Update 5: Energy revolution

2 thoughts on “Update 5: Energy revolution”

  1. Although this is a very interesting article, I do have one side-note on the improvements required for the electric car batteries. As of now, the production of those batteries require materials that are mined in extremely environment-unfriendly conditions and may become hard to get if we keep delving them as we do now. Also, because processing of those raw material and manufacturing of the batteries is scattered over the globe, a battery will have been flown or shippe pretty much over the whole world before it is ready-to-go in a car — at a very high ecological price.
    So not only the price and performance of the batteries needs improvement, but also it’s manufacturing process and raw components.

    1. Thanks for your reaction! 🙂
      Let’s assume for now that mining battery materials is extremely bad for the environment, and we could run into shortages.
      Then still, unlike traditional cars, the mining is only needed for the car(battery) production. The full life-cycle environmental impact of an electric car that runs on renewables would then probably still be lower than a traditional car that runs on ‘freshly mined’ fossil resources. After usage, the battery is recycled, which is not possible for fossil fuels of course. Furthermore, when it gets harder to get the right resources, recycling becomes more attractive.

      But I can find multiple contradictory articles that either say that mining battery materials is worse or better than ‘you would think’. And at this point I do not know who to trust, since I haven’t done enough research to find out which studies are financed by the automotive industry. I do think there is a consensus that of all materials in a battery, lithium is not as bad as metals such as cobalt copper and aluminium.

      A more cynical argument would be that despite possibly ruining a local ecosystem, it has a minimal effect globally.

      You are right about the transportation across the globe. Too bad ships, trucks and planes are not yet battery powered ;-).

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