The Single Biggest Threat To The Electric Vehicle Boom

Accelerate Kootenays EV charging stations expand along Highway 3, adding DC fast charging and Level 2 plugs to cut range anxiety for electric vehicles in B.C., linking communities like Castlegar, Greenwood, and the Alberta border.

Key Points

A regional network of DC fast and Level 2 chargers along B.C.'s Highway 3 to reduce range anxiety and boost EV adoption.

✅ 13 DC fast chargers plus 40 Level 2 stations across key hubs

✅ 20-minute charging stops reduce range anxiety on Highway 3

✅ Backed by BC Hydro, FortisBC, and regional districts

The Kootenays are B.C.'s electric powerhouse, and as part of B.C.'s EV push the region is making significant advances to put electric cars on the road.

The region's dams generate more than half of the province's electricity needs, but some say residents in the region have not taken to electric cars, for instance.

Trish Dehnel is a spokesperson for Accelerate Kootenays, a multi-million dollar coalition involving the regional districts of East Kootenay, Central Kootenay and Kootenay Boundary, along with a number of corporate partners including Fortis B.C. and BC Hydro.

She says one of the major problems in the region — in addition to the mountainous terrain and winter driving conditions — is "range anxiety."

That's when you're not sure your electric vehicle will be able to make it to your destination without running out of power, she explained.

Now, Accelerate Kootenays is hoping a set of new electric charging stations, part of the B.C. Electric Highway project expanding along Highway 3, will make a difference.

No more 'range anxiety'

The expansion includes 40 Level 2 stations and 13 DC Quick Charging stations, mirroring BC Hydro's expansion across southern B.C. strategically located within the region to give people more opportunities to charge up along their travel routes, Dehnel said.

"We will have DC fast-charging stations in all of the major communities along Highway 3 from Greenwood to the Alberta border. You will be able to stop at a fast-charging station and, thanks to faster EV charging technology, charge your vehicle within 20 minutes," she said.

Castlegar car salesman Terry Klapper — who sells the 2017 Chevy Bolt electric vehicle — says it's a great step for the region as sites like Nelson's new fast-charging station come online.

"I guarantee that you'll be seeing electric cars around the Kootenays," he said.

"The interest the public has shown … [I mean] as soon as people found out we had these Bolts on the lot, we've had people coming in every single day to take a look at them and say when can I finally purchase it."

The charging stations are set to open by the end of next year.

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Photovoltaics (PV) is booming in Poland. According to SolarPower Europe, 2.2 gigawatts (GW) of solar power was installed in the country in 2020 - nearly three times as much as the 823 megawatts (MW) installed in 2019. This places Poland fourth across Europe, behind Germany (4.8 GW added in 2020), the Netherlands (2.8 GW) and Spain (2.6 GW). So all eyes in the industry are on the up-and-coming Polish market. The solar industry will come together at Intersolar Europe Restart 2021, taking place from October 6 to 8 at Messe München. As part of The smarter E Europe Restart 2021, manufacturers, suppliers, distributors and service providers will all present their products and innovations at the world's leading exhibition for the solar industry.

All signs point to continued strong growth. An intermediate, more conservative EU Market Outlook forecast from SolarPower Europe expects the Polish solar market to grow by 35 percent annually, meaning that it will have achieved a PV capacity of 8.3 GW by 2024. "PV in Poland is booming at every level - from private and commercial PV rooftop systems to large free-standing installations," says Dr. Stanislaw Pietruszko, President of the Polish Society for Photovoltaics (PV Poland). According to the PV Poland, the number of registered small-scale systems - those under 50 kilowatts (kW) - with an average capacity of 6.5 kilowatts (kW) grew from 155,000 (992 MW) at the end of 2019 to 457,400 (3 GW) by the end of 2020. These small-scale systems account for 75 percent of all PV capacity installed in Poland. Larger PV projects with a capacity of 4 GW have already been approved for grid connection, further attesting to the forecast growth.

