L R AS Published on Sunday 15 April 2018 - n° 229 - Categories:electric vehicles
What if the widespread use of electric vehicles were a mirage?
Everyone is talking about electric vehicles and their forthcoming deployment. Les Echos wonders about the capacity to put them on the roads, underlining the existence of three obstacles: 1°) the first is linked to the
price of battery components. Lithium has tripled in three years, cobalt has more than doubled in 2017. If the industry is capable of producing batteries for 1.2 million electric or hybrid vehicles as at present, huge investments will be needed to multiply the supply by ten, or by sixty if the entire production is to be electrified.
Cobalt and lithium have two unfavourable characteristics: a°) resources are not infinite. With what is accessible, there are enough products to equip the world park once or twice but not beyond. b°) Their production consumes a lot of energy, as does their recycling. For example, an electric vehicle travelling 200,000 kilometres will have emitted 50 grams of CO2 per kilometre, even before having driven the first metre (any reduction in this mileage would increase the proportion of CO2 produced!). To reduce CO2 emissions, the energy used to produce the battery must itself be decarbonised!
2°) Charging a battery requires an enormous amount of electricity. An example: to charge 1% of the French vehicle fleet at night, it practically requires the production of a nuclear unit. As the sun does not shine at night and the wind often falls, new nuclear or carbonaceous power plants will have to be built! For example, with the Chinese energy mix, the Tesla vehicle emits more CO2 than a good old petrol car when calculating all the energy to produce it.
3°) The third obstacle is the transport of this electricity. A depot of 200 buses to be charged requires the power of 50 five-storey buildings. It will be necessary to install overhead wires or dig them in.
These three obstacles can be solved as we can see for shale oil. We are working on other electrodes or other electrolytes ... Solar energy can be used more to raise water which, by going down into turbines, will provide electricity ... We can make better use of energy during the day, ...
For the author, "given the scale of the investments to be made, the technical challenges to be overcome, the time needed to develop new technologies, the electric vehicle will remain a niche for a long time". Should we even speak of a mirage?
Les Echos of 12 April
