[Peakoil] Fwd: new electric car

Sat Nov 27 02:02:12 UTC 2010

Let's not get too excited by electric cars.
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Electric evasions
by Michael Dawson
http://www.deathbycar.info/2010/10/electric-evasions/
3.66666

http://www.deathbycar.info/2010/10/electric-evasionsFor any product that gets produced, green-ness involves four questions:
For any product that gets produced, green-ness involves four questions:

1. Material Intake: How much and what types of material does making the product extract from the environment?

2. Material Output: How does the product end up putting materials back into the environment, in the form of manufacturing, product operation, and garbage/recycling wastes?

3. Energy Use: How much total energy does manufacture, use, and recycling of the product require?

4. Alternatives: How does the product in question perform in the above three areas versus available alternative means of performing the same type of work facilitated by the product in question?

You may have already noticed that capitalists never publicly admit the existence and complexity of all four of these questions. That is for the obvious reason that capitalism is virtually impossible if these questions are taken seriously. Making big money almost always requires ignoring one or more of these questions, and the capitalist system as a whole is as heedless of ecological limits as just about any dystopian fantasy one could concoct.

Doubt this? Then I would invite you to consider the emerging overclass proposition that cars with electric motors are green.

In order for this to be true, the manufacture, use, and eventual trashing of electric cars would have to:

1. Sharply reduce both the overall amount of materials and the level of non-renewable materials presently going into the making and use of personal transportation machinery;

2. Sharply reduce both the overall amount of materials and the level of toxic materials coming out of the making and use of personal transportation machinery;

3. Sharply reduce the overall amount of energy required to make, use, and eventually trash personal transportation machinery; and

4. Score better in all the above areas than alternative forms of personal transportation machinery would, if given the chance.

Electric cars, of course, could never satisfy that fourth criterion. The laws of physics are very strict, and they dictate that each household or person using a 3,500-pound, 95% idled item to accomplish what could otherwise be accomplished with 1-pound walking shoes, 25-pound bicycles, and the use of shared, constantly operating public transit infrastructures is simply criminally harebrained.

Yet, despite this point, I think it is also very important to consider just how woefully electric cars will, if they ever achieve planned levels of distribution, perform in relation to all three of the prior questions.

Take, for instance, the claim that electric car batteries are somehow green things.

Lithium is a non-renewable resource, and is extremely likely to be desperately needed in the future for non-transportation energy storage purposes, in a post-fossil-fuel age ofgreatly diminished and much more intermittent electricity generation and use.For starters, the $36,000 battery in the $115,000 (counting the charging equipment) Tesla Roadster contains 6,831 separate lithium-ion battery cells and weighs 992 pounds, or as much as 39 modern, medium-quality, 25-pound bicycles.
But, meanwhile, what about the recycling of this 992-pound object at the end of its expected 7-year useful life? Battery recycling is a process touted by Tesla’s propaganda arm as being wondrously efficient and “non-toxic.”

Let’s take a gander, shall we?

The US Department of Energy has granted $9.5 million to a company in California that plans to build America’s first recycling facility for lithium-ion vehicle batteries.

Anaheim-based Toxco says it will use the funds to expand an existing facility in Lancaster, OH, that already recycles the lead-acid and nickel-metal hydride batteries used in today’s hybrid-electric vehicles.

There is currently little economic need to recycle lithium-ion batteries. Most batteries contain only small amounts of lithium carbonate as a percentage of weight and the material is relatively inexpensive compared to most other metals.

But experts say that having a recycling infrastructure in place will ease concerns that the adoption of vehicles that use lithium-ion batteries could lead to a shortage of lithium carbonate and a dependence on countries such as China, Russia, and Bolivia, which control the bulk of global lithium reserves.

When old batteries arrive they go into a hammer mill and are shredded, allowing components made of aluminum, cooper, and steel to be separated easily. Larger batteries that might still hold a charge arecryogenically frozen with liquid nitrogen before being hammered and shredded; at -325 degrees Fahrenheit, the reactivity of the cells is reduced to zero. Lithium is then extracted by flooding the battery chambers in a caustic bath that dissolves lithium salts, which are filtered out and used to produce lithium carbonate. The remaining sludge is processed to recover cobalt, which is used to make battery electrodes. [Source: Technology Review]

Tesla’s publicists, of course, do not mention things like the energy expense of cryogenic freezing; exactly what substances comprise that “caustic bath”; or whether industrial cobalt powder is really “non-toxic.”

Worse, even Tesla’s P.R. department admits this much: “The result from this process is that we are able to recycle about 60% of the battery material.”

In other words, 40 percent of the rare and toxic and energy-intensive things that go into an electric car battery will be lost and injected as garbage into the environment after each and every 7-year manifestation of these things.

Such is the substance of “green” in our market-totalitarian epoch…Gods help us all.

-----------------------------
Keith Thomas
www.evfit.com
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Begin forwarded message:

From: "Jenny Goldie" <jenny.goldie at optusnet.com.au>
Date: 27 Nov 2010 8:27:21 AM AEDT
To: "ACT-PeakOil mailing list" <peakoil at act-peakoil.org>
Cc: John Coulter <jrpfc at bigpond.com>, Bruce.Robinson at Westnet.com.au
Subject: [Peakoil] new electric car

New electric car on a charge

Chris Harris

The Age
November 27, 2010
AN AUSTRALIAN-DESIGNED electric car, to be built in China, plans to take on the world with a price under $10,000, an iPad-like dash capable of downloading apps and the promise of never needing liquid fuel.

The Noddy-like EDay hatch, set to debut at July's Melbourne motor show, will arrive next year as 100 lease vehicles, before going on sale in 2012 from $9990 (plus on-road costs). This undercuts petrol-powered competitors by thousands of dollars and is about 14 per cent of the price of the only mass-produced electric car on sale today, Mitsubishi's i-MiEV.

The car, able to travel up to 160 kilometres between charges, has a top speed of just 80km/h and weighs 450 kilograms. It will be the slowest and lightest new car on the market - and the cheapest, something sure to cement its appeal in a segment where shaving a few hundred dollars can boost sales.

The top-secret project is being run by EDay Life, a small Australian company run by former Holden director of innovation and advanced engineering Laurie Sparke and car dealer Robert Lane.

They have formed a team of 20 engineers and are finalising plans to sell the cars in countries as diverse as Malaysia, Hong Kong, Britain and France.

''What we're bringing … is Australian innovative technology,'' Mr Sparke said of the ambitious start-up project. ''We are going to develop the new generation of electric car.''

While the prospect of a start-up taking on the established car makers may seem overly ambitious, Mr Sparke said the size, flexibility and clean-sheet approach had advantages.

Just as fledgling brand Tesla had prompted others to take notice - Toyota has since signed an agreement with the Californian electric car specialist - Mr Sparke predicted a rise of next-generation vehicle makers driven from the IT industry, pointing to the Dell computers business model of lean manufacturing.

He said the new approach allowed engineering flexibility, while Australian ingenuity - often leveraged by US giants Ford and General Motors - and EDay's minuscule size gave it an advantage over established players.

The EDay will also get a touchscreen display to control major functions and the ability to download apps that could include everything from basic vehicle data to vehicle-to-home communications. With production set for a Shanghai plant, with initial capacity of 50,000, EDay plans to sell the cars around the world.

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