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Repairs are hard when you need them.
Hansjörg Gemmingen drove his Tesla Model S past the 1-million-mile mark last summer and he’s still going. The world record-holder for electric mileage hopes to soon pass 2 million kilometers (about 1.25 million miles). His EV didn’t reach this eye-popping total on its original equipment, though. InsideEVs notes his Model S P85 is on at least its second battery and eighth electric motor.
Most EV owners won’t travel the equivalent of two round trips to the moon. Yet Gemmingen’s experience may tell us something about how long electric vehicles could last, how repairable they are, and what it will take to keep them rolling for decades.
EVs are simple — mechanically, at least. Set aside a Tesla’s complex, proprietary software, and its hardware boils down to a big battery, motors, and other electric components, and about 20 moving parts. Compare that to a typical gas car, which is a maddening amalgamation of pistons, belts, and around 2,000 other moving parts waiting to go awry. Electric vehicles’ simplicity may bestow extra longevity. Car and Driver finds a new EV is expected to average about 50% more miles than a new gas car (300,000 vs. 200,000 miles).
Car owners have always faced hard questions about when it’s time to stop sinking money into a vehicle, especially when another major repair may be right around the corner. “There’s a cost of keeping the car on the road, and eventually the costs of maintaining the vehicle are going to be greater than the costs of replacing it. And so at that point, somebody’s going to retire it or part with it,” says Hanjro Ambrose, a vehicle electrification expert and researcher at the National Center for Sustainable Transportation at the University of California, Davis.
With an electric vehicle, the calculus could be subtly different. With fewer things to go wrong, repairs might be less frequent but also more expensive, particularly if a battery needs to be replaced. Fixes might also be more annoying because so few mechanic shops are ready to service EVs.
The battery is the big question, since it contributes so much to the cost and vitality of an electric vehicle. CEO Elon Musk has said Tesla’s older batteries are rated to last for 300,000 to 500,000 miles. (It would make sense, then, that Gemmingen had to replace his at least once on the road to a million miles.) If that longevity holds up, then owners could replace parts that might go bad at 100,000 or 200,000 miles — say, the electric capacitors or motors — with the confidence their investment will pay off. And, if the hype is to be believed, new EV batteries coming down the pipeline could last for a million miles of driving. It would take a normal person the better part of a century to drive that far. A million-mile battery could mean a car that lasts a lifetime.
Maybe. Despite such promises, the batteries in most new EVs are warrantied only up to about 100,000 miles. If the battery fails at any time after that, the driver is in a tough spot. Car-sized lithium-ion batteries remain notoriously expensive — it may cost $20,000 or more to replace an EV’s kaput battery pack, which happened to some Tesla Model S early adopters because of a manufacturing issue. In certain cases, it may be possible to repair a single defective cell rather than an entire battery, but that’s still an expensive fix and a tough pill to swallow for a car that’s already old.
Now, most EV batteries won’t randomly die — Ambrose estimates that less than 1 percent will suffer such a catastrophic failure. But all of them will age. Most battery warranties only guarantee the battery pack won’t fade beyond a certain percentage of its original capacity by the 100,000-mile mark (70 percent, in Telsa’s case). As a result, a driver still using the original battery at 200,000 miles or more will probably find that their car’s range has degraded significantly. “If you were barely hitting 200 miles to start, those reductions in range after 10 years might be pretty significant,” Ambrose says. “So much so that your vehicle might not be very useful for your normal commute.”
Still, if a modern EV can keep even half its original range, it will remain more than good enough for the short and medium-sized trips that make up the bulk of everyday driving. Many owners could conceivably keep their aging cars on the road for decades with occasional fixes. But another problem emerges: Who’s going to do the repairs? The professional mechanics qualified to work on EVs remain scarce. Pete Gruber, owner of EV-focused Gruber Motors in Phoenix, Arizona, has said that vocational schools are still churning out mechanics trained solely for internal combustion vehicles. When he wants EV mechanics for his shop, he often has to train them himself.
Today’s electric cars aren’t exactly DIY-friendly, either. Even before the EV revolution, modern cars were becoming complicated enough to deter the weekend garage mechanic. This may not be a bad thing, since few have the electrical engineering expertise to safely tinker with an EV. But many new electric vehicles are black boxes that require proprietary technology to diagnose and fix, discouraging owners from considering repair shops outside of the automaker’s ecosystem. Just last week Tesla faced a new class-action lawsuit alleging the automaker effectively makes drivers bring their cars to Tesla shops.
