Cameron Roberts, Carleton University
We need to change our transportation system, and we need to do it quickly.
Road transportation is a major consumer of fossil fuels, contributing 16 per cent of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions, which warm up the Earth’s atmosphere and cause changes to the climate. It also pollutes the air, threatening health and costing taxpayers billions of dollars annually.
At the same time, electric vehicles are getting cheaper, and vehicle range and the availability of charging stations are improving. This is exciting for many because it seems to suggest an easy and convenient answer to the problem of transportation emissions: if everyone swapped their fossil-fuelled vehicle for an electric equivalent, we could all keep driving, safe in the knowledge that we are no longer killing the planet by doing so — and all while enjoying a new car that is quiet, cheap to power and fun to drive.
Everybody wins, right? Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to be that simple.
The battery supply crunch
Electric vehicles still produce air pollution and greenhouse gases from their brakes, tires, the electricity that powers them and the factories that build them. Even if we can address (or ignore) these problems, there is a much larger stumbling block facing personal electric vehicles as a solution for climate change.
In 2019, the world produced about 160 gigawatt hours (GWh) of lithium-ion batteries. That’s enough for a little more than three million standard-range Tesla Model 3s — and only if we use those batteries for cars, and don’t build any smart-phones, laptops or grid storage facilities.
The battery production capacity currently under construction will allow the production of the equivalent of 40 million electric vehicles annually by 2028, according to one estimate.
That sounds like a lot until you see that the world produced nearly 100 million cars, vans, buses and trucks in 2019 alone. There are around 1.4 billion motor vehicles in the world today — a number that will almost certainly continue to increase if we don’t take major steps to shift transportation onto other modes.
Even at the projected 2028 level of battery production capacity, it would take us 35 years to replace this global vehicle fleet with electric models. That’s not nearly fast enough to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Maximizing climate impact
The unavoidable conclusion is that we will not be able to electrify all of our transportation in the timeframe necessary to deal with climate change. Some journeys will have to be decarbonized through other means, such as cycling, walking, public transit or telecommuting.
Lithium-ion batteries should therefore go primarily to vehicles intended for long distances or large cargo loads. Garbage trucks, buses, pickup trucks used by skilled tradespeople to get to job sites and the van that delivers your Amazon purchases are all prime candidates for electrification.
That Nissan Leaf you’ve been eyeing, unfortunately is not. You can probably travel on a bicycle or a city bus much more easily than a truckload of power tools, parcels or municipal waste can.
A win-win scenario
There are a lot of side benefits to focusing on commercial vehicles for electrification. Currently, these vehicles often burn diesel, which produces 100 times more particulate pollution than gasoline vehicles.
Diesel vehicles were responsible for approximately 83 per cent of all deaths due to air pollution from road vehicles in 2015, according to the World Health Organization. Diesel freight vehicles also tend to be noisy — a problem that is almost entirely eliminated by going electric.
For us in Canada, perhaps the greatest benefit to a focus on electrifying the commercial vehicle fleet is that several companies here are already emerging as leaders in developing and building them. Lion Electric, in Saint-Jérôme, Que., makes electric buses, trucks and school buses. New Flyer, based in Winnipeg, has already sold electric transit buses to several major American cities.
And Green Jobs Oshawa has already developed a plan to convert the Oshawa General Motors facility to the produce electric vehicles for the Canadian public sector. Our car sector is struggling, but a focus on building commercial electric vehicles could bring jobs back to this area in a big way.
There’s no way around it: We need fewer cars
As for the rest of us, the solution to zero-carbon mobility looks much more like a bike, a bus seat, a home office, a mobility scooter or a well-worn pair of shoes than a shiny new Tesla.
Some of these solutions can still take advantage of electric mobility without straining the global battery budget. With just over five per cent of 2019’s lithium-ion battery production, for example, there would be enough batteries to provide an Urban Machina electric scooter to every Canadian.
There is already talk of a federal government bail-out of the Canadian car industry, with stakeholders suggesting that this could be an opportunity to encourage the development of electric vehicle production in Canada.
If the government wants to do this in a way that has the greatest impact on the climate, it should look beyond supporting fancy personal vehicles, and turn its attention instead to the unglamorous workhorses that make our society function.
Cameron Roberts, Researcher in Sustainable Transportation, Carleton University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
This truckers runs last week. Neither one could have been done with any EV technology out there in the time required:
Tuesday 01:00 depart for TENNECO in Smithville, TN with a trailer full of parts and unusually heavy for runs to this customer. Delivered at 06:30 as scheduled.
