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Electric Vehicles and related issues (split from B.C. Heat Dome thread)

Yeah. I’m looking at it too, but mindful of the storage side of things…Tesla Wall units or fancy contracted solutions aren’t cheap. I’m tempted to MacGuyver the storage myself…wait til Costco has a sale on car batteries, and splurge on a good controller.

I’ll name the storage bank “Vasili’s Wall” in honour of Vasili Borodin, who “wanted to see Montana”…Big Sky Country with lots of sun.
I don’t think you can buy a Powerwall if you wanted to; last I read they’re only selling them with Tesla Roofs because they’re completely swamped in demand. Apparently everyone in California wants one because of rolling blackouts last year. I’m just going to tie to the grid as Ontario has net-metering and my area has pretty reliable power.
 
I’m just going to tie to the grid as Ontario has net-metering and my area has pretty reliable power.
My area won’t accept any more feed-ins — area farmers saturated the area with panel farms that according to Ontario Hydro, maxed out the ability of the local grid to absorb any more feed. So, it’ll be own-use with storage, however I implement that.
 
I will get excited when they are doing it, i been around long enough to see so many exciting breakthrough that don't pan out. Battery tech now is still about 30 years behind on the promises made in the 80/90's
Well luckily the alleged lithium shortage Isn’t actually a real problem.
Also worth noting that a large portion of the reserves are not in China since that was one of the concerns.
 
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There aren’t Rare Earth Elements in Batteries the critical elements are Lithium and Cobalt. Lithium is plentiful and Cobalt is being phased out of batteries; it’s one of the made up problems that we already covered. Are you guys going to research anything or just continue to spew junk that you heard on Twitter?
You are being obtuse. Rare earth elements are present in every windmill constructed and I believe solar panels as well. The two issues are joined together and cannot be separated as they are all part of the solution.
 
You’re making up problems with no basis in fact to justify that you want to keep doing what you’re doing.
You have not refuted a single point except for the length of battery usage and I apologize for that error it should have read 8 years. You are simply burying your head in the sand and either ignoring or ridiculing any evidence that contradicts your pre-determined mindset. You have made statements I have provided evidence, with references, that either totally refute or at the least call into question the statements which you made. Instead of posting contrary evidence you simply inferred that I was either lying or at least inventing the points that I brought up. Have a good day.
 
You have not refuted a single point except for the length of battery usage and I apologize for that error it should have read 8 years. You are simply burying your head in the sand and either ignoring or ridiculing any evidence that contradicts your pre-determined mindset. You have made statements I have provided evidence, with references, that either totally refute or at the least call into question the statements which you made. Instead of posting contrary evidence you simply inferred that I was either lying or at least inventing the points that I brought up. Have a good day.
You’ve provided no evidence. You’ve spewed out factoids that you heard on Fox News 5 years ago. I google the factoid and find one article from an ultra-conservative magazine 5 years ago and a litany of articles showing that this problem has been solved or never existed to begin with. The idea that global warming is a farce because in 1988 Congress said that the temperature would rise by 1.5 degrees by 2021 but it’s only risen by 0.6 doesn’t make any sense. Margin of error only applies year to year, not when it’s trending. Source
 
My area won’t accept any more feed-ins — area farmers saturated the area with panel farms that according to Ontario Hydro, maxed out the ability of the local grid to absorb any more feed. So, it’ll be own-use with storage, however I implement that.
They’re still doing that? I remember that was a problem with the feed in tariffs when I left circa 2012 and they had to buy it at a loss, Ontario Hydro just wouldn’t connect some people. I just assumed this would have been resolved by now. Sigh.
 
10 years for a modern car is nothing and be careful about the clauses in those warranties. As the number of EV increases, they are going to tweak those warranties to be tighter and tighter to reduce costs. Right now, a good rep and support is critical to marketing success. I don't think anyone really has a good handle on the used EV market yet, it's to early to see what will impact price.
Rich covers this from a Telsa perspective which to be fair has the oddest attitude to aftermarket sales.
 
This is the video I referenced earlier, it shows the current weakness in the post warranty support for EV's, while kudeo's for their ingenuity, being dependent on a used car part supply is risky, as more shops do this, the demand for that limited supply will make critical components hard to obtain. You may see a cottage industry in pulling apart batteries and rebuilding them, but that comes with a high liability risk as well.
 
This is the video I referenced earlier, it shows the current weakness in the post warranty support for EV's, while kudeo's for their ingenuity, being dependent on a used car part supply is risky, as more shops do this, the demand for that limited supply will make critical components hard to obtain. You may see a cottage industry in pulling apart batteries and rebuilding them, but that comes with a high liability risk as well.
Yeah, Nissan doesn’t want to sell anyone a new battery, there’s more money to be made in selling a new car so they’re being really difficult with used batteries and pricing them to dissuade purchase. There’s a couple companies working on aftermarket batteries but all vapourware so far, most people who replace them are finding batteries from junkyards.
 
