Our Electrified Future with David Reichmuth

Some guy pulled up to the charging station, and he was looking at me like, you dick, I can’t believe you’re at the 350 charging station.

Okay, this is the future of street fights.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist.

Got Chuck Nice with me.

Chuck, how you doing, man?

Hey, what’s up, Neil?

Okay, professional comedian and actor.

Yep, acting like a comedian.

Acting like a comedian.

How’s that working for you?

Yeah, well, you know, it’s nice work if you can get it.

So today, what a topic today.

It long overdue, it’s our electrified future.

Yes.

Everybody’s thinking about it.

It’s always in the headlines.

What path are we going to take as civilization in order to protect the very…

To survive.

To survive, to survive.

Basically, let’s be honest.

We’re on the path to doom right now if we don’t change.

Yeah, well, we’ll be here after climate change, but civilization won’t.

That’s the difference.

Everything we’ve built that we call civilization, it’s not clear how that will survive.

It’s going to be everybody who survives in Kevin Costner.

What a world.

What a world.

Okay, nobody saw that movie.

So that, I don’t know.

No, that’s true.

It’s an obscure reference, you know.

Chuck, I carry some knowledge in this field, but for this kind of topic, we need expertise, like centerline expertise.

So we comb the landscape.

We comb the universe, in fact.

And we found a PhD chemical engineer named David Reichmuth.

David, welcome to StarTalk.

Thanks, thanks for having me.

And did I say your last name correctly, please?

Got it spot on.

Excellent, very excellent.

You got a PhD in chemical engineering, specializing in electric vehicles.

This is a thing.

And you’re a senior engineer in the Clean Transportation Program of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

I remember these folks from way back, deep Cold War era.

So tell me what, who they are and what you all are doing today.

And presumably you’re still worrying about nukes.

Yeah, no, I mean, that was the Genesis about 50 years ago in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Some MIT scientists concerned about the militarization of science, especially around nuclear weapons.

And since that time, we’re looking at how do we bring the voice of science into policy, not just in terms of weapons, but now in terms of climate change and the environment as well.

Yeah, you got a lot to be concerned about there, David.

That’s right.

You got a lot on your mind there.

You got a lot on your mind.

But they’re very concerned people.

They’re very concerned, it’s just a bunch of dyes and lab coats sitting around stroking their chins.

Right, right.

Chuck, I can see the crossover point.

Will they become, when they become, the union of pissed off scientists?

Yeah, that’s what we need.

That is what we need.

We need the union of pissed off scientists.

I think we’re already there.

Yeah, there you go.

But we already got the website, so we’ll keep the name for now.

So, you focus on energy analysis, transportation sustainability, both things we need maximally in our modern civilization, and of course, they overlap, and zero emission vehicles.

So, what’s true zero emission?

You can’t start with the vehicle, right?

True zero emission, we got to start with the grid.

Or just where the energy is coming from, right?

But let’s back up for a minute, you specialize in transportation.

What fraction of our carbon footprint as civilization comes from transportation at this point?

Yeah, so if you look at the US, you’ve got man-made sources of climate pollution.

Transportation is the largest single sector.

It’s over a quarter of all human-caused emissions in the US.

And when you look at transportation, over half that comes from passenger cars and trucks.

So passenger cars and trucks alone are more emissions than residential and commercial buildings put together.

And what about, when you say trucks, you mean even trucks for distribution of goods?

Is that CDL commercial trucks or is it passenger cars and trucks?

Is that like our big pickup trucks and stuff?

We’re talking about the pickup trucks and SUVs in our driveways.

Okay, yeah, there you go.

So when we talk about the half the emissions of transportation coming from passenger cars and trucks, we’re just talking about regular old pickup trucks.

What we’re driving, everyday person driving around is half of all emissions.

That’s insane.

Half of all transportation emissions.

Half of all transportation emissions, yeah.

And the other half comes from what form of transportation?

Well, that’s sort of your larger trucks and then plane, shipping, rail.

But really, most of that is going to be your larger trucks as well.

So it’s the on-road transportation is really the bulk of emissions.

As the senior member of the three of us, the old fart, I have deeper memories than you guys.

I remember when air pollution simply meant the air was dirty.

So now, the air is pretty clean, all things considered.

Clean in terms of transparency.

But we now think of CO2, byproduct of combustion, burning fossil fuels, as a pollutant of sorts.

Is that fair to say?

And do we add that to what is still polluting forces in our environment, such as the burning of coal?

