...but it's just maddening that a PHEV would make sense at all except during a very narrow historical time period as we transition over...but that transition is taking way too long!
You got a couple TWh of battery you're hiding in a shed somewhere you want to share?
There is no battery fairy, and lithium packs in particular take a
lot of energy to both mine the materials and produce the cells. There's a lot of work going into improving that, but the amount of material and energy required to produce a large, long range battery pack is actually quite substantial. Some years back, I messed around with the numbers and figured out that you could ride an ebike about a million miles on the energy required to produce a long range pack (it was around 40MWh at the time, back in 2015). To put things in perspective, at 4mi/kWh, the embodied energy in that pack is the same as the energy used in 160,000 miles of driving, or "several years of an all electric home's energy use." Now, I'm willing to grant that battery production is probably a good bit more efficient in 2021 as opposed to back in 2013-2014 when I got my numbers, but the point stands: Batteries are exceedingly energy intensive.
The embodied energy in a gas tank and small internal combustion engine isn't nearly as high. You can find production energy estimates for car, but it's far less energy required for an engine on a mass production line than for batteries,
by far.
Using my local carbon intensity of 750lb/MWh, the emissions from that battery pack are ~30,000 lb CO2. Gasoline is 19.6 lb/gallon CO2. So, ~1530 gallons of gas to match the emissions of that pack out here, which is ~54k miles of driving.
Average US driving is around 35 miles a day, give or take. If you are hauling 100kWh of battery pack around every day for that, you're hauling a lot of dead weight in batteries, and there's a range hit.
But, more importantly, those batteries aren't going into other vehicles.
You can build 5 Volt-style PHEVs (20kWh battery pack, say 14kWh usable energy for driving with the rest as buffers and not fully charging the pack for longevity reasons). If you build 5 Volts, each doing 35 miles a day on battery, except for long trips, you're reducing emissions
far more than a single long range BEV, unless that long range BEV is doing hundreds of miles a day.
Even if you are using gasoline for longer trips, a number of studies have concluded that total cradle to grave emissions (and $-wise TCO) for a BEV and a PHEV are pretty close. You emit a bit more during operation, but have far less battery pack embodied energy.
If you want to make one particular point or another, you can fiddle with the numbers however you want and come up with the results you've decided you want to make (having seen one recently that assumes a battery pack requires total replacement around 100k miles to demonstrate just how horrible EVs were), but an honest accounting in my estimation ends up as "I don't have close enough error bars to make a clear argument either way."
However, in terms of practical driving requirements, it's far easier to find a gas station than a charging station, and I expect this to remain true for a long, long while. I can drive the back roads to Arizona and not worry about finding energy.
And long term, it's far from clear that long range BEVs are going to be substantially better than a midrange EV with a range extender for long travel. If you have 50-70 miles of battery range, then a liquid fueled range extender for long travel, you cover just about all the common uses on battery, and can still take a cross country trip without too much hassle.
I expect the usual hate from the "BEV Only!" people who don't seem to want to consider the reality that batteries don't come from the battery fairy, so... *shrug* Bring math if you're going to do that.
//EDIT: Well, I see I got rather beat to my points, including a link to my blog post I wrote on the topic a while back... glad people can find the new location, it took Google forever to figure out my blog had moved.
Topic: Electric Cars: Can they finally become popular in the United States? (Read 539133 times)
