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

submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

A lot of good answers here. One made me think about the good aspects, not just the game reduction aspects.

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.

Better batteries faster will help humans to make better use of the minerals we pull from the earth and the electrons we set in motion. (Imagine a battery peaking plant with 1980's batteries.)

Improvement of the electric grid could limit wildfires caused by them.

Smoothing electric grid drawls moves generation from peaking with natural gas to more base load, hopefully with something better than coal.

[–] weeeeum 1 points 9 months ago

This is a very good point. A large obstacle in widespread adoption of renewable energy, is the inherent inflexibility of many of them. You can't bend gods'will to make sunshine at midnight and as such you cannot meet the demand at certain times of the day. However, if renewable energy could be stored during a surplus, we wouldn't need fossil fuels to supplement peak power consumption in the afternoons.

An alternative are nuclear reactors but they are expensive and time consuming to build. Not to even mention the NIMBY's everywhere ("not in my backyard") preventing construction of these very controversial (unfairly so) reactors.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 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.