Batteries, they do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid.
About forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. (and an even larger fraction in the rest of the world) is from coal-fired plants. It follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered, a technical fact that is not well provided to the public, as it does not assist in making someone’s profits.
It takes virtually the same amount of energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does an electric one, and note that electric vehicles generally weigh far more than conventional gasoline powered vehicles. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device.
There are two types of batteries; rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead; well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles these are lead-acid type of battery, found in virtually all gasoline powered vehicles. The good thing about those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do not yet know how to recycle a single-use battery properly.
But that is not half of it. For those excited about electric cars and a green revolution, take a closer look at batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what we call environmentally destructive production costs.
A typical EV battery weighs about one thousand pounds. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
All those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just one typical electric automobile battery.
Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls, and workers can die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these factors as part of the cost of driving an electric car?
California is building the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the ultimate in being “green”, but it is not. This construction project is creating an environmental disaster.
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium-gallium, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each large windmill has a weight of about 1688 tons (the equivalent to about 1000 automobiles) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass/epoxy, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. A large windmill blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We presently cannot recycle used blades.
There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look beyond the myth of zero emissions.
"Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal but when you look at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind, you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's environment than meets the eye, for sure.
Why is it that these realities are not presented within our society? In my opinion, one only needs to look at the corporations and their management to see who can profit from promoting the “green revolution”. A new technology to promote, manufacture, sell and make profits from; that is what many of us have been trained to seek out for success in our working lives, often with a blind eye to the realities of what we are doing. No judgement here, just stating truth.
Having worked in the energy field for over 50 years, I believe the most real solution to most of the “green” objectives was presented by Jimmy Carter way back in the 1970s. This was not because of the motive of achieving minimum environmental impact, but rather to get through the Oil Crisis of that decade. Conservation, cutting back on the consumption of energy, that works much better than many of the present directions that big corporations are taking in today’s world. But there’s not much profit in going with that path.
-Frederick Rosse, Beckersville Steam Engineering Co.
