EV

 

Electric vehicle. What a lovely idea. I can just picture myself whining along in a car so quiet you can hold a proper conversation without having to strain to hear, a bit like a peaceable milk float. I remember them well. Come to that I even remember steam lorries that used to huffetypuff their way along the road on solid tyres and powered by coal. They didn’t go very fast, but they looked formidably strong and they were eye-catching, perhaps because everyone knew they were dying out and clearly raging, breathing fire after all, against the dying of the light. We prized modernity even in those distant days when they’d only just invented it.

 

Not that EVs are all that modern, no matter what their fans proclaim. Some of the very first cars were electric, powered by batteries, and very good they were. You simply pressed a switch to start the engine and they were easier to drive than their petrol-engined competitors, what with their mixture controls, adjustable timing, tricky gearboxes, and starting handles. So, with just an accelerator and a brake EVs won. They were also quieter, less smelly, and overall more comfortable. Classier, you might say. Passengers rode in elegance, with no risk of spoiling their fine clothes.

 

Electric cars lost in the end, of course. It was the need to start an internal combustion engine by manual cranking that gave EVs their biggest advantage. Cranking could be hard work. (That’s something else I remember.) So they invented the starter motor and henceforth starting the engine involved nothing more complicated than pressing a button or turning a key. Then they did away with variable mixture and timing controls. Add in a growing network of filling stations that gave petrol cars a virtually unlimited range, with no down time charging batteries, and it was RIP for the EVs.

 

Even then, the internal combustion engine didn’t have it all its own way. Steam cars rivalled them, and very smart those were, too. They were also comfortable to ride in and easy and pleasant to drive, and they could burn a variety of fuels. What’s not to like? Well it was mainly the starting problem again. Steam engines need to build up a head of steam. So to start your steam car you had to use a blowtorch to ignite the fuel, then wait half an hour for it to warm up before you could head off down the street. Mind you, I don’t see why people couldn’t just start to get ready half an hour earlier. If you think about it, you could start the engine before breakfast and by the time you’re ready to head off to work so is the car. Only it was the pesky starter motor that did for them, too. Folk opted for the instant start. Vroom. You can’t argue with the human desire for immediate gratification.

 

But now the EV is coming back and it has the environmentalists backing it, ably assisted by their compliant governments. Not only are EVs encouraged, they’re generously subsidised and just in case you didn’t get the message, in a couple of decades or so in several countries they’ll be compulsory. No more internal combustion engines will be made by order of those who instruct the politicians who make the rules. Think of it. We’ll all ride around in posh milk floats, rendered more comfortable than their forebears by being enclosed, better sprung, and without the irritating clacketyclack of the milk bottles in the back.

 

Nothing could be nicer. Only there’s a wee problem. Actually there are a couple of wee problems and they’re not the obvious ones.

 

In the first place, there’s the cost. EVs cost twice what petrol cars cost, which puts them way beyond most people’s reach. But, oddly, used EVs cost about the same as used petrol cars. Maybe they start over–priced? It’s also possible that when they enter mass production economies of scale will reduce the price. So the high initial cost may not be a problem in the long term, and as the price falls so should the insurance premiums, which are also somewhat eye-watering. Perhaps the price is a non-problem.

 

Then there’s the range. The most popular (i.e. cheapest) models will travel up to about 120 miles if you’re careful before their batteries need recharging. That used to make long journeys impossible, but charging points are now spring up everywhere like dragons’ teeth, and the charging time of around six hours is now down to about half an hour. So maybe range is another problem that’s on its way out.

 

Batteries are expensive, of course. After a few years they need replacing at a cost of about £4000. But there’s a sort of alternative. Instead of buying your batteries you can lease them. That reduces the initial cost of the car and you pay a rental of about £70 a month. When the batteries start to lose power they will be changed for no additional cost. So maybe that problem also has a solution of sorts.

 

So we can all look forward to the day when the last noisy, smelly petrol and diesel vehicles retire to museums and only electric vehicles hum along our streets beneath clean skies. I’d say blue skies, but I live in Scotland so that wouldn’t make sense.

 

And yet, and yet. The batteries contain cobalt and rare earth metals. The rare earth metals are used in most electronic devices, including batteries for smart phones, EVs, and in the electronics inside wind turbines. They’re obtained by mining, and the mining and refining operations aren’t what you’d call environmentally benign.

 

Rate metals occur dispersed among much more abundant other minerals, including radioactive elements. Separating them involves crushing the rocks to a fine powder and passing the powder through several tanks of water, where the rare earth oxides float to the surface and the unwanted minerals, called tailings, sink to the bottom, forming a poisonous sludge that is stored in ponds. The now-concentrated scum is then roasted in kilns and dissolved in acid, to produce a sludge from which the rare earth metals are extracted. The remaining solvent is neutralized. Clearly, there is a great deal of highly unpleasant waste that requires disposal, and large areas of land have to be strip mined to obtain the initial rock. Rare earth metals are produced in a few places in the United States and Australia, but China is by far the world’s largest producer.

