My issue with electric vehicles

He’s done some research and there seems to be a number of issues no-one talks about when it comes to electric vehicles, says

Ihave always had my misgivings about the advent of electric powered vehicles (EVs). They offer very little tactile feel through the vehicle controls and the worst feature has to be the artificial exhaust note from the stereo speakers. More than that, though, the science and the facts behind EVs just don’t add up. The Volkswagen Group announced that many of their brands will stop developing new internal combustion engines by 2026 and stop producing internal combustion vehicles by 2033. That’s just over a decade EVS HAVE TO BE charged using electricity. This electricity has to be generated at power stations using either nonrenewable resources such as coal, gas and nuclear or renewable resources, including solar and wind. With more and more EVs, we’re going to need a whole lot more electricity with massively increased mining for these non-renewable energy sources. We would all wish for this electricity to come from renewable resources such as solar and wind, but there are a number of fundamental problems with this. I came across some seriously interesting and sobering facts behind the generation of electricity by means of solar and wind. Solar and wind power generation only works when the sun shines or the wind blows. The maximum efficiency for solar power generation is around 33% with our best efforts currently at only 26%. For wind, the maximum efficiency is around 60% with current levels around 45%. This generated electricity would need to be stored for when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. This means more batteries. Consider then that the world’s largest battery factory owned by Tesla would need 500 years to produce enough batteries to power the USA for just one day. That is another huge amount of non-renewable resources to manufacture away. And VW is not the only major vehicle manufacturer with this type of message. I am very suspicious about the true impact that the wholesale production of EVs is going to have on us and, more importantly, the environment. When the time comes when there will be no more internal combustion vehicles, what new unforeseen and foreseen (but ignored) issues are we going to have to deal with? all of these batteries. And when the batteries are no longer serviceable, what do we do with all the waste? CONSIDER FURTHERMORE THAT the equipment used to harness the power from the sun and the wind are manufactured from huge amounts of non-renewable resources. A single 100 MW wind farm that can power 75 000 homes requires 55 000 tonnes of concrete, 31 000 tons of iron ore and 1 000 tonnes of other non-recyclable materials to build. Wind turbines then go on to produce waste material in the form of damaged and worn components, not the least of which are thousands of fibreglass turbine blades after being used for as short a time as 20 years. For solar farms, the material usage can be up to 1,5 times as much with an approportionate amount of waste. Consider then that gas turbine generators can last 50 years and more. Building one giant wind turbine costs around the same as drilling one oil well. In one hour, the wind turbine produces energy equivalent to one barrel of crude oil, while the oil well produces 10 barrels. It costs around R5 to store one barrel of oil but you need R3 000 worth of batteries to hold the energy contained in that one oil barrel. Personally, the most worrying fact is that this massive increase in demand for these non-renewable resources is going to drive mining operations into pristine wilderness areas. There has never been a good result when this happens. My money would be on the continued development of cleaner burning fuels and increased efficiencies for the internal combustion engine coupled with hybrid technology that does not require external recharging.