Yeah, so, I mean, you can look at it in terms of climate pollution.

And look, I mean, because it’s such a huge part of our emissions, there’s no way to reduce our climate change emissions without doing something about passenger cars and trucks.

I mean, there’s also the air pollution that comes from these vehicles.

And they are cleaner than the vehicles of 30 years ago.

My childhood, yes.

But there’s still air pollution that is causing health impacts from these vehicles.

So, a lot of it is coming from this fine particulate matter.

And so, you want to end its particles that are…

PM25 is a technical term.

It’s particles that are smaller than 2.5 microns or micrometers.

So, a micron is a millionth of a meter, if I remember correctly.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And just sort of context.

Like, so if you have hair, it’s about 70 microns is a gram.

Hypothetically, if you want to have hair on their head, pull it out.

I don’t take that for granted, but yes.

For those just listening, our guest today is bald.

Well, not bald, he’s Patrick Stewart distinguished.

So that’s about 70 microns is the average human hair.

And so we’re talking about particles that are 2.5 and smaller.

So really, really tiny particles.

And these particles are coming from the exhaust, but in most cases, they’re not coming directly.

It’s actually nitrogen oxides, volatile organic gases combining the atmosphere, combining with sunlight, making fairly tiny particles.

And then those particles are going deep into your lungs.

Right.

And that’s coming from…

Because of how small they are.

So they go past all of the filtering that you have naturally in your nose and even in top of your lungs, and they get deep into your lungs.

They can even cross into the bloodstream.

These are really…

That’s where the most health impacts from air pollution is coming from these tiny particles.

And it’s not…

When you say air pollution from vehicles, everyone thinks, oh, like a big rig or a bus belching a black cloud or an old car that’s burning oil.

But even a new car that doesn’t look like it’s putting out this pollution, it is leading to these really tiny particles that lead to asthma.

Yeah, asthma and…

And the latest research that I read, because I read a lot about pollution for climate change mostly, but still, is that the previous thinking was that it triggered asthma, but now the thinking is that traffic pollution is causing asthma, particularly for what you just said about the tiniest part of your bronchioles, I forget the name of it, alveoli or something like that.

That’s where these particulates end up lodging, and so it actually causes asthma.

Yeah, and it’s not just asthma.

I mean, asthma is the most, you know, like, when you think about breathing in particles to your lungs, you think asthma and you think, you know, sort of lung disease, but it’s also a cardiovascular disease.

It’s low birth weight.

It’s a lot of different impacts beyond just asthma, but, you know, this is pollution that shortens people’s lives.

So, David, civilization is killing us.

That’s what you’re saying.

No, I’m saying that…

I love that he went, no, I’m not saying that at all.

No, I’m saying we’re exposed to this pollution, some of us more than others, and we can get into that if you want, but we have now these options to reduce that, and so that’s where I’m like…

Okay, so one of the options we’ve been told is switch over to an electric car.

Electric cars have zero emissions at the car.

Okay, I get that, all right, but they had to build the car, the car has weird ingredients in it that regular car, quote, you know, the ICE cars, internal combustion engine cars don’t have, and that electricity is coming from somewhere, and I don’t think it’s all from solar panels yet.

So tell me about how green a green car really is.

Yeah, so I mean, that is something that I’ve spent a lot of time doing analysis around.

So you’re the right guy for this question.

I am the right guy.

So first, let’s look about like when you talked about the tailpipe pollution and that, yeah, so a fully electric vehicle, obviously no tailpipe emissions.

That’s an easy one.

But, you know, Chuck, as you said, hey, that’s maybe not the whole story.

That means that it’s a zero emission vehicle maybe at the car tailpipe, but not overall.

And so what we need to do then is we look at the life cycle analysis.

So we need to do an apples to apples comparison of looking at the whole process of getting that car recharged and compare it to refueling a gasoline car because that’s what we’re trying to see if it’s better than, right?

That’s the current technology.

And so that means for an electric car going upstream and looking at, okay, what are the emissions from power plants?

And then beyond that, if it’s a coal power plant, a natural gas power plant, what are the emissions from getting that coal out of the ground or getting that methane out of the ground and getting it to the power plant?

And so you have to add up all those emissions and then compare them to the same thing for a gasoline car.

Obviously, you’re burning gasoline in the car, so we have those emissions that are coming out of the tailpipe of CO2, but you also have all the emissions of getting crude oil out of the ground and then getting it to a refinery, turning it into gasoline, getting that gasoline to a refueling station.

