Electric Vehicles: How difficult is the transition? (Re-upload) (Patreon)

As many of you have pointed out, the video on electric vehicles which ran one week ago had several mistakes and omissions. I have been extremely unhappy with that and decided to take the video down and upload a revised version. I want to thank you all for your support here on Patreon because without that, I couldn't afford doing this.

[The below is the transcript with links to references.]

If you care about the environment, you leave the car at home. That’s a nice idea but let’s be honest, we’re not going to give up cars, right? Right. So how about plan B then, let’s make cars more environmentally friendly. We already talked about the problems with the hydrogen economy in a previous video, the biggest problem being that it doesn’t exist. But what about electric vehicles? Will those save us? That’s what we will talk about today.

Transportation is a major contributor to greenhouse-gas emissions. In the US and EU likewise, it accounts for about 29 percent of emissions. Globally the contribution is 23 percent. Passenger cars and light-duty trucks account for more than half of the that. The rest is big trucks, planes, boats, and Adam Tate. It’s a big chunk of total emission and the reason why much effort has recently gone into decarbonizing transport by switching to electric vehicles.

There are four types of electric vehicles. The first are fully battery driven. Those are the so-called Battery Electric Vehicles. Then there are two types of hybrid cars which combine batteries with combustion engines. Some of them you can charge from an outlet, these are the plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Some will charge the battery from the combustion engine when the car runs but can’t charge from an outlet. These are the classical hybrid electric vehicles. They do however run on gasoline most of the time, so they’re about as electric as a big mac is vegetarian just because there’s leaf of salad inside. Finally there are fuel cell electric vehicles, which are those that run on hydrogen.

If the thing runs on hydrogen why is it electric? It’s because you can’t directly use the fuel cell to drive an engine. Getting energy out of hydrogen is a chemical reaction and it can’t be turned up and down quickly. It’s a little sluggish, like Sabine without caffeine. So instead of using the hydrogen reaction to power the engine directly, the fuel cell charges the battery, and the battery powers the motor. This is why hydrogen vehicles are also electric vehicles. By the way, that it’s difficult to turn up and down chemical reactions quickly and efficiently is also why it’s difficult to efficiently produce hydrogen from intermittent energies.

The major problem with the transition to electric vehicles is that our entire transport infrastructure was built around fossil fuels, and changing infrastructure is costly and time-consuming. This is why I don’t think we’ll get far with hydrogen powered cars. It’s possible, alright. But building the infrastructure will take too long and cost too much money for that to make much sense.

The situation is completely different with electric vehicles that charge from the grid, because, as you might have heard, we do have electric grids already. This is why the transition to battery electric vehicles can be done much faster and at a lower cost. In fact, the transition is well on the way already.

Globally, in 2022 about 14 percent of new passenger vehicles were electric vehicles, and the share had steeply increased compared to the previous year. Most electric cars are currently sold by BYD followed by Tesla. It’s worth mentioning though that there are huge differences between countries. For example, in Greece about 1 percent of new cars are electric, in the US is about 7 percent, and in Norway it’s more than 50 percent. Keep in mind though that this is only new car sales, not used cars, which have a considerably larger market.

A 2022 report by the International Energy Agency estimates that the share of electric vehicles in total new car sales needs to reach around 60 percent by 2030 to stay the course and reach net zero in 2050. So there’s some way to go.

That’s why some countries are pushing policies to speed up the transition. The UK will stop the sales of new diesel and petrol-fuelled cars by 2030. The EU has banned their sale by 2035. Japan and China likewise say that by 2035 all new car sales have to be electric. Nearly 60 countries have imposed similar sales bans.

The major exception is, guess who, the USA, which has no plans to ban anything, though the Biden administration has set itself a *target of having 50 percent new vehicle sales electric by 2030, and a few US state, for example California, have announced their own bans.

