Board advised to adopt rules similar to Metrolinx regarding batteries
This article was written by Mahdis Habibinia and was published in the Toronto Star on December 3, 2024.
Gig workers could lose their main source of income, decreasing their autonomy and bargaining power, according to a report on a proposed winter ban on ebikes and scooters on the TTC.
A ban on ebikes and escooters on the TTC would disproportionately affect lowincome individuals and marginalized groups with limited transportation options, according to an equity report published by the transit agency’s chief people and culture officer.
“For lowincome individuals in particular, ebikes are a readily available and affordable form of commuting,” Shakira Naraine wrote in her report, which will be discussed at the TTC board meeting on Tuesday.
“Alternatives such as public transit, manual bicycles or scooters are viewed as less economically viable, and in some cases, less convenient, potentially increasing travel costs and negatively affecting their budgets.”
In October, TTC staff proposed banning lithiumion-powered micro mobility devices from the transit system — including ebikes and escooters — from November until April due to increasing concerns about them catching fire.
The TTC board voted to put the proposed ban on hold until staff determined how such a move would impact gig workers, as well as racialized and lower income riders.
In her report, Naraine suggests rather than a complete ban, the TTC impose “specific restrictions”— similar to Metrolinx’s, which ban ebikes with uncertified batteries but allow those with batteries displaying a UL or CE safety certification.
Such a policy could offer “many benefits” to the TTC, including promoting accessibility, enhancing safety measures, supporting economic vitality and promoting community engagement, Naraine wrote in her report.
TTC board member Coun. Dianne Saxe said she would be moving a motion at Tuesday’s meeting to adopt Naraine’s recommendation to be consistent with Metrolinx.
A blanket ban is “bad for compliance. It’s bad for climate, it’s bad for equity, it’s bad for small businesses,” Saxe said.
Naraine’s report says that a complete ban could have several negative impacts. It could limit access to a “relatively affordable option” of transportation, as well as restrict access to essential services including health care, grocery stores and education.
Gig workers could lose their main source of income, their autonomy and bargaining power, according to Naraine’s report.
This article was written by David Shepardson and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 22, 2024.
A group representing major automakers, including General Motors Co., Toyota Motor Corp. and Volkswagen, urged U.S. president-elect Donald Trump to retain key tax credits for electric-vehicle purchases and take steps to speed deployment of self-driving cars.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation in a previously unreported Nov. 12 letter to Mr. Trump also raised concerns about vehicle emissions rules citing “federal and state emissions regulations (particularly in California and affiliated states) that are out-of-step with current auto market realities and increase costs for consumers.”
The automakers did not specify how they want the rules revised but said they support “reasonable and achievable” emissions regulations. The Trump transition team did not immediately comment.
The letter, signed by the group’s chief executive officer, John Bozzella, said automakers face unfair competition “from heavily subsidized electric vehicles and technologies exported from China” and also noted that China was implementing a regulatory framework to support deployment of self-driving vehicles.
The group also asked Mr. Trump to reconsider rules finalized in April requiring nearly all new cars and trucks by 2029 to have advanced automatic emergency braking systems. The group earlier said the rules are “practically impossible with available technologies.”
Last week, Reuters reported that Mr. Trump’s transition team wants to kill the US$7,500 consumer tax credit for electric-vehicle purchases – a move that would likely slow an already stalling U.S. EV transition.
This week, Reuters reported Mr. Trump’s transition team plans to target federal regulations championed by President Joe Biden that aim to make automobiles more fuel-efficient and incentivize a shift toward EVs.
The move appears aimed at satisfying a Trump campaign promise to “end the EV mandate,” and would mirror a similar move during the first Trump administration to roll back Obama-era vehicle-efficiency rules.
Although no such “EV mandate” exists, the Biden administration regulations would effectively require automakers to shift at least 35 per cent of production to EVs in order to meet 2032 requirements, and encourage a gradual phaseout of the production of vehicles that run on fossil fuels.
The automakers did not specify how they want the rules revised but said they support ‘reasonable and achievable’ emissions regulations.
This article was written by Jeffrey Jones and James Bradshaw, and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 19, 2024.
Northvolt, whose factory in Skelleftea, north Sweden, is pictured in 2022, announced in September that it was cutting its Swedish work force by 1,600 and suspending a number of its expansion projects.
Several Canadian pension funds have sizable financial exposure in the event of a bankruptcy filing by Northvolt AB, the Swedish battery maker that is burning through cash as growth in demand for electric vehicles lags expectations.
Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Investment Management Corp. of Ontario (IMCO), Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System and Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec participated in US$2.3-billion in convertible debt financings for Stockholm-based Northvolt, joining major automakers and financial institutions to support the European battery hope as its future looked bright. OMERS also bought an undisclosed number of Northvolt shares in 2021.
The Financial Times reported on Sunday that Northvolt is considering seeking protection from creditors in the coming days after talks about a rescue package collapsed. The company is still trying to secure short-term financing, but time is getting short, the FT said, quoting unnamed people involved in the negotiations.
Northvolt has suffered this year as EV demand growth slowed and a US$2.15-billion battery order was cancelled.
In recent months, Northvolt has cut a fifth of its staff and shelved many of its expansion plans. Meanwhile, the fate of a $7billion factory planned for Quebec has yet to be decided.
Northvolt said little about its current predicament when contacted by The Globe and Mail on Monday. “Financing negotiations are ongoing,” Northvolt spokesperson Emmanuelle Rouillard-Moreau said in an e-mail. “We are maintaining close communication with our investors and key partners. We will share updates and the outcome of these discussions once decisions have been finalized.”
