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ELECTRIC CARS: I MAY HAVE BEEN WRONG

By Tony Minopoli

So, I was wrong, or at least I might be wrong. I attended a conference the other day and the subject of green energy and a transition to electric cars was a topic of discussion at the table. I made the point that I think some variation of Moore’s Law will take place in green energy in the same way that it has existed in computing power. For those that do not remember Moore’s Law, it is a principle named after Gordon Moore, a cofounder, and former CEO of Intel. I researched this and found the statement was made in 1965 and Moore espoused his view that there would be a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit, and he projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years, and while Moore did not use empirical evidence in forecasting that the historical trend would continue, his prediction held since 1975 and has since become known as a “law.”

My thought is that the same type of concept could be applied to green energy and that we could see battery life and the range of electric vehicles continue to grow. My daughter is currently in graduate school and is about 440 miles away. My friends who own Teslas tell me that 260 to 280 miles is the upper limit of how far you can travel on a full charge. Assuming this is accurate, I would need to stop once on the way to Buffalo and once on the way back. Assuming I could find a supercharger, I would be waiting 40 minutes to charge the car versus the less than 5 minutes it takes to fill a gasoline-powered car. My view is that as battery life lengthens and the speed to charge is faster there would be a much greater adoption of electric vehicles.

The guy sitting to my right at this dinner laughed at my notion and said that something akin to Moore’s law cannot happen in energy for two reasons. First, the laws of physics will not allow for this type of battery life growth and charging speed. I am a finance guy so I will need to accept this as true. The second, and even bigger issue, is that the world does not have a ready and economic source of the rare earth metals required to build batteries. So, unless there is a completely new design of batteries using entirely different materials, do not expect my dream about expansion anytime soon!

An expansion of this was a discussion with an engineer from an electric utility that said a basic American street with 24 homes and 2 cars per home can only have 6 to 8 vehicles charged at any given time because the grid cannot handle charging a larger number of vehicles. Electricity is heat and the power lines carrying electricity do not have the capacity to carry the amount of electricity needed to power the number of vehicles if fossil fuels were eliminated.

Perhaps we need to focus on a world with fossil fuels for transportation and consider nuclear and renewables to scale down fossil fuels for heating homes and providing electricity. Ultimately, any transition to a zero-carbon world will be measured in many decades. Something to think about.

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