Electric cars are the future. Is producing electricity to charge them cleaner than gasoline?

Factual Questions
82

Not anymore. Numbers for 2020 taken from U.S. Energy Information Administration

Natural gas 40.5%
Renewables (total) 19.8%
Nuclear 19.7
Coal 19.3%

The renewables include wind, solar, hydro and a variety of miscellaneous. The amount from solar was 91 Billion KWh, 2.3%, but that doesn’t include rooftop solar that’s behind meters:

Also note that none of that is from offshore wind, which we’re just starting to build. Offshore wind is much more consistent than onshore, although not perfect of course.

83

This I think is the next big market. We are seeing a slow push into “smart homes” but there needs to be a far deeper push into connected and controlled appliances with feedback. The earliest versions, I assume would involve something like the Apple Airtags that can do temperature monitoring, tied to smart power outlets - so for example, your freezer or fridge could postpone running when power price peaks; but to do so for the hot water heater or AC needs a higher degree of control. The NEST thermostat, for example could do some of that with the AC or heating, but AFAIK has no input for “if the power costs $X” yet. Plus, how many power meters provide price feedback? Would cost savings from managing supplies pay back the cost of meter replacement? Of should the system work on internet feedback from the utility website?

Should we be surprised that the biggest maker of EV’s has no legacy gas vehicle production? they are better-motivated. Indeed, one of the impediments to legacy auto building EV’s is the dealer system. Dealers make a lot of money on maintenance and repairs, and EV’s with far less to maintain or repair will cut into their profits. Tesla notably does not have a dealer network.

84

If we are going to wait for grid-scale seasonal storage, I hope none of you buy into the idea that we have to fix climate change in the next decade, or whatever deadline they are currently seliing. Because we won’t be seeing enough storage capacity for this for many decades.

This is why I’ve come to the conclusion that no one is really serious about climate change. On the one hand we are told that it’s deadly urgent and we must take drastic action NOW, but on the other hand the same people are content to wait for solutions that we either don’t know how to make work or which would take decades to build out.

Climate change policy seems to be more about rent-seeking, partisan politics and virtue signalling than actually fixing the climate.

And while a continent-spanning grid will help distribute energy, it stil isn’t immune to rare weather events that can cause a continent-spanning reduction in wind and solar. Europe just went through one of those - the North sea went calm unexpectedly as clouds blanketed the continent, causing power shortages that had to be supplemented with natural gas, causing supply issues and price spikes. At least they still had natural gas and France’s nuclear power to backstop them. If that wasn’t all still there…

Centralizing energy and connecting all the grids may have the effect of reducing normal fluctuations in power due to wind and solar normal variability, at the cost of a mega-failure when rare weather events happen.

To provide enough battery storage for the entire grid for overnight power would require about five times the lithium production we currently have. It takes a long time to open up a mine and develop it to the point where it is profitably providing material. And good luck opening one in North America. The environmental movement will not allow it without a long fight.

We have one solution that could make a difference on the order of a decade or two: nuclear power. That’s it. The longer we piss around with half solutions and wait for magical future tech, the harder the problem becomes. There is a role for renewables, but they won’t be enough.

But mostly, we have to come to grips with the fact that global warming is increasingly a China/India problem. The U.S. and Canada together only contribute about 12% to global warming. Nothing we do is going to matter. China is at 27% and growing rapidly.

Canada could eliminate all CO2 tomorrow, and it would amount to maybe a year’s worth of growth in China. The U.S. could eliminate all their CO2 and in a decade global levels will be back to where they were before. And India is just getting started and is already at 6% of global consumption - five times that of Canada. If they get their economy moving they’ll be the next China.

85

And this is part of the problem, providing an important motivation for North America. If 36 million people produce 1.2% of the CO2, then when 1.3 billion Indians want to reach the same level of prosperity, unless tech can find adequate substitutes, the result will be catastrophic. And those poorer countries don’t want to hear “you guys stay down there so we can enjoy this high a level of lifestyle.” (The same applies to all pollution and ecological preservation - developing countries asking why they should be the ones to sacrifice since the western countries did exactly the same destructive things a century ago.)

86

That’s why any ‘solution’ to global warming that requires sacrifice, rationing, higher energy costs and more risk is a complete non-starter, as far as I am concerned.

If we REALLY want to fix global warming, we need to transition to an energy source that is cheaper and better than what we have now. That would force China to follow suit just to compete.

The only technology that can possibly do that is nuclear. France gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear, and has the cheapest electricity prices in Europe.