The main problem which slows the adoption of electric vehicles is currently finding charging places. Despite many countries’ efforts, the deployment of charging stations is uneven and especially in rural areas it might be hard to find one. This for example is a map of charging stations in the EU. If you live in France, but not in Paris, well good luck.

To make matters worse, a significant fraction of the existing charging stations are out of order at any given time, in the US it was about 1 in 5 in 2022. In the UK, the numbers are similar, though they strongly depend on location. And then there are other reasons for why the car might not charge, such as problems with the connectors, issues with the mobile app you need for payment, or your husband who forgot to plug in the cable.

Ok, not all is going smoothly, but that’s birthing pain, you might say. It’ll pass and then we’ll finally know what shapewear is really good for. And I guess that’s right, the situation will likely improve in the coming years. But it does make the switch to electric unappealing for many potential buyers, and among owners it’s given rise to what’s been dubbed “range anxiety”.

You can charge your car at home, but the issue is that the time it takes to charge the battery depends on the power you can deliver to it, and the power depends both on the voltage and the ampere. The standard household voltage is 120 in North America and 240 in Europe. The maximum Amperes are roughly the same, though, so in Europe you get more power out of the standard wall socket.

I learned this the hard time when I moved back to Europe and blew up a few things I’d bought overseas, such as a set of external laptop speakers which went out with a loud puff and a little smoke.

North American households also often have some 200- or 240-Volts outlets, and in Europe we have some 400 Volts outlets. Those both deliver more power and will therefore charge a car faster.

In any case, electric vehicle chargers are classified on three levels, one is the stuff that you get out of the wall socket, that’s alternating current, and is called slow charging or level 1. Then there is alternating current but with higher amperes. Those are called fast chargers or level 2. And then there is rapid charging or level 3 which uses direct currents. Batteries all charge with direct currents. So if you use alternating current, it has to be converted to direct current in your car.

Just exactly how long it takes to fully charge a car with depends on many things, but roughly, the slow charger takes a day, the fast charger a few hours, and the rapid charger half an hour or so to get the battery to 80 percent. They usually stop there because the last 20 percent take much longer. It’s like it takes me 5 minutes to I write an email but then another hour to decide whether “Thank you” is ever an appropriate closing.

To overcome range anxiety now all these charging places will have to increase dramatically in number. The International Council on Clean Transportation estimates that by 2030 there will be 26 million electric vehicles on American streets. They’ll need about 1 point 3 million slow chargers, 900 thousand public fast chargers, and 180 thousand rapid chargers.

Since we already have too many numbers floating around, anyway, let’s do a little maths here. The rapid charging places can cost upward of half a million US$. That’s for four chargers plus the cost of building the place and connecting it to the grid, so roughly 125 thousand per charger. We need 180 thousand of those, that makes something like 20 billion US dollars. And this is only the rapid chargers. An estimate for the EU puts the expenses for all charging places at 240 billion Euro by 2030.

That’s a lot of money and especially in rural areas, it might be difficult to cover the costs with revenue from the charging place because there aren’t sufficiently many customers. Indeed, a 2019 white paper found that a lot of DC fast charging stations become money sinks.

This means that the market isn’t going to do it on its own and will need either subsidies or regulations. It’s a problem that often occurs with infrastructure investments in sparsely populated areas, we’ve seen this previously with telephone and internet coverage. Though in the long run though, as prices for the technology drop, the market often picks up on it eventually.

The Germans are testing an alternative charging method for electric vehicles which is power lines above one lane of the highway that vehicles can latch onto by a moveable arm on the roof. It’s primarily intended for trucks though.

Then there is the question whether the electric grid will cope. The US Department of Energy estimates that about 80 percent of charging will be done at home, and typically at night. But our current electric grids weren’t built for such high demand, neither in the US nor in Europe. They simply don’t have the capacity to support that many electric vehicles in addition to the electric appliances.

If you pull too much power from the line in a residential area, either fuses or transformers will blow. An added problem is that the transformers heat up during use and are designed to cool during the night. But if you suddenly have a lot of demand during the night from charging all those vehicles, transformers can’t cool down and are more likely to blow, especially in the summer when nights are warm and everyone’s running air conditioning in addition.

