Lakeland Currents.

Your public affairs program for north central Minnesota.

Production funding for Lakeland Currents is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airports.

Serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.org.

Closed captioning for Lakeland Currents is sponsored by Nisswa Tax Service.

Tax preparation for businesses and individuals online at nisswatax.com.

Hello again friends.

I'm Jason Edens your host of Lakeland Currents.

Thanks for joining the conversation today and thanks for your ongoing support of Lakeland Public TV.

The transportation sector is responsible for about a fifth of global carbon emissions and our cars are a big part of that.

Can electric vehicles help us decarbonize transportation?

Are electric vehicles actually cleaner and if so what are the trade-offs?

Here to help us wrestle with these questions is my guest, Jukka Kukkonen.

Jukka is the director of Shift2Electric, a Minnesota-based initiative intended to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.

Jukka, welcome to the program and thanks for making time for our conversation.

Well thank you for having me here Jason.

Absolutely.

Well first of all let's start out with a history lesson.

For those folks who are just becoming familiar with electric vehicles are they actually new?

Well, not that new.

I've driven now almost 10 years with electric cars.

So, we started 2012 in our family.

So it's not a very very new thing.

Nowadays people ask me like is the technology ready or so that we could already start driving EV's?

So, should I still wait?

I was like I've driven already 10 years.

There's no need to wait.

You can start driving.

But isn't it true Jukka that the technology was actually invented quite some time ago?

Well, for sure if you think about the old old times.

Electric drivetrain technology first time was introduced at the same time around when we got the internal combustion engine.

So, it has been around.

The challenge we had in all times that the battery technology was not good enough for us and that's why we are seeing a new coming now.

So just to be clear when you say EVs of course you're referring to electric vehicles.

Yes.

So my next question for you is are they cleaner?

Now sure there aren't any emissions actually at the tailpipe.

There may not be a tailpipe but are they cleaner?

Well, the difference between internal combustion engine and electric cars is the drivetrain and if you think about the biggest piece there is internal combustion engine which we have used for 100 years now.

It's excellent machine but the challenge with that unit is that it's not very efficient and that's because we are trying to transform the energy that is in chemical form in a gallon of gas and move it into transportation mechanical form by using small explosions and if you think about it using small explosions is not the most energy efficient way to do anything.

It might be fun but it's not very efficient.

So that's why internal combustion engines are between 15 to 25 percent efficient in real life.

Whereas, electric motors are between 85 and 95 percent efficient.

So, electric vehicles use just one quarter of energy than internal combustion engines use and look it from differently when anyone starts driving electric they drop 75 percent of their energy consumption overnight and if you're using less energy, you're also producing less pollution.

It's pretty clear from there.

So, the locomotion is more efficient but doesn't it depend a little bit on how we charge our electric vehicles?

Yeah, if you just use the general electricity coming from the grid, we are using, our emissions about one-third of traditional internal combustion emissions.

So, that's where we are with the grid power right now where it is.

Good news is that our grid is getting cleaner all the time.

So, that when electric producers are moving away from coal and other force of I mean other methods like that and they start to use more wind and solar and other things our grid is getting cleaner all the time.

So, our electric cars are actually getting cleaner every day just by virtue of how things are moving.

At the same time, electric vehicles provide us really an opportunity to choose how we can power our driving.

With internal combustion engines we are stuck with oil and right now we understand how bad it is for us.

How big of a price we are paying for our addiction to the oil but with electric cars you get to choose.

You can, you make indeed individual decisions about it.

You can either just buy the normal grid power.

You can ask for a utility company, could you provide me renewable electricity for it or you can even put solar panels on your roof and power your driving that way.

That is real freedom.

So, in the interest of full disclosure, I'm also an EV driver and I charge my vehicle with a dedicated solar array, however, if I were to simply plug it into my utility it would largely be powered on coal because of course some Minnesota utilities still depend heavily on coal.

So, that being the case would that vehicle in a utility that's powered largely by coal be cleaner than an internal combustion engine?

Yes.

