There’s an affordable EV out there displacing twice as much oil as electric cars
In the growing electric vehicle industry, it is electric cars that are given center stage when it comes to environmentally-conscious solutions to transportation. But what if I told you there was an electric vehicle that was displacing twice as much oil as those electric cars? And if that wasn’t impressive enough, consider this: It does it with half as many wheels.
Yep, that’s right. I’m talking about electric bikes.
Check out the Bloomberg New Energy Finance chart below, which was recently featured in Anthropocene Magazine.
When you actually break down the numbers, it’s easy to see just how big of an environmental impact e-bikes are making.
Compared to electric passenger cars, e-buses, and e-trucks, it’s electric bikes and trikes that are displacing the most oil usage – more than twice all of those larger EVs combined.
Impressively, those e-bikes are doing so with significantly less battery demand.
Shortages in the materials used to make lithium-ion batteries are affecting the entire EV industry and beyond, which puts an even larger emphasis on efficiency.
Electric bikes are more than 10x more efficient than electric passenger cars, meaning the same amount of battery needed for a 20-mile commute in an electric car could power an e-bike for over 200 miles. And that’s compared to normal electric cars. Vehicles like the new electric Hummer have enough battery on-board to produce 400 e-bike batteries!
Of course e-bikes and other micromobility vehicles aren’t a complete solution to our transportation problems, but they provide a potent alternative to many daily trips.
The US Department of Energy confirms that around 50% of all car trips in the US measure less than three miles, meaning electric bikes could replace a serious amount of vehicular traffic. And sure, some people don’t want to ride a bike in inclement weather (usually Americans, since somehow people with other passports have figured out how to ride in the cold or rain via the invention of… an additional layer of clothing). But even if an e-bike spends a few months in the garage, it still makes a huge impact during the rest of the year when it replaces many car trips.
A 2022 Swedish study found that the vast amount of biking was done at the expense of car usage, not just for recreational or fitness riding. And a 2019 Belgian study found that a mere 10% shift in car drivers to bike riders resulted in a 40% reduction in road traffic.
All of this goes to show just what a dramatic effect e-bikes can have on the world’s transportation paradigm.
E-bikes aren’t a panacea, but they’re a major part of the solution. And as more studies are showing, their effects could be significantly larger than those of electric cars.
With more and more affordable e-bike options coming everyday, the future is looking bright for EVs of every size.
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The US battery energy storage market added 5,597 megawatt hours (MWh) in the second quarter of 2023, a new quarterly record.
The grid-scale segment of the industry drove the market with a record-breaking 5,109 MWh in Q2, beating the previous record in Q4 2021 by 5%, according to Wood Mackenzie and the American Clean Power Association’s (ACP) latest US Energy Storage Monitor report.
The grid-scale segment achieved 172% growth quarter-over-quarter. California was No. 1 among states with the most grid-scale energy storage installations, with 738 MW and a 49% share of installed capacity.
Wood Mackenzie projects the grid-scale segment to be the main driver of the market in its five-year forecast from 2023-27, accounting for 83% of total installations, or 55 gigawatts (GW).
ACP’s VP of research and analytics, John Hensley, said:
The energy storage market is on pace for a record year, as utilities and larger power users increasingly turn to storage to enhance the grid and improve reliability.
The market is on pace to nearly double annual installations despite supply chain challenges and interconnection delays, and will continue to grow quickly in coming years.
Community, commercial, and industrial (CCI) installations, at 107 MWh, were higher than any quarter in 2022 but couldn’t keep pace with the huge spike in Q1 installations, resulting in a 53% quarterly decline. However, the segment is still up 25% year-over-year.
Residential storage saw its second-straight quarter of decline at 381.2 MWh, behind Q1’s 388.2 MWh. California saw the biggest decline, decreasing 17% quarter-over-quarter and 37% year-over-year.
Vanessa Witte, senior analyst with Wood Mackenzie’s energy storage team, said, “We still project strong growth for the residential segment in our five-year outlook, reaching a total of 8 GW in 2027. However, the CCI segment continues to fail to meet growth projections and we have downgraded its five-year growth forecast by 28% to 3 GW.”
On Friday, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced up to $325 million for 15 projects across 17 states and one tribal nation to accelerate the development of long-duration energy storage (LDES) technologies. The DOE has set a goal to reduce the cost of LDES by 90% by 2030.
Read more: Volvo is going to turn used EV batteries into new battery storage
Photo: Jupiter Power; Graphs: US Energy Storage Monitor Q3 2023 | American Clean Power Association, Wood Mackenzie
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Tesla has released an update with progress on its Optimus humanoid robot with a video that almost looks like CGI.
Optimus, also known as Tesla Bot, has not been taken seriously by many outside of the more hardcore Tesla fans, and for good reasons.
When it was first announced, it seemed to be a half-baked idea from CEO Elon Musk with a dancer disguised as a robot for visual aid. It also didn’t help that the demo at Tesla AI Day last year was less than impressive.
At the time, Tesla had a very early prototype that didn’t look like much. It was barely able to walk around and wave at the crowd. That was about it.
But we did note that the project was gaining credibility with the latest update at Tesla’s 2023 shareholders meeting earlier this year.
At the time, Tesla showed several more prototypes that all looked more advanced and started to perform actually useful tasks.
Tesla has now released a new update on Optimus with a video showcasing the ability of the robot to sort objects autonomously:
Like the latest versions of Full Self-Driving, Tesla also notes that Optimus is now being trained with neural nets end-to-end.
The video shows that Tesla is again making progress with the Tesla bot, which looks more refined in this update. The mechanics look more stable with a prototype balancing on one foot.
The video even looks CGI at times, but everything points to Tesla actually having those working prototypes around its offices.
In a previous update on Optimus, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed that the “Optimus stuff is extremely underrated.” The CEO said that the demand could be as high as 10 to 20 billion units.
He went as far as “confidently predicting” that Optimus will account for “a majority of Tesla’s long-term value.”
There’s no clear timeline for bringing the product to market, but Tesla is expected to first use it in its own operations.
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