You could upgrade the transformers to ones that can support more power. But those are larger and heavier and may not fit into the boxes or onto the poles on which they sit now. In the US alone there are about 180 million of those which would have to be replaced. Clearly this isn’t going to happen any time soon.

Instead, what’s happening for now is that municipalities control how many chargers of what type can be added to each street. This is why in many countries you now have to apply for a permit for a car charger. And to avoid that too many of those run at the same time, many countries ,including Germany and the UK, have passed laws that permit providers to interrupt power supply to certain lines temporarily.

In the long run, upgrading the grid will be very costly. A 2019 analysis conducted by Boston Consulting Group found that in the US, depending on charging patterns, the need for investment in grid upgrades will be between one and a half and about five thousand US dollars per electric vehicle through 2030. We are talking tens of billions of dollars.

And this isn’t half of it. Because in the long run, all transmission lines must be upgraded to support electric vehicles, especially if the vehicles are also supposed to act as energy storage that can feed back into the grid. According to estimates from the non-profit organization American Action Network, by 2035, the costs for the entire upgrade in the US will reach approximately 2 point 5 trillion US dollars. Trillion, that’s a thousand billion.

Other estimates have found between 2 and 3 and a half trillion by 2050, for the upgrade of the power grid in the US alone. According to an estimate from Bloomberg, globally the cost might be as high as 21 trillion.

Calling it a lot of money is like calling Elon Musk “kinda wealthy”.

And it’ll have to be done swiftly. By 2050, about 1 million miles of new transmission lines would be needed in the US. To put this number into perspective, in the decade from 2010 to 2020 the US added about 18,000 miles. So this means they’d have to get it done more than 20 times faster in the coming decades.

Okay, so it’s possible but it’s expensive. Does it at least make sense? I mean, it’s not like electric vehicles draw energy pluck energy out of the air. Just because the vehicle itself doesn’t burn fossil fuel doesn’t mean it doesn’t create carbon emissions.

The production of electric vehicles has a larger carbon footprint, but it goes in favour of electric motors that they are more efficient than combustion engines. Still, eventually how much carbon dioxide an electric vehicle produces per distance driven depends on what its energy was produced with. If the power grid is fed with, say, brown coal, that can actually produce more emissions for electric vehicles than for combustion engines.

One way to look at it is to ask how far you have to drive an electric vehicle to save carbon emissions compared to a new gasoline-powered one. In the US, the breakeven point has been estimated to lie between 15 thousand and 20 thousand miles. In Norway, which uses a lot of hydropower, the break-even point comes after just 8 thousand 400 miles. But in Poland and China, where a lot of energy comes from coal, an electric vehicle would need to be driven more than 78 thousand miles to break even.

As you see, how high the carbon footprint for electric vehicles is depends strongly on the energy mix at a given location. At the moment, various estimates say that the reduction is somewhere between 15% and 60%, for various places in the EU and states in the US.

The relevant part of the previous sentence is the phrase “at the moment”. Because as we power more vehicles with electricity, the demand for electric power will increase very quickly. This means we will have to add power plants very quickly. The question is then what the power mix will look like in the future.

Okay, so it seems like electric vehicles work and they do give us a decent chance to bring down carbon emission, so why is it going to slowly?

As we already saw above, one problem is that the grid isn’t quite ready for it. Another issue is that fast chargers are expensive and not always worth the investment.

It adds to this that repairing an electric vehicle is at the moment more expensive and takes longer than fixing one with a combustion engine. This is partly for reasons that can be improved on, such as the need for original equipment from the manufacturer, but partly it’s for reasons that will probably stay. For example, if your car has a crash and you must replace the battery that’s going to be more expensive than replacing a gasoline tank.