The terms of Northvolt’s convertible debt – including under what circumstances it would be swapped for equity – have not been disclosed, which makes it hard to gauge where the four Canadian pension funds rank in terms of seniority in the event of a bankruptcy, or how much of their initial investments are at risk of being wiped out. Lenders typically rank ahead of equity owners when a company is restructured.
Northvolt’s ownership group also includes some of the biggest automotive and financial names, such as Volkswagen AG, Bayerische Motoren Werke AG and Goldman Sachs. The latter was said to be leading ill-fated rescue-package talks that were aimed at securing a reported US$300-million.
The total exposure among the Canadian pension funds is murky, making it difficult to glean the precise values of the funds’ investments from public disclosures. The four pensionfund managers participated in a series of debt issues in 2023, including a US$400million investment from IM
CO. CPPIB invested US$55million, while OMERS and BlackRock Inc., which is the world’s largest asset manager, also participated as Northvolt expanded its existing US$1.1-billion convertible debt program to US$2.3billion.
In November, 2023, the Caisse took on US$150-million in convertible debt.
OMERS was an earlier backer of the battery maker and has made three investments, starting with the purchase of an undisclosed stake in a US$2.75-billion private placement of equity alongside a host of other investors, including Swedish pension funds, Goldman Sachs and Volkswagen. OMERS has not disclosed the size of its equity position.
Spokespeople for OMERS, CPPIB, IMCO and the Caisse all declined to comment beyond confirming investments that were publicly announced.
In September, Northvolt announced it was cutting its Swedish work force by 1,600 and suspending a number of its expansion projects. It retreated from its growth strategy as automakers such as General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co., Volvo Car AB and Volkswagen tempered their EV outlooks and spending to deal with high capital costs and some resistance among car buyers, who face sticker shock and still-spotty charging infrastructure. In June, BMW cancelled a US$2.15-billion order for Northvolt battery cells.
The total exposure among the Canadian pension funds is murky, making it difficult to glean the precise values of the funds’ investments from public disclosures.
All of this turmoil has raised questions about the Quebec plant, which has been awarded billions of dollars in loans and production incentives from the federal and Quebec governments. Northvolt has said that it is conducting a strategic review of the facility in Saint-Basile-le-Grand, Que., and results are expected in the coming weeks.
This opinion was written by Vince Beiser and was published in the Globe & Mail on November 18, 2024.
Steve Nelson’s scavenging, in which he extracts valuable metals from discarded items to sell to Vancouver scrapyards, plays an important role in the transition to renewable energy.
The concept is needed to pull off the energy transition, but it’s not a silver-bullet solution
Author of the forthcoming book Power Metal: The Race for the Resources That Will Shape the Future, to be published on Nov. 19, from which this article is adapted
Steve Nelson grabs the lip of the dumpster with his thick, calloused fingers, scrambles nimbly up the side, and drops down into the trash inside. He’s 57, and his many years of living on the streets of Vancouver show in his frazzled grey hair, weathered face, and unruly teeth. But he’s otherwise in great shape, sinewy, strong, and full of good cheer. A quick scrounge turns up a few lengths of electrical wire, some small sheets of aluminum, and a big outdoor light fixture. That’s a good find.
“I can take this apart without a tool and make it into money!” Steve crows about the light fixture. He shows me how to remove a small corner piece of metal and use it as an improvised screwdriver to loosen the casing. “Then you just drop it on a corner, and it’ll crack at the welds,” he explains. “The inside will pop out, and you’ve got yourself the copper core.” He figures that copper from the light plus the aluminum will net him about three bucks and change when he sells this haul to a scrapyard. Could be worse.
To most people, Steve’s work is invisible. He goes places most of us never see, trying to acquire objects others are trying to get rid of. But the metal scavenging he and countless others do every day plays an important role in helping to transition the world from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
Humanity is facing a brutal paradox. We must switch to renewable energy and electric vehicles to stave off the catastrophes of climate change – but in doing so we may create a whole other set of catastrophes. Renewable power has an Achilles heel: it requires staggering quantities of natural resources, especially metals. Building all the electric cars, wind turbines, solar panels, and power lines we’ll need will take billions of tons of copper, lithium, cobalt and other so-called critical metals. To meet the world’s growing hunger for those materials, rainforests in Indonesia are being cut to the ground. Rivers in South America are being poisoned. Children in central Africa are being put to work in mines. Warlords in Myanmar are getting rich. People in many countries are getting killed. And we’ re just getting started. Demand for lithium is expected to increase a hundredfold by 2050. In all of human history, we’ve mined about 700 million tons of copper; we’ll need to mine that amount again in the next 20odd years.
How, then, can we pull off the energy transition without trashing the planet? Perhaps the most popular answer to that question is a single word: recycling! Everyone from environmental organizations to the Canadian and American governments (at least under their current respective leaderships) is calling for more critical metal recycling. Billions of investment dollars are flowing into North American recycling startups. The mining giant Rio Tinto recently bought a US$700-million stake in the Brampton, Ont.based recycler Matalco Inc. Its rival Glencore’s recycling unit is expected to contribute US$1-billion to its earnings by the end of the decade.
The concept seems irresistibly virtuous and simple: When you’ re finished with a product, break it down to the raw materials it was made from and use them to make a new product. In practice, though, things are far more complicated.