If we had 70% of power coming from nuclear and hydro, we could tolerate 25% of renewables with natural gas peaking to handle the variance. Grid batteries could eventually replace most of the gas, but that could be done incrementally without straining production capacity.

That would be sustainable and cut CO2 by 95%. It’s also something that leverages existing natural gas distribution and could be completely built out in two decades.

87

Or to use nuclear power without having to poison the Earth and deal with severe nuclear accidents. That’s an option, too.

But it really isn’t clear that it’s even going to be needed. The only problem with renewables is that (aside from hydro), they’re intermittent, and that can be mitigated a lot more than we’re doing now.

88

You make it sound like these are equally bad options. The former option is literally many orders of magnitude worse by whatever metric you want to measure it. On one hand, we’re talking about dumping GHG and other pollutants in the atmosphere, killing millions of people per year just from the lowered air quality alone, ignoring the dramatic world-changing damage of global warming, versus… finding a place to stick a few barrels every year. The entire nuclear waste output of the world is something like the size of an SUV every year - and we could reduce that dramatically by using modern reactors that use such waste as fuel, but even if we didn’t, we’re comparing a couple of tons of nasty waste that’s 100% contained to billions of tons of pollutants that are released into the air we breathe and which will cause catastrophic environmental damage.

When people say “nuclear waste will last 10,000 years and burden future generations!” it completely baffles me. What do you think future generations would prefer: a massively changed Earth that’s hostile to human civilization, or some barrels buried under a mountain in the middle of nowhere?

The world is collectively insane on this issue. Even many people who acknowledge the severity of the threat of global warming are still insane on this issue. It is completely without justification.

It’s like you’re saying “you’ll either be tortured in the most horrible ways possible for years, or someone will poke you with a toothpick occasionally” and trying to pretend these are equally unpleasant options.

89

The other manufacturers just need to do like Tesla and have terrible build quality! Service centers are always busy.

90

This is a very useful paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26355-z

From the abstract:

So even if you have enough renewables to meet 100% of annual demand, you still wind up with long periods of not enough energy. But surely battery storage can fix that? Nope.

You can overbuild your renewables by 1.5X and add 12 hours of battery storage, and you will still get many gaps longer than 24 hours where there isn’t enough power available to meet demand. This problem gets worse the farther north you go.

An example from Germany:

Trying to reduce the gap requires exponentially larger systems, and you rapidly hit diminishing returns. It’s not feasible.

So consider Canada being able to switch to 100% wind and solar, AND have 12 hours of grid battery storage - a system that would take decades to build. We would still have gaps where we would have only 50% or less of our demand met for days or weeks at a time. This would almost always happen in winter when solar is mostly offline, and when the loss of power would have a massive impact on Canadians. If we hit a ‘dark doldrums’ period of two weeks in the winter in a world with only electric vehicles and no backup fossil power, it would be a mass casualty event.

And note that this assumes a national grid and zero transmission losses. The smaller your grid system, the worse the problem gets.

It turns out that the optimum mix for Canada in terms of renewable reliability is about 25% solar and 75% wind. But even with that mix and grid battery storage we can’t eliminate the gaps. And the gaps are what kill you.

91

I’m not sure why there isn’t more discussion about pumped hydro. This project is (allegedly) about commence an hour north of here: https://www.gordonbuttepumpedstorage.com/project-overview 400 MW, no lithium (or very little). I have read that pumped hydro is the cheapest battery available. Obviously the trick is to have the vertical relief necessary and private land to build it on adjacent to wind or solar and the grid tie-in to distribute it. Most of the Western US has this somewhere, Montana in spades. Columbia River Gorge would be another great option.

92

Pumped hydro is like wind. It works really well in the absolute best sites, but the efficiency drops off dramatically as you move to less optimal sites. It also increases the cost of the system pretty dramatically, incurs energy losses from pumping, evaporation, and generation. There are also significant environmental issues which may block pumped storage sites. I think some potential sites are already being contested by environmentalists.

93

You don’t necessarily even need to pump the hydro. Just use existing hydro dams, and only run water through them when needed to meet the gaps in wind and solar, and then let them refill naturally. Just because they can be run constantly doesn’t mean you have to (and indeed, we’re discovering that running them constantly is a bad idea anyway).

94

Sure it’s expensive, but dramatically less expensive than grid-scale battery storage as I understand it. Plus, the “battery” doesn’t degrade with time like lithium-ion. It would be interesting to contrast the ROI of various schemes–wind + pumped, solar + pumped, nuclear, etc. especially including all the externalities.

95

But that is strictly considering wind and solar. It take no account of existing power generation, much of which is hydroelectric.

