July 28, 2024 - 8:00am
A prevailing view is that transitioning away from fossil fuels is inevitable, though not imminent. But as consumers reject new green technologies, even that supposed inevitability is coming into question. Earlier this week it was reported that the German luxury car-maker Porsche is scaling back its ambitious sales targets for electric vehicles due to reduced demand, with the company stating that “the transition to electric vehicles will take longer than we assumed.” The original goal of making battery-only cars 80% of the manufacturer’s sales by 2030 is no longer realistic, and Porsche is joined by Mercedes-Benz after the latter recorded “a 25% drop-off in sales of fully electric cars”.
The retreat from electric vehicles is not limited to Germany. In the United States, General Motors has announced, also this week, that it will delay the development of new EV models and postpone the opening of an electric truck factory, while Ford Motor replaced plans for a factory that was designed to build electric SUVs with plans to build combustion engine pickup trucks. And there are good reasons for this. As the energy writer Robert Bryce has calculated, Ford “sold 23,957 EVs during the quarter, but it lost USD 1.14 billion while doing so. Thus, Ford lost $47,585 for each EV it sold.”
Given the fact that 10 years ago we were told that “by 2025, gasoline engine cars will be unable to compete with electric vehicles”, the numbers provided by Western car-makers are sobering. If anything, American and European electric cars are unable to compete with Chinese ones, as Beijing has put significant efforts into becoming the world’s leading manufacturer of EVs, repeating a model it has already successfully applied in the areas of wind and solar.
But even the Chinese might run into trouble selling their EVs if one looks at changing consumer sentiments. As Gallup reports, “44% of adults in the U.S. say they are either seriously considering or might consider buying an EV in the future. This is down from 55% in 2023. Meanwhile, the amount of people who say they are not considering an EV has increased from 41% to 48%.”
Despite government efforts — and often subsidies or other financial incentives — the EV hype is not really taking off among the broader public, and as subsidies are cut and tariffs imposed on Chinese models, this will not change anytime soon.
Human beings are incredibly creative at finding ways to use available energy. This is why the past has seen energy “additions” — the continued use of existing energy sources plus new ones such as renewables — but only a limited number of “transitions” replacing older sources of energy with new ones. The closest to this phenomenon might be the replacement of coal with gas and nuclear.
This lesson is currently being learnt the hard way by the electric-vehicle industry and all green technology manufacturers which rely on private consumers and not government subsidies for their profit margins. This does not mean, of course, that electric cars will disappear. But like any other innovation in the energy sector, they will be an addition to, not a replacement of, cars with combustion engines. EVs were once seen as the final nail in the coffin of the internal combustion engine — how naive that idea seems now.
Ralph Schoellhammer is assistant professor of International Relations at Webster University, Vienna.
Raphfel
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SubscribeLet’s not also forget the E in EV.
Wind across Europe, including the UK, is generating less than 5% of its boiler plate capacity and has been for several days. Solar’s guessed contribution is less than 15% even now at its summer daytime peak. The weather has been like this for days. It is often like this for weeks. As a reminder, there is no grid-scale electrical energy storage system that provides back-up for days – hours is the best that it is achieved and all that will be achieved in the next decade. And demand management – a cute term for price rationing – can’t delay electrical consumption for days and weeks.
The UK government has committed to decarbonise the UK electrical grid by 2030. Come 2030 there’ll be one large nuclear plant and lots of wind turbines and some solar because that’s all that can be built in the next 6 years. But more wind turbines doesn’t create more wind. To phase out the boiler plate generating capacity of fossil fuels we are currently relying on today (now) we need to double the number of wind turbines, and then multiply that number by 20 (!) to factor in the low / no wind speed this week.
This projection on how much extra wind generation we need ignores the higher electrical demand more EVs and heat pumps will place on the grid between now and 2030. Yet the present net rate of increasing generating capacity is actually negative – the maximum amount of electricity we can generate is shrinking in the face of projected rising demand from EVs.
And did I mention grid inertia and black start capability? Quite simply, we need large rotating masses to provide the inertia necessary to stop the grid falling over when switching back on any part of the grid after an outage. We currently get grid inertia for free from the huge gas and steam turbines in our fossil fuel and nuclear plants. We’ll have no fossil fuel plants and one nuclear plant in 2030. There will be a severe shortage of grid inertia. Worse still, all the extra electrical distribution and charging equipment being added for EVs increases the need for grid inertia just when we are losing it. The result is even a minor grid outage will require a rolling re-start, delaying the re-connection of homes over hours and days *after* a fault is fixed. There are no civil contingencies for this on a local level, nevermind a regional or national level.
