D.J. You Dirty Guy!

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Back in school, which means any time from high school to undergraduate, I was in some class where the instructor posed the following question: will electric vehicles necessarily lead to lower climate change, although that term wasn't much used in the 60s and 70s. Ooh, ooh, call on me!!! Well I got called on and answered: only if bad gases from power plants are lower than those coming out of tail pipes per net energy used. I got an Atta Boy for that. At the time, I didn't have the answer. Clearly, at point of use, an electric vehicle is cleaner than a gas powered one. But how much pollution results from the production and distribution of those wee little electrons? Not known at the time.

Today brings more reporting that it might be true, but only if power plants aren't mostly coal, and to a lesser extent natural gas, fired (lesser extent since natural gas is less polluting).

Today, electric vehicles in the United States usually produce fewer overall emissions than their gasoline- or diesel-fueled counterparts, even if they're plugged into a grid that relies on power plants burning coal or natural gas, which emit carbon dioxide. That's largely because electric motors are so much more efficient than internal combustion engines.

That's good news, not known way back then.

But the other point, mentioned in the report, is that electric vehicles will only work if there's significant Socialism at work; the same was true with the internal combustion engined vehicle displacing Old Dobbin: all those roads were paid for by the taxpayer. And the report goes into detail.

Some reporting states that there's enough lithium in the earth to support widespread battery powered vehicles. But there's also the question of net-energy expenditure. Just as going from gas powered to battery powered plus electric generation requires knowing where the balance lies, one still cannot defy the laws of thermodynamics, which guarantee that you can't even break even. There's also the net energy expenditure of extracting the lithium and manufacturing the batteries.

Most of the known lithium supply is in Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, Australia and China. The quality is acceptable and reports reveal that Brazil has lithium mineral reserves that are not only of higher quality but also have lower extraction costs. In 2019, meanwhile, Western Australia has become the number one global producer of lithium, the second largest global producer of rare earths, the third largest global producer of cobalt and the fourth largest global producer of nickel.

So, unlike petro, the USofA plays no part. We'll be importers, whether for raw lithium or products. MAGA!! Keep burning coal!!!

And, of course

Rather than worrying about a lack of lithium, there could be shortages of rare earth materials, should the EV replace the conventional car. One such material is the permanent magnet for the electric motors. Permanent magnets make one of the most energy-efficient motors. China controls about 95 percent of the global market for rare earth metals and expects to use most of these resources for its own production. Export of rare earth materials is tightly controlled.

The limiting factor to reducing climate change through replacing gas transport with battery transport (fuel cell may be better?) is that the additional power generation that such a transition demands can't come from coal fired plants. No, Mother Nature wouldn't approve. That leaves nucular and may be natural gas. Wind, except in parts of Texas and off shore, isn't dependable enough. Pumped water facility using excess off-peak electricity to move water uphill, and thence run it through the turbines during peak is another, incremental, source.

Pumped storage hydroelectric projects have been providing energy storage capacity and transmission grid ancillary benefits in the United States and Europe since the 1920s. Today, the 43 pumped-storage projects operating in the United States provide around 23 GW (as of 2017), or nearly 2 percent, of the capacity of the electrical supply system according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).