Interesting take on EVs from Peter Zeihan, about 6 minutes long:
His hypothesis is that EVs have reached a short-term peak, and may decline for a while until some fundamental changes happen.
You may have noticed that Ford and GM have cancelled most of their plans to produce EVs, and Tesla is scaling back planned expansion of production capacity.
There are several things going on here. Not part of the contraction in production is the fact that EVs aren't all that environmentally friendly.
First, Zeihan maintains that the numbers manufacturers use to calculate carbon breakeven assume every possible green input -- which doesn't exist in the real world.
- They assume that the vehicles' components are manufactured with clean energy and that the components are assembled with clean energy. That's highly variable, and generally not true.
- They assume that energy used to charge the vehicles is 100% green. Again, not true.
- Example: The greenest state in the union is California, which still uses fossil fuels to generate about 50% of its electricity. It imports about 30% of its energy from Arizona, which is 100% fossil-fuel generated, yet California claims not to know what is used to generate the energy it imports.
- It takes a LOT of energy to get the raw materials -- Lithium, carbon fiber, nickel, molybdenum, etc. -- from in the ground to the necessary purity to be used in EVs. Most of that refinement is done in China, where the energy is generated by soft coal and lignite -- some of the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. And that assumes you take the Chinese word for their energy use, and they lie about all their numbers.
Second, EV sales are stagnating for several reasons:
- An EV typically costs about $10K more than a comparable ICE car, and the difference can be much greater.
- If you're doing anything other than puttering around town on daily errands (and therefore able to charge your car over night in your garage), range anxiety is real.
- Energy payback doesn't take into account the cost of buying a home charging station, installing it, and running the necessary power line to your home.
- Charging stations can be hard to find.
- IF you can find one, they have notoriously unreliable operation -- IOW, a lot of them don't work.
- It still takes a long time to fully charge up a car, even on a supercharger.
IOW, significantly higher upfront expenditure, hard to find an operational refueling station, and if you do it takes a long time to refuel. Understandably, the general public is unenthused.
So Ford, GM and Tesla are having a hard time moving the EV inventory they have, much less expanding market share.
We have about 1% EVs on the roads now. Unrelated to the general public, but a valid consideration is that to have that number go to, say 25%, we'd have to massively increase the electrical grid....which is years off, even if we start today.
Zeihan advocates for stopping the emphasis on EVs. The technology just isn't yet there. He calls himself, "a Green who can do math," and advocates diverting that investment capital to other more promising areas of environmentally conscious production.
Disappointingly, not only does Zeihan not drill into some of those alternatives, he doesn't even name them. I wish he had at least said, "For example, X, Y and Z, each of which we'll examine in more detail over the next three installments." But he didn't.
My personal opinion is that we'll eventually get there, and EVs (probably fueled by nuclear power) are in fact the future. But that future is a long way off, and probably not in my lifetime.
His hypothesis is that EVs have reached a short-term peak, and may decline for a while until some fundamental changes happen.
You may have noticed that Ford and GM have cancelled most of their plans to produce EVs, and Tesla is scaling back planned expansion of production capacity.
There are several things going on here. Not part of the contraction in production is the fact that EVs aren't all that environmentally friendly.
First, Zeihan maintains that the numbers manufacturers use to calculate carbon breakeven assume every possible green input -- which doesn't exist in the real world.
- They assume that the vehicles' components are manufactured with clean energy and that the components are assembled with clean energy. That's highly variable, and generally not true.
- They assume that energy used to charge the vehicles is 100% green. Again, not true.
- Example: The greenest state in the union is California, which still uses fossil fuels to generate about 50% of its electricity. It imports about 30% of its energy from Arizona, which is 100% fossil-fuel generated, yet California claims not to know what is used to generate the energy it imports.
- It takes a LOT of energy to get the raw materials -- Lithium, carbon fiber, nickel, molybdenum, etc. -- from in the ground to the necessary purity to be used in EVs. Most of that refinement is done in China, where the energy is generated by soft coal and lignite -- some of the dirtiest of all fossil fuels. And that assumes you take the Chinese word for their energy use, and they lie about all their numbers.
Second, EV sales are stagnating for several reasons:
- An EV typically costs about $10K more than a comparable ICE car, and the difference can be much greater.
- If you're doing anything other than puttering around town on daily errands (and therefore able to charge your car over night in your garage), range anxiety is real.
- Energy payback doesn't take into account the cost of buying a home charging station, installing it, and running the necessary power line to your home.
- Charging stations can be hard to find.
- IF you can find one, they have notoriously unreliable operation -- IOW, a lot of them don't work.
- It still takes a long time to fully charge up a car, even on a supercharger.
IOW, significantly higher upfront expenditure, hard to find an operational refueling station, and if you do it takes a long time to refuel. Understandably, the general public is unenthused.
So Ford, GM and Tesla are having a hard time moving the EV inventory they have, much less expanding market share.
We have about 1% EVs on the roads now. Unrelated to the general public, but a valid consideration is that to have that number go to, say 25%, we'd have to massively increase the electrical grid....which is years off, even if we start today.
Zeihan advocates for stopping the emphasis on EVs. The technology just isn't yet there. He calls himself, "a Green who can do math," and advocates diverting that investment capital to other more promising areas of environmentally conscious production.
Disappointingly, not only does Zeihan not drill into some of those alternatives, he doesn't even name them. I wish he had at least said, "For example, X, Y and Z, each of which we'll examine in more detail over the next three installments." But he didn't.
My personal opinion is that we'll eventually get there, and EVs (probably fueled by nuclear power) are in fact the future. But that future is a long way off, and probably not in my lifetime.
