I should probably write an entire seperate article on the truth about electric car batteries. There's so much more to take into consideration that I never even mentioned in this article.
Please write an investigative report on the start to finished product, electric vehicle batteries. I can’t wait until the government realised that all of those small to medium commercial vehicles running around will need EV power too.
Friend of mine works for the car industry, totally convinced electric cars are a huge scam, useless on the long run, hyper anti green for the minerals involved in the batteries.
Yes, didn't even touch on that in the article. The batteries are terrible for the environment and destroys local areas. Not to mention child labor being used to mine them.
And the batteries don't last. they continually degrade. Just in Europe, that's 400 Million batteries that would need to be replaced every 10/15 years MAX. Worldwide the figure would be astronomical. It's just not going to happen. As you say, that's the plan, it's not going to happen!!!
As time goes by. We begin to truly realize. Climate Change has always been a plot to limit our freedoms and liberties. The Alarmism has become a nuisance.
Hi Peter. I am a huge fan of your tireless work, I always read your articles. I 100% agree with the sentiments and the fundamentals of your arguments set out here. However, the way the numbers are presented is not correct. In fact the situation is far, far worse than you have suggested here.
The issue is the conflation of power (measured in kW) and energy, which we can measure in kWh. If we have a car that has a maximum power output of 100kW, which would be about right for a small economical car, then you could drive it using its maximum power but only for one hour. If you drive more carefully then you would use less power than 100kW so you could drive for more than one hour. But not orders of magnitude more. Let’s say you might be able to drive for a ‘few’ hours. This is not something most people expect to do per week. In other words, a typical car will use considerably more than 100kWh per week.
But this is moot. The numbers absolutely, categorically do not stack up. There isn’t/aren’t enough power stations, wind turbines, nuclear power stations, lithium, cobalt, copper and more to get even remotely close to the fantasy goals of the corrupt governments and globalist elite cabal. Your conclusion is bang on. This is not about the planet, never was. It’s about disenfranchisement of the people - power and control.
Especially true in winter, when the cars use so much more energy just to keep warm and the range goes way down. People will need to charge more than once per week. I just used a conservative figure of charging once a week.
This is accurate. We purchased a hybrid this year because our car was totaled in an accident. During the summer months we get 40-45mpg, but we have noticed it's dropped to 33-35 during the winter months. I can't imagine relying on a total electric car to drive the 60 mile round trip to and from work (no chargers at work) and hopefully make it home at the end of the day. I know teslas do 200 mile range, but how bad is their range cut in the winter?
I don't know about Tesla, but as the video I included in the article showed, the Ford electric pickup track got it's range cut in half when it was cold. I've heard from other electric car owners that the range really drastically drops in winter.
Gasoline cars get worse mileage in winter too, but not nearly as bad as electric cars. Electric cars use the battery to heat the cabin, gasoline cars use the warm engine to heat up the cabin so much more efficient that way.
Great info. All the "green" technologies are highly dependent on hydrocarbons for their manufacture and distribution: also, most are made in China by slave labor.
Keep up the great work with this type stack: it's all about getting the word out to those who want to listen.
Hi Peter. Interesting thoughts, but do not forget to properly account for gigawatt-HOURS instead of "gigawatts", as these cars are charged at different moments. Please double check your calculations.
My calculations were as follows: 400 million cars X 100kw batteries = 40 000 000 000kw needed to charge them all up.
40 000 000 000 kilowatt = 40 000 gigawatt.
Did I miss anything?
Of course I'm not saying the 40 000 gigawatts would all be needed at the same time, so we wouldn't need 40 000 nuclear reactors to power them, but we would still need a lot of them.
Edit: I did conflate GWh with GW, the article is updated with the correct figures!
You have to differentiate GW (instantaneous power) and GWh (energy delivered in 1 hour). A 1 GW power plant generates 1 GWh per hour of operation and so on.
