US can’t meet EV copper demand, study finds
US can’t meet EV copper demand, study finds
"Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now," the study said.
Its almost like the answer isn't some whimsical butler just for you, but fucking public transportation. Build fucking trains.
Agreed. I love trains and it frustrates me to see them bungling the implementation. When they try, they always seem to make the same mistakes trying to bring it to my area.
To see meaningful ridership out here, the train needs to go fast enough to negate the penalty you get at the other end when you have to go from the station to your destination. They wanted to run them at ~55-70mph here, with a few stops between major cities, to parallel a freeway that is 65-75mph. Drive 1 hour (1:10 with parking) or spend 2 hours going to the station, riding a slow train, then going from the station to where you are going? I hate cars, but as someone who only gets a handful of hours to myself after sleep, work, and chores, I'm going to save my time and pick the car. If they ever build the train, as it is planned right now, it'll just be another commuter train that's only really used at rush hour when the roads are jammed rather than an all day all week car replacement solution that I can ride to Sunday night dinner at a friends house as easily as a 6am meeting.
/un-requested rant
@njordomir @Sanctus The safe money is it will also run too infrequently to be a good replacement. Adding 'time waiting for train' to the picture for trips outside of 69am or 37pm and officials wonder why services aren't well used.
Trams are the future!
Maybe build ebikes instead of EVs? Then you'd need about 1/50th to 1/100th the copper.
Yes, and also build trains instead of EVs
Trains don't even need batteries
Don't forget tramlines.
Metal Theft sector booming. Meth stocks are up.
They'll start mining landfill for metals and probably plastic soon enough. Air it out, wash it, get the metal and plastic, don't worry about that other in the air/water, that's a future poor person's problem.
metals, sure. The problem with plastics is that plastic is not plastic, it's a plethora of different chemical structures. Very difficult to recycle some of them, even if sorted.
No one uses pennies anymore… Just sayin’.
If I'm reading this chart correctly, each penny is only 2.5% copper.
This can be improved if all vehicles moved to a full 48v architecture. Substantially less copper that way.
@NotMyOldRedditName @Hypx I'm not against it, but I didn't think most of the copper in a modern car / EV was in the LV supply wiring, so such a change would be more in the range of a 10% reduction?
Deploy the crackheads!
Use Aluminum! There's nothing about copper that at this point aluminum couldn't really do.
Tell me you don't know metallurgy without telling me...
Aluminum coil transformers produce more waste heat and are more susceptible to vibration than copper coil.
Ev motors are big coils.
It’s gotta be copper.
As an example:
By weight (mass) aluminum is about twice as good a conductor as copper. This is important when they are hanging high-voltage wires from towers
Not my words. You're wrong. The problem is 1) enamel coating research. 2) the strength of the material. Aluminum that is formable into wire is just darn soft and can easily fracture from bending. 3) I would say is the issue with not being able to solder to it. It has to be crimped connections which may fail due to corrosion. But all these are fixable problems. Aluminum is a conductor that is on par with copper for usability, and it is way more abundant.
Either way they'd have to rip out new ore, probably burning carbon to dig it up. Then smelt it, using more carbon, then transport the metal and turn it into an EV. Seems like developing more effecient forms of transportation would be a lot more green than selling everyone a new "green" electric vehicle.
Agreed. Fuck cars. But if you just gotta have that big monster truck, go with aluminum core motors. Less mass means more acceleration. There's less inertia.
aluminum is only 61% as conductive as copper, but it weighs 2x less. it is used in overhead high voltage cable.