Understanding Electric Vehicles - Part 1 - Basics

The shift to electric is a fascinating space to witness as it is a combination of understanding science especially chemistry and electrical, automotive engineering along with how a new business/industry is formed with interplay of regulations.

There are a ton of great resources out there to read up on; I thought it might be useful to organize some of what I have been through. The intent is to get thoughts, see if my understanding is correct/get newer perspectives and share some of these great reads in a logical flow. I am looking to post a series of articles hopefully that cover a broad layout

1. What are electric vehicles, basics?
2. The science behind it? 
3. The engineering behind it?
4. Economics, Product-Market Fit and Value creation?
5. Industries impacted?
6. Regulatory development especially India?

I hope I am able to get through all of these during the lockdown.

What are electric vehicles, basics?

No one has raised the world’s curiosity, including mine, in this field as Elon Musk and Tesla have. They have been vilified, laughed at and have come through the other side with all the Aces or so it seems. A couple of data points bring to light very clearly on what is afoot 

1) Tesla was the first American car maker to go public since the Ford Motor Company had its IPO in 1956,[43]

And 

2) Tesla is currently valued more than Ford and GM put together

All vehicles need a source of power. EVs use electricity stored in batteries to power the vehicle. Traditionally we have been using Internal combustion engines a.k.a ICE. In fact electric vehicles used to be really popular at the beginning of the 20th century but lost out in efficiency to their ICE counterparts. Here is a video that explains the key components and basics of EVs well.

From this you would have gathered that the key components are

1. Battery : Which has the stored energy
2. Motors : Which converts this into rotational energy for mobility. 
3. Controller : Is an electronic hardware device +software which works very closely with the motor and is usually bundled with. A motor controller might include a manual or automatic means for starting and stopping the motor, selecting forward or reverse rotation, selecting and regulating the speed, regulating or limiting the torque, and protecting against overloads and electrical faults.

To reinforce the understanding you can look at this cool explanation specific to Tesla. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SAxXUIre28

Do note this has some specific variation of battery packs and motors which we shall learn about later. Additionally some of this tech and strategies for Tesla has changed over a period of time. We are going to look at each of these in more detail but before that we will have a look at a couple of things - differences between ICE and EV and the Environmental impact.

How do Electric Vehicles differ from Internal Combustion Engines (ICE)?

The Key takeaway of Pros and cons from the video above would be

Environmental Impact

It is very important to talk about the environmental impact as the big push for new tech has come due to this factor and not because of a massively superior solution that has emerged. To truly evaluate the full environmental impact we have to look at the full chain of energy creation in transportation. As a quick science primer . Fuel is any resource that can release heat energy to be used for work. We usually rely on carbon based fuels and overwhelmingly fossil fuels (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-based_fuel). These take million of years to formand our rapid release of “greenhouse gasses” into the atmosphere is causing an increase in Earth’s temperature, which is what we call global warming. The largest human influence has been the emission of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. Fossil fuel burning is the principal source of these gases, with agricultural emissions and deforestation also playing significant roles.[14] More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming.

Hence to compare/understand this we need to break this down into looking at the CO2 per Km. This can be done in a few ways, There is also a good readup on this over here https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change

I have also tried to take a stab at it below

Side note: nifty calculator https://www.cleanerandgreener.org/resources/pollutioncalculator.html

So without the gasoline distribution charges looks like regular EVs produce about 10 Kg of CO2 versus 15 Kg. If instead of natural gas Coal was used to generate the electricity for the EV the calculation would look as follows

2100 KG/Short ton; 1 Pound/ 1 KWH = .453 KGs; So for 15 KWH = 15.72 Kgs accounting for losses works out to roughly 20Kgs of emission

Here is a more detailed table from the carbonbrief.com article

The big picture points to note here are

1. There are many lenses you will find on efficiency like energy density, energy efficiency etc. However through advances over the last few years Li-Ion is now in the ball park when it comes to Co2 emission per Km across a variety of generation sources.
2. The technology on the renewable side is only improving
3. Even right now you have many transient technologies like Hybrid Electric vehicles (generating power through regenerative braking) and Plug-in Hybrid electric vehicles (need to plug in to charge battery but have regular ICE as well) https://electriccarhome.co.uk/electric-cars/bev-phev-hev-ice/
4. Also when it comes to energy storage Li-On is seeing the most investment but there are many more technologies in the fray like Aluminium, Hydrogen, Fuel cells etc. Hope to cover some of this in section on batteries

Without going into a lot of details there are a few other important threads to consider on environmental impact. Not everything about Li-Ion is rosy on three accounts

1. Presence of heavy metals like Cobalt, Copper and Nickel
2. Lifespan, these batteries become useless for automotive use within a few years as battery capacity degrades (https://www.forbes.com/sites/billroberson/2019/09/30/the-clock-is-ticking-on-electric-car-batteriesand-how-long-they-will-last/#15de526321d9)
3. Recylcing these batteries:  the tech for recylcing is uncertain and there is no established business model for it. WHo pays - Consumer, OEM, Govts etc? Does it all end up in a land fill (https://ec.europa.eu/environment/ecoap/about-eco-innovation/good-practices/france/504_en)

Also here is a good report that also brings to light overall how gasoline demand is split and how the carbon impact might play out.

https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/literature/whitepaper/bii-future-of-vehicle-2017-us.pdf

Here are some articles that explore these facets more

https://www.intertek.com/uploadedFiles/Intertek/Divisions/Commercial_and_Electrical/Media/PDF/Battery/Environmental-Considerations-for-Lithium-Batteries-White-Paper.pdf

https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/bu_1003a_battery_aging_in_an_electric_vehicle_ev

Finally on some of these aspects around energy and environment there are resources to go about more reading

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_aspects_of_the_electric_car
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon-neutral_fuel
4. https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/sites/www.nrcan.gc.ca/files/oee/pdf/transportation/fuel-efficient-technologies/autosmart_factsheet_6_e.pdf
5. https://www.quora.com/How-much-CO2-does-burning-a-litre-of-gasoline-produce
6. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml
7. https://cleantechnica.com/2018/03/10/electric-car-myth-buster-efficiency/
8. https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/19/electric-car-well-to-wheel-emissions-myth/
9. https://cleantechnica.com/2017/06/22/swedish-ev-battery-study-sucks/
10. https://insideevs.com/features/392202/ice-vs-ev-inefficient-combustion-engine/