  • In 2014, electric utilities and industry in Canada generated 639 terawatt hours. Canada is the second largest producer of hydroelectricity in the world. Hydroelectricity accounts for 59.3 per cent of the country’s electricity supply. Other sources include coal, uranium, natural gas, petroleum and non-hydro renewable sources.

The paper does not delve into whether hydro could cover the outages that solar and wind could not cover. Which makes sense, since the whole concept in the paper is pure theory anyway - location of the renewables would be a main factor in actual design. Also, the question becomes to what extent hydro power can be throttled up and down daily or over seasons to cover renewables’ shortcomings without interesting ecological effects. Dams can only get so full or so empty, and fluctuating river levels have their own issues.

the takeaway from the paper is that there is a lot more potential than is currently (sorry) being used. Even reducing greenhouse emission to 20% or 10% of today’s levels would be beneficial.

96

I would say there are two takeaways: One being that yes, we can and should have more wind and a bit more solar. But the other takeaway is that they will never be sufficient for our power needs.

Mixing hydro in is a good idea, and I said so in the previous message. But hydro is almost all in the East. BC has some hydro, the prairies almost none. Alberta gets 91% of its energy from fossil fuels. BC’s biggest hydro project is tied up in litigation from environmental groups and First Nations bands - a fate that will likely befall pumped hydro projects as well.

Also, hydro ramps up too slowly for true load following. Batteries can help here, but we will likely need to maintain natural gas for heat and for load following.

The disconnect I keep seeing is that the same people who claim that global warming is an existential threat that needs decisive action NOW will, when pressed for what their solution entails, come up with things that can’t possibly solve the problem in any kind of reasonable period.

At the same time they arenhighly resistant to nuclear oower, which is pretty much the only non-GHG solution we know can work at scale and which can actually be built on a short enough timescale to actually mitigate the problem. France went from 0% to 80% nuclear in about 14 years, If they can, we can. But we won’t, because reasons.

I suspect the real reason for the antipathy to nuclear on the left is that it doesn’t fit into their future vision of ‘green jobs’ and smashing the old big industrial companies in favor of ‘local’ solutions. A world full of windmills and solar panels built and serviced by armies of local workers is just more enticing to them than large nuclear plants run by GE or other big energy companies.

The problem is, that vision just won’t solve the problem. This is becoming apparent to more and more people which is why nuclear is coming back in Europe and other places. Saskatchewan is planning to build three reactors. Alberta should do the same. They can provide baseload for the west, and Quebec hydro and Ontario nuclear and hydro can provide baseload for the east, with both backstopping perhaps 25% wind/solar and maybe 10% natural gas for load following.

That’s a practical, real solution that has no big unknowns, magic tech, or resource limitations. We could start tomorrow.

97

I work in the fossil fuel industry. At the initial process of looking for the stuff. Seismic exploration.
I know this industry will have to mostly die out. I see it from start to finish. The costs are huge. But so are the benefits. Transition will be difficult.

Specifically about electric vehicles. There are two large negative aspects. Our lack of infrastructure to charge them. Both it’s structure and the sources. Then the batteries.

The city I live in calculated 25 Million kilometers a day driven on it’s streets in 2007. It was a steadily increasing number at that time. That is a lowball figure due to how they calculated.
A new Tesla model recorded best energy efficiency of 12 KWatt hours to go 100 kilometers. Actually 11.9. So about 0.12 KWatt hour to go one Kilometer. 120 Watt hours.
So if everyone in my city was using a top efficient Tesla right now, that would require at least 3 Billion Watt Hours a day extra electricity. 25 Million Kilometers times 120 Watt Hours.
3 Billion Watt hours divided by 24 equals 125 Megawatts per hour. That is 7% of the peak record electricity demand for this city that hit 1793 Megawatts. As I write this mid afternoon on a Saturday, -1 C outside. The demand is 1152 Megawatts.
So we need to have at least 10% extra capacity. Taking into account transmission losses and energy losses of the charging systems. Maybe more than 10% may be required.
Our newest gas fired plant can produce 800 Megawatts, more than 50% of the city’s power. It cost $1.4 Billion. So actual cost of extra generating cappacity is not terribly high, for say 15%.
The city also uses 231 Megawatts of wind power. If the wind farms were operating at maximum capacity, that is more than enough to charge the vehicles. Of course that source is wildly variable. But clean and renewable.

The basic expansion in generation required seems to be the easiest step. Distribution is more difficult. Expensive upgrades and installations at many steps out from the generator.