8,000 people employed in the PV industry
Andrzej Kazmierski, Deputy Director of the Department for Low-emission Economy within the Polish Ministry of Economic Development, Labour and Technology, explained in the Intersolar Europe webinar "A Rising Star: PV Market Poland" at the end of March 2021 that the PV market volume in Poland currently amounts to 2.2 billion euros, with 8,000 people employed in the industry. According to Kazmierski, the implementation of the Renewable Energy Directive (RED II) in the EU, intended to promote energy communities and collective prosumers as well as long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs), will be a critical challenge. Renewable energy must be integrated with greater focus into the energy system, and energy management and the grids themselves must be significantly expanded. The government seeks to create a framework for stable market growth as well as to strengthen local value creation.

Government incentive programs in Poland
In addition to drastically reduced PV costs and growing environmental consciousness, the Polish PV market is being advanced by an array of government-funded incentive programs such as My Current (230 million euros) and Clean Air as well as thermo-modernization. The incentive program Agroenergia (50 million euros) is specifically geared toward farmers and offers low-interest loans or direct subsidies for the construction of solar installations with capacities between 50 kW and 1 MW. Incentive programs for net metering have been extended to small and medium enterprises to provide stronger support for prosumers. Solar installations producing less than 50 kW benefit from a lower value-added tax of just eight percent (compared to the typical 23 percent). The acquisition and installation costs can be offset against income, in turn reducing income tax.
Government-funded auctions are also used to finance large-scale facilities, where the government selects operators of systems running on renewable energy who offer the lowest electricity price and funds the construction of their facilities. The winner of an auction back in December was an investment project for the construction of a 200 MW solar park in the Pomeranian Voivodeship.

Companies turn to solar power for self-consumption
Furthermore, Poland is now playing host to larger solar projects that do not rely on subsidies, such as a 64 MW solar farm in Witnica being built on the border to Germany whose electricity will be sold to a cement factory via a multi-year power purchase agreement. A new factory in Konin (Wielkopolska Voivodeship) for battery cathode materials to be used in electric cars will be powered with 100-percent renewable electricity. Plus, large companies are increasingly turning to solar power for self-consumption. For example, a leading manufacturer of metal furniture in Suwalki (Podlaskie Voivodeship) in northeastern Poland has recently started meeting its demand using a 2 MW roof-mounted and free-standing installation on the company premises.

By Tom Green
Senior Climate Policy Advisor
David Suzuki Foundation

Electric vehicles are making inroads in some areas of Canada. But as their numbers grow, will there be enough electrical power for them, and for all the buildings and the industries that are also switching to electricity?

Canada – along with the United States, the European Union and the United Kingdom – is committed to a “net-zero electricity grid by 2035.” This target is consistent with the Paris Agreement’s ambition of staying below 1.5 C of global warming, compared with pre-industrial levels.

This target also gives countries their best chance of energy security, as laid out in landmark reports over the past year from the International Energy Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A new federal regulation in the form of a clean electricity standard is being developed, but will it be stringent enough to set us up for climate success and avoid dead ends?

Canada starts this work from a relatively low emissions-intensity grid, powered largely by hydroelectricity. However, some provinces such as Alberta, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick still have predominantly fossil fuel-powered electricity. Plus, there is a risk of more natural gas generation of electricity in the coming years in most provinces without new federal and provincial regulations.

This means the transition of Canada’s electricity system must solve two problems at once. It must first clean up the existing electricity system, but it must also meet future electricity needs from zero-emissions sources while overall electricity capacity doubles or even triples by 2050.

Canada has enormous potential for renewable generation. Wind, solar and energy storage are proven, affordable technologies that can be produced here in Canada, while avoiding the volatility of global fossil fuel markets.

As wind and solar have become the cheapest forms of electricity generation in history, we’re already seeing foreign governments and utilities ramp up renewable projects at the pace and scale that would be needed here in Canada. In 2020, 280 gigawatts of new capacity was added globally – a 45 per cent increase over the previous year. In Canada, since 2010, annual growth in renewables has so far averaged less than three per cent.

So why aren’t we moving full steam – or electron – ahead? With countries around the world bringing in wind and solar for new generation, why is there so much delay and doubt in Canada?

