What Is A Battery

Healdsburg CA

Description

What is a battery? Tesla calls them Energy Storage Systems. EV batteries do not make electricity – they store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fueled generators. So, to say an EV is a zero-emission vehicle is not correct. Since forty percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the EVs on the road are coal-powered cars. Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of energy to move a three-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a mile as it does a three-thousand-pound electric one. A typical EV battery weighs about one thousand pounds and is about the size of a suitcase. It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, forty-four pounds of manganese, thirty pounds cobalt, two hundred pounds of copper, and four hundred pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic. Inside are over six thousand individual lithium-ion cells. These elements are extracted from ore dug mostly from open pit mines all over the world by diesel powered heavy machinery. It takes about five-hundred thousand pounds of extracted ore to produce the elements to produce one EV battery. Think about this the next time you jump into your "pollution free" EV.