AP: India is one of the world's fastest-growing EV markets. This is why

[OKIsItJustMe]

India is one of the world’s fastest-growing EV markets. This is why

BY SIBI ARASU
Updated 4:08 AM EDT, August 31, 2023

BENGALURU, India (AP) — Groceries stashed in the back of an electric delivery scooter are an increasingly familiar sight in the Indian city of Bengaluru. In crowded markets, electric rickshaws drop off and pick up passengers. And the number of tech startups focused on electric transport has shot up as the city — and country — embrace electric vehicles.

India is one of the fastest-growing electric vehicle markets in the world and now has millions of EV owners. More than 90% of its 2.3 million electric vehicles are the cheaper and more popular two- or three-wheelers — that’s motorbikes, scooters and rickshaws — and over half of India’s three-wheeler registrations in 2022 were electric, according to an IEA report released in April.

A $1.3 billion federal plan to encourage EV manufacturing and provide discounts for customers, along with the past decade’s rising fuel costs and consumer awareness of the long-term cost benefits are combining to drive up sales, analysts say.

Electric vehicles are one solution to bring down planet-warming emissions and improve air quality — with road transport contributing significantly to global emissions. For the electric vehicles market to successfully slash carbon, experts say moving electricity generation away from fossil fuels, managing critical mineral supply chains and boosting EV sales across different socioeconomic backgrounds in the country will be key.

…

[Shermann]

1. I hope there's enough lithium to meet the new demand nt

[keithbvadu2]

2. Demand for purchase and demand for repair/replacement when the batteries fail.

Wonder if they have an estimated timeline for failure surge.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. Fortunately, battery recycling is ramping up

Years ago, if you took a laptop battery to be recycled, the recycler recovered essentially everything but the lithium. That was sold as “slag” for use in making cement. Times have changed.

ACS: Lithium-Ion Battery Recycling─Overview of Techniques and Trends

[NNadir]

9. It would be better, rather than citing one paper, to look at the process chemistry of "recycling."

It might help to read the article rather than hand wave about it, or better, to make a habit of reading a lot of articles, a habit I personally have.

Pyrometallurgical processes require energy, specifically heat energy. The question is whether the environmental demands of recycling materially dilute energy materials, which is what batteries are, is sustainable.

Even this article, posted with a link glib assurance of "don't worry, be happy" rhetoric discusses the scale of the task:

Recycling also has environmental costs including transportation, preparation, and high energy use. Kim et al., for example, noted that “the techniques that are widely commercialized or researched are also environmentally harmful”. (26) Pyrometallurgical methods are implemented relatively simply, but incur environmental and significant energy costs for combustion and calcination of the batteries. While hydrometallurgical methods require less energy for processing than pyrometallurgical methods, many reagents are required and water must be purified afterward. (45)

Given the costs of making batteries, recycling battery materials can make sense. From the estimated 500,000 tons of batteries which could be recycled from global production in 2019, 15,000 tons of aluminum, 35,000 tons of phosphorus, 45,000 tons of copper, 60,000 tons of cobalt, 75,000 tons of lithium, and 90,000 tons of iron could be recovered. (46) These quantities of materials can reduce the need to mine new materials and also allow countries to reduce their dependence on other countries for battery supplies.

It uses the conditional word "can" not the definitive word "does." It refers to 2019, when presumably the batteries being recycled were probably from the first decade of the 21st century, when the world was not dominated by electric cars, much as it isn't so dominated now. The handwaving does not consider the implications of scale up; lithium, cobalt (provided largely by slaves), manganese cannot be recycled while in use.

The electric car fantasy, particularly based on the lie that electricity, a thermodynamically degraded form of energy, is clean because of all the delusional reference to the useless solar and wind industries as if they mattered - they don't - is not sustainable, not in India, not in China, not in the United States, not in Europe, nor in South America or Africa.

The laws of thermodynamics are inviolable. Storing energy wastes it. Storing thermodynamically degraded energy makes it worse.

In India, they burn coal to provide electricity. If one has been to India - I have, albeit decades ago - one can have the experience of choking on air pollution. Electricity in India is dirty, rather like electricity in Germany.

Have a nice day.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

12. The conversion of rickshaws from kerosene, and from manual, to electric rickshaws,..is something

the West won’t understand in terms of the immense benefits derived.

