Electric Vehicle Series Part 7
As the years go by, battery technology is getting better and better. With super-efficient automobiles, the air could get cleaner by the second. To cap off my series, we’re going to delve into some statistics, compare some data and monitor overall progress in order to see how well humans are implementing strategies for an energy-efficient future. Not only that, but we’re going to toss in a little competition to make things a bit more fun and see which country is doing best in reusing batteries. Open your eyes and widen your view, we’re going around the globe.
Right now, the majority of the consumer population uses gasoline-powered cars, but as people become more and more concerned about our planet, with global warming threatening the skies and our lives, more EVs are being purchased. The line graph below represents the increase in EV sales from 2013 to 2018, in Quebec, Ontario and British Columbia. The steepest line is the amount of cars sold in Quebec in between 2017 to 2018. There, the numbers of EVs sold jumped from 19,000 all the way to 43,000!!
The circle graph below represents the market share for lithium-ion batteries on a global scale. Basically, which company’s batteries are being sold/used the most in electric cars. If we look at the market shares for lithium-ion batteries, we can see that Panasonic Sanyo is the company with the highest hold with 33% of the share, and that Lishen and GS Yuasa are tied with the lowest hold with 3% of the share. The ‘others’ category represent other companies which individually have less than 1% of the market share. This implies that Panasonic Sanyo makes the best batteries available, hence why most electric cars use their batteries. Congratulations to Panasonic!
The country that best reuses electric car batteries is China, with 0.8 Gigawatt Hours of energy saved in 2018, 1.2 Gigawatt Hours of energy saved in 2019 and estimation to go from 1.7 Gigawatt Hours of energy saved to 12.1 Gigawatt Hours of energy saved from 2020 to 2025. These numbers may seem infinitesimal, but to put it into perspective, 1 gigawatt is equivalent to the energy used by 110 million LEDs. That’s a lot. When looking at the graph below, Europe, U.S.A. and the rest of the world seemed to have saved only a little bit of energy in comparison to China. That may be true, but the lowest amount of energy saved, 0.1 gigawatt hours in 2019 by the rest of the world, is still the equivalent to the energy produced by 11 million LEDs.
Data shows that we’ve been working hard and doing well to solve this battery problem, and enforcing energy efficiency to save the world from pollution. But what’s the next step? Well, that would be to expand horizons and create other electric vehicles. At this moment, we have electric bikes to combat motorcycles that use gasoline like their ICE car counterparts. However, in the future, something more exciting is coming – electric airplanes. These are predicted to be cleaner, quieter and cheaper. Even more, according to preliminary calculations, these planes should be able to travel 1000 km on a single charge, making them usable for half of commercial flying. The best part about it is that it would reduce carbon emissions produced by aircrafts by a whopping 15%.
If we wish to see the end of the age of gasoline-powered vehicles, it’s time to explore this efficient alternative. We’ve found solutions and we’ll continue to find more for even better batteries in the future. So let’s save our planet and convert to an electric car for a happier future. However long it may take, at least it’s happening. Due to COVID-19 lockdowns, there’s so much less air pollution as a result of car emmissions around the globe. However, once things get back to normal and we will step out of our houses again, the air would be doomed unless we decided to change. It’s as the CEO of Tesla, Elon Musk said: “We won’t stop until every car on the road is electric.”
We have all the tools needed to make a change within our grasp, all we have to do is make it happen.