Recycling is easier on the planet than extracting fresh raw materials, but it nonetheless entails heavy costs of its own. Metal recycling is a globe-spanning, multibillion-dollar industry. It involves diesel-burning heavy machinery, smoke-belching smelters, and cargo ships hauling millions of tons of cast-off products across the oceans. It devours huge amounts of energy, spews out pollution, and is often carried out on the backs of the world’s poorest people. And it will never supply all the critical metals we need.
Big scrap dealers buy most of their feedstock in bulk – leftovers from construction sites and industrial facilities or junk from demolitions. But that leaves out the countless tons of miscellaneous scrap scattered throughout millions of offices, small businesses, and homes. All those outdated phones and old charging cables cluttering up your junk drawer, to say nothing of the busted microwave in your garage or that rusty barbecue in the backyard, collectively contain enormous amounts of metals.
In developing countries, door-to-door scrap collecting is a significant industry. Across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, millions of people are at work every day, shuffling through piles of what others have deemed worthless and pulling out the materials that in fact have value to all of us. These waste pickers, as they’re often called, gather discarded plastic, cardboard, glass, cloth, and metals, collecting volumes too small for big companies to bother with. They provide a tremendous service by keeping junk out of landfills and reducing the need to extract virgin raw materials of all sorts. They are little noticed, badly paid, and often work in appalling conditions, with no safety equipment, or sometimes even shoes, exposed to all kinds of toxic filth. (Some of them are also children.)
In rich countries like Canada, those cast-off electric gadgets typically sit around unused or get thrown in the trash. That’s where scrappers like Steve Nelson comes in.
After Steve shows me his haul, he clambers out from the dumpster’s knee-deep gumbo of heavy plastic trash bags, bits of broken machinery, and cast-off metal miscellany and crams his finds onto a jerry-rigged trailer attached to his bicycle. There’s probably two pounds of copper inside the light fixture he’d taken apart, Steve estimates. He adds it to the metal detritus already piled up on the trailer, lashing it all down with tattered bungee cords. Cargo secured, Steve fires up the boombox affixed to his handlebars and rolls off to his next stop.
Steve sells his dumpster finds to Capital Salvage, a tiny scrapyard tucked in the middle of a non-descript, light-industrial block on Vancouver’s east side. The yard looks like someone filled it by dragging a Wile E. Coyote magnet through a random city block to pull out every metal bearing object. There are desk chairs, vacuum cleaners, ceiling fans, floor fans, a kid’s scooter, stacks of aluminum siding, a box of rusty saw blades, ice skates, window frames, a spatula. The angry buzz of power saws, the grumbling of a forklift motor, and the clatter of bits of metal getting tossed from one pile to another fills the air.
Capital Salvage, like most businesses that call themselves metal recyclers, doesn’t actually turn old junk into new metal. They are primarily collectors, aggregators – links in a long chain. They process the junk to varying degrees and sort it into piles big enough to sell to other businesses that can take it to the next stage. Places like ABC Recycling, based in a 10-acre lot in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby.
“You name it. We deal with steel distributors, mines, the movie industry, equipment suppliers, waste companies, demolition companies, plumbers, electricians, HVAC centres,” explains Randy Kahlon, vice-president for sales.
The yard itself is like a vast charnel house after the robot Armageddon, strewn with towering piles of twisted, blackened, rusting metal. Humans can be glimpsed here and there atop scurrying forklifts, but most of what’s moving around are enormous machines built to destroy. A machine that looks like a titanic, angry turtle methodically chomps the screeching, groaning steel and aluminum skeleton of a railroad car into pieces. Compressors squash old cars down into lumpy metal pancakes. Cranes wielding four-clawed grapples move snarls of chopped-up rebar from here to there, dropping them with a raucous clamour.
Mr. Kahlon, like just about everyone else in the scrap business, is well aware of the critical-metals boom and is positioning the company to take advantage of it. “The world is going electric, so the world needs more of this stuff, right?” he says. “The demand for recyclers and what we do is only going to intensify.”
Mr. Kahlon’s shop is just another link in the chain. They take in junk, shear or slice or smash it down to manageable sizes, sort it, bale it up, and move it along. Most of ABC’s product gets loaded into containers and shipped overseas to industrial smelters in places like India or China. Only once it reaches those distant places will the scrap be melted down, recast, and U-turned back into the supply chain.
Every ton of metal that gets recycled in this way is a ton that doesn’t have to be dug out of the ground, with all the destruction that entails. But the process isn’t harmless. It generates pollution and climate-changing carbon all along the way. Grinding and shredding up all that scrap throws off particulate matter – metal dust, essentially – that can travel away on a breeze and end up in the lungs of people living nearby. The intense heat involved can also vaporize whatever plastics, paints, sealants, and other cruft are in the scrap, creating more airborne toxins that can infect the water and air of surrounding communities.
The container ships and trucks that move the scrap around, of course, belch out carbon. More is generated by the huge, infernally hot furnaces in which the metal is melted. In China and elsewhere, much of the energy to power those furnaces comes from carbon-spewing coal and natural-gas plants. All told, the carbon emitted per ton of recycled metal is generally less than that of a ton mined from the ground. But it’s far from zero.
On top of all that, recycling is simply inadequate to fill the demand for critical metals. Even if we recycled all the critical metals currently in use around the world, we’d still have to mine more because demand keeps growing. And we’ll never be able to recycle all the metals we use. Some material is always lost in the process. Some is simply ignored by recyclers focusing on the most valuable elements in a given product, such as the cobalt and nickel in batteries. The lithium in those batteries is typically an afterthought; at the moment, the world recycles less than 1 per cent of the lithium it uses. Some metals, like rare earths, are so difficult to recover at scale that we are likely to depend on mining fresh supplies for decades to come.
