Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

if all cars, trucks, semi-trucks, and RV's go electric, we're going to all be consuming more electricity. Like....A LOT more. And unless all this new surge of electricity comes from solar & wind - we're just going to be swapping out gasoline and diesel for coal and natural gas. These figures are from an article in the NYT from 2018 - so it's few years back, but - 34% of all electricity produced in US are from power plants run on Natural Gas, and 30% from coal. Nuclear plants are 20%. Hydroelectric is 7%. Wind is 6%. Solar is just 1% and oil is 1%. 

Unless they ramp up solar and nuclear power production drastically - does not make a whole lot sense to me to switch to tens of millions and eventually hundreds of millions of EV's on the road. These cars are all going to need juice every few days- and that juice has to come from somewhere.

And have you guys ever seen the kind of devastation and pollution that mining for the natural resources that go into the batteries for EV's causes? There are entire toxic black lakes in China as a result of mining for the raw materials that make up EV batteries - and there are essentially child slaves in Africa in the Congo forced to mine for rare earth minerals that also go into EV batteries. Some children as young as 6 years old have been documented to be working the mines in the Congo. 70% of all the cobalt produced in the entire world comes from the Congo.

Yet no one really talks about any of this. It's as if people think just switching to battery powered vehicles will simply solve everything - and never think about the unintended problems or consequences of doing so might bring about.

My understanding is that power coming from centralized plants is cleaner than millions of combustion engines no matter if it’s coal or gas. I know when I was around fired equipment we had very strict limits on the CO and NOx we could emit, along with expensive analyzers. 

Even though we will be needed if electric capacity on the grid much of it can come during off peak times. I’m sure most power cos will be more than happy to pump more juice into the grid at night when they have the excess capacity. 

I've seen the math on EVs and CO2 production, and they are better even if they use coal fired electricity, but not by a whole lot.  A coal fired steam turbine is very efficient obviously and transmissions losses are remarkably small.

if it's not better by a whole lot - then what is even the point?

And the emissions are separate fact - we aren't even taking into account the human rights crisis of child slaves mining for cobalt (a mineral that goes in the EV batteries) in the Congo or the environmental crisis of toxic black sludge lakes in Inner Mongolia and China as a result of the mining there for minerals that also go in the EV batteries.

Not sure how you solve these two issues - but as far as production of electricity - I think the solution should be nuclear power plants. I know the public are hesitant to this because of horrific and tragic accidents like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima - but these were all nuclear reactors that were built in the 60s and 70s. Technology has come a looooong way since then. A plant built in the 2020s is going to be a heckuva lot better than one built in the 60s and 70s. The new nuclear reactors & plants have way more safe guards, are way more efficient, and designed much better.

The transition to EVs will be sporadic until the economic equation makes more sense for the buyer.  The pickup trucks are at that point now, I think.  EVs do have some other advantages in terms of immediate torque and cost per mile, and disadvantages in terms of fill up time.

General Motors: Key takeaways from GM's Q4 results and 2022 guidance (cnbc.com)
General Motors: Key takeaways from GM's Q4 results and 2022 guidance (cnbc.com)

GM expects to produce over 1 million EVs globally by 2025.

Human activities in general despoil the planet, it's a matter of trade offs, I'm not sure there is much that isn't that way.  If we replace coal with nuclear, we would get some advantages, but we'd also replace one large lot of problems with some smaller ones.  Trade offs.

In some theoretical future, perhaps recharging is effected using wind and solar, but those have environmental downsides as well, and perhaps batteries are made without previous metals like cobalt, but whatever replaces them would have some issues.  The entire petrochemical chain has issues beyond just CO2 generation.

Fusion perhaps COULD be the most benign source of energy we could have any time "soon", but ...

I'd rather do lunch