I recently caught up with my stack of reading material, and one article that I found especially interesting is an article by Dr.Iddo Wernick entitled “The Many Problems with Batteries”. It is an analysis well worth your time. Dr. Wernick is a senior research associate at The Rockefeller University’s Program for the Human Environment and was nominated for a Nobel Prize in 2013 and 2014. Some of the problems with batteries he notes are:
- batteries store energy less efficiently than hydrocarbon fuels, meaning that batteries require much more mass and volume than hydrocarbon fuels. Batteries are far less energy dense than other fuels. For example, the energy density of biomass fuels such as straw and cow dung is 20 times greater than lithium ion batteries, and the energy density of gasoline is 50 times greater than lithium ion batteries.
- half the power of the batteries in an EV go to moving the batteries themselves. (There will be increased highway wear and tear due to the weight of EVs that we as taxpayers will have to pay for).