From the industrialized world to emerging economies, we can and should be recycling more of the critical metals we need for the energy transition.
We should be figuring out cleaner, more efficient ways to do it while making sure the people actually doing the work are reasonably protected and fairly paid. And all of that should happen with the lowest carbon emissions possible.
But we also have to recognize that recycling is not a silver-bullet solution to the critical metal supply conundrum. That means we need to think beyond the question of “How can we increase the supply of critical metals?” We need to think more deeply about the demand implied by that question. We need to consider how we can reduce our hunger for critical metals in the first place.
The best way to do that is to reduce our consumption of the products made with those metals – everything from electronics to cars.
The famous slogan from the 1970s is more relevant than ever: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” The more we do all of those things, the better chance we have of reaching a truly sustainable future.
Automaker lagging on batteryelectric vehicles. So, what will its new electric vehicles be like?
This article was written by Brian Early and was published in the Toronto Star on November 16, 2024.
At Honda’s R & D Centre in Tochigi, Japan, the Saloon Concept’s farout styling hints at the newly minted, allHonda batteryelectric drive system and structural architecture it portends.
Where’ve you been, Honda? Like fellow Japanese automaker Toyota, Honda is late to the mainstream, North American market battery electric vehicle (BEV) game. But now it’s finally making its first solo foray into the mainstream EV market.
Teaming up with another carmaker can help.
A few years ago, Honda partnered with American automaker General Motors to produce EVs in the form of the Honda Prologue and Acura ZDX, which both went on sale early this year.
Unlike these two recent EV crossovers, which cloak GM’s Ultium battery platform and EV systems beneath Honda designed bodywork (and are manufactured in GM plants), the new family of BEVs, known as the “0” (Zero) Series, uses Honda’s own engineering, design and technology and will be manufactured in Honda facilities.
There’s a similarity in Honda announcing its own BEV platform — that is to say, the mechanical and structural gubbins upon which a vehicle is built — within months of the start of sales of the Prologue and ZDX.
It’s a move not without precedent in Honda’s history.
During the 1960s, in the early days of Honda’s entry into automaking, the now established motorbike and small engine manufacturer realized it had to produce an automotive engine that would be capable of meeting challenging future emissions standards.
At the time, it didn’t have a suitable water cooled engine to work with, so it used engines from Nissan and other contemporaries to develop the cylinder head technology that its own, in house designed four cylinder would end up incorporating.
That technology, “CVCC” (Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion), was so effective that the then new Civic that used it could meet the tough 1975 standards without needing a (costly) catalytic converter.
It was a major factor in the Civic’s early success.
But enough history. Doubtless Honda’s engineers learned a few things from their involvement in the Prologue and ZDX, and it has provided the Japanese carmaker with a pair of competitive products to satisfy the growing BEV market in the interim.
Honda executives wouldn’t rule out future joint venture products with GM (or others), but, having stated that the company will introduce a total of seven 0 Series models globally by 2030, from small to large, it would appear unlikely — at least outside of China’s specialized and joint venture filled market.
The first of these all Honda BEVs, a large, scifi looking car called “Saloon” and its SUVish companion, “Space Hub,” were introduced in concept form in early January of this year at Las Vegas’s CES 2024 (the Consumer Electronics Show).
My briefing here at Honda’s R & D Centre in Tochigi involved only the Saloon. The production version is planned to arrive in our market late in 2025 as a 2026 model. Adamantly not an Acura, the asyet unnamed BEV will, instead, be a premium Honda branded flagship.
Honda’s Marysville, Ohio facility seems likely to be the new model’s source.
So what’s special about 0? Honda says that “thin, light and wise” is the engineering and design philosophy behind the new platform, differing from what the company feels are the current industry norms for BEVs of “thick, heavy, but smart.”
Although the 0 isn’t revolutionary in the greater sense of electric vehicle design (even the planned steer by wire is uncommon, but not an industry first), it should be no surprise, that being a Honda, there are several clever new ideas baked in.
A newly patented welding process allows the company to make the steel body lighter and stronger by being able to weld together layers of sheet metal of differing thicknesses and strengths.
The front structure of the vehicle is designed to deform or bend slightly under cornering loads, and this, Honda claims, aids handling and cuts overall weight.
To reduce the underfloor battery pack’s thickness (to benefit interior space and overall vehicle height), Honda uses a 6,000ton, pressure casting machine to produce the aluminum battery housing’s two parts, then friction welds those and its underside cooling channels into a single component. (Many current EV pack housings require time consuming and expensive sub assembly to manufacture.)
The battery packs, of undisclosed capacity, will be produced for North American models in Jeffersonville, Ohio by LH Battery, a new joint venture plant with Korea’s LG Energy Solution.
Honda states that its goal is to minimize battery degradation. This is a major consumer concern, as it results in reduced range and appreciable vehicle value loss over time. Honda wants to cut this to a potentially top of industry capacity loss of less than 10 per cent over 10 years.
I did several laps of a short test track here in one of a pair of development mules. Based on an Accord and CRV, these chimeric prototypes had the Saloon’s chassis, battery, and electric drive systems hidden underneath. Rivetedon charging ports, fender flares, and tacked on instrumentation were all that betrayed the presence of the 0 Series bits inside. (Production 0s will not share bodies or structure with hybrid or combustion models.)
The brief drive revealed an already production quality level of refinement from the dual motor propulsion system, with good composure over the course’s few bumps, likely aided by the 0’s use of air springs. Neither mule had the Saloon’s planned steer by wire system, however.
