EV Charging: Still Slow Uptake at Lot Y

It has been a year since we checked in on the usage of the eight EV charging spaces in Lot Y south of Broadway on Chula Vista.  I use Lot Y often and have noticed some uptick in usage which has been extremely low in the past as noted here.  Last October/November 2020 usage was running a half of a charge per day, per space during Covid limitations.  Things have opened up a lot since then--just look at the traffic in town these days.  So one would expect some uptick in EV charging as well.  Here's the numbers from the city:

                   2020 minutes    2020 sessions          2021 minutes    2021 sessions

October            2650                121                        12,287                366

November         3571                137                        13,386                360

So the spaces are being used 2.8 times as frequently and providing 4.1 times as many minutes of juice.  That tallies to one and a half charging sessions per space per day.  That is still very light usage although I once saw four EVs charging at the same time.  I was at the lot on Wednesday afternoon when the regular spaces were very close to full and the eight EV spaces were empty.

There has been plenty written about the increasing load on the California grid from EVs, but not as much about the environmental effects of all the new batteries for EVs.  NBC News jumped on that last week

A nickel mine stretching nearly 4 square miles scars the forest above farmland (in the Philippines). The mine, Rio Tuba, plays a vital role in satisfying the global demand for a mineral more coveted than ever due in part to the explosion of the electric car industry.  The raw nickel dug out of the ground here ends up in the lithium batteries of plug-in vehicles manufactured by Tesla, Toyota and other automakers, according to an NBC News review of company filings and shipping records.

With the demand for nickel skyrocketing, the Rio Tuba mine is now on the brink of expanding deeper into the rainforest, adding almost 10 square miles to its current footprint. Local environmentalists fear that it will wipe out the forest’s fragile ecosystem and increase toxic runoff into the rivers that flow past the farmland down below, jeopardizing the crops.

I'm sure there are other mining areas seeing the same growth.  There's no free lunch, somewhere, somehow someone pays.  

Comments

[Handle Bard]

The city should just put canvas bags over 4 of these charging stations and make them free parking spots for gas guzzlers until the usage gets to 10 charges per station per day. It's time to start charging the electric cars a mileage fee for using the roads.

[Joe]

Here is an underreported aspect of EVs from the WSJ:

In May, the International Energy Agency reported that an electric-vehicle motor requires “upwards of 1 kilogram,” or more than 2 pounds, of rare-earth elements. The same report found that China controls about 85% of the global supply of those elements and that the “geographical concentration of production” of critical minerals—including rare earths, lithium, copper and cobalt—“is unlikely to change in the near term.”

Even if the U.S. could increase quickly the mining of rare earths—an unlikely prospect given the difficulty of gaining permits for new mining operations—the IEA explains that processing rare earths “often generates toxic and radioactive materials” that can leak into groundwater, and that “this has been a serious issue in China.”

According to the IEA, offshore wind turbines require as much as 500 pounds of rare earths per megawatt of installed capacity, including some 400 pounds of neodymium. Those are big numbers considering that the Biden administration wants to deploy 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind by 2030. The IEA predicts that the global wind-energy industry’s need for rare earths “is set to more than triple by 2040.”

The punch line here is obvious: Since the 1973 oil embargo, U.S. policy makers have decried America’s dependence on foreign oil to fuel our transportation sector. But now, in the name of climate change and the much-hyped “energy transition,” the U.S. is positioning itself to be dependent largely on China for rare earths, and it will do so at the same time that the U.S. and China are increasingly at odds over the origins of Covid-19, Taiwan sovereignty, control of the South China Sea, and genocide and crimes against humanity against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, including forced labor to produce polysilicon for solar panels.

By forcing electric vehicles into the market, the U.S. will trade reliance on domestically produced gasoline and diesel fuel for reliance on Chinese neodymium, terbium and dysprosium. What a lousy trade.

Author: Robert Bryce

[Joe]

Looks like a big whoops here in the Bay Area except for Tesla stations that were not surveyed:

If electric cars are to transform California, it needs to be easy to charge them. There’s a hitch: More than a quarter of public charging stations in the Bay Area don’t work, according to a recent survey. Concerned about reliability, a retired professor of bioengineering from UC Berkeley, David Rempel, decided to test charging stations around the Bay Area

They fanned out across the region’s nine counties over three weeks in February and March, visiting 181 public charging stations with a total of 657 plug-in kiosks. Testers tried to charge their electric cars for at least two minutes and noted any problems.

They found 73% of public kiosks in working order. But nearly 23% had inoperable screens, payment failures or broken connector cables. On another 5%, the cables were too short to reach the vehicles’ charging inlet.

In a statement to The Chronicle, EVgo, one of the top three charging network operators outside Tesla, said the charging industry “is still in its infancy.” The company “is dedicated to identifying the root causes of these issues and correcting them.” The company is improving its detection and notification systems to deal with problems quickly. The others, ChargePoint and Electrify America, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Carleen Cullen, executive director of Cool the Earth, which contributed to the charging station study with Rempel, said she grew more open to talking about the problems of charging after urging from her daughter.

Her daughter, Lena Cullen, a 20-year-old biology major at UC Davis, has navigated the challenges of finding charging stations. She charges her Chevrolet Bolt at campus stations every two weeks. On longer trips, she plots each charging stop ahead of time and plans backup options too.

“I don’t have a single other friend with an electric car. They know, ‘Lena always has to charge,’” she said. “But they also know I don’t spend nearly as much money on gas as they do.”

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/California-electric-cars-17152513.php

[Joe]

Dan Walters at Calmatters.org is piggybacking on the broken charging stations by noting:

California’s much-vaunted shift to electric cars may turn out to be one of the state government’s many high-concept programs that become managerial disasters, another Department of Motor Vehicles or Employment Development Department.

By happenstance, as Newsom and the air board were issuing their upbeat messages about the shift, a financial data website, Forbes Advisor, was revealing that California has one of the nation’s worst records on providing recharging sites for ZEV owners.

Its study, drawn from U.S. Department of Energy data and numbers from all 50 states, found that North Dakota is the nation’s most ZEV-friendly state with one charging station for every 3.18 electric vehicles.

Wyoming, Rhode Island, Maine and West Virginia round out the top five.

And California? It has the fourth highest ratio, just one station for every 31.2 ZEVs. New Jersey is the least accommodating to ZEV owners, with one station for every 46.16 electric vehicles.

https://calmatters.org/commentary/2022/05/electric-cars-california-newsom/?utm_source=CalMatters+Newsletters&utm_campaign=9dfc4446fb-WHATMATTERS&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_faa7be558d-9dfc4446fb-150672308&mc_cid=9dfc4446fb&mc_eid=914e27b612
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For the math-challenged, fourth highest ratio of cars to chargers is a bad thing--it means we rate 47th in the country....before deducting the ones that are broken.