The modelling team drew on a dataset that accounts for how wind and solar potential varies across the country, through the weeks of the year and the hours of each day. The models provide solutions for the most cost-effective new generation, storage and transmission to add to the grid while ensuring electricity generation meets demand reliably every hour of the year.

The David Suzuki Foundation partnered with the University of Victoria to model the electricity grid of the future.

To better understand future electricity demand, a second modelling team was asked to explore a future when homes and businesses are aggressively electrified; fossil fuel furnaces and boilers are retired and replaced with electric heat pumps; and gasoline and diesel cars are replaced by electric vehicles and public transit. It also dialed up investments in energy efficiency to further reduce the need for energy. These hourly electricity-demand projections were fed back to the models developed at the University of Victoria.

The results? It is possible to meet Canada’s needs for clean electricity reliably and affordably through a focus on expanding wind and solar generation capacity, complemented with new transmission connections between provinces, and other grid improvements.

How is it that such high levels of variable wind and solar can be added to the grid while keeping the lights on 24/7? The model took full advantage of the country’s existing hydroelectric reservoirs, using them as giant batteries, storing water behind the dams when wind and solar generation was high to be used later when renewable generation is low, or when demand is particularly high. The model also invested in more transmission to enable expanded electricity trade between provinces and energy storage in the form of batteries to smooth out the supply of electricity.

Not only is it possible, but the renewable pathway is the safe bet.

There’s no doubt it will take unprecedented effort and scale to transform Canada’s electricity systems. The high electrification pathway would require an 18-fold increase over today’s renewable electricity capacity, deploying an unprecedented amount of new wind, solar and energy storage projects every year from now to 2050. Although the scale seems daunting, countries such as Germany are demonstrating that this pace and scale is possible.

The modelling also showed that small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) are neither necessary nor cost-effective, making them a poor candidate for continued government subsidies. Likewise, we presented pathways with no need for continued fossil fuel generation with carbon capture and storage (CCS) – an expensive technology with a global track record of burning through public funds while allowing fossil fuel use to expand and while capturing a smaller proportion of the smokestack carbon than promised. We believe that Canada should terminate the significant subsidies and supports it is giving to fossil fuel companies and redirect this support to renewable electricity, energy efficiency and energy affordability programming.

The transition to clean electricity would come with new employment for people living in Canada. Building tomorrow’s grid will support more than 75,000 full-time jobs each year in construction, operation and maintenance of wind, solar and transmission facilities alone.

Regardless of the path chosen, all energy projects in Canada take place on unceded Indigenous territories or treaty land. Decolonizing power structures with benefits to Indigenous communities is imperative. Upholding Indigenous rights and title, ensuring ownership opportunities and decision-making and direct support for Indigenous communities are all essential in how this transition takes place.

Wind, solar, storage and smart grid technologies are evolving rapidly, but our understanding of the possibilities they offer for a zero-emissions future appears to be lagging behind reality. As the Institut de L’énergie Trottier observed, decarbonization costs have fallen faster than modellers anticipated.

The shape of tomorrow’s grid will largely depend on policy decisions made today. It’s now up to people living in Canada and their elected representatives to create the right conditions for a renewable revolution.

To avoid a costly dash-to-gas that will strand assets and to secure early emissions reductions, the electricity sector needs to be fully exposed to the carbon price. The federal government’s announcement that it will move forward with a clean electricity standard – requiring net-zero emissions in the electricity sector by 2035 – will help if the standard is stringent.

Federal funding to encourage provinces to expand interprovincial transmission will also move us ahead. At the provincial level, electricity system governance – from utility commission mandates to electricity markets design – needs to be reformed quickly to encourage investments in renewable generation. As fossil fuels are swapped out across the economy, more and more of a household’s total energy bill will come from a local electric utility, so a national energy poverty strategy focused on low-income and equity-seeking households must be a priority.