Acceleration, typically an EV strength, was robust but not startling; it’s certainly superior to even the previous two litre turbo Accord, but, with an expected maximum output of 360 kW (about 480 horsepower) in dual motor models, it’s not in Tesla Plaid territory. Strong regeneration, in which the vehicle captures energy from braking, enabled me to modulate just the accelerator pedal to slow down to parking lot speeds.
While Honda doesn’t see Tesla’s Model S as a specific competitor, executives did admit that buyers might still draw that comparison when the Saloon arrives.
Honda is counting on the 0’s unique style, efficiency, dynamic strengths, and the substantial amount of onboard computing power — the latter is intended to facilitate planned autonomous driving capabilities and owner/passenger personalization and convenience features — to set its 0 models apart from the growing number of competing BEVs.
Will it work? It’s started late, but Honda thinks it has found a recipe for success.
A report by the Carbon Removal Alliance, a non-profit representing the industry, outlined ways to improve monitoring, reporting and verification in the U.S.
This article was written by Isabella O’Malley and was published in the Toronto Star on October 24, 2024.
The unregulated carbon dioxide removal industry is calling on the U.S. government to implement standards and regulations to boost transparency and confidence in the sector that’s been flooded with billions of dollars in federal funding and private investment.
A report Wednesday by the Carbon Removal Alliance, a non-profit representing the industry, outlined recommendations to improve monitoring, reporting and verification. Currently the only regulations in the U.S. are related to safety of these projects. Some of the biggest industry players, including Heirloom and Climeworks, are alliance members.
“I think it’s rare for an industry to call for regulation of itself and I think that is a signal of why this is so important,” said Giana Amador, executive director of the alliance. Amador said monitoring, reporting and verification are like “climate receipts” that confirm the amount of carbon removed as well as how long it can actually be stored underground.
Without federal regulation, she said “it really hurts competition and it forces these companies into sort of a marketing arms race instead of being able to focus their efforts on making sure that there really is a demonstrable climate impact.”
The non-profit defines carbon removal as any solution that captures carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stores it permanently. One of the most popular technologies is direct air capture, which filters air, extracts carbon dioxide and puts it underground.
The Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law have provided around $12 billion (U.S.) for carbon management projects in the U.S. Some of this funding supports the development of four Regional Direct Air Capture Hubs at commercial scale that will capture at least one million tons of carbon dioxide annually.
Some climate scientists say direct air capture is too expensive, far from being scaled and can be used as an excuse by the oil and gas industry to keep polluting.
Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School at Columbia University, said this is the “moral hazard” of direct air capture — removing carbon from the atmosphere could be utilized by the oil and gas industry to continue polluting.
“It does not mean that the underlying technology is not a good thing,” Wagner said.
Direct air capture “decreases emissions, but in the long run also extends the life of any one particular coal plant or gas plant.”
Jonathan Foley, executive director of Project Drawdown, doesn’t consider removal technologies to be a true climate solution.
“I do welcome at least some interventions from the federal government to monitor and verify and evaluate the performance of these proposed carbon removal schemes, because it’s kind of the Wild West out there,” Foley said. “But considering it can cost 10 to 100 times more to try to remove a ton of carbon rather than prevent it, how is that even remotely conscionable to spend public dollars on this kind of stuff ?” he said.
This opinion was written by David Olive and was published in the Toronto Star on October 19, 2024.
The end game is battery electric vehicles, and not just because prices will come down with ever-improving technology and reduced range concerns with expanded charging networks, David Olive writes.
Don’t believe the hype about hybrid gas-electric vehicles. It won’t last. All-electric vehicles are the future.
Worldwide sales of new cars running purely on batteries (battery electric vehicles, or BEVs) outsold plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) by more than two to one last year.
But PHEVs have been closing the gap. In the first seven months of 2024, global PHEV sales jumped by almost 50 per cent year over year, while BEV sales increased by just eight per cent.
During a global economic slowdown, and with high borrowing costs, strong sales for hybrids priced lower than BEVs were to be expected.
And for the many car buyers still worried about range between charging stations, a PHEV with two powertrains, one gas and one electric, keep the vehicle running after its battery-powered engine runs out of juice.
In July, the average price for a new BEV was $74,043 compared with the $65,590 average for all new cars, according to Autotrader, an online marketplace for vehicles.
Ford Motor forecasts that it will lose about $7 billion on its electricvehicle production this year as demand for BEVs has waned.
BEVs cost more because of their much larger and more expensive batteries than PHEVs.
BEVs with about 640 kilometres of range achieve parity with the median range of gas-powered vehicles. A typical PHEV’s small battery provides about 60 km of range.
In fairness to the Western legacy carmakers, China’s BYD, the world’s biggest maker of electric vehicles, had a head start of more than two decades in making BEVs.
So did Tesla, the second-largest maker of all-electric vehicles, which has been developing only BEVs since its inception in 2003.
It wasn’t until the late 2010s that GM, Ford, Volkswagen and other legacy automakers began to commit to electric vehicles.
The legacy automakers have relied on the expedient of outsourcing software and other electric-vehicle components to third-party suppliers. By contrast, Tesla and BYD have kept their supply chains largely in-house.
The result for legacy firms has been delays in new products due to technological challenges not easily solved when you don’t fully control your supply chain.
Several legacy automakers have scaled back their electric-vehicle ambitions this year, including GM, Ford, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo.
