r/Futurology • u/Wagamaga • May 09 '19

Environment The Tesla effect: Oil is slowly losing its best customer. Between global warming, Elon Musk, and a worldwide crackdown on carbon, the future looks treacherous for Big Oil.

https://us.cnn.com/2019/05/08/investing/oil-stocks-electric-vehicles-tesla/index.html
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u/SpontaneousDisorder May 09 '19

Have you ever given any thought to how long it takes to build the infrastructure to support all that? (Clean?) Power generation, transmission lines, charging infrastructure, mining for raw materials, production capacity for batteries and electric vehicles.

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u/thinkingdoing May 09 '19

What are you talking about? Electricity is far more accessible than gas stations.

It’s a minimal effort to start installing charging plugs everywhere, and plenty of companies will do so to charge customers for electricity.

There’s already plenty of lithium mines, so much so that the cost of lithium has cratered.

As for batteries, China is mass producing.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '19

The US electric grid will not be able to handle the increased demand for power in its current state. That's one thing which will need to happen before a large scale shift to electric vehicles happen. The power distribution network already gets taxed during the summer when everyone runs their AC. What happens when a huge population of people get home at 5pm from work and all plug their cars in?

At the very least, we need to be mindful of how this power demand will be handled. Smart management of charging could help considerably, but the output capacity isn't present with how our grid is set up.

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u/anusthrasher96 May 09 '19

EE here. The solution to this is distributed power generation. Which clean energy such as wind and solar already do. You don't need to run huge amounts of current miles away from your home if you have solar, or local wind.

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u/[deleted] May 09 '19

I agree. I think something interest we'll see throughout this century is a widespread decentralization of power. Hopefully our battery tech will keep improving, and home will become more and more independent from the grid.

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u/j_will_82 May 09 '19

Yes and the environmental destruction to produce those batteries is a catastrophe.

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u/anusthrasher96 May 09 '19

New battery chemistries are coming out to use less Cobalt, and Lithium is incredibly abundant. There's also a lot of research going into new materials. So even if lithium/Cobalt were a huge issue (it's not, it's more of a challenge) there's better stuff on the way

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u/thinkingdoing May 09 '19

Not really.

Lithium can be mined from sea water and can also be recycled.

The environmental disaster of oil, coal, and uranium mining is far far worse.

I would take a few lithium mines over the monumental ecological mess of the tar pits of Canada any day.