And so there’s all those steps as well.

If you do that, you find that electric vehicles have not zero total emissions, but they have much lower emissions than a gasoline vehicle.

So if you look at where EVs have been sold in the US., they have on average, the average EV has emissions about equal to an 88-mile-per-gallon gasoline car, if one exists.

Yeah, and that’s based on the average EV.

And it does depend on where in the country you are.

Some places are going to be cleaner than others.

If you look in the average EV in like the northeast part of the US, it’s equal to about 110 miles per gallon of gasoline car emissions.

Interesting to think about it in that metric, because that would tell the auto manufacturers, keep using gas, but make me a 100-mile-per-gallon car.

And then you’re right neck and neck with the electric car.

The only problem is you can’t do that.

There’s like physics.

That pesky thing.

That old pesky thing, physics.

What does physics have to do with it?

Come on, David.

The maximum thermodynamic efficiency of a combustion engine.

It’s pretty low.

It’s very low.

You can get a gasoline car that gets up to the 50s mile per gallon range with some of the non-plug-in hybrids, but you can’t really get further than that without doing a significant size change in the vehicle.

I’ve got a fast story, which is a little bit of an off-ramp.

We’ve had steam engines forever.

So why did it take until 1903 to make an airplane, which is just another engine, but now it’s flying?

And the problem was to get enough power out of a steam engine required a steam engine that was so heavy, you could never get enough power to fly the damn thing.

And so all the experiments people were doing would say, oh, that’ll never work, that’ll never work.

It was not until we had the internal combustion engine that the Wright brothers then put that in the airplane, and now it’s much lighter compared with the power output.

And then you had airplanes.

There it was.

So the airplane was invented very shortly after the internal combustion engine car was invented.

And so it’s physics, the physics.

You can’t make a light enough steam engine to do this with.

Are you saying that the moment that we go fully electric, we’re going to have flying cars?

Yeah, I didn’t think I said that.

Did I?

David, you didn’t hear me say that, did you?

I don’t think so.

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Now, what about, you haven’t mentioned access to the rare metals or other components of not only the battery, but also the significant computing load that an electric car carries.

Yeah, so we also looked at sort of what are the emissions from building an electric vehicle.

Because as you said, there are the emissions involved in making that battery.

And so when you look at manufacturing a gasoline vehicle, manufacturing a electric vehicle, the emissions for building that electric vehicle for global warming emissions are higher.

And so there’s sort of this emissions deficit, but you pay off that debt in about, it depends on whether you’re looking at a pickup truck or a car and depending on where you are, but on average for a pickup truck in about a year and a half of driving and about two years of driving for a car.

And so overall, if you take in both the driving and the manufacture of the vehicle, if you compare an electric pickup truck to a gasoline pickup truck, it’s less than half the total global warming emissions, even when you consider the manufacturing of the battery.

Okay, so now that’s assuming that the electric grid is being fed by traditional coal or gas.

So if you can have an electrical grid that is green, either from tidal or wind or solar, and because I tell you, I had this moment some years ago, 20 years ago, I was driving an electric car, test driving electric car, and I did it at a power station, and one of the, I was going to call it spigots, but no, but one of the stanchions at the power station connected to their nuclear plant.

And so we charged up this car from the nuclear plant, and I drove around, and I felt so zero-carbon footprint in that moment.

It was a remarkable feeling in that moment.

I said, wow, not a single charcoal briquette was harmed.

And not a single gallon of gasoline was used to make this happen.

Yeah, I mean, that’s a great point because all the analysis I’ve done is based on sort of historical data.

So the most recent data I could get from the EPA is from 2021.

So we’re kind of looking back now a couple years when we do this analysis.

And that grid is getting cleaner over time.

We’ve been at UCS, we’ve been doing this analysis now for-

At Union Concerned Scientists, we’ve been doing this analysis now for over 10 years.

When we first did this analysis, the results were a little more mixed, because we had almost half the power in 2009, almost half the power in the US coming from coal.

That’s now down below 20% of the power coming from coal.

Renewables are now higher than coal in the US.

So we’re making this transition, and those cars are getting cleaned up.

And the cool thing about electric cars is that if you buy a car five years ago, and the grid gets cleaner, that means the emissions are going down over time.

Oh, for your car?

Yeah, for your car.

So it’s not just like, if you want to get a gasoline car that’s more efficient, that has fewer emissions, you have to go out and get a new car that has a higher MPG.

