EV Battery Factory Will Require So Much Energy It Needs A Coal Plant To Power It
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
A $4 billion Panasonic electric vehicle battery factory in De Soto, Kansas, will help satisfy the Biden administration’s efforts to get everyone into an EV.
It also will help extend the life of a coal-fired power plant.
Panasonic broke ground on the facility last year. The Japanese company was slated to receive $6.8 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act, which has been pouring billions into electric vehicles and battery factories as part of its effort to transition America away from fossil fuels.
The Kansas City Star reports that the factory will require between 200 and 250 megawatts of electricity to operate. That’s roughly the amount of power needed for a small city.
In testimony to the Kansas City Corporation Commission, which is the state’s equivalent of the Wyoming Public Service Commission, a representative of Evergy, the utility serving the factory, said that the 4 million-square-foot Panasonic facility creates “near term challenges from a resource adequacy perspective,” according to the newspaper.
As a result, the utility will continue to burn coal at a power plant near Lawrence, Kansas, and it will delay plants to transition units at the plant to natural gas.
And environmentalists are not happy about that.
The situation reflects an ignored fact about EVs — they require enormous amounts of energy to produce.
A 15-pound lithium-ion battery holds about the same amount of energy as a pound of oil. To make that battery requires 7,000 pounds of rock and dirt to get the minerals that go into that battery. The average EV battery weighs around 1,000 pounds.
All of that mining and factory processing produces a lot more carbon dioxide emissions than a gas-powered car, so EVs have to be driven around 50,000 to 60,000 miles before there’s a net reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.
So, as more factories are built in the U.S. to supply EV manufacturers, there will be higher demands on the grid for power.
Emily Arthun, CEO of the American Coal Council, was in Washington, D.C., this week speaking with federal lawmakers and members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Arthun, who lives in Gillette, told Cowboy State Daily that there’s a growing recognition of the need for coal to supply baseload power.
“I met with senators and representatives who understand that we’re going to need coal for far longer than people are talking about,” Arthun said.
The Inflation Reduction Act aims to produce more green energy industries here in America, and Arthun said there’s a growing recognition that these are energy intensive.
“People are starting to understand that energy needs are increasing, and these premature [coal-fired power plant] closures are a liability,” Arthun said.
Rep. Cyrus Western, R-Big Horn, told Cowboy State Daily that many people are unaware of how energy is produced to create a reliable grid.
“Kilowatts don’t just fall out of the sky,” he said.
Besides the energy demand for the industrial capacity in America, there will be more demands placed on the grid to charge all these vehicles.
“That electricity has got to come from somewhere. It’s not going to come from solar farms and wind turbines,” he said.
Western said renewables are a great source of “auxiliary supplemental power,” but without a solid base load to ensure a reliable energy supply, they don’t work. These are realities that some still don’t want to accept.
“This administration wants to put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” he said.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Pardon? did I hear right what’s written? US politics.
Just about sums up the Green bLobby .. If they really were well intentioned, they should be showcasing just how quickly & Efficiently they can do the complete fabrication and production by using ONLY Wind n Solar. Why are they wasting OUR Coal & Oil to produce their delusional jingoistic virtue-signalling follies
The USA could use our coal to make electricity in China but the eco-activists ion the west coast keep blocking coal terminals. I’d rather see the batteries made in the USA but many of the raw materials, particularly for graphite used as battery anodes, come from China. That could be made here but it requires a lot more power.
Just something that cropped up in my Mail this morning : to do with Batteries and IMHO holds true for ALL of them ‘At 10s of kilometres out in the open ocean, it is critical to have the world’s most powerful battery-operated torque wrench. ‘ So what about Cars in the Hinterland? Now these guys are maintaining HERONS at sea …. isn’t there a Power Connection cable somewhere ( for Control, etc) ?
New units alert!
‘That’s roughly the amount of power needed for a small city.’
‘Replacing traditional oil and gas boilers with heat pumps that run on electricity will play a role in combating climate change. No one disputes that.’
An excerpt from the Telegraph in an article on the fines for manufacturers of boilers for failing to sell enough heat pumps in spite of Sushi’s Net Zero u-turn. The rest of the article is good at pointing out how Soviet this is but there is much disputation of if heat pumps will change the weather.
No amount of taxes, regulations, bans, picking winners and losers in the market and dictating what products are allowed will make an iota of difference to whatever Mother Nature decides to do.
>> change the weather
Bearing in mind the utterly pathetic level of intelligence in our rulers and their advisors, I’m only surprised that they didn’t recommend powering the plant from a giga-battery.
There is nothing so stupid but they will say it. Just wait.
When they started giving names to recurrent weather systems in the UK, I thought that they would not, surely, ever be stupid enough to say ‘there are more named storms now than before, because of climate change’; but they did.
They keep saying, with regret, that sometimes the wind fails and the sun doesn’t shine, as if being wise and regretful will somehow change these elementary truths, and make them not true. Over and over, they do it.
They have consistently shown an inability to understand that the electricity to charge a battery must come from somewhere, and that if that somewhere is a gas or coal fired power station, then the exercise is pointless, at least as a way of reducing carbon dioxide (as if that mattered, but that is another discussion).
They have consistently shown an inability to understand that power from intermittent sources needs to be backed up by non-intermittent sources, and that this increases costs enormously, without giving any of the supposed benefits of ‘renewable energy’.
One could go on, of course. There are many other issues, which get regular discussion on this wonderful website.
Most of the problems seem to derive from genuine ignorance. There is also an important degree of devious and malignant manipulation of the arguments, which, playing on the ignorance, has been extraordinarily successful. I did not think the nonsense would go on for so long. It does seem, however, in late 2023, that we are getting some results.
NALOPKT – thank you again.
Concur, our politicians are truly letting the voting majority down, I fear for democracy
The political SPADs are 20 something lefties, no experience, no technical competence but huggings of useless stupidity – these fools should be banned from any fossil fuel usage until they relocate their common sense
Those fools that truly believe climate is affected by human activity and can be controlled by regulating CO2 emissions, then highly inefficient, heavy electricity 24/7 consuming heat pumps are not a solution unless they are powered solely by intermittent renewables that would only power them 10% of the year (and not in winter when needed)
When the Govt sends you billions of taxpayer cash, you don’t care what your stupidity costs, or whether there is a sound economic or technical business case for it, or whether it works – free money will always pervert sensibility
“Go coal” !
There was an article in the Guardian today about the rising costs of insurance for EVs due to the number of added features and the extra cost of repairing them. Some people are now paying at least £1,000 more for insurance than the cost of insuring a similar ICE model. Yet another reason EVs are never going to become widely popular. If even the Guardian are pointing out problems with the costs of EVs you know these problems are serious.