Yeah, Nissan doesn’t want to sell anyone a new battery, there’s more money to be made in selling a new car so they’re being really difficult with used batteries and pricing them to dissuade purchase. There’s a couple companies working on aftermarket batteries but all vapourware so far, most people who replace them are finding batteries from junkyards.
It’s worth noting that this issue is mostly specific to the LEAF because there’s no thermal management, so the batteries are cheap to make but substantially more prone to degradation compared to everything else on the market.
 
Telsa has the best battery thermal management in the world currently for EV's. Batteries and the electric motors are the souls of EV's. Telsas early motors were garbage and they seemed to have resolved that issue. but the post warranty battery issues is what is going to determine the value of used EV's. Once the subsidies go away and the full cost of EV's come out, that used sale value is going to be key in EV acceptance. I also suspect that the traditional car makers are looking at some of the Telsa solutions and will adopt them and make ICE cars even more affordable and efficient making it harder for EV to gain a larger market share without governments forcing the issue.
 
Electric Vehicle Bump

More interesting because I thought that Eric Reguly was a fan...

So much for the electric vehicle revolution. You cannot make the machines without the metals that power them​

Eric Reguly
ERIC REGULY EUROPEAN BUREAU CHIEF
ROME
PUBLISHED MAY 13, 2022

The metals’ scarcity means that the endlessly touted EV revolution will almost certainly be delayed, perhaps long delayed.

Any successful politician is adept at finding the one bit of good news floating in the ocean of despair, then gushing about it to try to drown our worries.

So it is with U.S. President Joe Biden. A few weeks ago, when the war in Ukraine was propelling gasoline and diesel prices ever higher – regular gas hit a record average of US$4.43 a gallon on Friday – he suggested that painful pump prices will speed the transition to electric vehicles (EVs), fear not.

Voila – no more hard decisions about filling your SUV or feeding your kids. “Transforming our economy to run on electric vehicles, powered by clean energy, will mean that no one will have to worry about gas prices,” he said on Twitter. “It will mean tyrants like Putin won’t be able to use fossil fuels as a weapon.”

Nice idea, except for one minor inconvenience: Gas and diesel aren’t the only commodities turning into luxury goods.

Most of the metals that go into EVs and their massive batteries – copper, nickel, cobalt, lithium, plus a variety of rare earth metals – have climbed even faster than pump prices because they are in exceedingly short supply and high demand. Cobalt two years ago went for US$15 a pound; today it’s US$40. Lithium carbonate prices have climbed about 600 per cent in the same period.

The metals’ scarcity means that the endlessly touted EV revolution will almost certainly be delayed, perhaps long delayed, barring the invention of batteries that use far less of these crucial metals, or none at all. Ditto then green revolution in general, for many of these same metals go into wind turbines and solar panels.

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Guillaume Pitron, the French journalist who wrote the (recently updated) 2018 book The Rare Metals War: The Dark Side of the Energy Transition and Digitalization, said the shortages “will make the energy transition much longer than we believed and hoped.” He added that the EV market “will be led by the countries and companies that are able to secure the supplies of strategic resources. For now, China is leading that race.”

Already, Tesla boss and co-founder Elon Musk is screaming about excruciating metals prices while quietly jacking up the prices of Tesla cars to make them even less affordable for the average family. According to the Wall Street Journal, the average price of a Tesla is US$52,200, up almost 3 per cent since late 2021.

Last month, Mr. Musk used a tweet to bemoan the “insane” cost of lithium and suggested that “Tesla might actually have to get into mining and refining directly at scale, unless costs improve.”

Mr. Musk has been a lot smarter than most auto executives in protecting supply chains. As far back as 2020, just before the price charts went vertical, he realized that shortages could translate into production and profit-margin squeezes. He negotiated a cobalt supply deal with Glencore, the world’s biggest producer of the metal that is essential for battery production. No more middleman.

General Motors and BMW recently did similar deals with Glencore, through presumably at a much higher price. Tesla is now trying to replicate the process with nickel producers.

In March, Volkswagen announced a joint venture with two Chinese companies to secure nickel and cobalt supplies from Indonesia. The deal thrusts VW into the mining industry, taking a page from the supply chain strategy created by Henry Ford a century ago. Mr. Ford was so obsessed with security of supply that he bought coal mines, timberlands, sawmills, a railroad and a fleet of freighters to make sure iron ore and other materials would reach his factories.

