EVs - New Hampshire gets it right

[2Planker]

2planker, I have to disagree but it is perspective thing. I borrowed my brother in laws EGO before I got my new mower. It took me about 2 hours to do my lawn and by the end it was bogging down. I bought a 30" deck Toro with dual blades. I blast through my thick ass lawn like a hot knife through butter. It takes me less than an hour with the large deck. Nope not going electric.

Also I cut my own log lenghts and split for fire wood. There is no electric saw that would last worth anything through 18 to 24" oak and maple log lengths. Some days I spend 2 hours just cutting to size. Again nope. I have Stilh 18" and a Husqvarna 24" with freshly sharpened chains.

Agreed BUT you are comparing Apples to oranges when comparing a walk behind to a deck mower..

As for the saw. My lil Stihl is fine for general yard clean up. No way would I ever try to cut anything more than 6-8" though...

Next move for the RI house is to the Husqvarna RoboMower. Now we're talkin' Set it and Forget it. Gain back 2-3 hours every weekend

 

[Hawk]

Robo mower??? Now I have heard everything. LOL

 

[2Planker]

Robo mower??? Now I have heard everything. LOL

They're just like a roomba vacuum.

Mows every 3-4 days.

 

[djd66]

Yeah, they are very cool!

 

[Harvey]

arguing that batteries are just as bad to produce from a pollution standpoint as ICE

I have no idea how to quantify the bad. It is a different kind of bad.

 

[Harvey]

all in on yard work equipment at home with a mower, blower and chainsaw all battery operated

From what I've read this matters a lot.

 

[2Planker]

2.2M views · 30K reactions | Dog Rides A Lawnmower | Just a good boy helping out around the garden 😂🐶 | By LADbible | Facebook

Just a good boy helping out around the garden 😂🐶

www.facebook.com

 

[Harvey]

It doesn't make sense to say that because my specific application requires ICE power there is no place for electric.

If we used electric where it made sense (hybrid taxi cabs in NYC, heat pumps in the southern US, whatever) it would matter.

Electric power tools are a no brainer for me. Hedge trimmer, leaf blower, weed whacker, etc.

 

[heiusa]

Have an EGO Battery powered Mower for 1.7 acres. FAR better than any Toro or Honda we've had lately.
Also have a Stihl Battery powered 14" Chain Saw, very nice !! and a leaf blower.

ALL are way better than a gas model

I have an EGO Mower, String trimmer and blower. I am so impressed with the quality and engineering of this brand. I have an 1/3 acre property and can cut the grass, use the trimmer and blower all on one battery charge. Its a big battery, 56V 5 AH. I highly recommend this brand of cordless yard equipment.

 

[mister moose]

US oil imports and exports are pretty complicated.
"In 2022, OPEC countries imported about 15% of their petroleum and 16% of their crude oil from the United States."

In the US, 12% of imported crude oil is from OPEC. Most of the crude oil imported into the US comes from Canada and Mexico.

"The top five sources of U.S. crude oil imports by percentage share of U.S. total crude oil imports in 2022 were:
Canada 60%
Mexico 10%
Saudi Arabia 7%
Iraq 4%
Colombia 3%"

Oil imports and exports - U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

U.S. crude oil imports sources including OPEC and Persian Gulf, and top five source countries of U.S. oil imports and destinations of U.S. crude oil exports.

www.eia.gov

I'm aware. There are all kinds of logistics and compatibility issues that makes it more efficient to export some oil of ours and then import it from others to refine here. The offshore wells and Irving refinery in New Brunswick exports 80% of its production to the US, and it's right here in the northeast that uses it.

However, geopolitics and world economy ebbs and flows, and I hold no misconceptions about OPEC's chances of having us by the short hairs again at some point.

On the electric mower front, I have a 20 year old 22hp tractor with a 54" deck that sometimes runs 6 hours in a day. I don't see that going electric anytime soon, and
I sure don't want to pony up the price of a new one either. An electric snowblower that runs with a button push has a certain appeal, although I do about 400 feet of driveway and it will bite into a foot of snow and throw it 50 feet. Again, not ponying up for a new one, mine runs on a PTO off the tractor, Chain saw - the big 24" bar isn't going electric. That's for whole trees. I have a little 14" Echo trim/climbing saw thats a featherweight, and when that dies I could definitely see going electric if it's lighter. Weight counts one handed off the ground.

 

[BenedictGomez]

Electric power tools are a no brainer for me. Hedge trimmer, leaf blower, weed whacker, etc.

All my power tools are Li battery (Dewalt), and they work great for that so long as the power application is minimal (jigsaw, impact wrench, drill, orbital sander, etc...). But once you step up to a serious power need for duration (chainsaw, lawn mower), they're not sufficient unless you're only cutting a few logs or mowing a very small lawn.

