirty business.
Toyota studied the car’s total environmental impact from factory to junkyard.
In fact, when looking at the “materials manufacturing” phase of the car’s life cycle, the Prius was worse than the class average across all five emissions categories. (AUTO SPIES)
Also, this from Reuters a few years back to put an emphasis on Dr. Lomborg’s $44 dollars of savings subsidized with $7,500 in tax-payers monies:
(REUTERS)– General Motors Co. sold a record number of Chevrolet Volt sedans in August — but that probably isn’t a good thing for the automaker’s bottom line.
Nearly two years after the introduction of the path-breaking plug-in hybrid, GM is still losing as much as $49,000 on each Volt it builds, according to estimates provided to Reuters by industry analysts and manufacturing experts.
Cheap Volt lease offers meant to drive more customers to Chevy showrooms this summer may have pushed that loss even higher. There are some Americans paying just $5,050 to drive around for two years in a vehicle that cost as much as $89,000 to produce….
SO, to be clear… it requires A LOT MORE energy to produce the electric or hybrid car, and takes more energy to “fuel” them.
It is time to stop our green worship of the electric car. It costs us a fortune, cuts little CO2 and surprisingly kills almost twice the number of people compared with regular gasoline cars.
Electric cars’ global-warming benefits are small. It is advertised as a zero-emissions car, but in reality it only shifts emissions to electricity production, with most coming from fossil fuels. As green venture capitalist Vinod Khosla likes to point out, “Electric cars are coal-powered cars.”
The most popular electric car, a Nissan Leaf, over a 90,000-mile lifetime will emit 31 metric tons of CO2, based on emissions from its production, its electricity consumption at average U.S. fuel mix and its ultimate scrapping. A comparable diesel Mercedes CDI A160 over a similar lifetime will emit 3 tons more across its production, diesel consumption and ultimate scrapping.
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Comparing Apples to Apples
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Yes, in both cases the electric car is better, but only by a tiny bit. Avoiding 3 tons of CO2 would cost less than $27 on Europe’s emissions trading market. The annual benefit is about the cost of a cup of coffee. Yet U.S. taxpayers spend up to $7,500 in tax breaks for less than $27 of climate benefits. That’s a bad deal.
(See also WUWT, where Lomborg notes that “…large battery pack [cars]… avoids nothing or even *increases* total CO2 emissions”)
This post will deal with two areas, the main one will be to simply compare the lifetime environmental impact of electric cars to regular gas cars and diesel cars and their carbon footprint. I will add some newer information here as well as combining some older posts herein. The second part is simple, where does the energy come to charge these Electric Vehicles (EVs).
SUBSIDY for CARS
These subsidies mainly benefit the rich, Tesla’s increased sales are directly linked to tax breaks offered to the wealthy on the backs of gas and diesel drivers:
…This means that CDA leader Sybrand Buma’s comments that ‘prosecco-drinking Tesla drivers’ have profited from the tax break at the ‘expense of the ordinary man in the street’ are largely true, the paper said.
It points out that the subsidies for electric cars are mainly funded by higher taxes paid by petrol and diesel car owners…
Follow the sources below to subsidy sites in purchasing an electric vehicle:
California just put another $116 million toward clean vehicle rebates(source)…. Administered by CSE for the California Air Resources Board, the Clean Vehicle Rebate Project (CVRP) offers up to $15,000 in electric vehicle rebates for the purchase or lease of new, eligible zero-emission and plug-in hybrid light-duty vehicles (source).
A side note. California, as a government, does not make money like a normal business. It CAN ONLY tax people to get the money it spends. If it gets money from the Federal government, THEY [the Federal government] can only tax people or print money [weakening the dollar if it does this too much]. So, this $116-million comes from somewhere, and, is really just a redistribution of peoples money to an area the State thinks is important ~ but! is in fact, based on bad science.
TOYOTA SAYS!