It is not out of the question that Mr. Musk or Tesla will buy, or at least invest in, one of the mining companies that supplies the EV maker with metals. Last year, there were even vague rumours that Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, was talking about buying Glencore, whose market value is now £60-billion (US$73.48-billion). That’s pocket change for Tesla, which is worth about US$830-billion.

Supply problems, including delays in receiving semiconductors, have extended the wait times for Teslas and rival EVs. This week, Mr. Musk warned that Tesla may stop taking orders because the delays for some models in some markets are already a year or so. “Our issue is not demand, it is production,” he told a Financial Times conference on the future of cars.

A classic economist would say that the best cure for high prices is high prices, which is generally true. Translation (in the metals context): Outrageous prices for copper, nickel, cobalt and lithium will trigger extra production, flooding the market with these metals and bringing their prices down to their historic norm.

Not so in this case. While the in-ground reserves of some metals are genuinely in short supply, such as copper, others, notably lithium, are blessed with generous reserves on several continents. But that’s not the point. The point is that building mines to extract the lithium, and plants to process it, can take five to 10 years. Cobalt mines can taken longer. “The biggest hurdles, in my view, are ecological, social and political – not geological,” Mr. Pitron says.

Every big automaker in the world is ramping up EV production. Forecasts say that tens of millions of these cars will be produced each year by the middle part of this decade. Maybe not. In the United States alone, about 13 lithium-ion plants are in the construction or planning stages – but what is not known is where the lithium will come from. There is only one operating lithium mine in the U.S. European and Japanese carmakers face similar supply constraints.

The EV revolution is beginning to look like an evolution. EVs are coming, but not at pedal-to-the-metal speeds.

 
In March, Volkswagen announced a joint venture with two Chinese companies to secure nickel and cobalt supplies from Indonesia. The deal thrusts VW into the mining industry, taking a page from the supply chain strategy created by Henry Ford a century ago. Mr. Ford was so obsessed with security of supply that he bought coal mines, timberlands, sawmills, a railroad and a fleet of freighters to make sure iron ore and other materials would reach his factories.

And I will bet the Indonesians are not the people benefitting from this transaction. This resonates with the Chinese efforts to secure Greenland for itself. Or at least the Greenland mines that The Donald offered to buy.
 
And I will bet the Indonesians are not the people benefitting from this transaction. This resonates with the Chinese efforts to secure Greenland for itself. Or at least the Greenland mines that The Donald offered to buy.
But no. We don't need to secure our resource sector in Canada...
 
But no. We don't need to secure our resource sector in Canada...

We haven't owned our resource sector for some time, viz:

Posing as Canadian: How Big Foreign Oil captures Canadian energy and climate policy

Alberta’s recent public inquiry into “anti-Alberta energy campaigns” targeted a molehill and missed the Rockies. Tasked with investigating the vast sums that allegedly flowed from U.S. foundations to Canadian environmental groups, inquiry commissioner Steve Allan followed the trail of money and found a pittance.

Allan’s report identified between $2.21 to $3.46 million a year in “foreign funding directed to Alberta resource development opposition” – a drop in the bucket for the dozens of groups concerned. If, as Alberta Energy Minister Sonya Savage stated, the aim of the inquiry was to expose the influence of foreign actors over domestic policy, it missed the mark badly.

Right under its nose was a far larger source of outside money influencing Albertan and Canadian politics: Big Foreign Oil. Oil corporations in Alberta and Canada are overwhelmingly foreign-owned.

This report examines how Big Foreign Oil (BFO) hinders climate action in Canada by capturing and controlling the lion’s share of the industry, policy-making, and profits. BFO maintains and asserts much of its power through control over the apex oil and gas lobby group, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). Through partially successful PR campaigns, CAPP has wrapped itself in the maple leaf and claimed to speak for Canada’s national interest. But as this report reveals, the Canadian-ness of Calgary’s oil patch is an inch deep:

• Of the 48 corporations on CAPP’s board, 30 were confirmed to be fully or majority foreign-owned, while seven more are very likely majority foreign-owned. Combined, that makes up 77 per cent of CAPP’s board.

• The overwhelming majority – about 97 per cent – of the oil produced by corporations on CAPP’s board in 2018 came from fully or majority foreign-owned corporations. Majority Canadian-owned corporations were responsible for less than three per cent of all oil production by corporations on CAPP’s board.

• Most of CAPP’s revenue comes from foreign-owned corporations because CAPP corporate membership fees are based on each member’s oil production. The greater the production, the higher the fees. Since 97 per cent of the oil produced by CAPP’s corporate board members comes from fully or majority foreign-owned corporations, their fees must account for about 97 per cent of CAPP’s revenue. For all its bravado as an independent, Canadian centre of oil and gas in the world, Calgary is in fact subordinate to Big Foreign Oil.

 
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