Your 400 million cars of 100kWh battery capacity charged once per week will require 40,000 GWh (40,000,000 MWh). A 1GW (1,000MW) power station running at 100% capacity factor will produce 168 GWh (168,000 MWh) in a week. So the absolute minimum generating capacity needed would be 238 x 1GW power stations (nuclear or otherwise).
An EV charging at home uses ~7kW (same as a reasonably high powered electric shower) so a 1GW power station can charge ~143,000 cars simultaneously and the 238 x 1GW power stations could charge 34 million simultaneously. It will take ~14 hours at 7kW to deliver 100KWh.
But as you and others have pointed out, they are not living in fantasy land. This is simple, basic physics meets economics, arithmetic and supply & demand. Politicians understand very well that they are doing the bidding of those to whom they report, the globalist cabal through a few benign sounding organisations like the UN, WHO and WEF etc. They know perfectly well that the numbers don’t work but that doesn’t matter in a controlled media world because what are you, the ordinary person, going to do about it? Nothing. Perhaps vote for the other guy who will be the same as the first guy.
Let’s not leave open the door that politicians and government officials make and have made mistakes. None of this is a mistake, it is all 100% planned and intentional. It is about complete, irreversible power, wealth and subjugation of the common man by a tiny group of so called elites.
I've updated the article now on the numbers! I did conflate gwh with gw.
The correct calculation should be: 400 million cars X 100kwh car batteries = 40 000 000 000kwh needed = 40 000gwh. Assuming you charge once a week, it would draw 40 000gwh of electricity.
I also updated to give a better comparison with nuclear reactors, taking into account the Swedish Ringhals reactor which produces 27 000gwh per year. So the nuclear reactor couldn't even make in a year what will be needed in a week.
Point is, we still need loads of nuclear reactors if we are to transition to EVs!
Conflation of energy and power are all too common. As an entertaining aside some years ago I was at a home improvement exhibition. One of the exhibitors was Tesla showing off their Powerwall. I went to speak with the salesman and he kept saying “kW” when he was referring to energy. I politely corrected him each time, and there were a lot of times. At first I thought it was just a misspeak or laziness but he grew tired of me correcting him and became less and less professional as the conversation went on. I eventually told him that I was politely correcting him but if this is the way Tesla talks to customers I’d have been better telling you from the outset that you’re an idiot. Happy days.
In my opinion, a better alternative would be to take some car data (I’ve used the Leaf, above) and get its estimated range and divide it by the battery power. Then, multiply that number by the average yearly travel and by the number of cars. In my sheet, I have arrived at around 484TWh/year (I didn't use the 400 million figure, but a 250 million one). The problem with that estimate is that it takes for granted the values presented by the manufacturer, which, even though multiplied by 0.7 by the epa to best reflect reality, is based on lab tests. That obviously disregards winter use.
My preferred method is getting the gasoline consumption and then converting it to energy. The EU consumes approximately 84 billion liters of gasoline per year (https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/gasoline_consumption/Europe/). Considering that only around 30% of that, on average, becomes usable power in a gas car, and that an electric car motor is ~85% efficient on average, I’d estimate, without accounting for winter, the cars would use around 380TW/Year. That doesn’t mean that’s the actual electricity they will draw from the grid, though. Taking into account an average charger efficiency of 85.7% and a transmission loss of around 6% (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7046253 and https://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-much-electricity-disappears-between-a-power-plant-and-your-plug/ respectively), you’d have an impact of ~472TWh/Year on the grid. If you’d like to guestimate more, you could even account for the European winter taking close to 29% of the year and that electric cars would be about 80% as efficient when temperature is close to 0°C, and that would mean a ~506TWh impact on the grid.
Now, that power could be supplied by 13 Gravelines nuclear stations. You’d need 209 Alta Wind Energy Centers or 176 Benban Solar parks, though, for a respective occupation of ~18000km² and 4500km² respectively. Now, that is if Europe could have the second, which is located in Egypt. But there is one small caveat. That amount was calculated based on gasoline usage alone, and Europeans love diesel cars.