Your electric car is going to be plugging into the same plug, but it’s going to be getting cleaner as we clean up the grid, even though all the EVs are getting cleaner.

That’s amazing.

So the book I read called Turning Oil Into Salt, and I forgot the two authors, co-authors of that, made a fascinating point, which was you have a car that requires oil products, so gasoline, it’ll only run on gasoline.

So wherever your oil comes from in the world, you know about it because it’s a strategic commodity.

Salt used to be a strategic commodity because it was the only way you could preserve foods from one harvest into the next spring.

And so your life depended on knowing where the salt come from and how much it cost.

And in fact, the Northern soldiers bombed the Southern salt reserves during the Civil War as a strategic move to continue the stranglehold on their ability to fight.

So today, do you know how much your salt costs?

Do you even care?

Do you know where it comes from?

You don’t know and you don’t care because we have 12 other ways to preserve your food.

Refrigeration, freezing, canning.

It goes on and on and salt is like one of a dozen or more.

So the thesis of the book was, if you have a car that does not depend on gasoline, that could run on 30 different types of fuel, then the gasoline is no longer a strategic commodity.

It just has to compete with 30 other commodities.

Well, how big an engine do you have to have so that you can put anything in it and have it still run?

Oh, no, just make an electric car, plug it into the wall, and on the other side of that plug is the sources, the multiple sources of energy that are competing with each other.

There’s an open marketplace, our demands, what they supply.

And so an electric car does run on 25 different sources of fuel.

Is that a fair understanding of this, David?

Yeah, I mean, that is one of the huge advantages that you can make electricity from cleaner sources and we can make that transition.

And it doesn’t mean, you know, your electric vehicle still plugs into the same outlet.

So the two authors there, I’ve got Anne Koren and Gail Luft.

So they’re the two authors of that book, Turning Oil into Salt.

I thought it was a brilliant thesis there.

So David, are you at odds with oil companies here?

Why don’t they just convert to green?

Or is that what they’re already doing?

No, I mean, I don’t think any of the petroleum companies are interested in accelerating this transition to electric vehicles.

I mean, I think that at one point, it was that these electric vehicles can’t work.

Nobody’s going to want them.

Nobody can use them.

I think now that the opponents of electric vehicles are more in the mode of, yes, yes, yes, we’ll make this transition, but let’s just do it as slowly as possible.

We have 30 years of oil that we’d like to pull out of the ground and burn.

If fracking goes unchecked, it’s more than that, right?

But then after we do that, then we can make that switch.

And we’ll all be dead, but guess what?

I don’t know who we’re going to sell the oil to.

We’ll just be living in a hotter, less hospitable world.

Wait, wait, David.

So let me ask.

Let me come at this another way.

I just try to stay open here.

Not so open that my brain spill out, but I want to just make sure all options are covered.

You go back 120 years, there were horses everywhere.

I see the old pictures in New York City.

The horses everywhere.

The horse drawn carriages and cabs and everything.

And there’s horse poop everywhere, manure.

And so the cities stank and there were flies and there were no supermarkets then.

A lot of food merchants were just on the street.

So the flies were in the food.

And when I grew up, you didn’t complain the flies were everywhere because that’s just how everything was.

Even in the deli, the flies all are.

All right, you didn’t want the flies, but you lived with them.

You get rid of the manure, okay?

Then you get rid of most of the flies.

So how are you gonna get rid of the manure?

Well, you could put something in the horse’s feed so maybe the flies don’t like it.

You put less bulk in there so they poop less.

There are all these solutions and the solution really was the car, okay?

But no one was saying let’s invent a car so that we don’t have flies on my deli sandwich.

It was just progress.

So I recently saw a news brief on this startup company that wants to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere.

They have this like phased array of the raw ingredients that has everything except CO2 to make limestone.

And they blow the air across it that this substance, this powdery substance grabs the CO2 and makes limestone.

And then they take the limestone and bury it into the earth.

These would be CO2 scrubbers, I think we call them.

And if one of these was at every power plant, then we could control, in an act of geoengineering, control the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

And if we did that, and if we could do it, then you could burn as much oil as you wanted until there’s not a drop left.

And it will have no effect on climate change provided this doesn’t run away from us.

So is there any thinking along those lines?

Well, I think what’s a lot cheaper and easier is not putting the CO2 in the atmosphere.

And it happens when you’re in the first place.

Then trying to pull it out.

The best thing you can do is just avoid it altogether.