So let’s start with some Prius examples. AUTOMOTIVE NEWS documents a study done by Toyota that bursts greenies bubbles:
The Toyota Prius is among the greenest cars to operate. But manufacturing the famous gasoline-electric hybrid can be a dirty business.
Toyota studied the car’s total environmental impact from factory to junkyard.
Not surprisingly, the fuel-efficient Prius was better than average in its class of vehicles in lifetime emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide and sulfur oxide, according to Toyota.
But it was slightly worse than average in emissions of nonmethane hydrocarbons and particulate matter. Toyota says this is because producing hybrid-only parts such as motors, inverters and nickel-metal hydride batteries consumes more energy and creates more emissions.
In fact, when looking at the “materials manufacturing” phase of the car’s life cycle, the Prius was worse than the class average across all five emissions categories.
One proponent (now detractor) of EVs is Dr. Ozzie Zehner who has written quite fairly on the issue of alternative energy, and has an open chapter in his book for people to read.
…An environmental activist who once pushed for EVs and now works as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley now calls electric vehicles “unclean at any speed” in a recent article for the engineering journal IEEE Spectrum (via Weasel Zippers and UPI):
The idea of electrifying automobiles to get around their environmental shortcomings isn’t new. Twenty years ago, I myself built a hybrid electric car that could be plugged in or run on natural gas. It wasn’t very fast, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t safe. But I was convinced that cars like mine would help reduce both pollution and fossil-fuel dependence.
I was wrong.
I’ve come to this conclusion after many years of studying environmental issues more deeply and taking note of some important questions we need to ask ourselves as concerned citizens. Mine is an unpopular stance, to be sure. The suggestive power of electric cars is a persuasive force—so persuasive that answering the seemingly simple question “Are electric cars indeed green?” quickly gets complicated.
Ozzie Zehner, who worked on the experimental EV-1 at GM before it got shelved, says some of the complications are due to the economics of science and scientific research. Most of the funding comes from interested parties, which tends to produce research that supports their positions…
The article HotAir references is actually really long, well balanced, and informative. I suggest the serious reader delve in as “Unclean At Any Speed” touches on the many aspects of the alternative energy push right now. One aspect noted in the article is the large rare-earth metals needed (mined) and energy used in the extraction of these and the destruction of large swaths of land mass in order to produce the batteries and magnets involved in EVs.
Prius vs. Hummer
I will combine a graphic from Dr. Zehner article with another noted study comparing the Prius to a Hummer (the better comparison will come later with a diesel and electric cars):
(click to enlarge)
A Prius has a life span of 100,000 miles.
A Hummer has a life span of 300,000 miles.
Over its lifetime, a Prius costs $3.25 per mile driven.
In contrast, the Hummer costs $1.95 per mile driven, and
The Toyota Scion xB costs $0.48 per mile driven.
The original fuel economy estimates for Hybrids were inflated 30% by the EPA.
One of the Prius’s battery factories causes so much environmental damage that NASA uses the lifeless land nearby to simulate moon landings.
Some have called the Hummer/Prius comparison into question, some of which is even hashed out in the comment section of the post where the bullet points are from, fine. (A diesel Hummer H2 would surely beat the total lifespan footprint of the comparison.) But the impact on the environment (note the moon-landing stat) and overall comparisons to diesel’s is what interests me. The author of the above article updated his post with this [for the curious]:
UPDATE: Apparently the Prius was only ranked #12 in overall green-ness, behind several diesels, city roadsters, and smart cars. Experts expect the ranking to be even worse next year.
This brings me to another idea noted in the aforementioned article, even given a growth pattern in alternative fuels diesel in 2030 is still projected to be the best in low impact on the environment:
Environmental Impact
This is an area that might be surprising. At face value, with high gas mileage and low emissions, hybrids seem like the easy answer. But as we have previously covered at Digital Trends, vehicles with batteries may not be nearly as “green” as is often claimed.
This is a complicated issue. Essentially, batteries – particularly lithium-ion batteries – are both incredibly energy intensive and also toxic to produce. This means that the carbon footprint for hybrid production is much larger than a gasoline-only or even diesel-powered car.
