Updates
Our next 1.5C Panel Discussion is set for May 4, on the topic of electrical grid infrastructure! Natalie Geise from Powerhouse will be moderating an absolutely amazing panel, including:
Astrid Atkinson, CEO and cofounder of Camus Energy
Kyle Garton, Head of Product at WeaveGrid
Henry Richardson, Senior Analyst at WattTime
Also, please note that this event is being held at a new venue, courtesy of New York Life Insurance. Special shout out to B. Nait Kaci for arranging it!
Good News for CTAN, Bad News for Me
The CTAN IPCC challenge has now raised over $200, meaning that I will be forced to read the 36 page IPCC summary report for policymakers and tell you all about it. This is bad for me because I have a terrible attention span. (Does anybody know if it’s available as an audiobook? Maybe read by Ray Liotta?) But the fundraiser isn’t over until the end of the month, and if we raise over $1000, I will read the 81 page full report, and do a dramatic reading of selected passages. So, keep those donations flowing in!
This Week in The Slow Moving Apocalypse: EVs for Everyone!
The EPA is preparing to release new rules that would rapidly speed up the adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in the US. By placing limits on the total CO₂ emissions for all vehicles, it would effectively require that 2/3 of all vehicles sold in the US be EVs by 2032. This is a pretty good way to achieve emissions reductions, because it’s technology agnostic. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, or even plutonium Deloreans, as long as your fleet emissions are below the threshold.
This is a faster timeline than even the Biden administration has been pushing up until now, and may help to take a bit of the sting out of their approval of the Willow oil project in Alaska, although that was still a very bad move1.
2032 is really soon. It’s nine years away. (Although, in some ways, it also feels like a long time ago: Nine years ago, most people didn’t know what a coronavirus was, same-sex marriage was illegal in many states, and Donald Trump was a reality TV personality with a spray tan.) So, I thought it would be useful to talk about some of the things standing between us and 2032, if we’re going to massively scale up EV adoption.
Batteries
Friends of the ‘Stack will probably be aware that I work as a researcher for a Very Large Car Manufacturer (VLCM), and I spend a lot of time thinking about how to manufacture batteries more efficiently. Batteries are pretty hard to make, relative to other kinds of car parts, because they’re a weird mix of electrical, mechanical, and chemical parts. Scaling up EV battery production that much will require us to overcome a lot of technical barriers.
Also, lithium prices are skyrocketing as demand surges, and we are going to need to find new sources of lithium, as well as cobalt, nickel, and other metals necessary for lithium-ion battery production. Doing that sustainably will be challenging.
The availability of lithium is also one of the reasons that China is trying to pivot heavily into sodium batteries.
Charging
Filling up your car with gas takes a few minutes. Fully charging an EV can take many hours, which makes it a lot harder to do things like go on road trips, or even just to commute for some people. This is especially acute in places like the Bay Area, where the lack of low-cost housing makes “supercommuting” very common, especially for people in lower income brackets. These people, not coincidentally, also tend to live in apartment buildings, and street park, making charging even more challenging.
Fast-charging is becoming more common, but it still takes about 15 minutes (about three times longer than buying gas), and fast-charging degrades battery life much faster.
Improvements in battery energy density are on the horizon, from new developments like silicon anode and lithium-metal anode batteries, but bringing new battery chemistries to market is difficult because of the challenges of scaling up manufacturing. And many of the more sustainable battery types, like LFP and sodium batteries, have lower energy density than lithium ion, meaning that there is tension between improving range, and improving sustainability and cost.
Infrastructure
There also needs to be enough chargers. Right now, we don’t have enough. This is a theoretically simple problem (build more chargers!) but there are some constraints. For one, a charging station requires pretty high power capacity (even higher for fast-charging), meaning that sites that want to install charging stations often require significant improvements to their electrical systems. And, this runs up against the constraints posed by our creaky and antiquated electrical grid. In general, as we move from fossil fuels to electric vehicles, it will put much more load on our grid. Unfortunately, sometime after World War II, Americans forgot how to infrastructure.
Finally, all this electrification is useless for carbon neutrality if we are still using coal and gas for electricity generation. The growth in renewables has been remarkable over the past decade, but we’re still not moving fast enough to hit our targets. And, our grid is already reaching saturation for connecting new power sources, which is threatening to slow down the growth in renewables.
None of these are insurmountable problems. They will require a mix of aggressive regulatory and industrial policy, a lot of capital, and a willingness of American citizens to accept some changes to their lifestyles. But I am excited that we are starting to take huge steps towards a decarbonized future, one which holds promise for our children, and our childrens’ children, for a more sustainable future.
Because of the immense power of the oil and gas industry in American politics, supply-side constraints on oil production are the third rail of climate politics. And yet, there’s a lot of reason to believe that much of our current policy mostly moves the emissions around instead of curtailing them.