The payoff from this policy package? Plentiful, reliable, affordable electricity that brings better outcomes for community health and resilience while helping to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

Could it be true? That this government will bring all sales of petrol and diesel cars to an end by 2030? That it will cancel all rail franchises and replace them with a system that might actually work? Could the UK, for the first time since the internal combustion engine was invented, really be contemplating a rational transport policy? Hold your horses.

Before deconstructing it, let’s mark this moment. Both announcements might be a decade or two overdue, but we should bank them as they’re essential steps towards a habitable nation.

We don’t yet know exactly what they mean, as the government has delayed its full transport announcement until later this autumn. But so far, nothing that surrounds these positive proposals makes any sense.

If the government has a vision for transport, it appears to be plug and play. We’ll keep our existing transport system, but change the kinds of vehicles and train companies that use it. But when you have a system in which structural failure is embedded, nothing short of structural change will significantly improve it.

A switch to electric cars will reduce pollution. It won’t eliminate it, as a high proportion of the microscopic particles thrown into the air by cars, which are highly damaging to our health, arise from tyres grating on the surface of the road. Tyre wear is also by far the biggest source of microplastics pouring into our rivers and the sea. And when tyres, regardless of the engine that moves them, come to the end of their lives, we still have no means of properly recycling them.

Cars are an environmental hazard long before they leave the showroom. One estimate suggests that the carbon emissions produced in building each one equate to driving it for 150,000km. The rise in electric vehicle sales has created a rush for minerals such as lithium and copper, with devastating impacts on beautiful places. If the aim is greatly to reduce the number of vehicles on the road, and replace those that remain with battery-operated models, then they will be part of the solution. But if, as a forecast by the National Grid proposes, the current fleet is replaced by 35m electric cars, we’ll simply create another environmental disaster.

Switching power sources does nothing to address the vast amount of space the car demands, which could otherwise be used for greens, parks, playgrounds and homes. It doesn’t stop cars from carving up community and turning streets into thoroughfares and outdoor life into a mortal hazard. Electric vehicles don’t solve congestion, or the extreme lack of physical activity that contributes to our poor health.

So far, the government seems to have no interest in systemic change. It still plans to spend £27bn on building even more roads, presumably to accommodate all those new electric cars. An analysis by Transport for Quality of Life suggests that this road-building will cancel out 80% of the carbon savings from a switch to electric over the next 12 years. But everywhere, even in the government’s feted garden villages and garden towns, new developments are being built around the car.

Rail policy is just as irrational. The construction of HS2, now projected to cost £106bn, has accelerated in the past few months, destroying precious wild places along the way, though its weak business case has almost certainly been destroyed by coronavirus.

If one thing changes permanently as a result of the pandemic, it is likely to be travel. Many people will never return to the office. The great potential of remote technologies, so long untapped, is at last being realised. Having experienced quieter cities with cleaner air, few people wish to return to the filthy past.

Like several of the world’s major cities, our capital is being remodelled in response. The London mayor – recognising that, while fewer passengers can use public transport, a switch to cars would cause gridlock and lethal pollution – has set aside road space for cycling and walking. Greater Manchester hopes to build 1,800 miles of protected pedestrian and bicycle routes.

Cycling to work is described by some doctors as “the miracle pill”, massively reducing the chances of early death: if you want to save the NHS, get on your bike. But support from central government is weak and contradictory, and involves a fraction of the money it is spending on new roads. The major impediment to a cycling revolution is the danger of being hit by a car.

Even a switch to bicycles (including electric bikes and scooters) is only part of the answer. Fundamentally, this is not a vehicle problem but an urban design problem. Or rather, it is an urban design problem created by our favoured vehicle. Cars have made everything bigger and further away. Paris, under its mayor Anne Hidalgo, is seeking to reverse this trend, by creating a “15-minute city”, in which districts that have been treated by transport planners as mere portals to somewhere else become self-sufficient communities – each with their own shops, parks, schools and workplaces, within a 15-minute walk of everyone’s home.

This, I believe, is the radical shift that all towns and cities need. It would transform our sense of belonging, our community life, our health and our prospects of local employment, while greatly reducing pollution, noise and danger. Transport has always been about much more than transport. The way we travel helps to determine the way we live. And at the moment, locked in our metal boxes, we do not live well.

