It's Just A Means of Conveyance

Batteries need to be recharged from grids powered by coal, hydro-electricity or nuclear energy.

So there's that:

There are about 12,000 gas stations across Canada, ranging from massive southern Ontario truck stops to mom-and-pop filling stations strewn along the Alaska Highway. As per Natural Resources Canada, the country has 6,800 charging stations. While that sounds comparable, keep in mind that most charging stations only have two or three ports, and that a “fill-up” can take between 20 and 40 minutes.

For now, the average EV driver is disproportionately likely to live in a detached home that they can rig up with a 240-volt charging station. But if EVs are going to represent 100 per cent of all sales in 13 years, they’re increasingly going to need to be owned by Canadians who live in condos or apartments. Any resident of the Canadian Prairies is used to the wintertime sight of extension cords haphazardly strung overtop sidewalks to charge the block heater of a vehicle parked on the street; those owners would presumably have a similar problem rigging up a reliable place to charge their EV.

The other issue is that this is all happening without any apparent plans to ramp up Canadian electricity production. California, which has enacted a similar 2035 ban on internal combustion engines, is already experiencing acute electricity shortages that are forcing the state to lean on oil-fired power plants in order to avoid the need for rolling blackouts.

 

Also:

This paper turns to a different reality: all energy-producing machinery must be fabricated from materials extracted from the earth. No energy system, in short, is actually “renewable,” since all machines require the continual mining and processing of millions of tons of primary materials and the disposal of hardware that inevitably wears out. Compared with hydrocarbons, green machines entail, on average, a 10-fold increase in the quantities of materials extracted and processed to produce the same amount of energy.

This means that any significant expansion of today’s modest level of green energy—currently less than 4% of the country’s total consumption (versus 56% from oil and gas)—will create an unprecedented increase in global mining for needed minerals, radically exacerbate existing environmental and labor challenges in emerging markets (where many mines are located), and dramatically increase U.S. imports and the vulnerability of America’s energy supply chain.

As recently as 1990, the U.S. was the world’s number-one producer of minerals. Today, it is in seventh place. Even though the nation has vast mineral reserves worth trillions of dollars, America is now 100% dependent on imports for some 17 key minerals, and, for another 29, over half of domestic needs are imported.

Among the material realities of green energy:

• Building wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity, as well as batteries to fuel electric vehicles, requires, on average, more than 10 times the quantity of materials, compared with building machines using hydrocarbons to deliver the same amount of energy to society.


• A single electric car contains more cobalt than 1,000 smartphone batteries; the blades on a single wind turbine have more plastic than 5 million smartphones; and a solar array that can power one data center uses more glass than 50 million phones.


• Replacing hydrocarbons with green machines under current plans—never mind aspirations for far greater expansion—will vastly increase the mining of various critical minerals around the world. For example, a single electric car battery weighing 1,000 pounds requires extracting and processing some 500,000 pounds of materials. Averaged over a battery’s life, each mile of driving an electric car “consumes” five pounds of earth. Using an internal combustion engine consumes about 0.2 pounds of liquids per mile.


• Oil, natural gas, and coal are needed to produce the concrete, steel, plastics, and purified minerals used to build green machines. The energy equivalent of 100 barrels of oil is used in the processes to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil.


• By 2050, with current plans, the quantity of worn-out solar panels—much of it nonrecyclable—will constitute double the tonnage of all today’s global plastic waste, along with over 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics from worn-out wind turbine blades. By 2030, more than 10 million tons per year of batteries will become garbage.

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Over one-third of Americans say they have had to cut groceries in order to afford gas as prices skyrocket in the second year of Biden’s presidency, a Quinnipiac University survey released this week found.