You weren’t choking on coal power plant fumes,…were choking on the no pollution control fossil fuel vehicles, and no control farmer stubble burning. 🔥 🌲

[NNadir]

18. You can mock poverty, but I was choking on coal fumes, not cartoon versions of reality.

At one plant I was touring, the coal smoke stack was less than 15 meters high, and the smoke was blowing directly into the plant.

The manager of the plant was actually proud of the thing; his own power plant.

I'm sure you weren't there with me, but it doesn't surprise me at all that people want to discuss topics about which they know nothing at all; it's a fairly regular occurrence here and elsewhere.

[Alexander Of Assyria]

20. Your mock interpretation is being confused with inform.

Your experience in India long ago, was not nine, recently.

Things have changed, rapidly…economic lifting of hundreds of millions out of poverty and into the middle class and education reining has taken place…pollution is a priority much mother than in the ages past.

With rising prosperity the need for energy rises…population x richness per capita.

Should India be denied the same cheap energy the West used to enrich itself?

Yes!…if only the West chips in with the cost gap! They have asked, the West delays recognition of the obvious…delays admitting hypocrisy.

[NNadir]

23. Thank you for "informing" me, but I really, really, really am unimpressed with the "information."

I think I understand fairly well the relationship between energy and poverty, thank you, professor, and I appreciate that you consider me a rube.

I also am aware of the criticism of China and India for raising per capita wealth using the same energy sources the West used to do the create it's wealth, coal, a point I make often here when people say the problem with climate is, um, China.

But I am also aware that the West has exported pollution.

My interest is climate change, and the context is not about whether wealth and pollution are related, but about whether electric vehicles are "clean."

I have been following the relationship between electric vehicles and electric power for quite some time, thank you, which is the topic at hand.

Now, it may be that in India, as in China, pollution from power plants will move from cities to rural areas where the population is less dense, and thus the death toll smaller. But the carbon dioxide at least, and probably many of the particulates belong to all of humanity, and they will not go away.

The point is that exporting pollution has nothing to do with eliminating pollution.

Now, if you are here to announce that coal burning in India is OK because the poverty level in India has declined, that's one thing. It's a common theme on the right, fossil fuels are good because they reduce poverty (at least for the short term).

I will say that at least India is actively building nuclear plants, unlike head up the ass countries, like, say, Germany. I will also say that India's nuclear program using heavy water reactors with a plan to switch to thorium breeding in those reactors is one of the finest in the world.

But, no, I'm not fond of "kerosene rickshaws," if you must know.

According to this website, which I confess to not having vetted, India has the second highest air pollution index in the world:

University of Chicago Air Quality Index

Your "information," while I'm sure you consider it valuable, has nothing to do with either climate change, electric vehicles, or whether I had coal blowing in my face at an Indian chemical plant, which you "informed" me was not the case, even though we have no personal relationship of which I am aware. Telling me that you have recently traveled to India does not show that coal smoke was not blowing in my face and into the plant I was visiting, nor does it show that air pollution, not even including climate change, is not a problem in India, nor does it show that electric vehicles in India do not drive air pollution, since India generates electricity from coal.


From the more than 17,000 pubications listed in Google Scholar on the subject of air pollution in India in 2023 alone, I submit it is a problem, a very serious one with very serious health implications.

[OKIsItJustMe]

3. It's not so much a problem of supply as production

There’s a lot of lithium in the world (PDF), most of it in the “lithium triangle.” However, demand for it has skyrocketed in recent years, making it difficult for the producers to keep up.

[Shermann]

4. I wonder how much is going into the landfills

Battery recycling is really problematic in many areas. In all likelihood, the best future battery technologies for EVs will still be based on lithium. There just isn't another element like it, although sodium shows promise in terms of cost reduction.

[OKIsItJustMe]

6. Too much (just like everything else)

A few years ago, I went to a conference, and they gave me this cool name tag holder. Instead of having a pin or a bit of elastic, it had powerful little magnets. I asked what they planned to do with them after the conference. They really hadn’t given it much thought.

I pointed out that those magnets were almost certainly made with neodymium, a “rare earth” mostly produced in China under horrible ecological conditions.