If you can walk bike, take transit, take your electric bicycle, whatever, that’s the best thing you can do.

The second best thing is to not burn the gasoline, not burn the oil at all.

So really, the anecdote that you gave, Neil, is get rid of the horses.

That’s the 21st century version of that.

Just get rid of it.

So yeah, it makes sense.

I mean…

Well, wait, but David, David, I live in the real world here and I interact with the public daily through my social media platforms and I care about how they think because knowing that enables me to communicate more effectively, all right, so that my message is received with receptors that I know lives within them.

And what I can tell you without hesitation is there’s always some fraction of the population that’s ready to change and modify their behavior and do whatever they got to do for the good of the earth.

And then there’s the rest of everybody that says, I don’t want to change a damn thing.

And, so for example, go back 150 years, we were still slaughtering whales for whale oil.

Whale, for whale oil.

Right, to burn our lamps and everything.

And the blubber was highly valuable.

And there are people that didn’t want to kill these majestic creatures.

Were they successful?

Not really.

Yes, we stopped killing whales, but not really because they’re saying no.

We stopped killing whales because we found oil in the ground.

We found oil in the ground to burn instead of having to go out and risk our lives, because that required no risk of life.

Risking our lives with Ahab and the great white.

Moby Dick.

Moby Dick, right?

Right, his name was Ahab, right?

Yeah, Captain Ahab.

Captain Ahab.

So, once again, things changed because, not because you got billions of people to change their behavior, but because some form of discovery, technology, some addition to our civilization did not require you to change your behavior.

So.

Yeah, I mean, you are right in that this, it’s an amazing amount of change in a really short period of time.

Look, if you look 15 years ago, the only people that had electric cars were people that basically had to make their own electric cars.

No, there were people who played golf.

People who played golf.

Golf carts.

But there’s a few people out there making their own electric cars in their garage.

And then, and if you look at maybe like 10 years ago, you really had to go out of your way to get an electric car.

There was only a few available.

Some of them weren’t really great at being a car.

And you had to go out of your way to do it and there weren’t a whole lot of them sold.

If you look at today, we got in California, over 25% of new cars are plug-in electric vehicles.

We are getting past the early adopters.

We’re starting to get into, really into the mainstream, at least in parts of the US.

Okay, wait, David, just so you know, don’t be so surprised because back to the horses, New York City went from all horses in 1905 to basically all cars in 1920.

You couldn’t give away a horse 15 years later.

And civilization was built literally and figuratively on the backs of horses for thousands of years, and they were gone within 15 years.

That was surely a bigger transition for anybody around at the turn of that century than going from combustion engine to electric cars today.

David, are you concerned, do I get to use that word in this way, are you concerned about people’s range anxiety, about whether they’re going to run out of battery and there’s no place to refill, and then they’re stranded on the road.

They can’t even walk to the nearest station with a can.

A gas station and get a can of gas.

And bring the can of gas back.

Excuse me, do you have a 25 mile long cord?

The issue of like where do you charge?

For most of the people buying an electric car today, it’s pretty simple.

You charge in your driveway or your garage.

Okay, so instead of filling up in the road, you fill up at home.

Yeah, and so that’s part of the thing is that you don’t, if you’re driving, a lot of the cars right now have over 200 mile range.

So for most of your driving, everyday driving, you’re commuting to work or visiting, for me, visiting family in the Bay Area, like it’s not really a question of where do you charge.

I charge in the garage and then if it’s low on range, I plug it in and next morning, it’s full.

You’re good to go.

It’s really simple.

Now we do need those public charging stations so that you can take those longer trips easily or if you don’t have the ability to charge at home.

And so that’s something that is happening right now is building out that charging infrastructure so that more people can use it.

So I’m going to add to this.

When I was growing up and we saw a lot of plays, I grew up in New York City, the playbill always had multiple ads for cars and they always showed people driving on an open road and it said, take a trip today, go, take a drive.

And it’s Sunday, take a drive.

And I just thought that was the natural order of the universe that when you got a car, you just found a place to drive to.

The car wasn’t a utility, it was an expression of your freedom.

And I don’t see that happening anymore.

I don’t, people say, oh, let’s take a drive for 100 miles and look at the scenery and then come back.

I don’t see or maybe it’s still happening.

I don’t see it.

It could be that this range anxiety is a leftover from people who were thinking about taking a 200 mile car trip, but today just wouldn’t do that anymore.

You get on Zoom and talk to people, you know, what are you doing that for?

What’s the need?

