Reply to post: Re: Vehicle cost is a barrier to entry for the majority

Re: Vehicle cost is a barrier to entry for the majority

Batteries have a limited life, currently a Tesla battery pack should last 400,000 miles, soon likely to be a million miles. However after that they can be put into power storage projects and have another few decades of use (often currently used as battery backup and power storage systems).

Ah.. perpetual motion! Limits on battery life are down to duty cycle, not range. So range claims can be misleading, as well as being 'forward looking statements'. The million mile battery does not exist, and may tie with fusion for entering commercial use. Or you get the million mile by simply towing it with a Tesla semi. But the limits on batteries are down to charge/discharge profiles, which lead to range reduction due to holding less charge. And as that's due to chemical & physical changes inside the batteries, leads to futher decline. So although you could sift through the thousands of cells in a typical EV battery pack for good ones, putting failing batteries into power storage systems isn't necessarily a good idea. Other than for commercial reasons if you can sell the batteries twice.

So a Tesla has a few Kg of Lithium in their pack. Lithium is not normally mines but is dried off salt lakes similar to how salt is extracted.

It can be mined, ie hard-rock extraction where lithium rich rock is extracted, then the lithium extracted. But that's more expensive than the salt lakes. Of course that means creating those brine lakes which means you need a lot of water. And salt lakes being where water was rather than is, means diverting water away from populations, agriculture etc. And then there's pollution if waste water & products aren't well managed. There are however some neat side effects from increased lithium demand-

On 16 July 2018 2.5 million tonnes of high-grade lithium resources and 124 million pounds of uranium resources were found in the Falchani hard rock deposit in the region Puno, Peru

See also-

https://www.xkcd.com/1162/

But then there are other environmental impacts from 'renewables' and EVs, so the need for stuff like copper and cobalt, which comes from massive mining operations in the DRC.. But out of sight, out of mind..

The renewable obligation obliged energy companies to get more energy from renawables and some minimum contract money was given to companies providing renewable energy. This contract has had very little need to be used due to the major costs of renewables becoming so cheap to install and run. It is unlikely a contract will be needed in the next round of funding.

You are confused. ROCs are/were a direct subsidy. It's a financial instrument where 'renewables' operators are given ROCs. Non-'renewables' companies have to buy ROCs. Different scams attracted different rates, ie the MeyGen tidal scheme gets 5x. Selling those ROCs generates the windfall, selling the power generated is then distorted by priority market access, thus inflating the price of electricity. And 'renewables' aren't becoming cheap, otherwise there would be no need for subsidies at all. There were some interesting bids in the last round of CFD auctions, where wind farmers entered low bids, but that's more to gain access and not firm pricing.

Then of course you have all the costs inherent in most 'renewables' being unreliable/intermittent, along with interconnection costs. So the costs of ensuring grid stability, which includes simple stand-by power for those calm days, and constraint payments for windy when there's no demand. So for every GW of wind, we might need 700MW of gas generation, assuming there'll be some output from wind. And instead of gas generated electricity being far cheaper than wind, it becomes more expensive due to variable hours, and of course having to buy ROCs or carbon credits.

It is not incorrect it has been used and used regularly saving hundreds of millions of dollars. They are expanding it and creating new plant s purely because of the savings and efficiency it is providing.

That's BS. But that's 'renewables' for you. So you decide to base your energy security on an unreliable, intermittent generation system like wind. You get problems, and inconvenient blackouts, along with higher energy prices. You then decide the solution is to spend millions more on batteries to deal with the inherent problems of wind, adding yet more cost. And thanks to a bit of spin, this is translated to 'saving hundreds of millions', even though users see no reduction in electricity prices. And if Australia wanted efficiency, it could have built modern supercritical coal power stations instead, it being a coal producer after all..

Who do you think pays fuel and road taxes? The tax payers.

Nope. Which is back to road charging. Road users pay those taxes, and pay more if they use the services more. EV users don't pay fuel taxes, and reduced road tax. Increased costs from increased EV usage is then a mix of direct, and indirect, ie every electricity user paying more to cover increased electricity supply, and any subsidy to fund roll-out of charging stations.

Also your 3x figure? Na wrong again.

I see you are an anti-environmentalist.

Wrong on both counts. The increase in electricty to support decarbonisation is a simple fact. Environmentalism is a more curious argument given environmentalists seem to encourage covering the landscape (and seascape) in windmills & solar panels, and never mind the impact on things like birds, bats, insects, fish etc. So a strange world where a dead common duck in an oil/gas settling pond may lead to a large fine, but bulk deaths of protected species like bats or birds of prey is just a cost of going Green..