The Missing Link Between Electric Cars and Renewables

Electric cars and renewable energies are inextricably tied. Both are saviours of this new world, bars for that cage we are building in the twenty-first century to keep the climate change monster contained and stop it from running free.

However, when we think of their benefits, we usually turn a blind eye to the forces behind the adoption of electric vehicles. Yes, there is an undeniable environmental component, but the Volkswagens and Teslas of this world don’t have a business model based on saving the world, but rather on selling as many vehicles as possible.

Let’s buy more cars!

The governments know this, but these mega-companies always have an immense power for lobbying. After all, no government likes the optics of letting thousands of people be out of a job because profits from <Insert Car Manufacturer of choice> are dwindling.

“So what can we do, Mr. Advisor?”

“Easy, Mr. Prime Minister. Let’s get people to buy more electric cars. We’ll save the environment and the company.”

This approach has a massive problem: by using grants to incentivise people to buy electric cars they don’t need, we are using a silly amount of unnecessary energy and materials. Look at this 2020 research paper from Honda and the Tohoku University, for example, which states that:

Our results indicate that the energy that is required for vehicle production is 41.8 MJ/kg per vehicle, where mining and material production processes represent 68% of the total consumption.

Given that most electric cars are around the 2-ton mark, we are looking at a energy consumption of more than 80 GJ, or about 2000 litres of fuel. Which in the case of an “old” diesel car of 2006, is good for a cool 40.000 km. Just for the manufacturing alone. While it is scary to think about this this way, it is also clear that the major players involved in the decisions are set on this “don’t repair, buy” model so it is extremely difficult to break.

A future full of scrap

To add to the drama, even if we were to only buy electric cars when we really need to replace our old car, the scrap problem is not going anywhere. We are going to keep scrapping more cars, and with the advent of electric cars things are going to get more and more complicated.

From an engineering point of view, the packaging challenges of building an electric car mean that it’s usually better to have many small batteries rather than a big one. This way, they form a battery pack that can have irregular shape and, if necessary, squeeze into all the gaps of the floor of the vehicle.

But again, this approach is great for manufacturing, but terrible for recycling. Meaning that once this electric car reaches the end of its life, it becomes incredibly costly to remove its battery. And even if we were to do that, recycling the minerals in the battery is not a matter of throwing batteries into a blender and a centrifuge, and hoping they come out separated. We would have to disassemble the battery cells and make this an even more expensive endeavour.

What can be done to solve this? There are a few new companies that are focusing on new technologies to recycle batteries with better ease. However, the “3 R’s of recycling” call for Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. So if we cannot stop making new cars, can we at least reuse them before attempting to recycle them?

A second life as home power storage

GM is a good example (but not the only one) of car manufacturer attempting to give their battery packs a second life. Their Ultium battery pack has been designed with battery reuse in mind, and they have already shown concepts of reused batteries used in home power applications.

So far, these batteries have come from electric cars that can be pretty much considered for early adopters. Electric cars have been suffering from crippling range and weight issues, and it’s only now that these problem are getting to a point where they are no longer a concern for prospective buyers.

In fact, the Ford F-150 Lightning comes with the capability to act as a home power backup solution — just like Tesla’s Powerwall. And while this is an interesting capability, the real nugget here is that the F-150 is undercutting the Tesla Powerwall in cost per kilowatt-hour, while still offering a fully-functioning pick-up truck on top of the battery. A used battery-pack that only retains 75% of its maximum capacity still has more juice than five Tesla Powerwalls, and this is just the base model I’m talking about.

The link with renewables

Renewable energy sources are great. They have seen a steady decrease in cost, up to the point where they are cheaper than most traditional sources of power. They reduce the reliance on fossil fuels, which can be a geopolitical nightmare if they need to come from another country. They are easily scalable, meaning you don’t need to install a solar farm for panels to be profitable — you can still reap the benefits with a panel on your roof.

However, as all things in life, they come with compromises. The biggest one is the reliance on weather (wind, sun, tides) that makes them mostly unpredictable. With gas, we can scale energy supply to the needs of the grid in that specific moment. With wind turbines, we can produce as much as wind will allow us there and then. We can turn off turbines individually, but unless we have an impractically large excess capacity, we won’t be able to respond to peaks in demand. And ideally, we would like to tailor power installations to the average, rather than peak energy demand.

This is where electric cars, or reused battery packs coming from them can become handy. Now that their capacity is large enough, it is feasible for these “Powerwalls” to act as dynamic balancers of the energy consumption in the grid, recharging themselves when the power generation is higher than the demand (and therefore, electricity is cheap) and pumping back energy into the grid when the opposite happens and the renewables can’t cope with the demand.

Since most customers would need the capacity of one Powerwall (and not 5), we already are at the point where our batteries are large enough to provide backup battery for a home and act as load balancers for the grid.

This symbiotic relationship between renewables and electric cars is going to be key for a road towards zero-carbon goals. Thanks to electric cars, renewables can be more reliable, more dominant, and drive the prices of energy down. And thanks to that, electric cars can have access to cheaper power, and get saved from scrap.

Thankfully, manufacturers are claiming they see this future, and is soon becoming a reality.