Internal combustion engines might now be more economical than electric ones.
The current energy crisis in Europe could put the brakes on electric mobility in Germany and make e-vehicles unattractive to potential customers, Der Spiegel reported on Friday.
With electricity getting ever more expensive, charging an e-vehicle is sometimes pricier than filling up a petrol or diesel vehicle, the newspaper writes. The combustion engine is more than €30 cheaper per month on average with a mileage of 15,000 kilometers, the publications writes. By the end of next year, an e-car should “clearly be at a disadvantage,” Der Spiegel quotes Ferdinand Dudenhoeffer from the Center for Automotive Research as saying.
The state bonuses for buying electric vehicles were also reduced by 25%. With an almost a year-long wait for an ordered electric car to arrive, the buyer will get a smaller bonus than they were expecting, the outlet writes, adding that there’s no longer any state subsidy for hybrid cars.
In the current climate, consumers may have little desire to buy a new car. The situation was described as a “toxic mixture of energy crisis and inflation” by Sabine Jaskula from ZF, Germany’s second largest car systems supplier. Electric car production will collapse in Europe next year, she predicts, as only 11 million cars could roll off the assembly line across the industry instead of the planned 18 million.
Another ZF representative described the EU plans to stop selling petrol and diesel cars by 2035 as “illusory.”
There’s also a shortage of public charging stations across Germany, according to Der Spiegel. In some metropolitan areas, a single station has to be shared between as many as 60 vehicles, and a large-scale station refurbishment is needed to provide enough charging spaces for everyone.
According to veteran battery car dealer Wolf Warncke, “There is a risk that prospective buyers will turn their backs on e-mobility.”
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Influential elites are either in denial about the horrifying costs and consequences of Net Zero – witness last Wednesday’s substantial vote against fracking British gas in the House of Commons – or busy scooping up the almost unlimited amounts of money currently on offer for promoting pseudoscience climate scares and investing in impracticable green technologies. Until the lights start to go out and heating fails, they are unlikely to pay much attention to a recent 1,000 page alternative energy investigation undertaken for a Finnish Government agency by Associate Professor Simon Michaux. Referring to the U.K.’s 2050 Net Zero target, Michaux states there is “simply not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target”.
To cite just one example of how un-costed Net Zero is, Michaux notes that “in theory” there are enough global reserves of nickel and lithium if they are exclusively used to produce batteries for electric vehicles. But there is not enough cobalt, and more will need to be discovered. It gets much worse. All the new batteries have a useful working life of only 8-10 years, so replacements will need to be regularly produced. “This is unlikely to be practical, which suggests the whole EV battery solution may need to be re-thought and a new solution is developed that is not so mineral intensive,” he says.
All of these problems occur in finding a mass of lithium for ion batteries weighting 286.6 million tonnes. But a “power buffer” of another 2.5 billion tonnes of batteries is also required to provide a four-week back-up for intermittent wind and solar electricity power. Of course, this is simply not available from global mineral reserves, but, states Michaux, it is not clear how the buffer could be delivered with an alternative system.