Few people have had the sort of front-row seat to the rise of electric vehicles as JB Straubel.

The softly spoken engineer is often considered the brains behind Tesla: it was Straubel who convinced Elon Musk, over lunch in 2003, that electric vehicles had a future. He then served as chief technology officer for 15 years, designing Tesla’s first batteries, managing construction of its network of charging stations and leading development of the Gigafactory in Nevada. When he departed in 2019, Musk’s biographer Ashlee Vance said Tesla had not only lost a founder, but “a piece of its soul”.

Straubel could have gone on to do anything in Silicon Valley. Instead, he stayed at his ranch in Carson City, Nevada, a town once described by former resident Mark Twain as “a desert, walled in by barren, snow-clad mountains” without a tree in sight.

At first glance it is not the most obvious location for Redwood Materials, a start-up Straubel founded in 2017 with a formidable mission bordering on alchemy: to break down discarded batteries and reconstitute them into a fresh supply of metals needed for new electric vehicles.

His goal is to solve the most glaring problem for electric vehicles. While they are “zero emission” when being driven, the mining, manufacturing and disposal process for batteries could become an environmental disaster for the industry as the technology goes mainstream.

JB Straubel is betting part of his Tesla fortune that Redwood can play an instrumental role in the circular economy
“It’s not sustainable at all today, nor is there really an imminent plan — any disruption happening — to make it sustainable,” Straubel says. “That always grated on me a little bit at Tesla and it became more apparent as we ramped everything up.”

Redwood’s warehouse is the ultimate example of how one person’s trash is another person’s treasure. Each weekday, two to three heavy-duty lorries drop off about 60 tonnes worth of old smartphones, power tools and scooter batteries. Straubel’s team of 130 employees then separates out the metals — including nickel, cobalt and lithium — pulverises them and treats them with chemicals so they can re-enter the supply chain as the building blocks for new lithium-ion batteries.

The metals used in batteries typically originate in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Australia and Chile, dug out of open-pit mines or evaporated from desert ponds. But Straubel believes there is another “massive, untapped” source: the garages of the average American. He estimates there are about 1bn used batteries in US homes, sitting in old laptops and mobile phones — all containing valuable metals.

In the Redwood’s warehouse, Straubel’s team separates out the metals, including nickel, so they can re-enter the supply chain
The process of breaking down these batteries and repurposing them is known as “urban mining”. To do this at scale is a gargantuan task: the amount of battery material in a high-end electric vehicle is roughly 10,000 times that of a smartphone, according to Gene Berdichevsky, chief executive of battery materials start-up Sila Nano. But, he adds, the amount of cobalt used in a car battery is about 30 times less than in a phone battery, per kilowatt hour. “So for every 300 smartphones you collect, you have enough cobalt for an EV battery.”

Redwood is also building a network of industrial partners, including Amazon, electric bus maker Proterra and e-bike maker Specialized, to receive their scrap. It already receives e-waste from, and sends back repurposed materials to, Panasonic, which produces battery cells just 50 miles north at the Tesla Gigafactory.

Straubel is betting part of his Tesla fortune that Redwood can play an instrumental role in the emergence of “the circular economy” — a grand hope born in the 1960s that society can re-engineer the way goods are designed, manufactured and recycled. The concept is being embraced by some of the world’s largest companies including Apple, whose chief executive Tim Cook set an objective “not to have to remove anything from the earth to make the new iPhones” as part of its pledge to be carbon-neutral by 2030.

If the circular economy takes root, today’s status quo will look preposterous to future generations. The biggest source of cobalt at the moment is the DRC, where it is often extracted in both large industrial mines and also dug by hand using basic tools. Then it might be shipped to Finland, home to Europe’s largest cobalt refinery, before heading to China where the majority of the world’s cathode and battery production takes place. From there it can be shipped to the US or Europe, where battery cells are turned into packs, then shipped again to automotive production lines.

All told, the cobalt can travel more than 20,000 miles from the mine to the automaker before a buyer places a “zero emission” sticker on the bumper.

