Weighing EV risk
Re: "Jockeying for pole position", (Business, Jan 20).
Thailand's National EV Policy Committee incentivises electric vehicles and pegs incentivisation against CO2 emissions. It is noteworthy that winter's annual assault on national public health is not due to CO2, which is a gas efficiently respired by humans, but by harmful particulates and toxic chemical aerosols suspended in the air.
EVs affect public health in complex ways which their adherents often fail to consider. Whether in your phone, a garage, storeroom, battery factory, recycling centre, or on the highway, high energy density lithium batteries are causing a worldwide epidemic of explosions and fires.
People die not merely because of rapid incineration or explosions, but also from inhaling the copious amounts of highly toxic fumes such fires produce.
E-bike battery fires are the leading cause of fire in New York City. There were 270 blazes last year claiming 18 lives. A recent fire at a battery recycling centre in Kilwinning, Scotland burned for several days requiring the government to warn nearby residents to remain indoors with windows closed.
Buses and trucks require much larger batteries and when they combust the results can be truly horrific. A Tesla truck which crashed into a tree near Sacramento last year burst into 1,000-degree flames which required 15 hours and 50,000 gallons of water to extinguish. Firefighters had to disperse fire retardants over the site from the air.
The risk of disaster increases exponentially with grid-scale storage batteries often associated with solar generating arrays. In May 2024, a fire at the Gateway Energy Storage facility in San Diego burned for 11 days, leading to evacuation orders and calls for a moratorium on new battery storage facilities.
Heavy metals leach into the ground and water after EV battery fires and resulting toxic fumes are nearly impossible to mitigate.
While EV's generate no particulates from burning diesel fuel, their tyres produce substantial air pollution of a more complex and hazardous nature, just like their IC cousins do.
A rigorous cost-benefit analysis of EVs, which includes the environmental and social cost of mining lithium, shows that their batteries are highly problematic. Far better are the water based, in-situ generated hydrogen powered vehicles proposed by Toyota and others.
