I keep being told EVs being cost effective are right around the corner, yet the prices for clean energy on my electric bill are 35% higher and government subsidies for the industry are never ending.
That's probably because you're paying the feel-good tax, and not a true accounting of the costs. Just like how oat milk is more expensive than cow's milk at retail, even though oat milk is almost free to produce relative to cow milk.
Isn't that due to scale of production? It does not take that much oat to make the milk. And cow milk gets bad fast and should be alot more expensive than cow milk really.
People are also notoriously bad at managing their money. If you have the money and suck at using it, EVs and solar panels make a lot more sense, and you should actually do it, we really need to scale up those industries.
Still incredible to consider how much material we'll have to dig out of the ground to deliver hundreds of GW of renewable electricity production potential in the form of solar and wind. For grid scale electricy storage, there's not enough Lithium and cobalt in the Earth's crust to build the needed capacity. Maybe widespread deployment of hydrogen can help
> For grid scale electricy storage, there's not enough Lithium and cobalt in the Earth's crust to build the needed capacity.
That’s widely incorrect. How exactly much batteries we need, what their chemistry should be is up for some debate as are exact numbers for commercially viable raw materials etc.
But using the numbers from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... and using the deepest mine * land area of earth gives enough lithium to build batteries to store roughly 200 years world of the total electricity generation of the entire planet.
Clearly we are never going to actually mine that much lithium, but just as clearly we don’t need anything like that much eitehr.
> using the deepest mine * land area of earth gives enough lithium to build batteries to store roughly 200 years world of the total electricity generation of the entire planet.
Strip mine the entire planet to a depth of multiple miles, and the resulting batteries are still few enough to talk about in human terms. This is not good.
I really don’t think they are worried considering coal usage is at an all-time high and the US president is going to dictators begging for oil, hat in hand.
> the US president is going to dictators begging for oil, hat in hand.
A big advantage of EVs is that presidents of the future shouldn't need to beg for oil as much, as road transportation energy supply market would be largely domestic.
I feel like a broken record at this point, but even if a large part of passenger cars move to electric, industrialized countries still consume incredible amounts of fuel for: all planes, ships, trucks, freight trains, plastics, most fertilizers, heating, electricity production, road building etc
Ok? What does that have to do with EVs? Those are all different problems to solve. You can’t say we shouldn’t partially focus on fixing a problem because it doesn’t fix every single problem we have.
EVs lower dependence on oil, but we'll have to keep begging Saudi Arabia and many similar countries, which was the mistaken assumption of the comment I am responding to
If you’re buying a new car today the right EV’s can easily have a lower TOC. The used market is based on what was manufactured 5-10+ years ago so it looks very different.
In terms of clean energy, inflation adjusted US wholesale rates fell as we dramatically reduced the grids carbon footprint. 2022 is looking like a major anomaly, but that’s in part because natural gas prices are through the roof due to Russia’s invasion.
> I keep being told EVs being cost effective are right around the corner, yet the prices for clean energy on my electric bill are 35% higher
I don't see how that's relevant. The alternative for your house isn't powering it with gasoline.
> and government subsidies for the industry are never ending
You should expect that when it's still "around the corner".
And it could make sense to continue subsidizing EV purchases once prices are similar. Or even beyond that, if you want new-ish EVs to be competitive with a bigger chunk of used gas cars in upfront price.
