California firefighters had to douse a flaming battery in a Tesla Semi with about 50,000 gallons (190,000 liters) of water to extinguish flames after a crash, the National Transportation Safety Board said Thursday.
In addition to the huge amount of water, firefighters used an aircraft to drop fire retardant on the “immediate area” of the electric truck as a precautionary measure, the agency said in a preliminary report.
Firefighters said previously that the battery reached temperatures of 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 Celsius) while it was in flames.
The NTSB sent investigators to the Aug. 19 crash along Interstate 80 near Emigrant Gap, about 70 miles (113 kilometers) northeast of Sacramento. The agency said it would look into fire risks posed by the truck’s large lithium-ion battery.
Remember that non electric cars are still dangerous too. Just think about how often you see a wreck that has cops, firetrucks, and cops all around it. That isn’t going to make the same level of national attention as an electric car burning would get.
There are a lot of reasons WHY news agencies disproportunatly show the downsides of green energy, and I’m hardly scratching the surface, but here’s my personal reasoning:
News sites like to over dramatize green energy dangers as they are funded by fossil fuel companies (ads). Theres a large amount of disinformation that they misleadingly tell people, take for example birds running Into windmills is something a LARGE amount of people know and think is an issue. However, statistically fossil fuels cause ~50x (iirc) more bird deaths per unit of energy than windmills due to birds being an apex preditor. Another example is that nuclear waste is a big issue that will prevent nuclear energy from becoming superior when that issue was solved several decades ago.
Yes, elon sucks and some of his practices should be banned, but it’s still green energy and you can’t let it distract you from the benefits of all electric vehicles.
Electric cars are not “green energy” - that’s utter bullshit.
the energy consumption of electric cars is about as clean as the power plant that produced said energy - if that happens to be a fossil fuel plant, it’s dirty as fuck, just with the pollution in a different location from where the car is driving If you have renewable energy, then yes, they can be cleaner, but:
we don’t have enough (mineable) rare earths to replace even a sizeable fraction of the world’s car market with electric vehicles
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20240221-1
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles
As I was saying in my first comment: If energy is produced by renewable sources, then they can be clean, so there’s no argument here.
Re:
Finally, like I asked another commenter: could you provide a source on EV batteries made without rare earths?
By the way - sodium requires salt, and that’s also limited on Earth. Knowing mankind, we’d extract locally (desalinification hurts the ecosystem there) and dump waste locally in another location (again, hurting the ecosystem).
My overall point is: the world’s car market is just too big and we need to shrink it, but mankind as a whole is too fucking selfish and stupid and short-sighted to accomplish that, and I WISH time will prove me wrong on that.
People also dont get the differece between average and marginal. Adding consumption doesn’t build more wind farms. Adding extra electricity consumption means in short run burning more coal and gas. They are the ones that can be ramped up / ran more hours.
In the long run they might build more nuclear, but that takes a (very) long time. Generally they’re building solar and wind pretty fast already, it is hard (costly) to ramp that up.
Adding new sources of electricity consumption just keeps the fossil fuel power stations running for longer. Efficiiency is stuff like electric mass transit to replace as many car trips as possible - and using as much wires as possible instead of batteries. But no all the money will go into facilities and subsidy for battery powered cars.
I think that’s only gas plants, that can react dynamically to changes in the grid?
I think what we need is consumer electronics that can tolerate more variation in the grid power supply - e.g. a laundry machine that runs on 80% voltage just as well, but then takes a bit longer to finish.
Nuclear power plants are only preferable to burning fossil fuels, and only when run by responsible entities (i.e. not by humans ;) - definitely not by profit-oriented corps) - I hope we can transition to enough wind, water & solar power, but we definitely need to cut down on energy consumption.
The dirtiest, least efficient coal power plant is still IMMENSELY more efficient than a car combustion engine. When you don’t have to make your energy generating device mobile, you can get a LOT more power from your fuel.
Maybe spend some time learning about a subject before you make claims about it. There’s less chance of looking like an ignorant fool that way.