Despite this, independent studies routinely say electric vehicles cause less environmental damage than their combustion engine counterparts. But the scope for improvement is vast: Straubel says electric car emissions can be more than halved if their batteries are continually recycled.

In July, Redwood accelerated its mission, raising more than $700m from investors so it could hire more than 500 people and expand operations. At a valuation of $3.7bn, the company is now the most valuable battery recycling group in North America. This year it expects to process 20,000 tonnes of scrap and it has already recovered enough material to build 45,000 electric vehicle battery packs.

Advocates say a circular economy could create a more sustainable planet and reduce mountains of waste. In 2019 the World Economic Forum estimated that “a circular battery value chain” could account for 30 per cent of the emissions cuts needed to meet the targets set in the Paris accord and “create 10m safe and sustainable jobs around the world” by 2030.

Kristina Church, head of sustainable solutions at Lombard Odier Investment Managers, says transportation is “central” to creating a circular economy, not only because it accounts for a sixth of global CO2 emissions but because it intersects with mining and the energy grid.

“For the world to hit net zero — by 2050 you can’t do it with just resource efficiency, switching to EVs and clean energy, there’s still a gap,” Kunal Sinha, head of copper and electronics recycling at miner Glencore says. “That gap can be closed by driving the circular economy, changing how we consume things, how we reuse things, and how we recycle.

“Recycling plays a role,” he adds. “Not only do you provide extra supply to close the demand gap, but you also close the emissions gap.”

Although niche today, urban mining is set to become mainstream this decade given the broad political support for electric vehicles and policies to address climate change. Jennifer Granholm, US secretary of energy, has called for “a national commitment” to building a domestic supply chain for lithium-based batteries.

It is part of the Biden administration’s goal to reach 100 per cent clean electricity by 2035 and net zero emissions by 2050. Granholm has also said the global market for clean energy technologies will be worth $23tn by the end of this decade and warned that the US risks “bring[ing] a knife to a gunfight” as rival countries, particularly China, step up their investments.

In Europe, regulators emphasise environmental and societal concerns — such as the looming threat of job losses in Germany if carmakers stop producing combustion engines. Meanwhile, Beijing is subsidising the sector to boost sales of electric vehicles by 24 per cent every year for the rest of the decade, according to McKinsey.

This support, however, could have unintended consequences.

A shortage of semiconductors this year demonstrated the vulnerability of the “just-in-time” automotive supply chain, with global losses estimated at more than $110bn. The chip shortage is a harbinger of a much larger disruption that could be caused by bottlenecks for nickel, cobalt and lithium as every carmaker looks to electrify their vehicle portfolio.

Electric car sales last year accounted for just 4 per cent of the global total. That is projected to expand to 34 per cent in 2030 and then swell to 70 per cent a decade later, according to BloombergNEF.

“There is going to be a mass scramble for these materials,” says Paul Anderson, a professor at the University of Birmingham. “Everyone is panicking about how to get their technology on to the market and there is not enough thought [given] to recycling.”

Monica Varman, a clean tech investor at G2 Venture Partners, estimates that demand for battery metals will exceed supply in two to three years, leading to a “crunch” lasting half a decade as the market reacts by redesigning batteries with sustainable materials. Recycled materials could help ease supply concerns, but analysts believe it will only be enough to cover 20 per cent of demand at most over the next decade.

So far, only a handful of start-ups besides Redwood have emerged to tackle the challenge of reconstituting discarded materials. One is Li-Cycle, based in Toronto and founded in 2016, which earlier this year raised more than $600m in a merger with a special purpose acquisition company valuing it at $1.7bn. Li-Cycle has already lined up partnerships with 14 automotive and battery companies, including Ultium, a joint venture between General Motors and LG Chem.

Tim Johnston, Li-Cycle chair, says the group’s plan is to create facilities it calls “spokes” around North America, where it will collect used batteries and transform them into “black mass” — the powder form of lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite. Then it will build larger hubs where it can reprocess more than 95 per cent of the substance into battery-grade material.

