The Swedish battery study joins that long list of lies. Like a bad penny, it shows up time and time again as in the Bloomberg article.
It really is amazing to see just how far the anti-EV propagandists go in creating fake "studies" which pretend to "prove" that EVs are more polluting than gasmobiles, or at least are no better from an environmental perspective. The lengths they have to go, the absolutely ridiculous assumptions they have to make to get their fake "study" to produce the results they want... well, it goes waaaaaaay beyond mere incompetence. You don't get studies with premise after premise after premise, and figure after figure after figure, all lined up to skew the results
that far in one direction by accident. These are extreme cases of "Figures don't lie, but liars do figure."
I agree with the truism known as Hanlon's Razor:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. But the false premises and fallacious conclusions in these fake studies are very far from being adequately explained by stupidity or incompetence; malice against the EV revolution certainly is at work!
* * * * *
An older, similarly faked study, widely quoted in articles claiming that EVs are "not really clean", is from the NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology). Robert Llewellyn, of "Fully Charged" fame, wrote
a blog debunking the fake "study". Quoting a relevant section of Mr. Llewellyn's blog:
The gist of the Norwegian report was on the total Life Cycle Assessment or LCA of an electric car when compared to a petrol/diesel vehicle.
It seems they might have made one or two teeny weeny error-ettes.
When they calculated the materials that went into making electric motors for cars, they accidentally used a static electric motor (the sort of thing you’d use to drive a large milling machine or industrial lathe) instead of a small, compact motor that would be found in a Nissan Leaf or similar car. Their calculations were for a *1,000 kg* motor, the motor in the Nissan Leaf weighs *53kg.*
As you can imagine, an error of this magnitude could skew the figures rather badly.
So why does it matter?
Well, their entire prognosis rests on the amounts of materials used and the ability to re-cycle those materials efficiently and economically at the end of the car’s life.
A 1,000 kg motor contains 91 kg of copper, copper is expensive and it’s mining and production has, without question, a negative environmental impact. All cars use a lot of copper, the wiring loom, the starter motor etc. Electric cars use a little bit more, that phrase is accurate, they use a little bit more. Not 90kg more.
The report also ‘casually misjudges’ the size, weight and copper content of the frequency inverter, the bit of an electric car that transforms the AC current fed in from the electricity supply, into the DC current stored in the battery.
These units do indeed contain copper but the report happened to measure a large, industrial scale frequency inverter you’d find in a factory tool shop. The factory one contains 36kg of copper, the one in the Nissan Leaf is 6.2 kg, total weight, most of which is the steel box it's housed in.
They then analysed battery chemistry which no EV maker uses, battery capacity that no plug in car uses, then skewed the figures of how much coal is burned to generate the power to charge the non existent batteries in the mythical car.
Essentially, the report is trash from start to finish.
Mr. Llewellyn never gives the name of this fake study, perhaps to avoid giving it more exposure, but I think we should name it so we'll know when we see it cited in anti-EV propaganda. The title is "Comparative Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Conventional and Electric Vehicles", by Troy R. Hawkins, Bhawna Singh, Guillaume Majeau‐Bettez, and Anders Hammer Strømman; first published 04 October 2012.