From Smithville, I took the empty trailer down to the BASF/XPO facility by the airport in Huntsville, AL. It was during this leg that I went through Lynchburg, TN and saw the school open and kids out and school open. A little girl about 7 or 8 was standing at the end of a driveway holding her mommy’s hand and as I apporached she gave me the universal sign of pumping her arm asking me to toot my big horn. She got a couple of good toots and I was rewarded with a big smile and enthusiastic wave. She made my day and I hope I made her.
On arrival at BASF I went directly into door 9 and was loaded with the usual. But this load was unusually light and had only two orders on it instead of the normal 5 or 6. After being loaded and the trailer sealed, and the information from the bills transmitted to dispatch via the Samsara tablet I pulled around to the back of the facility and took my 10 hour break. Obviously I idled since the temp was getting into the 80s. At 22:30 I headed out to go back to Anderson and arrived at 06:00 Wed. Dropped the trailer, fueled and put the truck to bed and went home to put myself to bed but got up with my wife at 10:30.
Josh called at 14:30 to tell me that I would be doing a run to the Toyota service parts DC in KC, KA again. On this run the backhaul would be a broker load as yet not set up. The run was scheduled to depart at 01:30. So I ate and early dinner and was back in bed by 15:30. I was up and ready but before I left the house I got a call telling me that the driver that was to bring the load was running an hour late so I waited at home for a while The driver had still not arrived when I went in and was closer to 2 hours late.
I had him drop the trailer right at the temporary check in parking and hooked to it there. Then went in and got the paperwork and took off. Since that driver was an hour later than anticipated I had already burned an hour of my 14 hour duty day by the time he arrived. By the time I was hooked up and took off I had burned another 1/2 hour.
When I was heading out of Indianapolis on I-70 the ABS (Anti-lock brake system) warning light came on telling there was a problem with that system. The trailer was breaking fine and I determined that as usual the problem was with the ABS malfunction sensing and not the brakes or the ABS system. I drove on. Once at the facility in KS I submitted a DVIR report telling Carter maintenance about the problem and where the trailer was located.
Despite the late departure I arrived at the Toyota facility 15 minutes prior to my scheduled arrival. There was a truck doing his drop and hook and I had to wait for him to get clear before doing my thing. Turned out that I had to move three trailers this time instead of the usual two to get things as they should be. Finally having done my duty as their yard jockey I was hooked to an empty. Sent in the DVIR mentioned above and then started working on figuring out where I was to go to hook to the broker load to bring me back towards Anderson.
Pickup was at Johnson Controls in Saint Joseph, MO about 38 miles north of my location. I hustled and arrived there 20 minutes before my scheduled pick up time. As I went I called Josh at dispatch and asked him why they had set this up. Times were very tight and required an experienced driver to move with alacrity. I told him that an inexperienced driver or a driver that did not hustle would never make the times they had scheduled. He told me that it was the best load brokerage could find to get me headed home.
Well Johnson control was a screwed up mess due to construction at the plant and some other factors having to do with their failure to pay enough people to deal with drivers checking in and doing the shipping paperwork. It was over three hours before I left the facility loaded with 42,395 lb. of dry car batteries. New batteries are often shipped dry without the electrolyte to make them lighter so more can be shipped and to avoid the extra hassle and expense of dealing with a Hazardous Material Load.
My 14 hours had expired by the time I was loaded and so I noted on the Samsara Log that I was driving to a “safe haven” when I found a place to park at the Love’s truck stop that was only 1.6 miles away from the shipper. I already knew that there was no way I could make the 12 noon delivery on Friday at Johnson Controls in Ft. Wayne, IN when I parked it to take my 10 hour break at that Love’s truck stop. I did not bother to weigh the load. I was confident, based on the squat of the tires, the way the trailer pulled, and the gauge on the dash that tells the driver how much pressure there is on the air bags of the drive axles on the tractor, that my axle weights were legal. Besides there was only one weigh station between my departure and delivery points. It turned out to be closed as I passed by it during the early morning hours.
I departed 10 hours and 10m minutes after I arrived and hustled the whole way across US-36 E to I-72 E to I-74 E to IN SR 32 N, to I-65 N to I-865 E to I-465 E to I-69 N, to the Ft. Wayne, IN Airport Expressway, to the receiver. I arrived 1 hour and 15 minutes after the scheduled noon delivery time but I had called ahead and let them know what was going on so they were ready for me. The had me in and out empty in 40 minutes.
As required in the dispatch message I pictured scanned the signed BOL and transmitted via Transflow before departing the receiver.
When I got back to the terminal in Anderson at 14:30 I had 12 minutes remaining of my 11 hour drive time and had covered 688 miles since I had departed from that Love’s in Saint Joseph, MO. 11 hours X 65 mph = 715 miles. Those kinds of loads are stressful but I guess that is what we salary drivers get paid for.
During this last run vehicle traffic was quite a bit heavier than usual much of the way.