All that said, that’s just the tip of the iceberg of electric car problems. Not only is the disposal of batteries troublesome, they are also very expensive (they cost almost as much as the car to replace). That probably means whomever can afford them would get a new car instead of buying a new battery, which would result in the entire car going to waste. Add to this problem the fact that any minor damage to the battery pack will result in the need to replace it. With all that in mind it is pretty obvious that electric cars are no substitute, for the masses, for gas and diesel powered ones.
Thanks for your comments! From what I have seen the winter use can be incredible sometimes. I heard of some guys in Finland trying to charge their electric car at -25C with a plug from the house, and the car hadn't actually charged up anything during the whole night. All the electricity was just going to heat the battery.
The EU is ending food production in Europe. 3000 farms in the Netherlands being shut down initially. Germany pricing fertilizer so high it can’t be used. The issue of electric cars will be made moot as they starve the population to death. The ultimate goal.
In India,there is already a paucity of electricity and if I get an electric car,what sense does it make? Why not work on something sensible instead of being fools rushing in where angels fear to tread? Have human beings lost the capacity to think ahead of their own noses?
Seen some electric scooters just being dumped because it's to expensive to recycle. They'll probably find a way to recycle car batteries I guess as that will be a big issue.
Yes and if it really was a public health emergency, they wouldn't allow the masks to just be thrown anywhere and in the trash. They would have been treated like hazardous waste. People were taking them off and putting them on tables in restaurants when they ate!!! So the next person that comes and sits down now has extra "germs" on the table cloth, not less... What a racket.
Fixing corruption in our systems is the one thing all people should stand in solidarity on. We need a #TransparencyMovement. Elon and Lex are right. The world is primed for one.
DEMANDING TRANSPARENCY: Our Systems Have Been Corrupted. Transparency is the Cure.
The politicians are good at making demands, but not good at providing the solutions. Critical thinking is not one of their attributes. Actually, thinking at all isn't one.
Either they are very good at thinking and coming up with these insane plans deliberately, or they are simply not very good at thinking and coming up with these insane plans...
They are very good at following the plans set out for them by the people to whom they report. And that is most certainly not the people who thought that their votes determined who got to be in government. Not that it matters who occupies the political leadership positions, none of them respect representative democracy. All of them are directed by the globalist cabal.
Not only will the new EV's become increasingly expensive because of limited resources for batteries and microchips, but the depreciation will fall quicker than a lead balloon because of the continually degrading batteries that are extremely expensive to replace. Some people buying second hand EV's will sit with an expensive headache when the battery stops working altogether or the range just becomes unusable. What a good way to further extract our wealth along with rampant inflation.
ICE cars could virtually last a lifetime. EV's are a throw-away and buy new situation. We are becoming a very throw-away wasteful society.
I should probably write an entire seperate article on the truth about electric car batteries. There's so much more to take into consideration that I never even mentioned in this article.
There’s no probably about it Peter.
Please write an investigative report on the start to finished product, electric vehicle batteries. I can’t wait until the government realised that all of those small to medium commercial vehicles running around will need EV power too.
Friend of mine works for the car industry, totally convinced electric cars are a huge scam, useless on the long run, hyper anti green for the minerals involved in the batteries.
Yes, didn't even touch on that in the article. The batteries are terrible for the environment and destroys local areas. Not to mention child labor being used to mine them.
And the batteries don't last. they continually degrade. Just in Europe, that's 400 Million batteries that would need to be replaced every 10/15 years MAX. Worldwide the figure would be astronomical. It's just not going to happen. As you say, that's the plan, it's not going to happen!!!
Those child miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo need to dig faster. /s
As time goes by. We begin to truly realize. Climate Change has always been a plot to limit our freedoms and liberties. The Alarmism has become a nuisance.
As I've said before, climate change is a scam to scare the populace into submitting to The Great Reset.
Hi Peter. I am a huge fan of your tireless work, I always read your articles. I 100% agree with the sentiments and the fundamentals of your arguments set out here. However, the way the numbers are presented is not correct. In fact the situation is far, far worse than you have suggested here.