But the end game is BEVs, and not just because prices will come down with ever-improving battery technology and reduced range concerns with expanded charging networks.
Prices of BEVs are falling faster than the average for all cars. In July, the average BEV price dropped almost 15 per cent over the previous year, while the decline in the average price for all new cars declined by just 0.7 per cent.
And Canada’s charging network grew by about 30 per cent last year, to 27,181 chargers at 11,077 locations across the country.
Analysis of real-world driving conditions shows that PHEVs consume between 46 per cent and 67 per cent more gasoline than advertised, according to the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a Washington think tank.
And “PHEVs cannot deliver the same climate benefits as BEVs,” the ICCT says.
“No matter the latest headlines, the future of the American car remains fully electric.”
What most threatens future sales growth of PHEVs is government mandates requiring automakers to transition to fully electric vehicles.
Canada is targeting 100 per cent zero-emission light-duty cars and trucks by 2035, with interim targets of at least 20 per cent by 2026 and at least 60 per cent by 2030.
Led by California, the market that most influences global automakers, 17 U.S. states have mandated that only 20 per cent of new-vehicles sales can be PHEVs by 2035. The rest must be all-electric by that time.
And the European Union (EU), like Canada, will ban the sale of all gas-powered vehicles, including hybrids, by 2035.
With that phaseout of PHEVs on the horizon, automakers have incentive to apply almost all their financial and technological resources to making better and more affordable BEVs.
Given the lengthy development cycle for new vehicles, automakers are risking their future the longer they wait to go all-electric.
French automaker Renault isn’t taking that chance, recently announcing plans for new BEVs priced lower than its current models.
The apparent retreat from BEVs is actually a pause.
For example, Volvo isn’t scrapping its plans to go all-electric. Instead, it has pushed back its target for doing so to 2030 from 2025.
Ford has similarly delayed production of electric SUVs at its Oakville assembly plant by two years to 2027.
Finally, governments and automakers have invested so heavily in BEVs that there’s no turning back.
In North America alone, more than $300 billion has been committed to an electric-vehicle supply chain. By 2027, it will be capable of turning out more than six million electric vehicles per year.
That promises to be a good investment, not least for the higher air quality and quieter city streets it will yield.
This article was written by Jack Ewing and was published in the Globe & Mail on October 18, 2024.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra visited a Spring Hill, Tenn., factory this month to show that the company is serious about electric vehicles.
Automaker is keeping its pledge to phase out sales of gas-powered cars in the U.S. by 2035, Mary Barra says
Electric vehicles have had a hard year. Sales have been disappointing. Former U.S. president Donald Trump has regularly disparaged them. And even many environmentally conscious car buyers have been choosing hybrids instead.
Yet the chief executive officer of General Motors Co., Mary Barra, says the company is still committed to doing away with combustion-engine cars in the United States by 2035 – and she may have good reason for her optimism.
GM says it will start making money on battery-powered models by the end of the year – becoming the only U.S. automaker aside from Tesla Inc. to achieve that feat. Sales of GM’s electric vehicles are starting to take off. And the company just introduced a model that sells for less than US$30,000 after a federal tax credit.
GM and other manufacturers have delayed investment in electric-vehicle projects. But in an interview, Ms. Barra rebuffed the notion that the transition from internal combustion has run out of juice. She said GM was determined to uphold its 2021 pledge to phase out sales of gasoline cars by 2035 in the U.S.
“That is the plan we’re still executing,” she said.
Her expression of resolve comes at a critical moment. Without GM, the largest U.S. carmaker, it is unlikely that the country can move away from internal combustion engines and the greenhouse gases they emit.
Tesla has largely driven the growth of electric vehicles. But lately, the company’s sales have slowed, and its CEO, Elon Musk, has sought to focus the company on long-shot plans to build autonomous taxis and humanoid robots while saying little about new consumer models.
Ms. Barra went to Spring Hill, Tenn., south of Nashville, this month to show that GM was serious about electric vehicles and to reassure investors that they could make money on them.
GM has retooled a plant in Spring Hill to produce electric Cadillacs and has built an enormous battery factory nearby. It has invested more than US$4-billion as part of a plan to build electric vehicles in numbers that will drive down sticker prices while increasing profit margins.
The latest GM electric cars and trucks can travel more than 480 kilometres on a charge, and one – the Chevrolet Equinox – lists at US$35,000 before a US$7,500 federal tax break.
In 2022, two years into the pandemic, new electric vehicles were quickly snapped up. That is no longer true, but U.S. sales of such cars and trucks still grew about 11 per cent in the third quarter from a year earlier. Electric vehicles now account for 9 per cent of the new-car market, according to Kelley Blue Book, and some analysts expect them to hit 10 per cent by the end of the year, up from 8 per cent in 2023, as the Equinox and other affordable models reach showrooms.
GM did especially well during the third quarter, registering a 60per-cent increase in electric-vehicle sales largely because of new models such as the Equinox and an electric Chevrolet Blazer. One in five Cadillacs sold in the U.S. from July through September was electric.
Tesla still sells five times as many electric vehicles as GM does. But given the early stage of this new technology, analysts said, Ms. Barra’s main competition is Ford, Hyundai and other established automakers that are competing for the same customers as GM.
“They don’t have to beat Tesla,” said Tom Narayan, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets who follows the auto industry. “They just have to beat everybody else.”
Ms. Barra’s personal commitment to electric vehicles was on display late last year when problems manufacturing a key battery component stalled production.