It still would be cleaner even if it's fully coal powered but of course we want to be powering it as renewable energy as possible.

So, that's why it's good to see most of the utilities, if not all of them already moving into more renewable energy and that's a great thing.

We don't really have to make any more choices between being cleaner and being more efficient.

We we can beget both.

Well, let's talk a little bit about Lithium.

Lithium, it's my understanding, you can please correct me if I'm mistaken, but it's my understanding that's the dominant form of battery storage in EVs.

Is that correct first of all?

Why it's a one of the most important components in a cathode which is the main piece of the electric or at the batteries, lithium-ion batteries.

But of course it's not the biggest portion of the battery.

What's the biggest portion of the battery?

Battery is actually the biggest materials that you use, there are Copper and Aluminum.

Those are by far bigger portions of the battery because they actually form the cathode anothe as a current collectors.

Lithium is actually just the main component in a tiny coating that goes on top of those collectors.

That's where that comes from but they're called Lithium-ion batteries because that is the main component in that cathode material.

So, Lithium is essential to the battery, to motion.

Yes.

So it's my understanding that the upper bound of the estimate of Lithium on earth is about 90 million tons.

Is that enough to facilitate the transition to electric transportation?

Right now I haven't heard anyone really saying that Lithium would be a limitation.

In the long run, of course, the production has to be increased right now, so that's happening all the time.

But Lithium can be found in so many different ways.

There's Lithium is pretty much everywhere.

There's like, give you an example.

There's a geothermal system that in for example in California in where they are using geothermal.

So, they are pumping water through the lower levels of ground and getting warm heat from that and at the same time there's actually a small portion of Lithium coming out from that one and they could have separated it already but they didn't have any, they didn't value it, wasn't high enough.

Now it starts to be at a level where they're thinking well we maybe we should separate the Lithium out of this one before we send it back to the crust again.

So, there are a ton of different ways we can produce it and more and more are coming up, so I'm not really concerned about the Lithium availability in the future.

So, right now there's no talk of peak Lithium or anything along those lines?

Not really and if we think about it we can recycle all of these batteries.

We're not losing any of that Lithium when it's put once in a batteries.

When those batteries are done then it can be recycled and you can reuse the materials from that.

So, it's something that is very clearly coming back to our use.

Our biggest challenge in that level is not so much of the car batteries because their longevity is long, it's more of these cell phones which are so small that there's no really a good second life usage for them.

So, what we should do right now is for laptops and cell phones and all of the other ones, we should figure out how we can best recycle these because there's excellent source of materials for new batteries and the challenges right now many of them are still staying in people's houses even after they are not used anymore.

So, it could be recycled but it's actually not being recycled because the global recycling rate of Lithium is only about five or six percent right now.

Isn't that correct?

I don't know exact numbers of that but as I said the biggest thing again is that Lithium is used in these babies and if you think about your home or if people think about their own home, you can probably find a couple of used of these still in our home because you're not like I don't know what to do with this.

And that's where the recycling problem is.

Recycling problem is not with the electric car batteries because those are so big and they are so valuable that there's no question, that they will be first of all getting reused and then recycled later.

But that'll happen 30 years from now.

So, there's no question about whether or not Lithium will be recycled from vehicles?

I'm hearing you say I can say that for confidently.

We will have really high percentage of that because if you think about the electric vehicle batteries right now, we are seeing that first of all EV batteries have eight years and hundred thousand mile warranty on a car and we are right now seeing that we're expecting them to last 12 to 15 years in the use.

No issues with that.

At that point they have, their capacity has reduced so maybe they have only 70 percent of the capacity left.

But even in the smallest electric vehicle batteries like this old Nissan Leaf batteries that have 24 kilowatt hours of battery capacity.

At that point they might have only 18 kilowatt hours of capacity.

Well, that 18 kilowatt hours right now if you buy home storage batteries, cost people over $10,000.

So, that tells how valuable that battery is still when it's taken out of the car and BMW for example had a system where they could just take old electric vehicle battery, bolt it to the wall, connect it into an inverter and you have a home storage battery right there or you can just chain more of those together, put them in a bigger container and make a grid storage system from it.

