An overall assessment of the EVs transition

Electric vehicles have the great potential of increasing the air quality we breath, reducing our oil dependency and boosting economic growth with exciting business opportunities beyond the automotive industry. It will also help the UK to reach agreements of emissions reduction it has committed to.

​Whilst there are a legion of advantages, it seems that they are all highly dependent on how this transition takes place. ​There are severe potential impacts with how we extract, process and recycle lithium, but also with the plethora of upgrades the country will need to invest in to accommodate the transition.

The sustainability of an EV transition therefore, hangs in the balance of how we approach these potential impacts. 

Is this transition sustainable?
We have decided to frame the question differently, and point out some of the issues that will make this unsustainable. 

Not without a strategic upgrade to the distribution network

With exploding complexity, the distribution network takes bulk energy from the transmission network and spreads it in cities and neighborhoods, with a total of 14 licensed Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) in Great Britain. The costs associated with required upgrades, current capacities and capabilities of the infrastructure, are all details protected under non-disclosure agreements between DNOs and sub-contractors, making it extremely difficult to project and quantify any required upgrades. 
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The low voltage network, with its majority existing in underground cables, its potential required upgrades would cause more disruptions to the public, with non-EV customers affected as much. 

Not without mitigation measures set in place for fuel taxation loss

With the government losing approximately £732 per conventional car, per annum, it could be facing a loss of up to £32 billion per year by 2050. 

To recover from this, the government is likely to introduce what we like to call Electric Vehicle Tax Component, that carries enough potential to compromise this shift through a sharp rise in electricity prices. 

​It is vital to this transition, that the government carefully introduces this tax component, without discouraging potential EV users. 

Not without a sustainable approach to how we use lithium

Currently, there is no global-scale recycling process of lithium, even though it powers most of today's electronic age. 

For our aggressive scenario, the lithium demand was quantified up until 2050 to be 227Mt, assuming that no recycling takes place, and a linear 10 year life-span of cars. ​Taking the global lithium reserves into perspective, shows that Great Britain alone could consume ~1.5% of the global reserves in the next three decades.

This could have catastrophic effects, and is key in a sustainable transition of electric vehicles. Not only 100% lithium recycling will need to be scaled to global consumption, but also the processes behind mining and treating lithium will need to be addressed. 

Not without a smart-charging infrastructure

Having millions of electric vehicles charging throughout each day across the country will require massive amounts of electrical energy. Not only the UK will have to install more generation to cope with the ever increasing electrical demand, but also to ensure that the installed capacity can be dispatched instantaneously when and if millions of EVs charge at the same time. 
The approach that appears to be most suitable for tackling this, is through introducing Managed Electric Vehicle Charging (MEVC) to low voltage clusters. That will establish the necessary buffers to the local primary/secondary transformers, but also for the physical limitations of the cabling, to avoid blackouts and other potential disruptions. ​

Not without a low-carbon electricity mixture

A fully electrified automotive industry would be pointless, if the electricity consumed and shifted to the wheels is generated by fossil-fuelled power stations. While this is an exaggeration, the low-carbon intensity of electricity sources is paramount to the success of a sustainable transition. 

While there is no ideal energy mix, it is widely accepted that energy storage will play a significant part in enabling this transition. Interestingly, it might just be that a smart introduction of selected Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) operations is the way forward to ensure a balanced supply and demand.