Earlier in her career, all of it spent at GM, Ms. Barra oversaw all the company’s production machinery. She drew on that expertise, spending “many days,” she said, alongside engineers in a Detroit factory who were trying to fix an assembly line critical to battery manufacturing. Ms. Barra said she wanted to “understand the situation – ask questions and then get them the support they needed.”
Once that problem, which involved packaging battery cells into modules, was solved, GM swiftly increased production at battery factories in Spring Hill and in Warren, Ohio. Both those factories, and a third under construction in Lansing, Mich., are part of a joint venture with LG Energy Solution of South Korea. GM is planning a fourth battery factory, in New Carlisle, Ind., with Samsung Electronics Ltd., another Korean manufacturer.
GM has recruited several senior executives from Silicon Valley for technology expertise. In June, the company hired David Richardson from Apple Inc. to lead software development, an area where most carmakers have struggled. Kurt Kelty, a former high-ranking executive at Tesla and Panasonic Holdings Corp., a big battery supplier to Tesla, joined GM in February as vicepresident in charge of batteries.
GM has also locked in a steady domestic supply of lithium, a metal critical to batteries, by investing in a Nevada lithium mine called Thacker Pass.
Big car companies such as GM have struggled to move as quickly as Tesla, and some industry observers remain skeptical.
The United States, where GM is strongest, accounts for only 11 per cent of global sales of electric vehicles. China, where GM has struggled, accounts for 69 per cent. Even if GM makes gains in EVs in the U.S., “they are going to be leading sales in a market that is still moving slowly,” said Karl Brauer, executive analyst at iSeeCars, a used-car website.
Strong sales of gasoline and diesel vehicles have helped GM ride out fluctuations in electricvehicle demand, Mr. Kelty noted. “Maybe I shouldn’t say that,” he said, “but it’s bringing in a lot of profits that enable us to do some really creative things and really invest in the future.”
The Spring Hill battery plant, with automated assembly lines overseen by workers dressed in grey full-body suits to protect the sensitive machines from contamination, has allowed GM and LG to become one of the biggest makers of batteries in the U.S. That puts the company in a position to reap cost savings that come with mass production.
This article was written by Ana Pereira and was published in the Toronto Star on October 4, 2024.
A worker loads tires at the Environmental 360 Solutions tire recycling plant in Barrie, Ont. The company helps manufacturers, brands, importers and retailers fulfil recycling requirements.
The province’s largest recycler of tires and batteries is asking the Ontario Superior Court to order the government and its recycling regulator to enforce their own laws against giant manufacturers who are failing to meet green obligations.
Environmental 360 Solutions, a producer responsibility organization (PRO) that helps manufacturers, brands, importers and retailers fulfil recycling requirements, says the industry regulator’s “unwillingness” to enforce the law is putting the entire recycling system — and the environment — at risk, according to a notice of application filed in late September.
It maintains the government needs to overhaul management of the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority (RPRA), which oversees Ontario’s recycling laws.
In an emailed statement to the Star, a RPRA spokesperson called the court action “misguided,” adding that “none of E360S’ legal maneuverings will distract us from continuing to enforce the legal requirements set out in Ontario’s regulatory framework for recycling.”
The Ontario Ministry of the Environment, Conservation and Parks said it is reviewing the notice, but refused to comment further as the matter is before the court.
None of the allegations have been proven in court.
But Environmental 360 Solutions is already reducing shifts and laying off employees at its tire recycling plant in Barrie due to a decline in recycling activity in the province, says company vice-president Andrew Horsman. Soon it might have no option but to shut down the facility for good.
For Ontarians, “the real consequence here of this failure to enforce is that not only are we not advancing” on the recycling front, said Horsman, “we’re moving backwards.”
Ontario’s recycling programs have been in turmoil since the Ford government implemented new rules for tires in 2019 and batteries in 2020, making producers of the materials responsible for operating and paying for such programs, and becoming the first province to abandon a government-run oneprogram model for waste management.
Ever since, the biggest producers of tires have fallen short of annual collection targets, according to RPRA data. Producers are required by law to retrieve 85 per cent of the weight of tires they supply to the market, or roughly all tires supplied assuming they become lighter after use. In 2022, the latest year for which RPRA data is available, the collection rate was 81 per cent.
Meanwhile, certain battery producers failed to make “best efforts” to meet their minimum management requirements in 2022, according to the RPRA. In fact, PROs reported retrieving 12 per cent of the supply for single-use batteries and 13 per cent for rechargeable ones, versus the RPRA’s 40 per cent target for both categories.
Under both tires and batteries regulations, producers that don’t meet their targets can purchase credits from those that over-collect and recycle to comply with the law. Environmental 360 Solutions says it generates more credits than its producer clients need. But without enforcement, the recycler says it is facing financial harm because other PROs have no incentive to purchase the extra credits.
“We are collecting tires, collecting batteries, bringing them back to our facilities, processing them, and, under a properly functioning market, we would then sell the surplus activity,” Horsman said.
But now, without the “obligation to make sure recycling happens, nobody’s prepared to pay for those recycling services,” he added.
Most producers of tires and batteries in the province have partnered with two main PROs: eTracks Tire Management Systems, for tires, and Call2Recycle, for batteries. Both companies control the majority of market share for recycling management of those materials.
Call2Recycle declined to comment for this story.
Steve Meldrum, CEO of non-profit eTracks, said the company had routinely purchased credits with Environmental 360 Solutions until 2023. But since January, he said the PROs haven’t been able to agree on a price for the credits.
“We want to do the right thing and buy every credit that’s available,” Meldrum said. “This is the first year that a PRO has gone out … to overcollect and then try and force the sale back.”