The issue is the conflation of power (measured in kW) and energy, which we can measure in kWh. If we have a car that has a maximum power output of 100kW, which would be about right for a small economical car, then you could drive it using its maximum power but only for one hour. If you drive more carefully then you would use less power than 100kW so you could drive for more than one hour. But not orders of magnitude more. Let’s say you might be able to drive for a ‘few’ hours. This is not something most people expect to do per week. In other words, a typical car will use considerably more than 100kWh per week.
But this is moot. The numbers absolutely, categorically do not stack up. There isn’t/aren’t enough power stations, wind turbines, nuclear power stations, lithium, cobalt, copper and more to get even remotely close to the fantasy goals of the corrupt governments and globalist elite cabal. Your conclusion is bang on. This is not about the planet, never was. It’s about disenfranchisement of the people - power and control.
As another Substacker says, Do not comply.
Especially true in winter, when the cars use so much more energy just to keep warm and the range goes way down. People will need to charge more than once per week. I just used a conservative figure of charging once a week.
This is accurate. We purchased a hybrid this year because our car was totaled in an accident. During the summer months we get 40-45mpg, but we have noticed it's dropped to 33-35 during the winter months. I can't imagine relying on a total electric car to drive the 60 mile round trip to and from work (no chargers at work) and hopefully make it home at the end of the day. I know teslas do 200 mile range, but how bad is their range cut in the winter?
I don't know about Tesla, but as the video I included in the article showed, the Ford electric pickup track got it's range cut in half when it was cold. I've heard from other electric car owners that the range really drastically drops in winter.
Gasoline cars get worse mileage in winter too, but not nearly as bad as electric cars. Electric cars use the battery to heat the cabin, gasoline cars use the warm engine to heat up the cabin so much more efficient that way.
Great info. All the "green" technologies are highly dependent on hydrocarbons for their manufacture and distribution: also, most are made in China by slave labor.
Keep up the great work with this type stack: it's all about getting the word out to those who want to listen.
Danny Huckabee
Hi Peter. Interesting thoughts, but do not forget to properly account for gigawatt-HOURS instead of "gigawatts", as these cars are charged at different moments. Please double check your calculations.
My calculations were as follows: 400 million cars X 100kw batteries = 40 000 000 000kw needed to charge them all up.
40 000 000 000 kilowatt = 40 000 gigawatt.
Did I miss anything?
Of course I'm not saying the 40 000 gigawatts would all be needed at the same time, so we wouldn't need 40 000 nuclear reactors to power them, but we would still need a lot of them.
Edit: I did conflate GWh with GW, the article is updated with the correct figures!
You have to differentiate GW (instantaneous power) and GWh (energy delivered in 1 hour). A 1 GW power plant generates 1 GWh per hour of operation and so on.
Your 400 million cars of 100kWh battery capacity charged once per week will require 40,000 GWh (40,000,000 MWh). A 1GW (1,000MW) power station running at 100% capacity factor will produce 168 GWh (168,000 MWh) in a week. So the absolute minimum generating capacity needed would be 238 x 1GW power stations (nuclear or otherwise).
An EV charging at home uses ~7kW (same as a reasonably high powered electric shower) so a 1GW power station can charge ~143,000 cars simultaneously and the 238 x 1GW power stations could charge 34 million simultaneously. It will take ~14 hours at 7kW to deliver 100KWh.
Yes, I realized that I did conflate GWh with GW - I updated the article to reflect that!
Thanks to Igor for pointing it out!
So we would need to build hundreds of nuclear power plants just to support all the electric cars.
The politicians pushing this stuff are living in fantasy land really.
But as you and others have pointed out, they are not living in fantasy land. This is simple, basic physics meets economics, arithmetic and supply & demand. Politicians understand very well that they are doing the bidding of those to whom they report, the globalist cabal through a few benign sounding organisations like the UN, WHO and WEF etc. They know perfectly well that the numbers don’t work but that doesn’t matter in a controlled media world because what are you, the ordinary person, going to do about it? Nothing. Perhaps vote for the other guy who will be the same as the first guy.
