We amaze ourselves with this very question everyday – Will EV really revolutionize green energy, and is it a real alternative to the gasoline powered vehicles? This question deserves a serious debate.

Tesla, Lucid, PoleStar, Rivian, Nio, Xpeng, LordsTown, etc. are not the real green futures. They are all battery powered vehicles that need thousands of pounds of extraction of rare earth to build new batteries. They are replacing a manageable air pollution by extracting unlimited resources from underneath the earth’s surface.

The traditional gasoline powered autos create energy on combustion, however batteries themselves do not create energy. Nuclear powered electric grids create energy, which is then transferred/stored in the batteries during the charging process.

As automakers continue their move from gasoline powered vehicles to EV, the demand for batteries will continue to increase. The real question is – ‘how many batteries can we really produce?’

There are about a billion vehicles on the planet, and if we were to transition every single one of them from gasoline powered to EV/Battery powered, we need to produce billions of batteries.
Going with an assumption that an average battery is approximately about a 1,000 pounds, we will require multiple pounds of natural resource extraction from underneath the earth’s surface. How much of the earth can we continue digging to produce billions of 1,000-pound batteries? Can we dig trillions of pounds of earth? The answer is ‘No’.

The real future may not be EV, but the low-grade nuclear powered automotive. Can the nuclear powered automotive be safe or not is still disputable, but we should start exploring that as a more reasonable option compared to battery powered vehicles.

Author: Jasbir Sandhu