In fact, according to some studies, fully electric vehicles have a bigger carbon footprint than diesel powered vehicles in areas where most electricity is produced using fossil fuels.
Modern diesel-cars should not be compared with truck engines that blast clouds of panda-killing soot into the air. Thanks to improvements in technology, current diesel cars are comparable in terms of particulate emissions to any other gasoline-powered car. In fact Volkswagen and Audi’s clean diesel technology makes cars like the Passat TDI cleaner than 93 percent of other cars on the road.
As with price, there will be specific exceptions to this rule, but diesel is greener than hybrid technology.
So diesel hybrids are the ideal for those concerned about the environment. But the rare-earth metals and substances used to make the batteries and magnets are in much less supply than coal, oil, and the like. In fact, in the 70’s it was predicted that we would be running dry of oil this year, but in fact we have at least 200-years worth of supply, the highest ever in the history of man (see point #3). To be clear, the impact on land and energy to get these materials is worse than normal automotive choices:
This section is a response of sorts to Dr. Lomborg, who is interviewed in the opening video. And it is very simple, alternative energy sources create more pollution than they will save (carbon footprint wise).
Thousands of Britain’s wind turbines will create more greenhouse gases than they save, according to potentially devastating scientific research to be published later this year.
The finding, which threatens the entire rationale of the onshore wind farm industry, will be made by Scottish government-funded researchers who devised the standard method used by developers to calculate “carbon payback time” for wind farms on peat soils.
Wind farms are typically built on upland sites, where peat soil is common. In Scotland alone, two thirds of all planned onshore wind development is on peatland. England and Wales also have large numbers of current or proposed peatland wind farms.
But peat is also a massive store of carbon, described as Europe’s equivalent of the tropical rainforest. Peat bogs contain and absorb carbon in the same way as trees and plants — but in much higher quantities.
British peatland stores at least 3.2 billion tons of carbon, making it by far the country’s most important carbon sink and among the most important in the world.
Wind farms, and the miles of new roads and tracks needed to service them, damage or destroy the peat and cause significant loss of carbon to the atmosphere, where it contributes to climate change.
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“This is just another way in which wind power is a scam. It couldn’t exist without subsidy. It is driving industry out of Britain and driving people into fuel poverty.”…
Wind power cannot meet demands, and are dependent on weather conditions, as the above graph shows. Here is a snippit of the issue at hand with Germany’s electric grid:
You can see the extreme volatility of wind power. Such volatility plays havoc with the electric grid and makes fossil fuel backup generation more expensive to run because it must constantly change production rate; it cannot be run efficiently. Those constant changes cause production of more emissions than would be produced without having to contend with the quirky wind power contribution.
Gosselin (a US citizen living in Germany, who received a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arizona) notes that “Resistance to wind power in Germany is snowballing.” “The turbines, which the German government says will become the ‘workhorse’ of the German power industry, ran at over 50% of their rated capacity only for 461 hours [out of a possible 8,766], or just 5.2% of the time.”
In addition to the unreliable power produced by allegedly “green” wind power, it is becoming increasingly obvious that wind generation is taking a large toll on wildlife and has deleterious effects on human health.
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“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and American Bird Conservancy say wind turbines kill 440,000 bald and golden eagles, hawks, falcons, owls, cranes, egrets, geese and other birds every year in the United States, along with countless insect-eating bats. Wind turbines killed 600000 bats last year.
“Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.” – Top Google engineers
“We get a tax credit if we build a lot of wind farms. That’s the only reason to build them. They don’t make sense without the tax credit.” – Warren Buffett
“Suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy.” – James Hansen (The Godfather of global warming
alarmism and former NASA climate chief)
(LINK TO ARTICLE IN POWER PLANT PICS)
Put another way:
“A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge” ~ George Gilder
Interview by Dennis Prager {Editors note: this is how the USSR ended up with warehouses FULL of “widgets” (things made that it could not use or people did not want) no one needed in the real world. This economic law enforcers George Gilder’s contention that when government supports a venture from failing, no information is gained in knowing if the program actually works. Only the free-market can do this. [See my post on Capitalism.]}
….But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.
Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built.
This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms.
It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.
It is reported China is now erecting 36 wind turbines every day and Texas is the largest producer of wind power in the US.
Liming Zhou, Research Associate Professor at the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the University of New York, who led the study, said further research is needed into the affect of the new technology on the wider environment.
“Wind energy is among the world’s fastest growing sources of energy. The US wind industry has experienced a remarkably rapid expansion of capacity in recent years,” he said. “While converting wind’s kinetic energy into electricity, wind turbines modify surface-atmosphere exchanges and transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. These changes, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate.”
The study, published in Nature, found a “significant warming trend” of up to 0.72C (1.37F) per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to near-by non-wind-farm regions.
The team studied satellite data showing land surface temperature in west-central Texas….
….According to Prinn and Wang, this temperature increase occurs because the wind turbines affect two processes that play critical roles in determining surface temperature and atmospheric circulation: vertical turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport. Both processes are responsible for moving heat away from Earth’s surface.
In the analysis, the wind turbines on land reduced wind speed, particularly on the downwind side of the wind farms, which reduced the strength of the turbulent motion and horizontal heat transport processes. This resulted in less heat being transported to the upper parts of the atmosphere, as well as to other regions farther away from the wind farms….
Not only do wind farms kill off high-profile bird species like golden and bald eagles and California condors, the farms also cause global warming. After hundreds of millions in blown taxpayer money and thousands of dead birds the latest research shows that wind farms cause warming. Reuters reported, via Free Republic:
Large wind farms might have a warming effect on the local climate, research in the United States showed on Sunday, casting a shadow over the long-term sustainability of wind power…
…The world’s wind farms last year had the capacity to produce 238 gigawatt of electricity at any one time. That was a 21 percent rise on 2010 and capacity is expected to reach nearly 500 gigawatt by the end of 2016 as more, and bigger, farms spring up, according to the Global Wind Energy Council.
Researchers at the State University of New York at Albany analysed the satellite data of areas around large wind farms in Texas, where four of the world’s largest farms are located, over the period 2003 to 2011.
The results, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, showed a warming trend of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade in areas over the farms, compared with nearby regions without the farms.
“We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms,” the study said. The temperature change could be due to the effects of the energy expelled by farms and the movement and turbulence generated by turbine rotors, it said.
“These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate,” the authors said.
But the Democrats will continue to dump billions into the costly energy source anyway. It makes them feel good.
Can you imagine the polluted, destroyed world we would have if the left had their way with green energy?
Environazis, like all progressives, care about two things: other people’s money and the power entailed in imposing their ideology. Prominent among the many things they do not care about is the environment, as demonstrated by a monstrosity planned for Loch Ness:
A giant 67 turbine wind farm planned for the mountains overlooking Loch Ness will be an environmental disaster thanks to the sheer quantity of stone which will need to be quarried to construct it, according to the John Muir Trust. In addition, the Trust has warned that the turbines spell ecological disaster for the wet blanket peat-land which covers the area and acts as a huge carbon sink, the Sunday Times has reported.
According to global warming dogma, carbon sinks are crucial in preventing human activity from causing climatic doom.
The planet isn’t the only victim of this ideologically driven enterprise:
Around one million people visit the picturesque Loch Ness, nestled in the highlands of Scotland each year, bringing about £25 million in revenue with them. Most are on the lookout for the infamous monster, but if Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE) get their way the tourists will have something else to look at: the Stronelairg wind farm – 67 turbines, each 443ft high, peppered across the Monadhlaith mountains overlooking the Loch.
Is “green” energy, particularly wind and solar energy, the solution to our climate and energy problems? Or should we be relying on things like natural gas, nuclear energy, and even coal for our energy needs and environmental obligations? Alex Epstein of the Center for Industrial Progress explains.