Let’s not leave open the door that politicians and government officials make and have made mistakes. None of this is a mistake, it is all 100% planned and intentional. It is about complete, irreversible power, wealth and subjugation of the common man by a tiny group of so called elites.
Well, I'm still not sure whether its pure incompetence or deliberate malice. It's hard to tell.
But sure, people like Klaus Schwab are definitely not incompetent.
I've updated the article now on the numbers! I did conflate gwh with gw.
The correct calculation should be: 400 million cars X 100kwh car batteries = 40 000 000 000kwh needed = 40 000gwh. Assuming you charge once a week, it would draw 40 000gwh of electricity.
I also updated to give a better comparison with nuclear reactors, taking into account the Swedish Ringhals reactor which produces 27 000gwh per year. So the nuclear reactor couldn't even make in a year what will be needed in a week.
Point is, we still need loads of nuclear reactors if we are to transition to EVs!
Conflation of energy and power are all too common. As an entertaining aside some years ago I was at a home improvement exhibition. One of the exhibitors was Tesla showing off their Powerwall. I went to speak with the salesman and he kept saying “kW” when he was referring to energy. I politely corrected him each time, and there were a lot of times. At first I thought it was just a misspeak or laziness but he grew tired of me correcting him and became less and less professional as the conversation went on. I eventually told him that I was politely correcting him but if this is the way Tesla talks to customers I’d have been better telling you from the outset that you’re an idiot. Happy days.
I just updated the article as well to reflect kwh and gwh and a better comparison on how much nuclear reactors produce!
Thanks for always posting such great information.
Merry Christmas to you and your family . ( From Canada). It’s a ‘warm’, minus 31C here this morning.
Thank you, and Merry Christmas to you as well!
That was a nice article. However, I believe using the power capacity of a battery to determine what the power consumption of a fleet of electric cars would be is a little bit misleading. For instance, considering the official numbers of the Nissan Leaf (https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/electric-cars/leaf/features/range-charging-battery.html), a driver charging the battery from 0 every week would end up driving a total of a little bit over 17000km every year. The average european driving is around 11300, with the highest value being around 16400 for Ireland (https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-by-sector/transport/distance-travelled-by-car.html). That does not mean there won’t be people recharging weekly, but most people won’t be.
In my opinion, a better alternative would be to take some car data (I’ve used the Leaf, above) and get its estimated range and divide it by the battery power. Then, multiply that number by the average yearly travel and by the number of cars. In my sheet, I have arrived at around 484TWh/year (I didn't use the 400 million figure, but a 250 million one). The problem with that estimate is that it takes for granted the values presented by the manufacturer, which, even though multiplied by 0.7 by the epa to best reflect reality, is based on lab tests. That obviously disregards winter use.
My preferred method is getting the gasoline consumption and then converting it to energy. The EU consumes approximately 84 billion liters of gasoline per year (https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/gasoline_consumption/Europe/). Considering that only around 30% of that, on average, becomes usable power in a gas car, and that an electric car motor is ~85% efficient on average, I’d estimate, without accounting for winter, the cars would use around 380TW/Year. That doesn’t mean that’s the actual electricity they will draw from the grid, though. Taking into account an average charger efficiency of 85.7% and a transmission loss of around 6% (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7046253 and https://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-much-electricity-disappears-between-a-power-plant-and-your-plug/ respectively), you’d have an impact of ~472TWh/Year on the grid. If you’d like to guestimate more, you could even account for the European winter taking close to 29% of the year and that electric cars would be about 80% as efficient when temperature is close to 0°C, and that would mean a ~506TWh impact on the grid.
Now, that power could be supplied by 13 Gravelines nuclear stations. You’d need 209 Alta Wind Energy Centers or 176 Benban Solar parks, though, for a respective occupation of ~18000km² and 4500km² respectively. Now, that is if Europe could have the second, which is located in Egypt. But there is one small caveat. That amount was calculated based on gasoline usage alone, and Europeans love diesel cars.
