Oxford researcher Jan Rosenow on Twitter:
When horses were replaced by cars there was a lot of resistance & scaremongering by the incumbent horse industry. Here’s an old anti car advert by a horse carriage company.
History now repeats itself with countless scare stories about renewables, heat pumps & electric vehicles.
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Same thing for electricity.
And don’t get the Anti-Vaxxers of 1802 started.
In this cartoon, the British satirist James Gillray caricatured a scene at the Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital at St. Pancras, showing cowpox vaccine being administered to frightened young women, and cows emerging from different parts of people’s bodies. The cartoon was inspired by the controversy over inoculating against the dreaded disease, smallpox. Opponents of vaccination had depicted cases of vaccinees developing bovine features and this is picked up and exaggerated by Gillray.
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Some things never change.
I met yesterday with a State Legislator (I live in Michigan) and explained to her that local officials in rural areas were under a well organized attack from fossil fuel interests using a sophisticated social media driven misinformation campaign.
This is a very nice, smart person, who has been introducing bills in support of clean energy. But she has not spent the amount of time I have in local township halls across the midwest.
She said, “I’ve never heard of this.”
Just as it’s hard to explain why people are still refusing to get vaccinated even as their peer group is dying at accelerated rates – it’s hard to understand the fear campaign against clean energy, but it certainly has precedents in human history.
There are many potential problems with a battery powered vehicle fleet. None of the problems are unsolvable, but do require forward planning. The sooner we acknowledge and prepare the better.
I suspect electrification will proceed quite smoothly in Europe, be a bit of a problem in the US and a disaster in Australia. The standard of debate in Australia is abysmal, the preparation near zero.
In the US, as with a lot of ideas and technology, I see electrification moving in stages, with early adopters in the prosperous cities and last adopters in the poorest and most rural areas, like internet and cell phone usage. Some local spots around wind and solar farms may get “infected” with new tech earlier than places connected to the fossil fuel economies (Houston, oil and coal counties).
half of Tesla’s now with lithium Iron Phosphate batteries that are non flammable, hold up better in cold weather, and have longer lifetime.
Other car makers will be following suit.
PV Magazine writes ‘To reach the 6 TWh of energy storage needed to clean the grid by 2050, we need to grow grid-scale energy storage by 98.4 times.’https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/07/28/six-terawatt-hours-of-grid-scale-energy-storage-by-2050/
That’s around 6 TWh for the whole USA. Just Quebec province in Canada already has 176 TWh of hydro storage, they still have to import power from Ontario in winter, most of the heating and transport uses proposed to be covered by electricity are still reliant on fossil fuels… and the CEO of Hydro-Quebec is considering reopening the province’s only nuclear reactor, mothballed in 2012.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-mulls-reopening-mothballed-nuclear-gentilly-plant-1.6936101#:~:text=The%20new%20CEO%20of%20Hydro,the%20potential%20of%20nuclear%20power.
Batteries have a hard enough job already taking over most of the light vehicle sector, without loading the entire energy system onto them every time the wind slows. If it takes the draw of 3-4,000 houses to charge a Tesla semi, how many batteries do you think you would need to run a steel foundry, or an aluminum smelter ?