So, yeah.

Why are you doing that for?

Cause you gotta be in the car with your family.

Come on.

Oh, is that it?

Okay.

So David, maybe there’s fewer trips that are even necessary.

Well, I think there is the case of like, I mean, look, people buy an electric car and they want to be able to see like, hey, can I get from Oakland to Boston?

You know, can I drive there?

It’s like, you know, are there enough charging space?

Not that they ever did before.

Okay, go on.

Or not that I ever will, right?

If I need to get to Boston, then I’m probably going to go to the airport.

And I don’t want to have to drive for days on end to do that.

But, you know, I think that people want to be able to see that.

And it’s something that, you know, this is a transition that is, you know, we are still on the first steps of this transition.

Exactly.

And we are, there’s federal funding for, in the bipartisan infrastructure law, over 7 billion to build out charging stations in the US.

A lot of the car companies are investing in charging infrastructure to make sure that you can make all of those trips.

Now, it’s going to be a little bit different than a gasoline car.

You might have to do a little bit of like planning or at least see like where the charging stations are, especially right now.

Well, they have apps for that now.

Right, it’s an app.

I have an electric car, it’s an app.

It tells me when I get in the car, the first thing it says is where I can go charge.

Why don’t the traditional convenient marts all have electric charging stations, or do they?

I haven’t noticed that.

The charging stations tend to be in other places.

I mean, there’s different reasons why different charging stations are in different places and it depends on who’s buying the charging station, whether it’s a car company or a for-profit, third-party charging company.

But I think part of it is just that, it is going to take just a slightly different mindset.

And we are people that have, where the norm is the gasoline car and the electric vehicle is the weird thing and I have to do research, I have to figure it out.

Like if we went to a car dealership and said, I’d like to buy a gasoline car, they wouldn’t spend time telling me, well, here’s how you refuel it.

Like, here’s how it happens.

Here’s the map of gas stations for you to use.

If I was maybe not an expert on EVs and going to it, I might have those questions, right?

So it’s a different mindset.

My daughter is 18.

She learned how to drive on electric car.

That is the normal for her.

When she went off to college this fall and there are rental cars on her campus, and I was like, oh my gosh, do you know how to refuel a gasoline car?

No, no, we had to go to a gas station and like, okay, here’s, you take the nozzle out, you put here, here’s how you do it.

And that is just, you know.

Plus you don’t want her to be one of those people who likes the smell of gasoline.

You know, there’s some people, but who are those people?

I don’t know who those people are, but they exist for sure.

I mean, I know for, I mean, also for an 18 year old, like instead of spending $70 at a gas station, charging at home every day, every night is a great deal.

Oh, plus often the electric rates are lower at night.

So it’s very natural to plug in your car overnight.

Yeah, kilowatt hours are much cheaper at night, which is why you got to plug in.

Plug in at night, charge overnight, guys.

Yeah, in any event, it’s going to be cheaper than gasoline.

What is the compatibility among different charging stations with the cars people buy?

Because with all the gas nozzles, they match up, no matter what brand of car it is.

So did we have this issue coming into this brand new marketplace?

Yeah, so most of the chargers at home were the same type.

When we look at chargers for the fast charging, we had essentially three different plugs.

One plug that the Japanese car companies were using, one that the US and the European car companies were using, and then one that Tesla was using.

Now, pretty much all cars and all manufacturers from 2025 and onwards have said they’re going to use the North American charging standard as the one plug.

So right now, there’s still this diversity of plugs, but going forward, that’s all going to standardize to one fast charging plug.

Okay, that’s very hopeful.

And I know we’re still in the early days of this marketplace, but right now, if you compare the price of an electric car to that of an internal combustion, there’s a very big gap there.

So are electric cars a rich people’s game?

And will that ever change?

I mean, as we’re getting more and more models out there, we’re going to see both luxury cars, and we’re going to see more recently priced electric vehicles.

One thing that is going to help is that the federal tax credit is going to make that initial cost of the electric vehicle more competitive with a gasoline vehicle.

Starting in January of 2024, a lot of car companies are going to be able to offer that at the dealership.

So you don’t have to wait for your tax return, you’re just going to get that just as part of that, you know, taking off the sale price of the vehicle.

So this is the federal government basically investing in the stability of its own energy future.

So you foresee in the near future not only tax incentives, but also the overall drop in price, do you foresee that?

Yeah, we’re seeing battery prices come down.

I mean, they’ve dropped dramatically in the last decade.

