I’ve seen a lot of posts here on Lemmy, specifically in the “fuck cars” communities as to how Electric Vehicles do pretty much nothing for the Climate, but I continue to see Climate activists everywhere try pushing so, so hard for Electric Vehicles.
Are they actually beneficial to the planet other than limiting exhaust, or is that it? or maybe exhaust is a way bigger problem?
A lot of good answers here. One made me think about the good aspects, not just the game reduction aspects.
Electric cars are creating additional sources of funding for battery research, improvement of the electrical grid (there was a movement to get rid of central power generating and just use generators at each house), and electric generation smoothing.
Better batteries faster will help humans to make better use of the minerals we pull from the earth and the electrons we set in motion. (Imagine a battery peaking plant with 1980’s batteries.)
Improvement of the electric grid could limit wildfires caused by them.
Smoothing electric grid drawls moves generation from peaking with natural gas to more base load, hopefully with something better than coal.
This is a very good point. A large obstacle in widespread adoption of renewable energy, is the inherent inflexibility of many of them. You can’t bend gods’will to make sunshine at midnight and as such you cannot meet the demand at certain times of the day. However, if renewable energy could be stored during a surplus, we wouldn’t need fossil fuels to supplement peak power consumption in the afternoons.
An alternative are nuclear reactors but they are expensive and time consuming to build. Not to even mention the NIMBY’s everywhere (“not in my backyard”) preventing construction of these very controversial (unfairly so) reactors.
The kinds of battery used in cars and the kinds of batteries suitable for grid-scale operation only have a small overlap. They have entirely different needs. Car batteries make lots of trade-offs to very lightweight for example which is totally irrelevant in a stationary facility.
I think the only reason Li-ION batteries were even considered for grid-scale is that better suited battery technologies simply haven’t been researched until very recently.
If our goal was energy storage for our grids, we would not be researching BEV battery tech.
Hard disagree.
This week, I’m designing a circuit which would traditionally use relays, but I’m considering IGBTs instead. IGBTs weren’t designed for my industry, but they’re so cheap (thanks to quadcopters) that I can just overspec them and get the job done despite the lack of optimization.
Grid scale energy storage was already being researched before the EV boom – remember when people stopped talking about vanadium-flow? EV batteries undercut stationary-optimized batteries in $/kWh because EVs are lucrative enough to drive the research that much harder. Without the EV industry as the incubator for competing battery tech, stationary storage would still cost what it did in 2010.
Cool but that’s beside the point. I don’t care how lucrative a market is for some aristocrat arseholes. I want what’s best for society as a whole, not the pockets of aforementioned aristocrat arseholes.
If we put all the money and effort that went into researching BEV batteries into researching and developing grid-scale batteries instead, I imagine there’s a good chance we wouldn’t need coal power plants anywhere on earth anymore.
I have absolutely no clue about your example but you can ask the same questions: If the R&D went into relay tech instead of IGBTs, wouldn’t you think those would be even less expensive for your use-case?