NEW INFORMATION on the low frequency noise made by wind farms shows a direct connection to the health of ones heart.
Interviewed in Allgemeine-Zeitung, Vahl said that the Low Frequency Noise generated by wind turbines can weaken the heart muscle and change the blood flow.
Prof. Wahl became interested in infrasound and its impact on health after a friend who lived near a wind park had complained of feeling continuously sick. It is known that all around the world people living near wind parks often experience health issues – some being severe.
The group led by Prof. Vahl conducted an experiment to find out if infrasound has an effect on heart muscle strength. Under the measurement conditions, the force developed by isolated heart muscle was up to 20 percent less.
The strength of the heart muscle is important in the event the aortic valve becomes caked up and thus more narrow. According to Dr. Vahl: “This changes the blood flow and the flow noise.”
Now researchers are discussing whether these changes can pose an additional risk to the function of the heart, the Allgemeine Zeitung reported.
Citing the results, Prof. Vahl said: “The fundamental question of whether infrasound can affect the heart muscle has been answered.”
The researchers conclude: “We are at the very beginning, but we can imagine that long-term impact of infrasound causes health problems. The silent noise of infrasound acts like a heart jammer.”
There has long been anecdotal evidence that wind turbines are injurious to human health. I first heard these stories myself on a visit to Australia in 2012 when I met several people who had experienced serious health problems from the effects of wind turbine infrasound – and had been forced to abandon their homes. Subsequently, I also spoke to people in the UK who were also victims of Wind Turbine Syndrome.
You can read the first report I wrote on the subject here.
The wind industry is a massive class action suit waiting to happen. [Especially now that the World Health Organisation has confirmed the health risks – which, of course, just like Big Tobacco, Big Wind has been covering up for years] Indeed, of all the scandals to emerge from the great global warming scam, the wind industry is in my view the worst….
GOOGLE
This realization has hit Google scientists squarely in the common sense thinking center. Google (and Apple) had grand dreams of going 100%-powered by alternative means. They have all but given up:
“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”
I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.
Low-Tech Magazine notes that new “research shows, albeit unintentional, that generating electricity with solar panels can also be a very bad idea. In some cases, producing electricity by solar panels releases more greenhouse gases than producing electricity by gas or even coal.” Continuing, they point out that…
Producing electricity from solar cells reduces air pollutants and greenhouse gases by about 90 percent in comparison to using conventional fossil fuel technologies, claims a study called “Emissions from Photovoltaic Life Cycles”, to be published this month in “Environmental Science & Technology”. Good news, it seems, until one reads the report itself. The researchers come up with a solid set of figures. However, they interpret them in a rather optimistic way. Some recalculations (skip this article if you get annoyed by numbers) produce striking conclusions.
Solar panels don’t come falling out of the sky – they have to be manufactured. Similar to computer chips, this is a dirty and energy-intensive process. First, raw materials have to be mined: quartz sand for silicon cells, metal ore for thin film cells. Next, these materials have to be treated, following different steps (in the case of silicon cells these are purification, crystallization and wafering). Finally, these upgraded materials have to be manufactured into solar cells, and assembled into modules. All these processes produce air pollution and heavy metal emissions, and they consume energy – which brings about more air pollution, heavy metal emissions and also greenhouse gases.
So an electrical grid powered by alternative fuels or “renewable energy is really a pipe-dream. Take the projections of that giant bird killing plant on the California-Nevada border:
….A solar power plant in the Mojave Desert that’s attracted negative attention for its injuries to birds is producing a whole lot less power than it’s supposed to, according to Energy Department figures.
According to stats from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a number-crunching branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in San Bernardino County has produced only about a quarter of the power it’s supposed to, with both less than optimal weather and apparent mechanical issues contributing to the shortfall.