 

[BenedictGomez]

The most interesting thing about this thread for me is how quite a few here seem to think EV cars will make a huge difference soon. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's perhaps not shocking, as that's what all the media & politicians tell you, but as someone who considers himself a fairly serious investor in this space I assure you it's really not going to be a big deal environmentally for many years. Yes, I know that's not what you're hearing, but you're being lied to.

For starters, it will be a few decades before EV cars can be scaled to the masses globally (e.g. there are more drivers on Planet Earth than just Americans, Brits, and a handful of rich Germans) if ever frankly, due to the high costs due to various factors. Tax breaks cant go on forever anywhere, even in rich America we're getting stretched, and the real irony is that there are serious concerns about rare earth availability even if we DID actually leap some hurdles. The minerals are eventually going to be a huge problem as auto companies start cranking out EVs the next few years, and what I find genuinely hysterical, like really funny, is the fact that there's not enough source material mined & available for all the auto manufactures to actually hit the units they each claim they're going to manufacture in x years if you assume they each will actually manufacture the numbers they say they are! Then there's the inconvenient truth (which you never hear about) regarding who controls the lion's share of those commoditized assets required for EV production. Ruh roh Rohrge!

Lastly, less than 30% of global oil production is currently used for ICE automobiles anyway. So even if everyone in the world switched to EV passenger cars tomorrow, we'd still need the majority of our "evil" and "dirty" oil for...... well.....other stuff. I mean, for heaven's sake there's something like 300 million cars in India alone & the average median income there is roughly $5,000 USD a year last I checked. I wonder what the EV charging infrastructure's like in a country where hundreds of millions of people still don't have toilets in there homes? I mean, sure, San Francisco streets are littered with human feces too, but at least they get big EV tax credits and have copious access to Tesla Superchargers! But sure, if it makes you feel good about yourself (which so much of this is sociologically about if we take the rare moment to be entirely honest with ourselves), Viva la EV revolution!

TL/DR: Buy yourself a basket of global lithium miner stocks, preferably ones de-risked from China.

 

[Harvey]

serious power need

The thing about gas/fuel is it has a very high power to weight ratio. Like you need in airplanes.

Trains are a great use of electric because the don't need batteries.

Hybrids are really a beautiful thing. I see that heat pump with propane backup as a hybrid. Each system is used in the application where it shines.

 

[Newpylong]

All my power tools are Li battery (Dewalt), and they work great for that so long as the power application is minimal (jigsaw, impact wrench, drill, orbital sander, etc...). But once you step up to a serious power need for duration (chainsaw, lawn mower), they're not sufficient unless you're only cutting a few logs or mowing a very small lawn.

Agreed. I have a 12" Dewalt Electric Chainsaw which along with the Sawzall is game changing for small trees and sapling cleanup without lugging my 59cc gas chainsaw around. Other than that, I have to use a gas trimmer and mower because I weed wack and cut several acres of grass and pucker brush on steep hills.

The requirement for all landscaping power tools ie mower, leaf blowers weed wackers etc in California to be electric in a few years is a joke. My wife is part owner of a property management/construction company and they would likely hang up the gloves vs try to make that work if that ever flew over here. It's bad enough manufacturers already need to make CARB compliant equipment.

 

[drjeff]

The most interesting thing about this thread for me is how quite a few here seem to think EV cars will make a huge difference soon. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's perhaps not shocking, as that's what all the media & politicians tell you, but as someone who considers himself a fairly serious investor in this space I assure you it's really not going to be a big deal environmentally for many years. Yes, I know that's not what you're hearing, but you're being lied to.

For starters, it will be a few decades before EV cars can be scaled to the masses globally (e.g. there are more drivers on Planet Earth than just Americans, Brits, and a handful of rich Germans) if ever frankly, due to the high costs due to various factors. Tax breaks cant go on forever anywhere, even in rich America we're getting stretched, and the real irony is that there are serious concerns about rare earth availability even if we DID actually leap some hurdles. The minerals are eventually going to be a huge problem as auto companies start cranking out EVs the next few years, and what I find genuinely hysterical, like really funny, is the fact that there's not enough source material mined & available for all the auto manufactures to actually hit the units they each claim they're going to manufacture in x years if you assume they each will actually manufacture the numbers they say they are! Then there's the inconvenient truth (which you never hear about) regarding who controls the lion's share of those commoditized assets required for EV production. Ruh roh Rohrge!

