Also, if you really want to be powered by the grid consider a PHEV with a smallish battery. Or maybe wait a few years and get a used Volt, or a few more and a Leaf that has lost enough of its capacity as to be not of suffcicient utility to its current owner but whose remaining range is more than enough for yours.
Yes, but if the OP waits a few years to get a Volt or a Leaf, the kid will be out of the car seat, which appeared to be the big problem with using Zipcars.
Even when you consider the transmission losses, and even considering that electricity mostly comes from coal rather than gasoline, an electric car still ends up using less total energy, and producing less total CO[sub]2[/sub], than a gasoline car. Basically, the losses in burning fuel and converting heat into motion dwarf the losses in any other stage of either process, and a power plant can convert heat into motion significantly more efficiently than your car engine can (mostly because they run at higher temperatures).
Well, yes, the ethanol itself is produced domestically, but that doesn’t mean it’s doing anything to make us energy independent. It takes energy to drive the tractors to farm the corn (or whatever), and it takes energy to distill and otherwise process the alcohol, and a lot of that energy comes from the same foreign oil that the ethanol is supposed to be replacing. It’s hard to disentangle exactly what the energy ratio is for ethanol, but it’s telling that there aren’t any ethanol-production facilities that run entirely on their own product, without any other fuel or external electricity going in (you’d think at least one company would do that if they could, just as a proof of concept).
I don’t live in the inner city either, and I insure two cars <7 years old for $550/yr. (edit to add, with $100k/$300k limits and full comp/collision)
I did work for an auto insurance company though.
Insurance costs vary greatly. I don’t know anything about the OPs history, but not having insurance right now is one of the things that really kills your rate (question usually phrased “how long have you been continuously insured ?”).
We didn’t rate in Canada, But for say, Chicago, where we did rate, if you added that to bad credit or an accident in the past 3 years you could easily have exceeded 2k/year on a single new econobox. (edit to add, with more than state minimum coverage limits)
Ontario does have a pretty good incentive set up for the smallish battery C-Max Energi, $5808 off the purchase price, and for the smaller battery yet plug-in Prius, $5000 off.
Don’t want to start a long threadjack but if someone was in the situation of no car/no insurance (duh) and then they purchased a car, if they just got state minimum liability coverage for whatever the shortest contract time is, would that rescue them from this pitfall when they were shopping around later? Or does the type of previous insurance also get considered?
If you do go with either of those be aware that advertised all EV range will not met during much the year in Toronto (range goes down in the cold and the heater/defroster draws a lot of power). But still, most of your miles will be grid derived and the Prius in particular gets excellent mileage on gas as well. And little environmental impact from production of the relatively small battery (especially in the case of the plug-in Prius, only 4.4 kWh, roughly 1/6 th the size of the Leaf’s and not much more than 1/4 of the Volt’s).
power plants don’t usually store electricity so it’s not a direct conversion of coal. I think they have some west coast pumped-storage systems that use off-peak capacity to pump water to a higher elevation for later hydroelectric use.
Typical line losses are only around 7% - geography plays a role - it can be anywhere from about 3 to 10.
Most large fossil plants are also much more efficient, with cars coming in around 25% and steam turbines over 40%. Modern combined cycle plants are upwards of 60% efficient.
There are also much better environmental controls on modern steam plants - with SCRs and FGDs removing NOX and SO2, respectively.
Cool, I want the one with the tail gunner. That will be very handy during the zombie apocalypse.
Magiver, huh? The only storage being mentioned up til now is in the car.
Chronos was merely explaining that even coal power plants and elctric vehicles use less energy and produce less CO2 to move a car a certain distance than does the process of burning gasoline in a typical ICE because converting gasoline to motive power in an ICE is comparatively inefficient.
Now comparing to the best hybrids is another story. This is a pretty good resource. Per that analysis a coal plant powering a car with electricity is comparable to a vehicle that gets 30 mpg. The best hybrids can beat that easily. Natural gas is comparable to a car that gets 54 mpg. A bit better than the Prius is rated at. Nuclear and hydro as source, OTOH, are equal to cars that get 2000 and 5800 mpg respectively. Using 2010 data that meant that “[n]early half (45 percent) of Americans live in BEST regions—where an EV has lower global warming emissions than a 50 mpg gasoline-powered vehicle, topping even the best gasoline hybrids on the market” and another “38 percent of Americans live … where an electric vehicle has the equivalent global warming emissions of a 41 to 50 mpg gasoline vehicle, similar to the best gasoline hybrids available today.” Map detaling regions in the report. (I know I’ve linked you to this and other similar reports before and pointed out before how the study you point out is the outlier and why.) Note also that while 2010 is recent much has changed over these past two years in terms of power generation with many coal plants shuttering and much new natural gas generation taking their place.