Not So “Green” Technology: The Complicated Legacy of Rare Earth Mining

[Alexander Of Assyria]

11. China is not alone among capitalists regarding ecologically dangerous mining and extraction.

Struggling with the same toxic dumps found in the West all over as well

https://e360.yale.edu/features/china-wrestles-with-the-toxic-aftermath-of-rare-earth-mining?ref=hir.harvard.edu

China has been a major source of rare earth metals used in high-tech products, from smartphones to wind turbines. As cleanup of these mining sites begins, experts argue that global companies that have benefited from access to these metals should help foot the bill.

…..The West that benefitted should pay up for the clean up? Goes for past burning of fossil fuels…

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. High number of facility fires in 2022 prompts renewed look at battery recycling efforts

High number of facility fires in 2022 prompts renewed look at battery recycling efforts

The media reported 390 waste and recycling facility fires in the U.S. and Canada in 2022, the highest number since Fire Rover started tracking reports. EPR laws and federal funding aim to reduce risk.
Published March 22, 2023

Megan Quinn
Senior Reporter

Fires at waste and recycling facilities continued to be a problem in 2022, with at least 390 incidents reported by the media in the United States and Canada, according to data from Fire Rover, a fire suppression system company.

During a recent webinar hosted by the National Waste & Recycling Association, Ryan Fogelman, a partner at Fire Rover, said that number is the highest since he started collecting fire incident data in 2016. That compares to 367 reported incidents in 2021 and 317 in 2020. In 2022, waste and recycling facility fires caused 56 reported injuries and 2 reported deaths, he said.

The industry has long suspected that lithium-ion batteries are a growing fire hazard because of their tendency to ignite when crushed or bent — and their increasing prevalence in everything from light-up shoes to birthday cards. Recent state and federal actions aim to curb fires by bolstering safe collection strategies.

Pinpointing the cause of these fires can be tough, Fogelman said, partly because media reports often don’t list a cause, but anecdotal reports show a significant portion of facility fires are related to batteries. Waste and recycling operations face other diverse fire hazards because of the nature of their facilities, he said, which often house large machinery, store combustible chemicals and perform hot work tasks that can emit sparks.

…

[Think. Again.]

8. Imagine that...

"A $1.3 billion federal plan to encourage EV manufacturing and provide discounts for customers, along with the past decade’s rising fuel costs and consumer awareness of the long-term cost benefits are combining to drive up sales, analysts say."

Federal ACTION has an affect on things.

Someone should tell the U.S. Federal government about that...

[OKIsItJustMe]

10. Some of the government already knows...

Try this experiment:

1. Open this PDF: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Inflation-Reduction-Act-Guidebook.pdf
2. Search for the word “Billion”

[Think. Again.]

14. well..I guess..

..."some" would be okay if this weren't, in Biden's own words: "an Existential Crisis".

[OKIsItJustMe]

17. Look, we need to face facts

Fact #1: You can complain about Joe Biden not doing enough, fast enough, but I don’t think he can do things any faster. There’s still a Congress to deal with.

• The GOP has the majority in the house.
• The Democrats have a nominal majority in the Senate.

Fact #2: Taxing and spending by the government is controlled by the Legislative Branch (i.e. Congress.)
Fact #3: Even funding for FEMA is not guaranteed:

Reuters: Biden boosts spending request to help pay for disasters

By Jarrett Renshaw
September 1, 2023 12:19 PM EDT

Sept 1 (Reuters) - The Biden administration on Friday added $4 billion to a supplemental funding request to Congress to help pay for relief efforts following a string of disasters that have ravaged large swathes of the U.S. in recent weeks.

U.S. President Joe Biden asked Congress in early August to approve about $40 billion in additional spending, including $24 billion for Ukraine and other international needs and $12 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency's disaster relief fund.

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) now needs $16 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund (DRF), an OMB spokesperson said, citing disasters in Hawaii, Louisiana and Florida.

"The President has been clear that were going to stand with communities across the nation as they recover from disasters for as long as it takes, and the administration is committed to working with Congress to ensure funding for the DRF is sufficient for recovery needs," the spokesperson said.

…

[Think. Again.]

21. I strongly disagree...

...There is quite a lot Biden, without the approval of congress, and everyone else in a position of power could be doing to ramp up the transition away from fossil fuels and to massively decrease the amount of CO2 we're emitting while that transition takes place.