Apparently the answer to this is your EV battery. You’ll power your house from it. Notwithstanding this revolution needs to happen in just 6 years, the numbers show it to be a lie. Per day the average house in the UK *in winter* without a heat pump uses about 20kWh of electricity, and with a heat pump uses 50kWh. A typical EV family car battery is 60kWh, and with 80% charge (for a healthy battery) that means you’ve got less than a day’s back-up if you sacrifice mobility. The typical Europe-wide high pressure system of no/low wind speeds lasts 3 days, and there’ll be several that last 7 days or more per year.
EVs are not just subsidy holes, they’re not just destroying European car manufacturing, they’re also going to make your electricity price far more expensive and unpredictable, your electricity supply more unreliable, and force you to choose between heating your house and your mobility.
And they wonder why populism is spreading across the west.
Is this even populism? It is just rationalism. The numbers are what they are.
Most people simply care about their wallet when it comes to these things. If the working- and middle classes are told they have to get used to more poverty because of the energy transition – while the upper classes only enrich themselves more and more – surely that is a good recipe for populism.
According to some scientists a mix of nuclear and decentralized energy generation/storage would make energy extremely cheap. However, I can imagine that a decentralized post-scarcity situation away from the petrodollar is not something global elites actually want.
Then those scientists know nothing of the economics of nuclear. A nuclear power plant requires a huge capital outlay. To recoup this outlay the plant must operate at maximum ouptut between shutdowns for refuelling. Consequently, nuclear power plants sell electricity at any price, they are price takers. This isn’t a criticism or nuclear, but it does dictate how nuclear is best used.
A further technical note is that nuclear plants are relatively slow (more than 30 minutes) to respond to fluctuating demand. Nuclear is not good for balancing supply to meet demand.
In a distributed renewables grid, there are unpredictable and highly cyclical rises and falls in supply that are often (particularly solar) the exact opposite of demand. This makes any reliable, consistent generator like gas or coal or nuclear less economic, but is particularly crippling for nuclear because of those very high capital costs.
It is no coincidence that the electricity markets most dependent on renewables have the highest electricity prices and the most unstable electricity prices. The UK has the second highest proportion of electricity generated by wind in the world and it has the third highest electricity prices in the world. The countries with the lowest electricity prices all use coal and gas. Which is exactly where EV car manufacturing is being offshored.
(China has a very large amount of wind generation, but this pales into tiny insignificance when compared with its coal, gas and nuclear generation.)
Oh never fear, it could be worse.
In fact, it almost certainly will be worse.
Whilst it’s right to emphasise the lack of feasibility & economics of renewables we should not forget the environmental impact of what you describe above. It’s resource intensive, requires a large amount of new infrastructure, much of which has a short lifespan & is not recyclable. It would be an ecological disaster. At least CO2 is good for plant life.
It’s a pity the U K has Ed Miliband and not you!!!
Yes, but the target will not be missed because it will be moved into the not so distant future, only to be moved again in a few years’ time, unless they come up with the equivalent of LED lights Vs low energy light bulbs (do you remember them? They were supposed to be the future) technology for cars.
The long rant wasn’t necessary. EV’s do not hold their value and are not practical, this is why people are not buying them. There are 622 Porsche Taycans currently on Autotrader because the replacement battery is £40k.
40k. Wow!!!
No problem. Starmer should simply create GB Auto and nationalize car manufacturing. Car buyers will line up for EVs once that happens. In fact, maybe the govt should nationalize the whole damn economy. Get some NGOs in there and show us how it’s done.
You realise that quite a few people could read this and actually take it seriously?
Nah. This isn’t the Guardian.
Great idea, comrade. It’s not like government run economies have a dismal track record.
However much it is pushed, EV is not a mass viable option for much of the non Western world.
Anyone seeing the mass transport dislocations over the last two weeks can only shudder at the thought of more pushing of expensive technology when even the basics of the old systems prove fragile.
So I don’t think Porsche is necessarily a good indicator for EV popularity as I imagine many of those enthousiast consumers are longing for a powerful and noisy combustion engine.
As for ‘normal cars’ I would say that it has to do with affordability and usability. If EVs are a better alternative people will switch. In principle EVs are simpler than normal cars.
However, the days of Western industrial might and Fordism are far behind us. The high tariffs the EU and US have to impose on Chinese EVs are humiliating. Just in general innovation seems to have slowed for the past 40 years. Efficiency of existing technologies has increased but, frankly, we expected to have fusion working by now. It is a bit of a stretch to consider renewables truly novel. Only Tesla was able to put EVs on the map by turning the company into a big tech meme so investors do not care so much about actually making profits. Innovating outside of the Ponzi-economy seems impossible.