In addition, Ambrose says, EV manufacturers are moving towards integrated manufacturing — for example, where the battery is part of the frame and thus more difficult to replace. “It might make it cheaper to make EVs in general, and make better EVs,” he says. “At the same time it’s going to make it harder to repair a vehicle, right? Because if you think about it, it’s just like now in modern laptops, everything’s glued together. I can’t take anything apart anymore.”
If it sounds like the planned obsolescence of smartphones and other tech is coming to EVs, you wouldn’t be wrong. What the industry needs to be more sustainable may be the opposite — a car repairable and modular enough that a determined owner could make it last forever.
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A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.
Long Islanders, meanwhile, are showing up in support of offshore wind, and more in this week’s edition of The Fight.
Local renewables restrictions are on the rise in the Hawkeye State – and it might have something to do with carbon pipelines.
Iowa’s known as a renewables growth area, producing more wind energy than any other state and offering ample acreage for utility-scale solar development. This has happened despite the fact that Iowa, like Ohio, is home to many large agricultural facilities – a trait that has often fomented conflict over specific projects. Iowa has defied this logic in part because the state was very early to renewables, enacting a state portfolio standard in 1983, signed into law by a Republican governor.
But something else is now on the rise: Counties are passing anti-renewables moratoria and ordinances restricting solar and wind energy development. We analyzed Heatmap Pro data on local laws and found a rise in local restrictions starting in 2021, leading to nearly 20 of the state’s 99 counties – about one fifth – having some form of restrictive ordinance on solar, wind or battery storage.
What is sparking this hostility? Some of it might be counties following the partisan trend, as renewable energy has struggled in hyper-conservative spots in the U.S. But it may also have to do with an outsized focus on land use rights and energy development that emerged from the conflict over carbon pipelines, which has intensified opposition to any usage of eminent domain for energy development.
The central node of this tension is the Summit Carbon Solutions CO2 pipeline. As we explained in a previous edition of The Fight, the carbon transportation network would cross five states, and has galvanized rural opposition against it. Last November, I predicted the Summit pipeline would have an easier time under Trump because of his circle’s support for oil and gas, as well as the placement of former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum as interior secretary, as Burgum was a major Summit supporter.
Admittedly, this prediction has turned out to be incorrect – but it had nothing to do with Trump. Instead, Summit is now stalled because grassroots opposition to the pipeline quickly mobilized to pressure regulators in states the pipeline is proposed to traverse. They’re aiming to deny the company permits and lobbying state legislatures to pass bills banning the use of eminent domain for carbon pipelines. One of those states is South Dakota, where the governor last month signed an eminent domain ban for CO2 pipelines. On Thursday, South Dakota regulators denied key permits for the pipeline for the third time in a row.
Another place where the Summit opposition is working furiously: Iowa, where opposition to the CO2 pipeline network is so intense that it became an issue in the 2020 presidential primary. Regulators in the state have been more willing to greenlight permits for the project, but grassroots activists have pressured many counties into some form of opposition.
The same counties with CO2 pipeline moratoria have enacted bans or land use restrictions on developing various forms of renewables, too. Like Kossuth County, which passed a resolution decrying the use of eminent domain to construct the Summit pipeline – and then three months later enacted a moratorium on utility-scale solar.
I asked Jessica Manzour, a conservation program associate with Sierra Club fighting the Summit pipeline, about this phenomenon earlier this week. She told me that some counties are opposing CO2 pipelines and then suddenly tacking on or pivoting to renewables next. In other cases, counties with a burgeoning opposition to renewables take up the pipeline cause, too. In either case, this general frustration with energy companies developing large plots of land is kicking up dust in places that previously may have had a much lower opposition risk.
“We painted a roadmap with this Summit fight,” said Jess Manzour, a campaigner with Sierra Club involved in organizing opposition to the pipeline at the grassroots level, who said zealous anti-renewables activists and officials are in some cases lumping these items together under a broad umbrella. ”I don’t know if it’s the people pushing for these ordinances, rather than people taking advantage of the situation.”