[OKIsItJustMe]

24. It worked so well when Barack Obama tried

Then, Trump was elected, and he rolled it all back, plus some. If we had a chance of getting Climate Change under control, Trump may have just blown it for all of us.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-trump-administrations-major-environmental-deregulations/

COMMENTARY
The Trump administration’s major environmental deregulations
Cayli Baker
December 15, 2020

Over the last four years, the Trump administration has taken on a massive deregulatory effort. With the issuance of Executive Order 13771, the administration’s two-for-one rule, federal agencies were directed to eliminate two regulations for each new rule issued. Much of this effort has focused on scaling back previous Obama-era regulations and weakening agencies’ statutory authority. Notably, environmental regulation has proven a prominent and easy target, as many existing policies and regulations had never been enshrined into law. The Trump administration has replaced the Clean Power Plan, redefined critical terms under the Endangered Species Act, lifted oil and natural gas extraction bans, weakened the Coal Ash Rule, which regulates the disposal of toxic coal waste, and revised Mercury and Air Toxic Standards–just to name a few[1].

Over the past few months, various federal agencies have finalized major environmental deregulations marking the end of, in some cases, years-long processes. The rules vary in consequence, from walking back pesticide bans to encouraging fossil fuel extraction on federal lands, weakening emissions standards, and even countering previous Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) findings. The Center on Regulation and Markets has been tracking these ongoing deregulations. A sampling of some of the most consequential environmental revisions and rescissions to date are listed below.

Clean Power Plan

Finalized in 2015, the Clean Power Plan (CPP) was proposed by the Obama administration in June 2014 and intended to reduce electricity sector greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The CPP established carbon dioxide (CO2) emission performance rates for two subcategories of fossil fuel-fired electric generating units. CO2 is the most prevalent greenhouse gas pollutant, accounting for 82 percent of U.S. GHG emissions (using 2017 figures). At the time of the rule, the electricity sector was responsible for approximately 30 percent of the United States’ overall GHG emissions. EPA estimated that by 2030, CPP would reduce carbon pollution from the electricity sector 32 percent below 2005 levels. Likewise, sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants were predicted to drop by 90 percent and nitrogen oxides emissions by 72 percent. The reductions under CPP were expected to prevent an estimated 3,600 premature deaths each year.

In March 2017, just two months after his inauguration, President Trump issued an Executive Order directing EPA to review the CPP.[2] In October that same year, EPA proposed to rescind the policy. While EPA worked to repeal the Clean Power Plan, the administration considered possible replacement policies in response to EPA’s 2009 endangerment findings that determined current GHG concentrations in the atmosphere posed a threat to public health and welfare. In August 2018, EPA proposed the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule as CPP’s replacement. Unlike CPP, ACE did not set GHG emission guidelines for states using emission performance rates. Instead, ACE defined the “best system of emission reduction” (BSER) for existing power plants as on-site, heat-rate efficiency improvements (HRI), whereas CPP determined BSERs to be CO2 emission performance rates. ACE used these BSERs to provide states with a list of “candidate technologies” to establish standards of performance by the states. EPA’s Regulatory Impact Analysis predicted that, relative to CPP, the replacement rule would increase CO2 emissions by over 60 million short tons by 2030.[3] In June 2019, EPA finalized three rules implementing ACE and its set emissions. The state of New York, along with 21 other states and seven cities, filed a lawsuit seeking a review of the action. The states claimed ACE does not meaningfully reduce GHG emissions, violating EPA’s duty to address carbon pollution from power plants under the Clean Air Act.

…

Then, Biden rolled back what Trump did, but not before terrible damage had already been done.

If President Biden starts acting like a king, acting by fiat, we will get another Trump term, or someone worse. The only way to do something which lasts, is with the cooperation of Congress (something a lot like the Inflation Reduction Act.) Oh, sure, I would have liked more, but I don’t think we could have gotten it.

[Think. Again.]

25. I still believe...

...that the entire Biden administration could be a much stronger advocate for the reduction and elimination of CO2 than they are being, without coming off acting as a king. I feel that the youth vote has a point when they speak about feeling betrayed by Biden's climate actions versus his campaign promises.

He's basically gone silent on the issue.