Without urban mining at scale, Johnston worries that the coming shortages will be like the 1973 Arab oil embargo, when US petrol prices quadrupled within four months, imposing what the US state department described as “structural challenges to the stability of whole national economies”.

“Oil you can actually turn back on relatively quickly — it doesn’t take that long to develop a well and to start pumping oil,” says Johnston. “But if you look at the timeline that it takes to develop a lithium asset, or a cobalt asset, or a nickel asset, it’s a minimum of five years.

“So not only do you have the potential to have the same sort of implications of the oil embargo,” he adds, “but [the effects] could be prolonged.”

Beyond aiding supply constraints and helping the environment, urban mining could also prove cheaper. A 2018 study on the recycling of gold and copper from discarded TV sets in China found the process was 13 times more economical than virgin mining.

Straubel points out that the concentration of valuable material is considerably higher in existing batteries versus mined materials.

“With rock and ores or brines, you have very low concentrations of these critical materials,” he says. “We’re starting with something that already is quite high concentration and also has all the interesting materials together in the right place. So it’s really a huge leg up over the problem mining has.”

The top-graded lithium found in mines today are just 2 to 2.5 per cent lithium oxide, whereas in urban mining the concentration is four to five times that, adds Li-Cycle’s Johnston.

Still, the process of extracting valuable materials from discarded products is complicated by designs that fail to consider their end of life. “Today, the design parameters are for quick assembly, for cost, for quality, fit and finish,” says Ed Boyd, head of the experience design group at Dell, the computer company. Some products take 20 or 30 minutes to disassemble — so laborious that it becomes impractical.

His team is now investigating ways to “drastically” cut back the number of materials used and make it so products can be taken apart in under a minute. “That’s actually not that hard to do,” he says. “We just haven’t had disassembly as a design parameter before.”

‘Monumental task’
While few dismiss the circular economy out of hand, there are plenty of sceptics who doubt these processes can be scaled up quickly enough to meet near-exponential demand for clean energy technologies in the next decade. “Recycling sounds very sexy,” says Julian Treger, chief executive of mining company Anglo Pacific. “But, ultimately, [it] is like smelting and refining. It’s a value added processing piece which doesn’t generally have enormous margins.”

Brian Menell, the founder of TechMet, a company that invests in mining, processing and recycling of technology metals and is partly owned by the US government, calls it “a monumental task”. “In 10 years’ time a fully optimised developed lithium-ion recycling battery industry will maybe provide 25 per cent of the battery metal requirements for the electric vehicle industry,” he says. “So it will be a contributor, but it’s not a solution.”

The real volume could be created when the industry recycles more electric vehicle batteries. But they last an average of 15 years, so the first wave of batteries will not reach their end of life and become available for recycling for some time. This extended timeline could be enough for technologies to develop, but it also creates risks. G2 Ventures’ Varman says recycling processes being developed now, for today’s batteries, risk being made redundant if chemistries evolve quickly.

Even getting consistent access to discarded car batteries could be a challenge, as older cars are often exported for reuse in developing countries, according to Hans Eric Melin, the founder of consultancy Circular Energy Storage.

Melin found that nearly a fifth of the roughly 400,000 Nissan Leaf electric cars produced by the end of 2018 are now registered in Ukraine, Russia, Jordan, New Zealand and Sri Lanka — places where getting a hold of the batteries at end-of-life is harder.

Berdichevsky of Sila Nano says his aim is to make EV batteries that last 30 years. If that can be accomplished, pent-up demand for recycling will be less onerous and costs will fall, helping to make electric vehicles more affordable. “In the future we’ll replace the car, but not the battery; of that I’m very confident,” he says. “We haven’t even scratched the surface of the battery age, in terms of what we can do with longevity and recycling.”

A boiler owned by Nova Scotia Power on the grounds of the Port Hawkesbury paper plant is burning 35% more woody biomass this year than last. 

The year-to-date figures show 126,810 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity was generated over the first nine months of 2021 compared to 93,934 MWh for the same period in 2020 and 65,891 MWh in 2019. 

