EV Battery life.

[Jazzist]

As long as tanks and other military fighting machines do not run on electricity, oil will have to be available. Given the current arms race, the need for it will only increase.

[ColinS]

Imagine the range anxiety in a Challenger EV .  I think it's ICE range is around 280 miles but it needs to carry 350 gallons to achieve that.

[peteo48]

I may have mentioned this before but the uptake in EVs where I live (Warrington) has been nothing short of dramatic. I read somewhere that there were now a million plus EVs but, if we have 30 million cars I can't believe, from the evidence of my own eyes, that only one in 30 is an EV.

The car industry has moved on from the Internal Combustion Engine - you see very few if any adverts for anything that isn't either an EV or a hybrid.

That's not to say there aren't issues - there are including the provision of enough charge points for the roughly one third of households with zero access to off street parking but things will change in the next 7 years. Also good luck with buying a new ICE car after 2030 even if the date has now been pushed back until 2035. There won't be any or very few.

The ICE is dead and gradually people will accept this.

[Lord Voltermore]

As long as there is money to be made out of oil  the Billionaires and their useful idiot chums  (politicians etc)  will control policies  in the ways that brings them the most wealth. Disaster and shortages  are just new opportunities . If you feed the gullible ignorant masses whichever version of  propaganda they want to hear and promise them  no outsiders will get their bread and circuses   you can get away with anything.

The need to change and its costs  may be obvious arguments, but common sense  and necessary life style changes and sacrifices  will be slow going  until  the  Oligarchs and their cronies start pulling in the same direction. Also the  small investors who dont really care  how their  fund managers  obtain their  profits. 

I  think dogs are often kinder than people. Until you try and take its bone away.

[madasafish]

Nuclear fusion is always 20 years from now and uncountable $Trillions in investment away.


When I graduated in 1969 with a degree in Physics, it was 20 years away.It makes the current fission energy systems  look 100% safe and dirt cheap..
When we cannot design and build mini nuclear reactors in 10 years despite the technology being in use for over 50 years, fission energy is clearly a very very very long time and lots and lots and lots of money away.

[ColinS]

I served my apprenticeship with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority and rose over the years to become a Senior Design Draftsman.  I saw it all from the inside and can testify that it wasn't Safety, Practicality or Cost that destroyed the UK nuclear industry.  It was, as usual, politics.

Rather than have British built power stations on our own soil generating energy, we decided to import nuclear generated power from Europe.  We have never looked forward again since.

[Spodric]

I think that your prediction misses one essential requirement…the £60 billion or more to upgrade the electric network and complete it in time. Who will pay ? and how the hell will you physically achieve it ?
We all have our own views , which is good, but there are too many variables out there at the moment to really know, plus I am sure technology will play its part.
Interesting that our friends across the pond now recognise Toyota probably got it right in predicting a bigger longer term future for Hybrids. It probably won’t alter the future your views predict, just the timing.

£60 billion isn't so much over ten years, I think that's about the same as the first phase of HS2. There will be a cost associated by NOT doing it. They are already upgrading the network, granted it will take a long time but I'm sure it will happen by the mid 2030's. Who knows, by then the scientists may have cracked nuclear fusion for generating electricity.

This is a bit tangential to the topic of EV battery life. But still: all the current projections for the cost of Net Zero 2050 are unrealistic and vastly underestimate the scale of infrastructure change and associated costs required to electrify everything and get rid of fossil fuels for land based transport, and heating domestic and commercial buildings etc plus industrial energy consumption. [This does not include aviation]

On Youtube there is an excellent presentation from an engineer's perspective, by Prof. Michael Kelly of Cambridge University. He carried out a basic scoping exercise. His reasoned conclusions, supported by independent numbers, are that in order to achieve Net Zero 2050, the generating and distribution capacity of the Grid needs to be increased by a factor of 2.7 times where we are now. The cost is projected to be about £4 trillion for the UK. Equivalent to about one HS2 every year. The extra numbers of new trained engineers and the quantity of mineral resources needed are staggeringly high, and that is only for the UK. I just can't see how it can be done.