No. of Recommendations: 4
What all too often doesn't get considered on the topic of ubiquitous battery cars, and this WaPo piece is no different, is the context of battery car ubiquity.
Our electric grid can't handle the load imposed on it by battery car ubiquity, nor do we have, currently, the generation capacity, even could the grid carry it. Wind and solar farms are too unreliable to supply the ubiquitous battery car demand, along with all the current demands from powering our homes to powering our businesses, with data centers and AI centers already sorely taxing the system, even were the grid eventually built out.
Producing the battery car components is enormously destructive of our environment, from mining the metals and minerals--lithium and nickel especially are toxic--through disposing of the tailings, through refining those metals and minerals--which is more electricity demand from the grid and from generation of the electricity--through to disposing of the even more toxic batteries at end-of-life, and it's a short life for batteries.
Then there's the short range of battery cars between charges and the long time required to recharge. That's improving; it's a technology matter, not an intrinsic one, but the batteries have a long way to go. The extra weight those batteries inflict on suspensions and tires requires specially designed tires (and plussed up suspensions) that wear out faster. There's some heat about wearing tire particles into the atmosphere being net worse than ICE car tires, but it's way too soon to tell on that.
Then there's the human cost of producing battery cars: a very significant fraction of the lithium and nickel that's mined for the batteries is mined with the forced labor of children.
It's just barely possible that folks are considering more concerning battery cars than just the journalistically lazy Republican-Democrat divide.
Eric Hines