And I think that’s still going to happen as we start building more batteries.

Have that price, the batteries come down, which makes the price of electric vehicle come down.

The other part of it is that the upfront cost of these electric vehicles is higher, but the cost of recharging these vehicles is much lower than buying gasoline.

So on net, you’re going to be able to have a total cost of ownership that’s less.

But it is important to have those incentives.

And less maintenance and repair, of course.

Less maintenance and repair.

No oil changes for the fully electric vehicles, no spark plugs.

It’s a pretty simple electric motor.

So there’s not really much maintenance.

You still have to change the tires.

But you got to put the windshield wiper fluid in.

But that’s about it.

Yeah.

All right.

So what about, is there still talk of possibly swapping out a battery so that you don’t have to wait the duration of time?

Because not all charging stations are created equal.

It depends on the voltage.

And as I understand it, David, the charging rate goes as the square of the voltage, right?

And so, if I understand that correctly, so you want as high a voltage charging station as possible, and then it goes rapidly.

Maybe in the time it takes you to have a cup of coffee.

But to the extent that those are not available, you can’t on a trip say, I got to sit here for two hours and charge while I twiddle my thumbs.

I would have finished my cup of coffee in 15 minutes.

So do you guys have a response to that on the grid?

Yeah.

So the latest charging stations go up to 350 kilowatts.

And there’s also a part of it that’s dependent on the car.

So some of the cars are built around an 800 volt architecture that can accept the maximum rate of charge.

And so those cars are cars that you can go from, say, 20% charge to 80% charge in less than 20 minutes.

That’s really all you need, right?

That’s all you need.

Yeah.

And that is the case where, hey, if you’ve been driving for two or three hours, it’s not bad to take a 15-minute or 20-minute stop, stretch your legs, get a cup of coffee, et cetera.

And so I think that is part of it, is that as we look into the future, more and more of the cars are going to be capable of doing those faster charges, where it’s going to be a little bit longer than filling up with gasoline.

I don’t know.

When I take road trips with my kids, the gasoline stop is not the one that extends my trip.

It’s the having to stop for the bathroom, having to stop for snacks, then stopping for the bathroom again.

Those are the stops.

And if we’re talking about going 400 miles or something, then you’re probably going to make a stop anyway.

Yeah, maybe too.

And like you said, the fast chargers are amazing.

They charge you, like you said, first of all, you’re never going to zero because the car won’t let you.

The app tells you, hey man, you got to go here and charge.

And secondly, so you’re down around 20%.

You’re going up to 80%, you know, and sometimes even, and it takes about 20, not even 20 minutes.

The last time I did it on a 350 kilowatt charger, it took me 19, 18 minutes exactly.

And I went to 92%, I remember.

And the only reason I stopped is because some guy pulled up to the charging station and he was looking at me like, you dick, I can’t believe you’re at the 350 charging station.

I could see he wanted that charging station because there was only one 350 kilowatt charger.

Okay, this is the future of street fights, is access to the high.

So I saw him about to park and I motioned to him.

I was like, yo, man, I’m going to leave.

And I just stopped.

But at some point, you won’t have that.

I envision a time, and maybe it’s me just being super optimistic, but I envision a time where municipalities will invest in charging stations so instead of parking meters, you’ll plug in, you’ll pay your parking meter and a charging fee, and the city will make money that way.

You know, I could totally see that happen.

Stop trying to give advice for how New York City can get more parking fees out of me.

I know that’s true.

What is wrong with me?

David, we’ve got to sort of land this plane here.

Oh, wait, the show is over?

Okay, so David, can the grid handle 100% electric cars?

The electrical grid, the power grid?

Yeah, it will be able to if we do this right.

That doesn’t sound very encouraging.

It will maybe if we sort of might be able to.

Because be careful what we wish for.

You want everybody to have electric cars, you have electric cars.

Now we have to have brownouts or blackouts because the electric car is definitely drawing more power than my air conditioner did in the summer, right?

When they’re telling me to unplug stuff because the power grid can’t handle it.

So what assurance do I have that on the other side of that equation, on the other side of the plug, the power is going to be there for everybody if everybody switches over.

I mean, that’s a great example because your air conditioner, I mean, you need it when you need it, right?

Like you need it maybe at 4 p.m.

on a summer day.

And you’re not really interested in changing that to using it at 4 a.m.

maybe.

And so that is the thing is that most EVs are going to be parked for over 20 hours a day, maybe 23 hours a day.