Re: perceived simplicity of ev’s – certainly not the case once you factor in the electronics necessary to manage the battery and it’s delivery of power to the vehicle’s systems.
I would say that if anything, Porsche is a better than average indicator, given the enormous performance advantage of EVs over ICEVs.
EV’s having an “enormous” performance advantage is debatable depending on how you define it. From a pure road performance perspective, EVs clearly have superior acceleration to top end speed, but not necessarily superior top end speed. Because EVs are significantly heavier per car size, they will not corner as well. Further, when travel performance and convenience are considered, EVs fall well short of ICE vehicles across the board.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of ev’s the simple fact is they just do not meet the needs of a huge percentage of vehicle owners.
Firstly a large cohort do not have access to off road parking therefore cannot charge at home – who is going to willingly choose to waste upwards of an hour a time recharging and pay through the nose for the privilege.
Secondly, cost. Apart from the initial cost being way above most people’s budget the resale value is poor making the economics even less attractive. This is before looking at servicing, maintenance and repair costs (all of which are significantly higher than ice’s), the rise in insurance rates and the inevitable imposition of road and charging taxes. In all, the economic case for ev’s is looking increasingly poor.
Thirdly, range anxiety. Self explanatory and valid despite what the ‘experts’ would have you believe. Even if you are lucky enough to have off road charging any journey much over a hundred miles just isn’t convenient or practical with an ev.
Fourthly, weight. Ev’s are significantly heavier than an ice equivalents because of the batteries. This leads to potential issues like increased risks in a collision and much greater damage to roads which (in the UK at least) are already deteriorating significantly.
While ev’ s can be very good in limited applications the case remains they are simply not as good as an ice vehicle in the majority of situations. This is well known and any serious plan to reduce motoring related emissions would focus on hybrids and alternative fuels not ev’s – the fact governments haven’t suggests the intention is to drive personal transport off the road (pun intended) for most people.
It’s been obvious for some time that the decarbonisation targets were absurdly optimistic and were simply never going to be met.
The technology isn’t moving fast enough, the economies of scale can’t possibly be built fast enough (see Mark Mills on this – the numbers are scarily out of kilter with reality), and, ironically, the existing infrastructure, much of it with decadal lifetimes still to run, can’t be junked in favour of zero-carbon technologies without throwing away the sunk-carbon-cost that it originally took to create.
The part that I’m worried about isn’t the climate effects of not reaching these targets. It’s the political reaction of western governments to the persistent failure of their agenda to achieve their always-unrealistic targets that is my concern. When we can’t hit the targets, will the government keep the hydrocarbon-powered platforms going until we can? Or will the government simply impose falling living standards, reduced liberties and the increasingly-oppressive state power necessary to maintain sociopolitical stability?
The vibes I’m getting off this newly installed Labour government strongly imply the latter. I hope I’m wrong, of course.
In answering questions of the type you propose, I always proceed on the basis that the government in question will be both cowardly and incompetent. It usually produces the right answer.
Is anyone really surprised? There are only so many well off virtue signallers, so that market is now saturated. You have company cars (they attract tax breaks in the UK if you get an EV), but the same applies. “Normal” people who would fork out their hard earned cash to buy an EV are few and far between.
Conclusion… Sales can’t take off.
Sell Tesla, buy GM and Chevron
Short horses
The proscription against hybrids, which are generally agreed to be superior to full electric, is not just silly and self-defeating. It’s also a frightening mark of just how culturally/politically powerful the Climate Alarmists really are.
How did we let this happen?
This is a political attempt to subvert the rise of China. However, it is merely propaganda and will ultimately backfire badly. We do it now or later, so behind everybody else.
What we call innovation is just impulse decision making that sometimes fails…this is it.
The trajectory of computers and cellphones was similar; when everyone had access to them, the industry boomed and improved. Trying to hold back to harm the Chinese economy (because we fell behind in innovation?) will spectacularly backfire. If the two largest countries in the world can work together towards environmental health, why can’t we?
Apples and pears. Computers and cell phones offered users significant advantages and benefits over existing technology leading to widespread adoption.
This is simply not the case with ev’s which only offer any benefits to a narrow group of users while presenting significant disadvantages to the majority.
Hybrids and alternative fuels always have been the better option and will eventually have to be adopted by governments serious about reducing emissions.
Hmm. China dominates the entire EV supply chain. I think it would harm their economy much more if we built cars that don’t rely so much on so many minerals.
My work for the past 20 years or so has been on electric cars. There is a lot of potential there, and thanks to Elon Musk and others, we are seeing some real-quality electric cars on the roads in increasing numbers. Thanks to the Chinese we are also seeing more and more low-end electric cars, mainly in China. This is all good to see.
