Electric Everything

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Aug. 13, 2022

Our best environmentally-friendly intentions have outstripped our ability to implement them. The push for electric everything is the best example.

New York City, Berkeley, San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, and New Jersey, among other locales, have, or soon will, outlaw the use of natural gas for any new residential or commercial construction. Though natural gas burns considerably cleaner than coal or oil for heating or cooking, it still produces greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change. Moving away from it is part of an overall effort to at least slow down our use of emission producing fuels.

But that electricity doesn’t just magically appear; it has to be produced by something, and right now, we don’t have anywhere near enough renewable sources to create all that power. So we’ll burn natural gas, oil, and even dreadful coal to produce more and more electricity for more and more users producing more greenhouse gasses.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which keeps track of such things, says 27 percent of all greenhouse gasses are produced by the transportation sector, another 25 percent producing electricity, industry accounts for 24 percent, commercial and residential uses account for another 13 percent, and 11 percent comes from agriculture.

Those emissions are generated by the products we burn. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, some 36 percent of our electricity is produced by petroleum products (oil and natural gas plant liquids), 32 percent by natural gas, 11 percent by coal, and 8 percent by nuclear power. Only 12 percent of our electricity is generated from renewable sources like solar, wind, or hydroelectric. It just isn’t nearly enough to supply the growing demand.

More electricity means more batteries—lots more batteries—for storage in homes and businesses and in all-electric vehicles (EV). The functional part of EV batteries is mostly cobalt, lithium, and nickel, all of which requires mining. And like everything else, battery production comes with its own environmental issues.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) says the biggest producer of cobalt is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Russia is second. Unfortunately, DRC has an abysmal environmental record, and tales of oppressive labor practices abound. We’re not even pretending to be friendly with Russia these days. Australia is the world’s largest lithium producer, though Chile has the largest reserves awaiting extraction. Indonesia is the world’s leading nickel producer.

That’s a lot of mining and manufacturing creating emissions on their own in some areas less concerned about their carbon footprint. Our future non-fossil-fuel world is relying on others, including China, our biggest economic competitor. China ends up with most of the raw materials and produce about 80 percent of all lithium ion batteries destined for electric vehicles and about a third of the world’s solar panels according to the S&P Global Market Intelligence Report.

It’s an ongoing issue. While solar panels can last up to 25 years, EV batteries last, on average, about 10 years before they need to be replaced. And they can be expensive; about $2,000 on the low end for smaller hybrid batteries and as much as $13,000 to replace Tesla batteries.

The good news is the lithium, cobalt, and nickel in EV batteries can be recycled or the batteries themselves repurposed for non-transportation uses. Solar panels, which are mostly glass, plastic, and aluminum, can also be recycled in part or in total. The bad news is currently only about 5 percent of lithium-ion batteries are being recycled and 10 percent of solar panels. Absent the will or ability to recycle them, they end up in landfills.

It isn’t all bad news. Despite their flaws, EV batteries and renewable energy sources like solar are still far less polluting, from extraction to transportation to manufacture to use, than traditional internal combustion engines and fossil-fuel produced electricity. And we’re getting better at it.

Smaller, more efficient solar panels in all manner of configurations, including as exterior paint, are already in the experimental phases. Aptera Motors, an American start-up, has created a vehicle that might never need charging. Solar panels on the hood and roof will generate enough power for around 45 miles a day, and since the average American drives about 39 miles per day (Federal Highway Administration data from 2020), it might never need to be charged. (With a full charge, Aptera claims their vehicle will have a range of about 1,000 miles.)

And Toyota is hard at work on a hydrogen engine that will extract hydrogen from the air and convert it to fuel without the need for a hydrogen tank on board the vehicle.

We’re doing better with technologies trying to at least slow climate change, and, on balance, renewables are a quantum leap forward from our continuing to gorge on fossil fuels. We just can’t let the bumps along the way become roadblocks.