Speaking of money. Why are those batteries so expensive in the first place? It’s because they require a lot of raw materials that are expensive, such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese for the cathode, or copper for the current collector. Altogether, electric vehicles use around six times more minerals than conventional vehicles. According to the report by the International Energy Agency, the demand for those minerals could grow by a factor 30 in the next two decades.

The biggest problems are lithium and cobalt. In the past 25 years, global lithium production has increased by more than a factor 10 but that wasn’t fast enough to keep up with demand. Consequently, the price of lithium has seen a wild increase. It broke in sharply in January this year, probably because that’s when the Chinese government discontinued subsidies for electric vehicles. But it’s almost certain to increase again, a trend that’s been dubbed “greenflation.”

The major problem with cobalt supply is that almost all of it comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which has a long history of conflict, political upheaval, and instability. In addition to this, mines there are often unsafe for workers and rely on child labour, all of which makes it an unappealing business partner.

Luckily, it’s possible to produce electric vehicle batteries without cobalt. There are several different ways to do this, and the first ones have been on the market since 2021. Ford, Tesla and several other companies are betting on lithium iron phosphate batteries that use neither cobalt nor nickel. They have somewhat lower energy density, which means a battery of the same weight won’t get you as far as those with cobalt and nickel. However, they charge faster, last longer, and at the moment they’re also cheaper.  

Still, for now it looks like prices of batteries, and with them the prices of electric vehicles, will likely continue to increase. In fact, a few months ago, the CEO of Ford, Jim Farley, told CNBC “I don’t think we should be confident in any other outcomes than an increase in prices”.

Scientists and engineers are trying to alleviate the problem by developing different batteries or recycling old ones, but unless a miracle happens that isn’t going to have much of an impact on the market in the coming decade.

One of the upcoming changes is the introduction of sodium batteries. The research on those is quite advanced and several companies are already moving to mass production. Sodium batteries have some big advantages over lithium batteries. Notably, sodium is more abundant on earth and easier to handle, which makes those batteries cheaper.

However, sodium batteries also have a lower energy density, which means they can deliver less energy from the same weight. They also can’t be recharged as often as lithium-ion batteries. This makes them unappealing for electric vehicles, and industry experts expect their major use to be for energy storage and short range vehicles. But even if they’re not used much for electric vehicles, they could reduce lithium demand which would be an indirect benefit.

Finally there’s the question of who is going to do all that. The automobile industry has noticed that the tide is turning. General Motors has announced that by 2035, they want to have “100% zero tailpipe emissions for new light-duty vehicles” and Audi plans to stop selling petrol-powered and diesel models by 2033.  

But electric vehicles are different from gasoline or diesel-powered ones in many regards. People will be needed for the entire supply chain, from mining to battery production to software development to maintenance and repair. At the same time, jobs will be lost in the sector working with combustion engines, as those vehicles will become increasingly rare.

Exactly what this will do to the market is hard to say. But one relevant factor is that the motor of an electric vehicles has fewer parts because the whole mechanical equipment dealing with the combustion isn’t there. Because of this, it’s plausible that in the long run the number of people working in the supply chain will decrease.

Indeed, a 2021 analysis from the Boston Consulting Group of the European auto industry found that by 2030 about 930 thousand existing jobs will disappear but another 895 thousand new jobs will be added. So it’s not such a huge change Though, another analysis found that a total of 275,000 jobs will be lost in the car industry by 2040. So well, never trust a market analyst.

In summary. Electric vehicles are well on the way to replace combustion engines, but it’ll be neither cheap nor easy. Switching to electric vehicles only makes sense alongside a decarbonization of the power grid, while the switch itself will rapidly increase demand and thereby make the decarbonization more difficult. Electric grids will have to be overhauled substantially and like with many infrastructure changes, it’s unlikely that free market economies will take care of it without substantial subsidies.

Still, I think it’s the most realistic way to decarbonize transportation and I believe in a hundred years it’ll turn out having been worth the investment. Are you driving an electric vehicle already? I’d be interested to hear how your experience has been, so let us know in the comments.