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As Danko points out, Ivanpah’s owners have recently sought extensions on the repayment schedule for the $1.6 billion in government-backed loans that paid for Ivanpah’s construction, hoping to delay writing checks until the firms can secure a government grant they hope to use to pay down the loan… .
In an excellent post linking to a German documentary (30-minutes) and study showing the devastation to Chili of lithium mining, we find the following:
German ZDF public television recently broadcast a reportshowing how electric cars are a far cry from being what they are all cracked up to be by green activists.
The report titled: “Batteries in twilight – The dark side of e-mobility” [now not available] shows how the mining of raw materials needed for producing the massive automobile batteries is highly destructive to the environment. For example, two thirds of the cobalt currently comes from the Congo, where the mining rights have been acquired by China. Other materials needed include manganese, lithium and graphite.
Every electric car battery needs about 20 – 30 kg of lithium.
The mining of the raw materials often takes place in third world countries where workers are forced to work under horrendous conditions and no regard is given to protecting the environment. When it comes to “going green”, it seems everything flies out the window….
The production of lithium through evaporation ponds uses a lot of water – around 21 million litres per day. Approximately 2.2 million litres of water is needed to produce one ton of lithium. (EURO NEWS)
AGAIN… here is a Facebookpost of the same thing regarding Lithium Fields:
This is a Lithium leach field.
This is what your Electric Car batteries are made of.
It is so neuro-toxic that a bird landing on this stuff dies in minutes.
Take a guess what it does to your nervous system?
Pat yourself on the back for saving the environment.
Chile, 2nd largest lithium producer, is having water-scarcity problems as this technology takes so much water to produce battery-grade lithium. 2000 tons: 1 ton.
And the current version of the “inflation reduction act” wants 100% of EV battery components produced in the US.
Lead, nickel, lithium, cadmium, alkaline, mercury and nickel metal hydride.
Batteries are a collection of things that are extremely deadly.
Alternative fuels/energy is a DIRTY BUSINESS… but the left who live in the seclusion of the New York Times and MSNBC would never know this. I can show a graph showing skyrocketing carbon emissions worldwide for the past decade and that the temperature has dropped during this time by a small amount, and it is like showing them instructions to build an IKEA bookcase with instructions written in Gaelic!
What about the impact and supply of the materials needed to produce batteries? TreeHugger has a good post that mentions some of these environmental pitfalls. These issues involve many devices we use daily (cell phones, lap-top computers, rechargeable batteries, etc.), but add to this burden a mandated or subsidized car industry:
…lithium batteries take a tremendous amount of copper and aluminum to work properly. These metals are needed for the production of the anode & the cathode, cables and battery management systems. Copper and aluminum have to be mined, processes and manufacturing which takes lots of energy, chemicals and water which add to their environmental burden.
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First of all, this study emphasizes that there would be less Lithium available than previously estimated for the global electric car market. It also states the fact that some of the largest concentrations of Lithium in the world are found in some of the most beautiful and ecologically fragile places, such as The Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. The authors note:
“It would be irresponsible to despoil these regions for a material which can only ever be produced in sufficient quantities to serve a niche market of luxury vehicles for the top end of the market. We live in an age of Environmental Responsibility where the folly of the last two hundred years of despoilment of the Earth’s resources are clear to see. We cannot have “Green Cars” that have been produced at the expense of some of the world’s last unspoiled and irreplaceable wilderness. We have a responsibility to rectify our errors and not fall into the same traps as in the past.”
[….]