All that said, that’s just the tip of the iceberg of electric car problems. Not only is the disposal of batteries troublesome, they are also very expensive (they cost almost as much as the car to replace). That probably means whomever can afford them would get a new car instead of buying a new battery, which would result in the entire car going to waste. Add to this problem the fact that any minor damage to the battery pack will result in the need to replace it. With all that in mind it is pretty obvious that electric cars are no substitute, for the masses, for gas and diesel powered ones.
Anyway, great article, as always.
Thanks for your comments! From what I have seen the winter use can be incredible sometimes. I heard of some guys in Finland trying to charge their electric car at -25C with a plug from the house, and the car hadn't actually charged up anything during the whole night. All the electricity was just going to heat the battery.
Excellent analysis Jota Pe. Really good work.
The EU is ending food production in Europe. 3000 farms in the Netherlands being shut down initially. Germany pricing fertilizer so high it can’t be used. The issue of electric cars will be made moot as they starve the population to death. The ultimate goal.
In India,there is already a paucity of electricity and if I get an electric car,what sense does it make? Why not work on something sensible instead of being fools rushing in where angels fear to tread? Have human beings lost the capacity to think ahead of their own noses?
I can't even get rid of an old dehumidifier or a regular car battery following my city's policy.
What about the EV car batteries? How will they be disposed of?
Seen some electric scooters just being dumped because it's to expensive to recycle. They'll probably find a way to recycle car batteries I guess as that will be a big issue.
Whenever a city or government spouts the word "recycle" I have to laugh.
All those face masks and PPE just thrown into the trash.
They really can't be serious about recycling.
There's billions of face masks floating in the ocean right now...
Which is incredibly disturbing...think of the harm to the ecosystem.
At least plastic bottles can be recycled if they can be scooped up from the water systems.
Meanwhile they are forcing us to use paper straws that suck to reduce plastic waste lol.
When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s, all we had were paper straws.
They never held up until you were finished with your drink.
Yes and if it really was a public health emergency, they wouldn't allow the masks to just be thrown anywhere and in the trash. They would have been treated like hazardous waste. People were taking them off and putting them on tables in restaurants when they ate!!! So the next person that comes and sits down now has extra "germs" on the table cloth, not less... What a racket.
You’ll have to pay a hefty charge.
Well it’s only going to get worse. The climate change green Marxist death cult is in charge now.
‘United Kingdom Government Approves Climate Lockdown Trials For 2024’
Coming to a country near you comrade.
Fixing corruption in our systems is the one thing all people should stand in solidarity on. We need a #TransparencyMovement. Elon and Lex are right. The world is primed for one.
DEMANDING TRANSPARENCY: Our Systems Have Been Corrupted. Transparency is the Cure.
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/demanding-transparency-our-systems
The politicians are good at making demands, but not good at providing the solutions. Critical thinking is not one of their attributes. Actually, thinking at all isn't one.
Either they are very good at thinking and coming up with these insane plans deliberately, or they are simply not very good at thinking and coming up with these insane plans...
They are very good at following the plans set out for them by the people to whom they report. And that is most certainly not the people who thought that their votes determined who got to be in government. Not that it matters who occupies the political leadership positions, none of them respect representative democracy. All of them are directed by the globalist cabal.
I agree. The way to the future is up to us. But, I don't think we are up to it... Send lawyers, guns and money.
Actually we will have to kill all of them as they have tainted our blood.
Not only will the new EV's become increasingly expensive because of limited resources for batteries and microchips, but the depreciation will fall quicker than a lead balloon because of the continually degrading batteries that are extremely expensive to replace. Some people buying second hand EV's will sit with an expensive headache when the battery stops working altogether or the range just becomes unusable. What a good way to further extract our wealth along with rampant inflation.
ICE cars could virtually last a lifetime. EV's are a throw-away and buy new situation. We are becoming a very throw-away wasteful society.
It's all a scam. Some car manufacturers also starting to take subscriptions for turning certain features on and off. e.g heated seats. You basically rent them. (You will be happy and own nothing) All part of the same scam. https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/12/23204950/bmw-subscriptions-microtransactions-heated-seats-feature