Lastly, less than 30% of global oil production is currently used for ICE automobiles anyway. So even if everyone in the world switched to EV passenger cars tomorrow, we'd still need the majority of our "evil" and "dirty" oil for...... well.....other stuff. I mean, for heaven's sake there's something like 300 million cars in India alone & the average median income there is roughly $5,000 USD a year last I checked. I wonder what the EV charging infrastructure's like in a country where hundreds of millions of people still don't have toilets in there homes? I mean, sure, San Francisco streets are littered with human feces too, but at least they get big EV tax credits and have copious access to Tesla Superchargers! But sure, if it makes you feel good about yourself (which so much of this is sociologically about if we take the rare moment to be entirely honest with ourselves), Viva la EV revolution!

TL/DR: Buy yourself a basket of global lithium miner stocks, preferably ones de-risked from China.

I think a comparable ski related analogy might be the high speed detachable lift. Definitely has changed the ski industry and is now common place at a significant portion of ski areas all around the world, of most sizes. The 1st one was installed in the late 70's/early 80's if I recall correctly off the top of my head. Took probably a solid 20-25 years until they became more of a common sight than a rareity often just found at larger resorts. then took maybe another decade or so until they became fairly prevalent at a number of smaller resorts and arguably became the 1st thought for a ski resort operator when looking at either a new lift or replacement lift installation. The change, for numerous reasons, took decades to happen in significant quantities

 

[kbroderick]

The most interesting thing about this thread for me is how quite a few here seem to think EV cars will make a huge difference soon. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's perhaps not shocking, as that's what all the media & politicians tell you, but as someone who considers himself a fairly serious investor in this space I assure you it's really not going to be a big deal environmentally for many years. Yes, I know that's not what you're hearing, but you're being lied to.

For starters, it will be a few decades before EV cars can be scaled to the masses globally (e.g. there are more drivers on Planet Earth than just Americans, Brits, and a handful of rich Germans) if ever frankly, due to the high costs due to various factors. Tax breaks cant go on forever anywhere, even in rich America we're getting stretched, and the real irony is that there are serious concerns about rare earth availability even if we DID actually leap some hurdles. The minerals are eventually going to be a huge problem as auto companies start cranking out EVs the next few years, and what I find genuinely hysterical, like really funny, is the fact that there's not enough source material mined & available for all the auto manufactures to actually hit the units they each claim they're going to manufacture in x years if you assume they each will actually manufacture the numbers they say they are! Then there's the inconvenient truth (which you never hear about) regarding who controls the lion's share of those commoditized assets required for EV production. Ruh roh Rohrge!

Lastly, less than 30% of global oil production is currently used for ICE automobiles anyway. So even if everyone in the world switched to EV passenger cars tomorrow, we'd still need the majority of our "evil" and "dirty" oil for...... well.....other stuff. I mean, for heaven's sake there's something like 300 million cars in India alone & the average median income there is roughly $5,000 USD a year last I checked. I wonder what the EV charging infrastructure's like in a country where hundreds of millions of people still don't have toilets in there homes? I mean, sure, San Francisco streets are littered with human feces too, but at least they get big EV tax credits and have copious access to Tesla Superchargers! But sure, if it makes you feel good about yourself (which so much of this is sociologically about if we take the rare moment to be entirely honest with ourselves), Viva la EV revolution!

TL/DR: Buy yourself a basket of global lithium miner stocks, preferably ones de-risked from China.

First off, if we could get that 30% number to 5%, that's still a 25% reduction in oil burnt per year. That's significant.

Second, I think someone upthread (or maybe in an EV thread on another ski forum) had quoted 12 years as the average time-on-the-road for a passenger vehicle in the US. Pushing adoption now isn't just about next year, it's about the next decade.

I look at it as being a lot like low-flush toilets—when they first came out, no one wanted them because they weren't particularly effective at flushing. After they were government-mandated (maybe just in California, not sure about the details), it took a few years, but we ended up with low-flush toilets that actually worked. The government putting its foot on the scale sure seemed to drive more R&D, which in turn resulted in a net good that wasn't otherwise adequately addressed by economics (less water used pushing toilet paper into the sewer). IMO, it's a similar situation with moving away from ICE to electric—the true economic cost of the point-source pollution isn't borne by the person burning the fuel, so it makes sense for the government to provide incentive to address it (or disincentive to continue doing it). I strongly suspect the forced conversion to electric for lawn care (in California, among other places) will end up in this category—forced early adoption will drive more development and in a few years, it won't be a big deal to use electric devices even in commercial use cases.

Rare-earth availability—and the impact associated with mining it—is a real issue. Demand may drive more lithium availability (e.g. I've seen at least a couple of news stories about "large" lithium deposits in North America that simply weren't economically viable to pursue—if that's the issue, more value per gram can change the math). But oil extraction, refining, and transport has a real cost as well, both economic and environmental.