Now in Ontario, where our op is located, only 7% of power generation comes from coal. 55% is from nuclear, 25% from hydro, 2% from wind. Natural gas more than coal, at 10%. A pretty impressive mix. So again, while a pure EV makes no sense for him, but he can potentially meet his ambition with something like a plug-in Prius. Worth it in gas savings with his usage … no.
a coal plant doesn’t produce the power consumed. It produces more than the power consumed. It’s wasted energy and storing it in the form of kinetic energy allows for a more efficient operation.
But electric vehicles produce more co2 than a conventional hybrid if that is based predominately of coal generated electricity. We went over this before.
And I posted a caveat of the requirements needed for a pure electric to best a hybrid in co2 production which the Ontario area apparently meets.
Another idea. Get a small, cheap, used, high MPG gas/natural gas powered car.
Figure out how many giga ounces of CO2 it spews into the air per mile driven. Then find one of those “give us money and we will plant and grow whatever wherever to sequester atmospheric CO2” places. If its a legit operation you might even be helping to employ some needy person halfway around the world to do that job as a bonus.
Pay to have your share of CO2 taken outa the air. Might be the most practical and cost effective solution.
Coal power plants only “produce more than the power consumed” in the sense that they produce waste heat. There are strict thermodynamic limits on the amount of waste heat produced, and most power plants are already pretty close to those limits, so you can’t usefully store any of that wasted energy.
Power plants do have wasted capacity, which can be substantial, and which can be helped by having some way of storing energy. Basically, you need to make the plant big enough to be able to supply all of the demand at peak usage (usually, during the day when it’s hot enough to require air conditioning), but demand isn’t always that high. When people aren’t watching TV and lighting up offices and running the AC and so on, the power plant is producing less power (and, accordingly, consuming less fuel), but it could still be producing its peak amount, if the demand were there.
But this has nothing to do with discussions of efficiency or emissions of cars, since when the plant is producing less power, it’s also consuming less coal and producing less carbon dioxide.
there is no way to precisely match production to consumption. the energy needed to deliver a given kilowatt fluctuates based on the different types of power plants brought on line during the day. But starting with a base-load power plant it’s going to have a coal injector running at X lbs per hour while consumption varies. At some point less efficient plants kick in for peak consumption. It’s possible to run the most efficient plant at peak power continuously and store the energy kinetically and that is done in places where it is possible.
You’ve already made up your mind, but hee’s another data point for you. We have a Toyota Prius, an gas/electric hybrid. It does NOT like to stay unused for more then a week. The battery has a habit of draining itself, especially when you left an (very inconspicuous) door light on.
We had to buy a start battery. It sits in the basement, we keep ti charged for when we have to jump-start our Prius, again.
Otherwise, I love our Prius. 
Can’t float charge it?
Sorry but I am still not sure I am understanding what you are talking about relevant to this discussion Magiver with storing kinetically … but if the following I agree:
There is a lot of unused generating base-load capacity at night. EV’s charging at night (during demand troughs) give a place for it go, to be used as kinetic energy later in the day. Or even in EV connected to the grid, vehicle to grid (V2G), while parked that can be used as a source to briefly borrow small amounts of electricity from to meet sudden brief spikes, recharging them as soon as that spike has been dealt with, smoothing out the demands on the power generation and transmission systems. That’s load shifting.
Plants’ thermal efficiencies do change based on their loading levels - the I/O curve is typically represented as a 3rd or 4th order polynomial with an intercept, in terms of mmbtus/MWhr.
The incremental heat rate (the first derivative of the I/O curve) goes up as the unit ramps up, but the arveage heat rate goes down, as you’re dividing the intercept by a larger number. The degree to which this occurs varies by plants, but tends to be the most pronounced at the larger, older plants (which were built to be baseload only). Smaller plants were always built with cycling in mid, and newer plants are just more flexible in general.
One other minor point is that sometimes in order to keep a plant online it is necessary to disengage the SCR in order to reach a lower minimum output level, therefore increasing the NOx output of the unit on a per MWhr basis. This isn’t done very often, but it does happen (no impact to CO2, though).
My old Civic hybrid drains out its starter battery pretty quickly if I ever forgot to turn off the lights. Usually if I turned off the lights and left it alone for 45 minutes the big battery would trickle charge the starter battery and the car would start. But I’ve needed a few jumps.
I never had the issue you’ve had leaving it left unused for a couple of weeks on vacation though.