Sometimes, to comfort myself, I imagine that the administration is doing a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes where it can't be picked at in public by the republicans, but when I consider that any success will need massive public support, I wonder how affective such a non-public approach could be.

[OKIsItJustMe]

26. You are free to believe what you want

Joe Biden has been in this business a long time (yes, he’s old) and (better than many) he understands the “art of the possible.”

During the Obama administration, when a “conservative” would decry the “affordable care act” as a sweeping government takeover of the healthcare system or as (shudder) “socialized medicine!” my reply was, “Oh, I wish!” What it provided was more universal health insurance (not universal health care.) However, I had to admit, “Obamacare” although it was not everything I wanted (not by a long shot) was one hell of a lot better than what we had gotten from more than a century of effort by other administrations! and (make no mistake about it) Joe Biden deserves a lot (most?) of the credit.

So, did we get the “Green New Deal?” No! (But, frankly, we probably never would have gotten the “Green New Deal.”) Instead, we got the “Inflation Reduction Act” and (just like the “Affordable Care Act”) it is (to quote Vice President Biden) “a BFD!”

[Think. Again.]

27. Thank you for...

...your permission for me to believe that there is a LOT more the Biden administration could (and should) be doing to promote and support the energy transition away from fossil fuels in addition to the IRA and BBB Act. The IRA is a huge step forward, now let's make the next step and the next, and keeping doing that until we are seriously in the race.

I leave you now to 'believe' that the role of President is strictly limited to formal Acts and official deals with other politicians, no nuance allowed.

[LiberaBlueDem]

13. EV's are great for nuclear electricity producers

Nuclear power plants are built to go full burn, 24/7.

Most of that heat is wasted since power demands are only about 12 hours a day.

With batteries everywhere, that wasted production can be funneled into filling EV batteries on off peak demand times.

Of course charging with solar is too cheap to meter, but from now until when we have solar everywhere, nuclear can be used efficiently, finally.

[Think. Again.]

15. Yes...

...The Biden administration is funding projects that will use nuclear facilities to create hydrogen which is also an energy storage option, in the one example below, H2 made from nuclear power will then replace natural gas in a power station:

Power-to-Power Hydrogen Demonstration Involving Largest U.S. Nuclear Plant Gets Federal Funding

Palo Verde Generating Station, a 4-GW nuclear power plant in Arizona, is gearing up to produce hydrogen from a low-temperature electrolysis (LTE) system, and that hydrogen will then be used to fuel a natural gas–fired power plant owned by Arizona Public Service (APS). The innovative power-to-power demonstration led by PNW Hydrogen is set to receive $20 million in federal funding, including $12 million from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office (HFTO) and $8 million from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy (NE).

Full story: https://www.powermag.com/power-to-power-hydrogen-demonstration-involving-largest-u-s-nuclear-plant-gets-federal-funding/

[OKIsItJustMe]

19. Actually there's a larger waste of heat associated with nuclear plants

Thermal Water Pollution from Nuclear Power Plants

…

The thermal energy efficiency of a conventional thermal power plant is 30% to 48%, while typical nuclear power plants have thermal efficiencies around 30%, the low end of the spectrum. This is because most nuclear power stations must operate below the temperatures and pressures that fossil fuel plants do in order to provide more conservative safety margins within the systems that remove heat from the nuclear fuel rods. The remainder of the energy is mostly contained in cooling water and released to the environment. While nuclear power's thermal pollution per usable energy produced is only slightly more than other thermal power generation technologies, nuclear power releases a higher percentage of its wastewater as liquid effluent streams instead of vapor. This is because coal and natural gas plants discharge much higher wastewater temperatures, 128.4°C and 91.1°C, respectively. Therefore, nuclear power plants have a more direct, intense environmental impact on local water sources, while other plants have a less intense, but broader environmental impact.

…

[LiberaBlueDem]

16. We need nuclear power plants to keep making money

If nuclear power goes broke because of solar and hydrogen who will pay for all the expenses of controlling and cleanup of the tons of nuclear waste?

[Think. Again.]

22. I don't think any nuclear plant...

...has ever turned a profit (they're massively expensive to build and operate even before centuries of waste storage), but we're not discussing interesting investment oppotunities, we're discussing the immediate need to reduce and eliminate CO2 emissions while keeping some semblance of a stable society going.