Meldrum said Environmental 360 Solutions’ pricing is roughly double of what the other three PROs agreed to charge eTracks.
Horsman, however, said Environmental 360 Solutions’ service costs as the province’s largest PRO and recycler have indeed increased, mainly because it now has to move tires out of province due to declining recycling capacity in Ontario.
In August, eTracks wrote a letter to Environment Minister Andrea Khanjin along with General Motors, Ford, Pirelli, Michelin and others. The letter obtained by the Star urges Minister Khanjin to amend the tire regulation by 2025 to prevent “unintended marketplace behaviour that benefits neither the environment, nor Ontarians.”
The government is currently conducting public consultation as part of the larger process of amending the tires and batteries recycling regulations.
Maury Shnier, founder and president of Mobius PRO, agrees that the regulation as it stands creates a lot of uncertainty for everyone involved and needs to be clearer.
“How it impacts consumers in Ontario is, the intended regulations are meant to create a competitive marketplace. But … the marketplace is not terribly competitive,” he said. “It’s not a real hospitable place to invest.”
This article was written by Jack Ewing and Neal E. Boudette, and was published in the Globe & Mail on October 3, 2024.
Tesla said Wednesday that it delivered 463,000 vehicles from July through September, up from 435,000 a year earlier. Slumping EV sales have prompted some car makers to scale back their investments.
Tesla has posted its first quarterly increase in global sales this year, a possible sign that demand for electric vehicles may be recovering
Automaker has lost market share as rivals increase offerings, but still saw global sales rise 6.4% in the third quarter
Tesla Inc. said Wednesday that its global sales of cars and trucks rose 6.4 per cent in the third quarter, the first quarterly increase the company has reported this year and a sign that demand for electric cars may be recovering as interest rates fall.
The automaker delivered 463,000 vehicles from July through September, up from 435,000 a year earlier, offering hope to investors that the company’s sales have stabilized after falling in the first half of the year.
The sales data were just below the expectations of Wall Street analysts, and Tesla’s share price was down about 3.5 per cent on Wednesday.
Tesla boosted sales in part by offering 2.5-per-cent financing to qualified buyers in the United States, well below the market interest rate. It will be easier for the company, which is led by Elon Musk, to offer cheaper financing after the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by half a percentage point in September, the first of what is expected to be a series of cuts. Central banks in Europe, China and elsewhere have also been lowering rates.
Interest rates determine the size of monthly car payments and are often more important to buyers than sticker prices. That’s why many analysts think car sales in the U.S. in particular could rise as the Fed cuts rates more.
“There is a contingent of folks who are going to say, ‘Now is not the right time to commit $50,000 to a new vehicle,’ ” said Charles Chesbrough, a senior economist at Cox Automotive, a research firm. “They may just decide to wait a few months until after the election, until after the Middle East calms down, until they see if the Fed cuts rates further.”
Tesla’s share of electric-car sales has fallen as rivals such as General Motors Co., Hyundai, Ford Motor Co. and BMW have offered more battery-powered models. But Tesla still accounts for almost half of electric-car sales in the U.S. and sets the tone for the market there and in other countries.
Sales of electric cars, while still growing, have fallen short of expectations and prompted GM, Ford, Volvo and others to scale back or slow down investment in electric-vehicle production. A rebound in Tesla’s sales could signal faster growth of electric models, a pillar of efforts by the Biden administration to fight climate change.
On Tuesday, GM said sales of its electric models in the United States in the third quarter jumped 60 per cent from a year earlier, to more than 32,000. The company’s U.S. sales of all vehicles fell about 2 per cent in the quarter.
On Wednesday, Ford reported a 12-per-cent increase in U.S. electric-vehicle sales in the third quarter, to about 23,500, and a 0.7-per-cent gain in overall car and truck sales.
Tesla still faces significant challenges and questions about its strategy. The company’s sales have recovered in China, the largest car market in the world. But the Chinese auto market is very competitive, and many automakers are losing money or earning meagre profits there.
In Europe, electric-vehicle sales are slumping after Germany slashed subsidies for buyers. Tesla remains reliant on just two cars – the Model Y sport-utility vehicle and the Model 3 sedan – for most of its sales, while rivals such as GM and Hyundai-Kia offer more choices, newer designs and often lower prices.
GM’s bestselling battery-powered model is a new electric version of the Chevrolet Equinox SUV. GM sold more than 9,700 in the third quarter, and this week started selling an entry-level model of that car that starts at US$35,000 before federal and state breaks. The cheapest Tesla Model Y sells for about US$45,000 before tax incentives.
In addition to selling cars that are more expensive, Tesla appears to be struggling because Mr. Musk has alienated many potential buyers with his provocative statements on X, the socialmedia site he owns, and his vocal support of former U.S. president Donald Trump and conservative causes. Centrist and left-leaning consumers are much more likely than conservatives to buy electric cars.
Mr. Musk has staked the future of Tesla on autonomous driving, while saying little about plans for new models.
On Oct. 10, the company plans to unveil a self-driving taxi, but analysts are skeptical that Tesla is as close as Mr. Musk says to developing a vehicle that can navigate without human intervention.
There is speculation that Tesla will also unveil a cheaper passenger car on the same day, expanding the number of people who can afford a Tesla. The company has said it is working on a such a product, but it has not confirmed that it will show the vehicle this month or when it might go on sale.
Tesla boosted sales in part by offering 2.5-per-cent financing to qualified buyers in the United States, well below the market interest rate.
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