As far as infrastructure in countries that are at different places developmentally, I'd argue that (a) EVs have the possibility of working effectively without a fuel-distribution infrastructure; and (b) not all EVs are cars and trucks. Small-scale generation—especially what we'd consider homeowner- or neighborhood-scale solar or wind—may allow some of those places to leapfrog just as cell phones have allowed many of them to leapfrog having copper phone lines everywhere. Electric motorcycles and e-bikes have a role to play as well, an an e-bike set up for cargo may actually be a better tool in a lot of places that lack not only fueling infrastructure but highway infrastructure.

 

[1dog]

The most interesting thing about this thread for me is how quite a few here seem to think EV cars will make a huge difference soon. Nothing could be further from the truth. It's perhaps not shocking, as that's what all the media & politicians tell you, but as someone who considers himself a fairly serious investor in this space I assure you it's really not going to be a big deal environmentally for many years. Yes, I know that's not what you're hearing, but you're being lied to.

For starters, it will be a few decades before EV cars can be scaled to the masses globally (e.g. there are more drivers on Planet Earth than just Americans, Brits, and a handful of rich Germans) if ever frankly, due to the high costs due to various factors. Tax breaks cant go on forever anywhere, even in rich America we're getting stretched, and the real irony is that there are serious concerns about rare earth availability even if we DID actually leap some hurdles. The minerals are eventually going to be a huge problem as auto companies start cranking out EVs the next few years, and what I find genuinely hysterical, like really funny, is the fact that there's not enough source material mined & available for all the auto manufactures to actually hit the units they each claim they're going to manufacture in x years if you assume they each will actually manufacture the numbers they say they are! Then there's the inconvenient truth (which you never hear about) regarding who controls the lion's share of those commoditized assets required for EV production. Ruh roh Rohrge!

Lastly, less than 30% of global oil production is currently used for ICE automobiles anyway. So even if everyone in the world switched to EV passenger cars tomorrow, we'd still need the majority of our "evil" and "dirty" oil for...... well.....other stuff. I mean, for heaven's sake there's something like 300 million cars in India alone & the average median income there is roughly $5,000 USD a year last I checked. I wonder what the EV charging infrastructure's like in a country where hundreds of millions of people still don't have toilets in there homes? I mean, sure, San Francisco streets are littered with human feces too, but at least they get big EV tax credits and have copious access to Tesla Superchargers! But sure, if it makes you feel good about yourself (which so much of this is sociologically about if we take the rare moment to be entirely honest with ourselves), Viva la EV revolution!

TL/DR: Buy yourself a basket of global lithium miner stocks, preferably ones de-risked from China.

So much for energy independence if we go with REM's.
Heres where to invest - along with China and rest of the BRICS ( who won't be doing it in US dollars)

The Daily Chart: Who Has the Metals?

A transition to a nearly all-electric energy and transport system is going to need a gigantic amount of metals, the extraction and processing of which have their own substantial environmental footp…

www.powerlineblog.com

Spot on post BG, and in a free country, buying what you like makes a market. Its just a fallacious one when subsidized by tax dollars we don't even have.

We'd go from largest reserves of natural gas to bottom of the barrel if we switched. We won't, we can't. We might though.

If environmentalists were very serious about cutting carbon , many many years ago we discovered natural gas has HALF the emissions of oil.

Its not about clean ( plenty of true environmentalists of course, passionate about a clean earth) but t he controlling interests are about just that, control.


Even the founder of Green Peace eventually realized this and left.

 

[BenedictGomez]

Hybrids are really a beautiful thing.

There is absolutely no doubt hybrid cars should have been the answer, but.......politics.......

Hybrids still use some of the aforementioned "dirty" and "evil" oil, so they got Betamax'd.

 

[2Planker]

All my power tools are Li battery (Dewalt), and they work great for that so long as the power application is minimal (jigsaw, impact wrench, drill, orbital sander, etc...). But once you step up to a serious power need for duration (chainsaw, lawn mower), they're not sufficient unless you're only cutting a few logs or mowing a very small lawn.

Not true at all. Our ECO mows 1.66 acres on a single charge, no problem at all

 

[BenedictGomez]

The requirement for all landscaping power tools ie mower, leaf blowers weed wackers etc in California to be electric in a few years is a joke. My wife is part owner of a property management/construction company and they would likely hang up the gloves vs try to make that work if that ever flew over here. It's bad enough manufacturers already need to make CARB compliant equipment.

Thanks for sharing that, I had no idea. Just another dumb feel-good California law in a litany of dumb feel-good California laws. I already know what's going to happen, battery sales in California will skyrocket! LOL You already see that on jobsites now where guys prefer the cordless, but they're using brad nailers, nail guns, and drills etc... all-day long. They roll with tons of batteries. There's quite an online market for lightly used Dewalt & Milwaukee Lions.