Asklemmy

43940 readers

517 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

142

Do EV's actually do anything beneficial for the planet? (lemmy.today)

submitted 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

211 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've seen a lot of posts here on Lemmy, specifically in the "fuck cars" communities as to how Electric Vehicles do pretty much nothing for the Climate, but I continue to see Climate activists everywhere try pushing so, so hard for Electric Vehicles.

Are they actually beneficial to the planet other than limiting exhaust, or is that it? or maybe exhaust is a way bigger problem?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Electric cars are creating additional sources of funding for battery research, improvement of the electrical grid (there was a movement to get rid of central power generating and just use generators at each house), and electric generation smoothing.

The kinds of battery used in cars and the kinds of batteries suitable for grid-scale operation only have a small overlap. They have entirely different needs. Car batteries make lots of trade-offs to very lightweight for example which is totally irrelevant in a stationary facility.

I think the only reason Li-ION batteries were even considered for grid-scale is that better suited battery technologies simply haven't been researched until very recently.

If our goal was energy storage for our grids, we would not be researching BEV battery tech.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hard disagree.

This week, I'm designing a circuit which would traditionally use relays, but I'm considering IGBTs instead. IGBTs weren't designed for my industry, but they're so cheap (thanks to quadcopters) that I can just overspec them and get the job done despite the lack of optimization.

Grid scale energy storage was already being researched before the EV boom -- remember when people stopped talking about vanadium-flow? EV batteries undercut stationary-optimized batteries in $/kWh because EVs are lucrative enough to drive the research that much harder. Without the EV industry as the incubator for competing battery tech, stationary storage would still cost what it did in 2010.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

EV batteries undercut stationary-optimized batteries in $/kWh because EVs are lucrative enough to drive the research that much harder. Without the EV industry as the incubator for competing battery tech, stationary storage would still cost what it did in 2010.

Cool but that's beside the point. I don't care how lucrative a market is for some aristocrat arseholes. I want what's best for society as a whole, not the pockets of aforementioned aristocrat arseholes.

If we put all the money and effort that went into researching BEV batteries into researching and developing grid-scale batteries instead, I imagine there's a good chance we wouldn't need coal power plants anywhere on earth anymore.

I have absolutely no clue about your example but you can ask the same questions: If the R&D went into relay tech instead of IGBTs, wouldn't you think those would be even less expensive for your use-case?