The information is contained in monthly fuel cost reports Nova Scotia Power must make to the Utility and Review Board, which regulates how much consumers ultimately pay for electricity.

Burning biomass  — which includes everything from low-grade pulpwood to bark, shavings, and wood chip waste from sawmills — for the purpose of generating electricity is only about 22% efficient. Nova Scotia Power’s boiler at Port Hawkesbury supplies about 3% of the total electricity used in the province. 

Citizens concerned about climate change have for years opposed the government classifying biomass as “renewable energy” because clearcutting, which releases carbon from the ground, remains the dominant form of harvesting on Crown and private land. That’s despite ongoing work to begin implementing 2018 recommendations from Professor Bill Lahey to move toward a more ecological approach. 

In May 2020, after it became obvious renewable hydroelectricity from Muskrat Falls was going to be delayed yet again, the McNeil government passed an Order-in-Council extending until December 2022 the deadline to generate 40% of electricity from renewable sources. 

To help with the shortfall, Nova Scotia Power was told to “maximize” its use of biomass at both the facility it owns in Port Hawkesbury and another one in Brooklyn owned by its parent company, Emera.

In a letter to Nova Scotia Power dated May 15, then-Energy Minister Derek Mombourquette added: “Nova Scotia Power shall also maximize the use of dispatchable renewable electricity from its own facilities, as well as those of renewable electricity power producers in Nova Scotia (excluding COMFIT generation sources).” 

By definition, “dispatchable” excludes wind and hydro sources, which are not available 24/7. Nova Scotia Power claims the only “dispatchable renewable electricity power producer” in the province is Brooklyn Energy, the 35 MW biomass plant near Liverpool. 

The government capped at $7 million a year how much electricity Nova Scotia Power could buy from its affiliate company. Critics of the deal — such as auditors hired by the regulator and the province’s consumer advocate — say electricity generated by Brooklyn is the most expensive power and question why the province would burden ratepayers with its purchase.

The answer became apparent in September 2020 when then-Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Kelliann Dean appeared before the legislature’s standing committee on Natural Resources and Economic Development to praise the Order-in-Council for helping rescue the forestry industry four months after the closure of the Northern Pulp mill. 

“The change to Renewable Energy Standards (May,2020) is enabling Nova Scotia Power to generate more electricity from wood chips and sawmill residuals by operating two biomass plants at capacity until electricity from Muskrat Falls comes onstream,” she said. “We are using all the policy levers at our disposal to support the sector.”

Nova Scotia Power is not required to report to the UARB how much electricity is being produced or how much biomass is being burned at Brooklyn Energy. The company pleads “commercial confidentiality” when asked by The Halifax Examiner. 

Nova Scotia Power does report how much it spends each month to buy power from independent producers — a small group which includes Brooklyn but excludes all wind farms. That dollar amount has also increased over the past year — from $15.9 million for 10 months ending October 2020 compared to $23.3 million for 10 months ending October 2021. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency makes it impossible to know exactly how much of that increase is attributable to purchasing more biomass.

Radio silence
The current Minister of Natural Resources and Renewable Energy ,Tory Rushton, has the authority to reduce the amount of biomass being burned to generate electricity and by extension, the rate of clearcutting.

With a stroke of the pen, the PC government of Tim Houston could issue another Order-in-Council capping the amount of metric tonnes that could be used in the boilers, or, direct Nova Scotia Power to use biomass only when it is the most economical fuel choice. 

But so far, Rushton has not responded to the Halifax Examiner’s question about whether he intends to make any change to stop “maximizing” the use of biomass to produce electricity.

 The Examiner isn’t the only one pushing the Minister for answers to difficult issues. At noon today, Citizens opposed to a controversial clearcut on Crown land near Rocky Point Lake in Digby County will stage a demonstration outside the Department of Natural Resources and Renewable Energy on Hollis Street. The protest led by members of Extinction Rebellion and the Healthy Forest Coalition is to pressure the government to take action to protect the habitat of the mainland moose, an endangered species that ranges overs the Crown land currently being cut by the Westfor consortium.