The report estimates that there would be less Lithium available than previously estimated for the global electric car market, as demand is rising for competing markets, such as cellular telephones and other electronic devices. At the same time, due to a great concentration of Lithium found in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina (70% of the world’s deposits), the United States and other developed countries needing the material will be subject to geopolitical forces similar to those they have already encountered from the member countries of OPEC…
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In an excellent article we see the projected demands on other metals involved in the battery and transit goals:
….Regarding the demand for the different minerals, in the case of aluminum, according to our results, the demand for minerals from the rest of the economy would stand out, with the requirement for batteries having little influence. Copper would have a high demand from the rest of the economy, but it would also have a significant demand from vehicles, infrastructure and batteries. Cobalt would be in high demand because of the manufacture of batteries with the exception of the LFP battery that does not have this mineral, in the case of its demand from the rest of the economy it can be stated that it would be important but less influential than the demand for batteries. Lithium would have very high requirements from all the batteries and with a reduced demand from the rest of the economy. Manganese would have an important but contained demand coming from LMO and NMC batteries, since the requirements for this mineral would stand out in the rest of the economy. Finally, nickel would have a high demand from NMC and NCA batteries, but its main demand would come from the rest of the economy.
The batteries that would require the least materials are the NCA and LFP batteries. The NMC battery has been surpassed in performance and mineral usage by the NCA. The LiMnO2 battery has a very poor performance, so it has been doomed to disuse in electric vehicles. In addition, the LFP battery, the only one that does not use critical materials in the cathode (other than lithium), also has poor performance, requiring very large batteries (in size and weight) to match the capacity and power of batteries using cobalt.
Charging infrastructure, rail and copper used in electrified vehicles could add up to more than 17% of the copper reserve requirement in the most unfavourable scenario (high EV) and 7% in the most favourable (degrowth), so these are elements that must be taken into account…..
Are Electric Vehicles really clean? | They run on dirty energy and blood of children as young as 6. | Electric cars drive human rights abuse and child labour. | China is one of the villains in this story. | Are electric carmakers equally guilty too? | Palki Sharma Upadhyay tells you.
…. lithium is also not the only battery ingredient with a dark side. Perhaps the darkest of all is cobalt, which is commonly used, alongside lithium, in the batteries of many electric vehicles.
Worse still, UNICEF estimates 40,000 of the workers in these mines are children under the age of 18, with some as young as 7 years old. Cobalt mining also comes with serious health risks. Chronic exposure to dust containing cobalt can cause the potentially fatal lung disease “hard metal lung disease.” Many fatal accidents have also been caused by mines not being constructed or managed safely.
Clearly then, in the face of such widespread environmental damage and human rights abuses, the ethics of electric vehicles is far more complicated than the expensive car adverts and glowing newspaper headlines would have us believe…..
This is pretty lame. I wonder how many people think this power just comes out of the ground? Perhaps these greentards think this is magic solar power that is leached from the sun and stored in invisible floating Tesla flywheels. Bet that went right over most heads. Anyway this is a real problem for shoppers at WalGREENS. Weather they are asked or not they are subsidizing this climate hoax and paying for the fuel that is getting these FARCE-CARS from point “a” to point “b.”
And there are a lot of tax-monies/incentives used even for the above charging stations. Wiki has some pretty good references in regards to this:
Plug-in conversion kits
The 2009 ARRA provided a tax credit for plug-in electric drive conversion kits. The credit is equal to 10% of the cost of converting a vehicle to a qualified plug-in electric vehicle and in service after February 17, 2009. The maximum amount of the credit is $4,000. The credit does not apply to conversions made after December 31, 2011.[142][149]
Charging equipment
There was (through 2010) a federal tax credit equal to 50% of the cost to buy and install a home-based charging station with a maximum credit of US$2,000 for each station. Businesses qualified for tax credits up to $50,000 for larger installations.[144][150] These credits expired on December 31, 2010, but were extended through 2013 with a reduced tax credit equal to 30% with a maximum credit of up to US$1,000 for each station for individuals and up to US$30,000 for commercial buyers.[][]
Another factor regarding optimal output and electric vehicles is hot and cold weather. I will let a wonderful WIRED MAGAZINE article explain:
…EV drivers have other factors to consider in winter weather: How far they can go, and how long it will take them to recharge.
Cold temperatures can hurt both, especially when it gets as severe as Winter Storm Jaden, which has triggered states of emergency across the country and will subject more than 70 percent of the US population to subzero temperatures over the next few days. That’s because the lithium-ion batteries that power EVs (as well as cellphones and laptops) are very temperature sensitive.
