My long winded response...I work for a company that is dropping hundreds of millions of dollars into onsite battery technology, EV's and overall responding to the market demands for cleaner sources of energy. I giggle a bit at that because for every battery powered station we put on a jobsite, a 56kw generator goes with it to recharge it every day or two. It does cut down on the amount of diesel being used but the cost/benefit is nowhere near were it actually makes sense. I digress.
We have invested in 700 Ford Lightnings for our sales force, about 2 years ago. We still have about half that are unallocated because acceptance by the field has been less than anticipated. They get less than the advertised 200 mile range on a charge. Pulling anything behind it drops range to 150ish miles which for an equipment rental salesman, that's a pretty frequent occurrence. Factor in southern heat and that range drops further to 120-130ish miles. The extreme cold also has an adverse effect on the battery charge. As mentioned upthread, there are few places to charge outside of the big cities that are pushing this agenda which encompasses 85% of our territory in the US. We don't even bother sending them to Canada.
We've recently invest in 10 OTR (Over The Road) tractor trailers to put into CA. They cost $400k each and have a range of 150 miles. Because the batteries are so heavy, the amount they can haul is somewhat less than a typical load but I'm not well versed enough to know by how much. The kicker with these is every two days that have to sit for a complete 8 hour charge in order to preserve battery integrity. If you don't, your battery starts to degrade and replacing those are probably $10k or more but again, I really don't know. Battery replacement on a 5k electric forklift is $6k so that's what I'm basing things on, it's probably more than $10k. For trucks that sole purpose is delivery of equipment, 150 miles can sometimes be a one way trip. Again, the cost benefit is just not there.
Also mentioned upthread, the tech of today is not the tech of tomorrow. I agree but, all of these batteries are made from materials that are 1.) located in a few spots in the world, 2.) have a very definitive, limited supply and 3.) we (US) has little to no control over. Just finishing up
Cobalt Red which outlines how we get about 3/4's of our Cobalt from the Congo, good read if you are interested. It's not sustainable and not only that, the runway is short. By 2035 we're going to be redlining our supply of a lot of these materials, that's 12 years. If you think battery tech or some new tech will come along by then, you have more faith than I do. Hope is not a strategy and that's where we are right now. In order to make the change we all want EV's to make, there needs to be a massive increase of them worldwide, by 100 million or more. Per
this chart, there were 10 million EV's on the road in 2020. Lets be optimistic and bump that to 12 million for 2023, we're 88 million short. EV is not the solution, it's part of the answer but not being forced down our throats and not in the short time span we are talking about. For the major car companies to say they will only be producing EV's by 2030, good luck. We'll be out of material before then.
I've never understood the leap from combustion straight to EV. What happened to hybrid technology? Why is the most sensible next step in this evolution simply being dismissed and we hop over it to a new-ish tech that hasn't really been pushed to scale yet? Easy enough to go off the deep end when you start asking those kind of questions so I'll leave it there. I don't hate EV's, they have their place but the agenda being forced upon us doesn't make sense to me and is absolutely not sustainable with current tech. Moving to hybrid and then eventually to a better EV tech makes 100% more sense to me than what we are doing today.
...steps off soapbox
PS - the power grid, as it stands today, can’t accept 100 million EV’s