Interesting.

That's how they will get a second life and because they are, it's much easier for them in a usage when they are not in that stationary storage compared to what they were used in cars.

They can easily get another 15 years life out of them.

So, that's why I'm saying it will be 30 years before you really need to recycle those and again they are extremely valuable materials in them.

They will definitely get recycled and there's a lot of recycling happening already in battery size electric vehicle batteries because for example if the manufacturers build some batteries and there are some portion of that that they're not using a car stick it goes into recycling and the recycling facilities say that it's much purer material that they can get out of those than what they would get from from virgin materials.

So, definitely they will be used for that.

So, it's my understanding that about eighty percent of the world's Lithium-ion batteries are made in China.

Why is it, in your opinion that the United States hasn't developed the capacity to manufacture more Lithium-ion batteries to meet this need and to meet our climate commitments?

Well, it's kind of, there wasn't really a foresight in many way in Minnesota or in the US when it came to this.

Well a little bit late in the game, in some ways, not too late, we still can do these things but it was for a longest time it was like "Well I don't know if this is going to happen, we'll see" and therefore Chinese were seeing like hey this is happening and we're gonna take care of this one if no one else will and right now people other elsewhere are realizing that that is the case.

At the same time I don't know if it's any more 80 percent.

It probably is lower and it gets lower all the time.

So, that's the good news.

There's ton of infrastructure development right now happening for battery manufacturing both in Europe and in the US.

So, this will level out over the years here but we were just not the first movers in the game.

Let's put it that way.

Sure.

Well, let's talk a little bit about the charging infrastructure.

Of course there's been a recent commitment to expanding the charging infrastructure across the United States but I had a close personal friend recently who decided not to buy an electric vehicle because he was concerned about driving out west and not being able to recharge his vehicle.

Is it possible today Jukka to drive from Minnesota to let's say Seattle and charge an electric vehicle along the way?

There's no problem with that.

Of course it depends a little bit what kind of car you're driving.

If you get 2013 Nissan Leaf that we have in our garage there that gets 73 miles of range, that's not your ticket to Seattle necessarily.

But if you get a new vehicle EVs because in average range for new EVs last year was over 250 miles.

So, it's totally different discussion nowadays when it comes to range and charging infrastructure has developed very fast in recent years and will continue to develop.

Tesla of course has been leading the way with this one.

They have built a very robust supercharging network that I for example used that first time, what is it now eight years ago in 2014.

We drove the first time from here to California by using it.

No issues.

That was the first time using it.

But, other manufacturers are now getting better infrastructure in there because there's a number of different manufacturers that are building networks in the US and of course federal government has made this a priority too.

In a recent infrastructure bill they dedicated $5,000,000 specifically to the public charging and and especially the corridor charging on highways and that money is starting to flow later this year and it will build a lot of charging structure in the US.

A kind of, they are preparing so that the electric vehicle sales is expected to be about 50 percent of new vehicle sales in 2030.

So, we have to have the charging instruction in place to be ready for that.

The charging infrastructure or I should say, the ability to drive long distances is a function of the make and model because each make and model has its own range.

Is that correct?

Well, in that way, we are starting to get in a level where 200 to 300 is where most of the cars come out.

There are some models right now like Lucid Air, that one reporter just test drove one of those 70 miles per hour in highway speeds and he drove almost eight hours with it.

He had to stop for bathroom breaks and get food but he didn't charge it.

So, that just tells you, you can drive pretty far.

But I think most of the people will be driving about I mean two to three hours and then they plug in for 20 to 40 minutes and then continue.

That's how you do long distance trips and it's actually very nice way to travel.

I've done it before and I enjoy it a lot and it will be very similar for for new vehicles that come with the bigger battery and with the highest charging rates.

One thing that we have to remember though about charging is that most of the charging happens at home.

Public charging is only a small portion of that because our homes are the most convenient and most affordable way to power your driving.

Surveys say that about over 85 percent of the charging happens at home.