Let me guess. You spend a lot of time in /c/fuckcars and therefore find ANY type of car bad and pointless?
First things first: Yours is a straw-man argument. I said that electric cars are not “green energy” because it matters how the energy is produced. You, however, argue for the better efficieny vs. combustion engines. I did not even MENTION combustion engines. So watch your tone, dumbass :p /s
Regarding your straw-man, I’ll bite:
Efficiency of an electric car is up to 65% including losses when charging. Efficiency of a Diesel powered car is up to 45%. Producing a liter of diesel costs about 1.13 times as much energy as is contained in a liter of Diesel fuel, which - even assuming 100% efficiency on winning that energy - is further bringing down the efficiency to 45% * (1 / 2.13 ) = 21% (one unit gained per 2.13 units invested). A coal power plant is at best reaching 45% energy efficiency, bringing the overall efficiency of an electric car down to 65% * 45% = 29.3%. That makes an electric car operating on coal generated electricity about 29.3% / 21% = 1.395 or about 40% more efficient than a Diesel powered car.
And this does NOT include that electrical vehicles are - due to the weight of batteries - around 50% heavier than combustion engine cars, and that battery life is much shorter and then generates a lot of electronic waste.
Accordingly:
Not true. Numbers for the most efficient coal power plants are just about equal with the efficiency of the best Diesel engines. But even moderate Diesel engines stay around 40% efficiency, whereas coal plants can be in the 30%-40% range easily.
While - all things considered (I honestly did not expect the production of Diesel to be quite so energy-inefficient) - electric cars fare better if driven at constant speed (or with good energy recuperation mechanisms on braking) and not taking into account the battery life, energy investment into that and chemical waste produced on production / disposal, they are far from getting “a LOT more power” from an “IMMENSELY more efficient” power plant.
Likewise.
Not this nonsense again. 60% of EV owners have solar panels for starters
Secondly, they’re becoming increasingly less reliant on rare earth metals and all that can be recycled anyway
Their battery can be used for v2g to assist solar and further transition
Finally, they’re incredibly effectively compared to combustion.
In comparison to combustion and hybrid, they’re way cleaner over the entire life
And now with sodium batteries coming into the market, they’ll increasingly become so.
Are they as clean as bikes? No
But not everyone wants to be isolated within 5km of public transport and their home.
I’d have to travel 2 hours by train to get to work, and wouldn’t be able to go mountaineering or hiking anymore
Also, what’s with the nonsense about there aren’t enough mineral resources.
EVs don’t need to use lithium batteries. The technology can evolve with any battery chemistry or power source.
Whereas gas or hydrogen is limited to those two options permanently
Hydrogen in particular has absolutely s*** efficiency in all parts of the process. It’s only clean if you ignore the high energy wastage
Solar panels need to run for a couple of years before they produce net energy considering the energy invested into production
Source on battery production being less reliant on rare earths?
Speak English, please - I am not looking up abbreviations to argue with you
See my other reply here: https://lemmy.world/comment/12349903 Efficiency of an electrical car is better, but absolutely not “incredibly” better, as per the numbers I checked while writing that comment
How much cleaner EVs are, depends on the source of energy mix (which at charging stations outside your home, you can hardly control) - if renewable energies are used, they are certainly cleaner. If fossil fuels are used, they are at best (not counting the waste from battery production and disposal) as much cleaner as the efficiency improvement (which is about 40% over Diesel engines, by what I calculated from sources that were acceptably credible for writing an internet comment as opposed to a scientific paper)
I was not speaking about “mineral” resources, I was speaking about mineable rare earths. Because there are plenty in the Earth’s mantle, but we can’t get to those.
Again, source please on how EVs do not need rare earths for batteries
Agreed for the time being, but if research allows to improve the process for generation of hydrogen, it could be a cleaner combustion fuel
In summary: I am not arguing for combustion cars, I am arguing against EVs not for individual use cases, but as a “this solves all problems with combustion engines” - because it is not a solution applicable to the world market for personal mobility.
The best solution is a proper public transportation system - good bus connections and trains that can operate “by wire” without the need for batteries.