Quarterly sales of Ford’s EV branch fall by 84 percent in a year – Image and sound – News

No burning of fossil fuels is nice, but manufacturing those batteries (mining raw materials) is of course extremely harmful to the environment, and you will soon be left with a huge mountain of written-off batteries in your stomach.

That’s going to be a lot more difficult than you think. Depreciated solar panels are a problem that will bother people in the future. But batteries, no.

Because by then it will already be profitable to recycle. Now I live in South America. The gap between rich and poor is relatively large. But there are still plenty of poor people driving around on motorized 3-wheelers with a flatbed and they drive around every month to collect old batteries. And they know all the tricks to make it work as good as new again. And if you have such a person who really knows what he/she is doing, then you really have to look with a magnifying glass to see if you can spot the traces of recycling.

You will not easily encounter this in the Netherlands, but here in this part of the world, recycling quickly pays off. This will certainly be no different for EV batteries. Ok, batteries are not exactly the same as batteries in an EV, neither is the increase in scale, but the fact that recycling quickly pays off here is no different.

Now I live in the sub-tropical part of South America, so the battery is mainly needed to supply cooling systems (fridge/refrigerator, fans and possibly air conditioning). There is more than enough solar heat here. I have a ‘solar water heater’ here, a scaffold with a 200 liter water tank on top and from which about 12 glass tubes protrude, angled towards the ground. If I place this in the morning sun at 6:00 AM during the summer, steam will come out of the pressure relief valve on this tank around 9:00 AM. In spring and fall, steam comes out around 11 in the morning.

Now I don’t use 200 liters of water a day so I have hot water all day long. That whole installation cost me about 700 USD in total. And still doing well after 15 years. I just burn some energy by pumping that hot water to different places and heights.

So if an EV battery for Dutch use has been depreciated, it does not mean that it cannot be used anywhere else in the world for a long time because the remaining capacity still fits perfectly in use cases in other places in the world. I personally think that an EV battery can easily last 10 years by Dutch standards. If you ship it here, the same battery will last another 15 years as a home battery.

It will soon be 25 years before that EV battery has to be offered for recycling.

For the Netherlands, noise pollution in the city will also decrease dramatically as soon as there are (many) more EVs than ICE on the road. You already notice this in certain parts of the Netherlands where public transport and bicycle traffic have been included in the design and ICE vehicles have been banned. Then it comes very close to the noise pollution you have if you live in the backcountry. Only with all the conveniences of the city within walking and cycling distance. In addition to a lot of healthier air to breathe, the lack of noise is mentally healthy.

So we can get sober Dutch people back into society.