If there's workplace charging, people might use that.

Might be like ten percent of the charging and public charging might be only five percent of our overall charging portion.

It's not used as commonly as people think because it's so convenient to charge the car at home.

My wife, for example, has driven over nine years with electric cars.

She has never used a public charging station.

Interesting.

I use it only when I do long distance trips.

This week I went to Duluth.

So, I drove to Duluth, plugged it in there, used it to charging there before driving home.

Couple weeks ago I went to or last month I went into St.

Cloud to do an event there and there I just drove to St.

Cloud and did my presentation there, drove back.

I didn't use even public charging station for that.

It was all home charging.

So, that just kind of kind of gives an idea.

People are not using public charging as much as they initially might think.

So, does public charging mean free charging?

Not necessarily.

It depends on who owns the station.

They get to choose what they are charging for, what you have to pay for it so to say.

Usually, if you use the corridor charging, so these high-powered DC fast charging stations for a long distance trip, way to stop for a short period of time and continue, those definitely you have to pay for for the charging there and you have to pay a little premium over your home charging rates because those are pretty expensive equipment.

So, that's understandable but for example if I drive long distances, I try to stay in hotels which provide me charging and that might be free for me or they might ask me to pay $5.00 for that and I'm fine with that.

It's not that big of an issue because driving electric cars is so much cheaper than driving internal combustion engine.

So, there's a huge difference in that way.

So, much cheaper.

Interesting.

I want to ask you about that in a moment but I have one more question about the infrastructure.

Is it agnostic if you will?

So, you've already mentioned a whole bunch of makes and models.

You've mentioned Nissan and Tesla and BMW I believe.

If I'm traveling across the country is the charging infrastructure that I'll encounter, will it work for the vehicle that I have or again does it depend on the make and model?

Right now we have two charging infrastructures really in place.

One for Tesla, their supercharging network.

When we talk about the DC fast charging and then others are using CCS combo.

There was a third Japanese standard that was called Chademo that is still kind of used but not much.

That's gonna be kind of like legacy.

We are right now moving into the CCS combo.

That is the SAE standard.

So, that's a standardized nice thing and it might be in the future that even Tesla will start to move to this because in Europe they have already done it.

They are just using the same standards as everybody else is.

So, that's what we are seeing right now with the connectors.

Well, since you've mentioned Europe, which country on the planet or which world region rather has the highest percentage of EV users?

Well, right now I don't know if I have exact numbers of the proportions in that way but what we are seeing right now is that market is growing really fast in Europe and that's because in Europe they tied in the emission standards a couple years ago so that manufacturers actually had to bring EVs into the market to be able to sell vehicles there.

They had to?

Well, it was hard for them to build you know efficient enough internal combustion engines that they could meet the standards.

I See.

So, that's why the best way for them to reach the standards to meet the standards was to bring EVs into the market in bigger numbers and at that time they were still talking like I don't know if there's enough demand for these EVs or if the infrastructure is there and all of that things.

When they actually started bringing the vehicles in the market, the market just took off right away boom and the growth there is just pretty nutty right now.

So, we are kind of left a little bit behind with this one because we don't have the same kind of emission standards in place in the US.

So, other manufacturers are not providing us the latest and greatest technology in bigger numbers.

We get much smaller number of vehicles and that's the challenge right now is that we have a ton of demand but the vehicle availability is the biggest challenge.

If we look at the year we are right now last year we were 2.1 percent of the order.

The year before the EV market was 2.1 percent of the market here in the US.

Last year it was 4.1 percent of the market which is a good growth, yes, but at the same time if you look at the Europe what has happened, what is happening there I'll take a comparison to my country of origin, Finland which is the same well it's one-third bigger than than Minnesota.

So, think about Minnesota and then add one-third on top of the Minnesota from Canada, there you can borrow a little land from them too for this experiment here and then it has the same number of people.

So, it's actually more sparsely populated than what Minnesota is and they have more metro areas across the country.

So, people actually drive long distances in Finland and Finland used to be in the same two to four percent region of EV sales in 2017.

