> David Checkel, a professor at the University of Alberta and an electric car expert, did some back-of-the-napkin math to dispute the claim. Checkel calculated that if each gallon of fuel costs $3, then 21 billion gallons would cost $63 billion annually. If $63 billion was the price tag for 250,000 batteries, then the cost of raw materials for each battery would be more than $250,000.
> Nonetheless, it is shown that conventional gasoline and diesel vehicles emit the highest amount of total life-cycle GHGs in comparison to vehicles powered by other available energy resources. When using green electricity, plug-in hybrid electric and fully electric vehicles can reduce the total life-cycle emission in comparison to combustion engine vehicles by 73 % and 89 %, respectively.
Plenty of other papers with similar results. Current total lifecycle emissions are already net negative for EV vs ICE including production of the battery and vehicle, and production of the electricity using the current grid. That margin improves as the grid gets cleaner.
so 273 billion kWh of hydrocarbon fuel burned to make batteries that can hold only 51.5 million kWh of energy.
And then roughly a few billion or more to fill them up each year.
What year will we make enough solar & wind power to compensate for the 21 billion gallons of fuel?