And they’re probably going to act, even at home, actively charge for maybe two or three hours, even if you’ve been driving around.

Okay, so it spreads that out.

If we can be smart about when those cars are being charged, like if you only need to charge for two hours, it doesn’t need to be at the same time.

Okay, so I’m making this up, but the power company could then strategically price hour by hour what your fees are, forcing people to respond to save money by charging their cars at different times of day.

Yeah, I just got an email today from Marin County Electric, or Marin Clean Electricity, that had an offer that if you said, okay, if you use their app and say, okay, I need to have my car fully charged by 7 a.m., but you, the power company, get to pick when, they would give you a rebate, because that way they could-

Money back.

They could pick, and the great thing is that that lets you actually get more renewables on the grid, because hey, look, if there’s more wind power, or if it’s during the day, like, you know, it’s 10 a.m.

in the morning, and the air conditioners haven’t kicked on yet, but we have lots of solar power, charge the vehicles then.

So you can sync up renewables and charge cars.

With the source of power that it is, without having to store it, you can just distribute it through the 24-hour cycle.

That’s brilliant.

It’s like obvious, but completely brilliant.

At some point, the grid will be smart enough, won’t it, to actually kind of almost as a collaboration with the homeowner to tell you, hey, you know, or to look at patterns and find for you the best time to do everything.

Yeah, and I think that’s where we need to go, but it’s going to require the car companies, it’s going to require the utilities, the regulators all sort of working together.

I mean, right now, it’s not an issue, but we want to lay the foundation.

So that when we do get all those electric vehicles out there, that this is all worked out.

We’re not trying to figure it out on the back end.

So have we solved this other than just batteries?

Is there a more inventive storage mechanism for daytime solar power?

Or does it have to be used as it gets generated?

I mean, I think the easiest thing is that if we can use it when it’s available, that is the best thing.

And that’s where EVs both in passenger vehicles, also larger vehicles, trucks, school buses are a great example because they only get used usually like twice a day and the rest of the time they could be sitting there being charged.

The other thing that we can do is that if everyone has a big battery in their driveway or garage, is that we could even go one step further.

Instead of just controlling when they charge, we could have them send power back to the grid when there is the peak load.

So that is the other step, is sort of not just controlling when they charge, but can they actually feed power back, or if there is a power outage, can they power a home or even help power a neighborhood.

This all falls under vehicle-to-grid integration, and it is an incredibly important thing that is where we are just starting to sort of figure out the policies to make that happen.

And real quick, is there any plans to have photovoltaic skins on a car so that the car itself becomes a recharging source?

In the daytime.

Or stranded at night.

Yeah.

There are people that have looked into that.

There’s a few models that have looked into doing that.

But in general, it’s hard to get enough…

You don’t have enough area to really recharge the car.

You need more area.

And also, the other thing is you have to be parked somewhere that is…

Sunny…

.

where you can use that.

And it might not necessarily be at the right angle, whereas if you have panels on the ground or on a roof, you can angle them correctly and they’re going to get sun when it’s sunny.

Chuck, we have a StarTalk episode of those guys who had the solar-powered airplane.

Do you remember that?

It was a few years ago.

And that was interesting.

The first transatlantic flight.

Because they can fly above the clouds, of course, and get full air.

And then they talk about if they get high enough by sunset, then they’ll slowly descend over hours and hours and get sort of low but not too low for the sunrise to kick in and pick them up again.

There was an interesting sort of dynamic about that.

But anyway, yeah, and their skin is our solar panels on the airplane.

Because, of course, they have wings.

There’s a lot of surface area there relative to a car, of course.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can make a solar powered car.

It’s been done.

I think they had a race in Australia like decades ago where they did that.

But it involved having like one person laying down in this very flat aerodynamic car.

And so maybe not practical for you.

Not ready for primetime yet.

Guys, we got to close this out.

David, this has been delightfully informative.

And I’m glad to know that you and others of your brethren exist in this world, being, of course, concerned about it.

David, how do we find the Union of Concerned Scientists online?

What’s the website there?

Yeah, we are at www.ucsusa.org.

And does it include, do you collaborate with other countries?

Yeah, most of our work is based in the US, but we definitely have some work in terms of like the international climate.

So, Dr.

Reichmuth, thanks for being on StarTalk.

Oh, thanks for having me.

It’s all right, Chuck, good to have you, man.

Always a pleasure.

All right, this has been StarTalk, a Union of Concerned Scientists edition telling us about the future of an electrified world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you.