“Batteries are like humans,” says Anna Stefanopoulou, director of the University of Michigan’s Energy Institute. They prefer the same sort of temperature range that people do. Anything below 40 or above 115 degrees Fahrenheit and they’re not going to deliver their peak performance. They like to be around 60 to 80 degrees. As the temperature drops, the electrolyte fluid inside the battery cells becomes more sluggish. “You don’t have as much power when you want to discharge,” says Stefanopoulou. “The situation is even more limited when you want to charge.”
Modern cars are designed to take that into account, with battery thermal management systems that warm or cool a battery. But while an internal combustion engine generates its own heat, which warms the engine and the car occupants, an EV has to find that warmth somewhere else, either scavenging the small amount of heat that motors and inverters make or running a heater. That takes energy, meaning there’s less power available to move the wheels.
Additionally, to protect the battery—the most expensive component of an EV—the onboard computer may limit how it’s used in extreme low temperatures. The Tesla Model S owners manual warns: “In cold weather, some of the stored energy in the Battery may not be available on your drive because the battery is too cold.”…
In a conversation between EV owners and others at WATTS UP WITH THAT, a comment that sums up the above but in a short paragraph, reads:
It’s not just bigger, it’s huge. Unlike an IC powered car, where cold weather won’t really affect it much, an electric car is severely disadvantaged. Drop outside temperatures down to -10 degrees F (not uncommon in Chicago) and that 300 mile range drops to 75 miles. Commute 20 miles to work on a frigid winter morning and 20 miles home in slooow traffic in a snowstorm with lights, wipers, and defroster on hi, and you just might not make it.
And another story of Minnessota doo gooders plans failiung them:
The Twin City buses were supposed to go 150 miles on a single charge, but the actual range was closer to 75 miles.
Minnesota cities worked to shift toward clean energy in public transit, but complications from acquired electric vehicles have prompted significant overhauls and additional expenditures to keep the buses operational.
In Duluth, Minn., technicians installed diesel-powered heaters on electric buses as the city’s electric fleet struggled to perform. In 2015, the city received a $6.3 million federal grant, according to MinnPost, for seven battery-electric buses from Proterra, which were delivered in 2018.
Proterra, which went bankrupt in August, sold 550 buses. The company enjoyed outspoken support from the Biden administration, but the buses have given transit districts across the country extensive problems. Many of the buses, which were purchased with sizable federal grants, have broken down, and repairs have been slow going as a result of a lack of parts.
The Proterra buses in Duluth struggled to make it up steep hills and to keep riders warm in winter. Proterra technicians installed diesel-powered heaters on the buses and increased the battery capacity so they could handle steep hills and subzero temperatures, which degrade the performance of electric vehicles.
In the Twin Cities, meanwhile, the transit department received another $1.7 million federal grant for eight more electric buses from Canada-based New Flyer. The Twin City buses were supposed to go 150 miles on a single charge, but the actual range was closer to 75 miles. The buses further failed to meet 20% of their scheduled operating miles because of needed battery replacements. In 2021, the buses were out of service for most of the year because of charging station issues at the garage…..
Reality is a Bitch!
THE DAILY MAIL notes that “[e]lectric cars have 40 per cent less range when the temperature dips below freezing, new research has revealed.” Wow. Canadians are well-aware of the issue — as are the people in the northern states.
IN~OTHER~WORDS, this “venture is a giant boondoggle and these charging-stations would never survive outside of transferring wealth from business owners and those that drive the economy to cover this failure of a “choice.”
AGAIN:
“A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge” — George Gilder
Interview by Dennis Prager {Editors note: this is how the USSR ended up with warehouses FULL of “widgets” (things made that it could not use or people did not want) no one needed in the real world. This economic law enforcers George Gilder’s contention that when government supports a venture from failing, no information is gained in knowing if the program actually works. Only the free-market can do this. [See my post on Capitalism.]}