But we need to stop extrapolating from the progress that has been made to force people to move to electric cars on a set timetable. Let the market work its magic. Let people decide what is best for them, and let the carmakers follow rather the people’s choice rather than the government’s mandate.
I’m writing a book now on how to speed up innovation in carmaking, and the lessons from the computer industry teach us that more progress is made by a government using a light touch than the heavy hand of industrial policy. Let the market grow, don’t try to force it.
Developmental Alison Gopnik made a fascinating analogy along these lines in her book The Gardener and the Carpenter.
Carpenters have a clear idea in mind of what they want to build. They gather the materials they have to work with, and follow clear standards to build, using right angles and precision tools, to get good results. Messiness and variability are enemies, precision and control are allies. Measure twice, cut once. Don’t make mistakes.
Gardeners do things differently. They too have a goal in mind, but they realize that their main goal is to create a protected and nourished space for plants to flourish. Perfection is not expected or even possible. Weed the garden, water it, and then step back and let the plants do their thing, often unpredictably and with delightful surprises. Messiness and unpredictability are features, not bugs.
The government works best as a gardener, but tries to be a carpenter. Its job is not to bring about a planned solution to problems, but to provide a space for companies to flourish and explore possibilities. The government can’t make companies innovate, but it can let them innovate. And they will.
Good analogy. May I add another observation, as someone who works with mechanical technology for a small engineering company? Broadly what I have seen over the decades, is that there are two kinds of innovation: Something that is developed as a result of a perceived or mandated requirement; and something that is developed from a discovery , perhaps while looking for something else, but takes time to find its market, whether that be hi-tech niche or mass market. In my experience, the discovery type is usually more successful.
The article and commenters are spot on in identifying the problems with both EVs and renewable energy. A very significant corollary of their failure to deliver is that they also represent an immense ideologically-driven statist intrusion into Western economies and industrial bases at a scale unseen since the old USSR and may reap similar longterm effects. The unrecoverable tax expenditures, non-market-driven realignment of industrial priorities, and inherent inflationary characteristics of greening transportation and energy infrastructure may precipitate economic stagnation and decreased standards of living. Ecological Marxism may only succeed in making us all poorer.
I am currently 61, and I expect to have twenty or so more driving years ahead of me. By my calculations, I should be able to keep an ICE vehicle running for all that time, and thus never suffer the indignity of driving an electric car.
The greatest proportion of EVs are in Norway where they make up about 26% of total passenger cars . I don’t know what the figures are for freight vehicles, I imagine much smaller, since battery weight limits payload. Not only is Norway oil-rich, but they have long had cheap (at source, if not at delivery) electricity available through the provision of 900+ high altitude hydro dams.
This is often mentioned as “renewable” and therefore good, but I’ve yet to meet a climate activist who’s in favour of dams.
Also, I work in Norway often, and in Bergen and Stavanger at least, every EV owner I know also has an ICE vehicle.
Norwegians got rich selling North Sea Oil. This wealth has enabled them to buy lots of EVs, which has in turn enabled them to smugly lecture everyone else about how Green they are.
EVs were always only a science experiment that may have paid dividends if everyone suddenly got real pay rises – how rich do you need to be to laugh off a £40k battery? Haven’t we a £400-500Bn Covid/QE bill to pay? Private money infrastructure providers (eg. Shell, Vitol, BP) know all this and, they also know the rate at which EV charge points need to be rolled out ; at least 4000/wk until 2030 isn’t going to happen. But why would we want to become more dependent on China and their BYDs? If Crowdstrike was just another glitch and the Azure platform just fell over too then, OK, bad luck. In that case do we really want to let the barbarians sack the ramparts because BYDs are the modern day equivalent of the Trojan Horse…..do we really think that at £12k a Dolphin, they’re just cars? What, BYD aren’t back door devices hoovering up IP addresses and real time images, same as Huawei and HikVision? Then there’s the greenwashing. Apart from the Chinese ownership of the West Australian Lithium mines, their insatiable appetite for, Queensland coal, global ferrying in 6,000 car monsters fuelled by heavy oil (tar), apart from this, how are the resulting EVs less polluting than my petrol powered Ford Fiesta?
Last thing, where did I hear that in 2010 world daily consumption of oil was 100 MBd and in 2022, 120MBd? PetroChem or fuel, it all goes up in smoke one day….I’ll take my chances secondhand on Autotrader, no Taycans, but please, fill the pot holes.
14,000/month 2021-2030 https://www.acea.auto/files/Research-Whitepaper-A-European-EV-Charging-Infrastructure-Masterplan.pdf