 

Not nice, to say the least, but, of course, the industry is trying to improve, to reduce the harm resulting from rare-earth metal production. But, and there’s always a but, if we go on making more and more EVs and wind farms, how long will it be before demand for rare earth metals exceeds the supply and the whole enterprise grinds to a halt? We’ve had fears of exhausting resources many times before, of course, and they’ve always proved misplaced, but could this be for real? I only ask.

 

Then there’s the cobalt. More than half comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo and one-fifth of that from artisanal mines in the south, where the ore is obtained from underground tunnels that are dug by hand. Many of the tunnels are unsupported and most of the miners have no protective equipment, not even gloves or face masks. Children as young as seven carry heavy sacks filled with soil, some of them working full-time. Once the ore reaches the surface it is processed by methods that release effluents that pollute water. Again, the mining companies have promised to improve conditions and maybe it will happen, and the joint British-DRC Kimbilio charity has taken as many of the children as it can to its boarding school where they are housed and educated until they’re eighteen, but overall the situation remains dire.

 

It would seem, then, that despite their shiny green image, EVs have a somewhat dark side. And then there’s the matter of the energy they use.

 

This is basic physics, and it goes like this. Coal, oil, and natural gas are primary sources of energy. You can burn them directly to release energy, as heat, more correctly known as kinetic energy. Burning them changes one form of energy, chemical energy, into another form of energy, kinetic energy. It is a fundamental physical law that we can’t create or destroy energy, but we can change it from one form to another. In this case we do so in two steps. The fuel we use is the primary source of energy and we transform it from chemical energy first into kinetic energy and then into mechanical energy in our internal combustion and steam engines.

 

Alternatively, we can use the mechanical energy to spin turbines that generate electricity, transform that electricity into chemical energy by charging batteries, and change the chemical energy back into electrical energy and finally into mechanical energy in electric motors to power our EVs. In the case of a primary source of energy used to power an internal combustion engine there are two steps, or energy transformations: chemical to kinetic and kinetic to mechanical. Powering an EV requires six steps: chemical to kinetic (heat), kinetic to mechanical (turbines), mechanical to electrical (generation), electrical to chemical (battery storage), chemical to electrical (release from the batteries), and electrical to mechanical (driving electric motors).

 

Which brings us to another fundamental physical law: every time energy changes its form a proportion is lost by being converted into heat that can’t be used, waste heat. In other words, the laws of physics forbids any such process from being one hundred per cent efficient. There is inevitable loss.

 

This means that in energy terms no EV can ever be as efficient as a comparable petrol-driven vehicle. An EV is bound to use not just more energy, mile for mile, but a great deal more energy. If we convert to EVs, therefore, we will need to use proportionately more of a primary energy course to satisfy the demand.

 

So it comes down to motive. Why do we want to change to EVs? The most obvious reason is to improve the quality of our urban air, and the change would certainly achieve that. But it would do so at the cost of severe environmental and social damage in other parts of the world. We would be solving a local environmental problem while causing other problems elsewhere, and in that sense simply exporting our problem to parts of the world where people are poorer. And if there proves to be a constraint over the supply of rare earth metals, then our ‘solution’ may be unsustainable anyway.

 

Others argue that the change to EVs would reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we release into the air through our burning of oil in internal combustion engines. But this is an illusion. EVs would use much more primary energy. This need not be oil, of course. We could use wind, solar-voltaic, or nuclear power. Wind and solar energy are highly dispersed, which is their problem. Kilowatt for kilowatt, generating them takes up much more space than fossil-fuel or nuclear establishments. A nuclear power station with two reactors generating 1.8 gigawatts occupies a site covering about 1100 acres (1.7 square miles). A wind farm with equivalent rated capacity would occupy 108,000 acres (169 square miles) and a solar farm would occupy 13,320 acres (21 square miles). This assumes, however, that the wind and solar farms generate for more than 90 per cent of the time, as the nuclear plant does, but obviously this isn’t so. The wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine all the time, so wind farms operate for about one-third of the time and solar farms for about one-quarter. When they’re not generating, back-up power is required, usually supplied by natural gas-powered generators. So their area should be added. What is clear is that if we wish to use wind and solar power to drive millions of EVs, we will need to devote a vast area of land to the necessary installations. And, of course, wind farms use huge quantities of concrete, steel, and plastics, not to mention those rare earth metals.

 

It’s a lovely idea, the almost silent car that releases nothing into the air, allowing us to ride in clean comfort. But when you start to add up all the hidden environmental costs maybe they don’t look so green after all.

 

I guess the moral’s the old one: there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

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