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?

  • Atemu@lemmy.ml
    0·
    10 months ago

    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.

    • Thevenin@beehaw.org
      0·
      10 months ago

      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.