So, that was that.

Last year, EV sales were already thirty percent of the market and in December, 44 percent of the market was electrics.

So, that's 44 percent of new sales right?

Yes.

Okay.

So, that's how fast the change can happen when we start to get the cars here.

So, it's really rapid movement.

Sweden for example is over 50 percent already market share.

Market share in Norway is over 90 percent.

Last month in Norway just one model, I think their top selling electric vehicle was Audi Q e-tron.

That sold one and a half times more than all gas and diesel vehicles combined sold in Norway that month.

That's pretty impressive but as I said this is where we are going.

When people get an opportunity to drive electric cars they realize that these are actually better cars.

You mentioned something about affordability and I wanted to ask you about that.

How is it that an EV is more affordable as you say?

It comes back to the first thing where we started is, if you use just a quarter of energy for your driving, you're definitely going to be, first of all producing less emissions and second of all it's going to cost you less and rough calculation that I usually use for people is, if people drive about 1,000 miles a month and their electric car in general gets about three miles per kilowatt hour, they use about 333 kilowatt hours that month and if they pay for a regular flat rate from a utility company which is about 12 cents per kilowatt hour, their monthly cost for driving is about forty dollars and then if they take an advantage of EV rate because utilities want to incentivize people to charge their cars overnight which works well for people and at that time it's usually like half off the pricing.

So, if you pay them seven cents per kilowatt hour after taxes then your monthly driving costs are $23 for your driving and you make a comparison then how much you pay for this cell phone coverage every month and you realize that your driving doesn't cost you anything.

So, because of the operating costs, the reduced operating cost, it's more affordable but of course there is still the upfront cost of purchasing the vehicle.

If you look at right now on many vehicles and do a really apples to apples comparison, there isn't that big difference anymore because the battery prices have come down over the years.

That's why we have a longer range, bigger batteries in these cars.

At the same time, they can also be priced comparable to internal combustion engine vehicles and I've done comparisons for some of the vehicles and they actually turn out to be cheaper to buy an EV than comparable internal combustion engine vehicle.

The challenge there is that it can be a bit hard for the consumer to do very good apples to apples comparison because usually electric vehicles have quite a many options.

They are very well equipped in many levels and if you look at just the cheapest internal combustion anything comparable car, you're like no there's a $10,000 difference here.

Well, yes but it's not the same car.

Then when you start to add the same equipment, so you have the same capabilities in the car, you realize that oh boy this might be actually very close or similar pricing and then you take into account that you get tax credit for it and more for most cars it's $7,500.

You realize it's much cheaper to even purchase the electric car.

If you can take advantage of the tax credit to be fair.

But if you can't take advantage of the tax credit outright, you can lease the car and then leasing company will actually take the tax credit and count that towards it.

So, you will get the lower leasing price for it which is not a bad way.

I would not recommend leasing for traditional cars usually.

But with electric cars I say it's usually not a bad idea.

So, make sure that you take that into account too and consider that as an option.

Well, Jukka, unfortunately we only have time for about one more question.

I was wondering if you could briefly explain the role of both Nickel and Cobalt in the batteries and where they come from.

Nickel and Cobalt are the same way.

They are cathode materials right just like Lithium is.

So, they are one piece of that.

And more and more resources are coming up right now again same way as Lithium.

They have been figuring out how to find these more and more of those that's coming up and then some of the manufacturers are moving away for example from Cobalt.

There are chemistries like Lithium-ion Phosphate batteries which don't even use that.

So, it depends on what kind of batteries they want to make.

That might be the perfect solution for it and we are seeing battery manufacturers and other manufacturers looking very closely into this and figuring out what's the best and the most sustainable way to build the batteries for us in the future.

Well, I appreciate that Jukka.

Thank you so much for what you do and on behalf of advancing this technology and thank you for your time today.

Well, thank you very much.

And thank all of you for joining me once again.

I'm Jason Edens your host of Lakeland Currents.

You can continue the conversation on Twitter @currentspbs.

Be kind and be well.

See you next week.