Batteries. Solid state batteries are probably coming on line soon. They are a lot better. This will make a big difference in the ease of use and lifetime of the pack. It will also impact the ability of storage for renewable power generation. Although flow batteries are already a good solution. Battery component reclamation methods are quickly being perfected.

An electric car is also way better on longevity terms. Maintenance is less costly. An electric motor is so reliable. Even the brakes last longer due to regenerative braking. No oil changes. No filter changes. No plugs. So many things that consume resources, that will no longer be consumed.

There is a big investment required in infrastructure. But that has happened several times. One notable one was with the introduction of fossil fuel powered vehicles.

98

I think the hydrocarbon industry has a decent future - there are plenty more uses than burning the stuff; plastics, solvents and lubricants, etc. I imagine the volume will be far less, and the reputation will be more like that coal enjoys (?) now. Or whale oil.

I think there will always be a residual number of combustion engine based applications. For example, in travels in assorted 3rd world countries, I see things like irrigation pumps and farm tools have replaced human or animal labour with gasoline-powered machines as the green (?) revolution reaches further into the developing world. It may be a long time before the electrical grid replaces gasoline in some parts of the globe.

The point is - so what? The goal is not to eradicate the burning of fuel, but to get it down to where the environment can process and start decreasing the amount in the atmosphere. If those of us doing most of the burning stop, things will be less bad.

Yes, battery tech will improve. however, counting on it and waiting is not the optimal solution. Even if we begin installing renewable energy sources now with limited storage capacity, they will be able to use those battery packs when they become available.

Your calculations should also consider that the majority of EV’s will likely be charged at night, and the rest during working hours, rather than equally around the clock.

99

When the Internal Combustion Engine came along they had a number of disadvantages. They were unreliable had to be hand cranked to get the engine started and this took a certain amount of physical strength. It took a good ten years before electric starter motors became common. Gas stations did not emerge overnight, it took time to develop a network and the roads? It took years to go from dirt tracks to highways.

Migrating the power train to electric is a fairly modest change in comparison.

Most have an app that can control when and for how long and at what rate it charges. Power companies can offer variable rates to reflect generation capacity. Your EV will become smart enough to talk to your electricity meter and moderate its charge rate or even lend power to the company at times of high demand. Also charging at places of work has a some interesting possibilities for companies to create micro-grids. EVs sitting unused outside in car park or depot can be used for storing electricity to power buildings to cut costs a peak times. It is all programmable in software.

We are still at an early stage of development of EVs, there is a lot of potential.

Sometimes the arguments made by conservative voices who really do not want any sort of change make me imagine what it must have been like for the pioneers of technologies that are now common.

Here is Bob Newhart and a conversation between a product marketing manager and the Wright brothers about their new invention.

I am sure such characters are alive and well in the auto industry.

Hopefully the power supply industry is a little more enlightened and prepared to face the challenge of accommodating renewable energy generation and distributed battery capacity by re-engineering the grid where necessary. Other countries, notably, Brazil, Germany and China are using HVDC lines to move power over great distances with fewer losses between renewable sites and the big cities that need the power. There has been relatively little takeup of this technology in the US, though GE wins contracts for HVDC overseas, especially connecting in the UK North Sea wind farms. The technology is not the issue, if the investment is there. Putting cables under the sea seems to avoid a lot of issues…if the water is shallow enough. Geography is big consideration.

The US has huge potential for renewable generation, but it needs to invest in a power grid to move the electricity to where it is needed. I expect there are legal rights of way issues that simply do not exist in other countries so its progress seems to be trapped in a legal gridlock.

This article explores the issue. I wonder if it has gotten any better since it was written.

100

Wasn’t there an episode in The Rievers (?) where they spend the whole day trying to get the car out of the mud because they refuse to pay the farmer to haul it out. (IIRC, wasn’t that also the source of the joke where the farmer says “and I spend all night hauling water to refill the mudhole…”?)

101

Nuclear Power as part of a national energy policy is very politicalised since it is mixed up with Cold War politics and national security. Power generation is always political because it is a very clear indication that the government has lost control of a fundamental issue when there are power cuts and the lights go out. This was a very important conflict during the political ructions in 1970s and 80’s in the UK, when Coal was King…and under the control of the communist led labour unions intent on bringing down the government of the day. That battle was won by Thatcher and the policy was to privatise powe generation as much as possible. They were interesting times. However private companies are unwilling to pick up the tab for the costs associated with nuclear power.

In the UK nuclear still accounts for about 20% of power generation and it looks as if it will remain at that figure for some years. However this comes at a great cost of keeping these ageing power plants going. Moreover the decommissioning costs are a huge bill. They say £70Billion, but is probably much higher. France is also facing these huge bills because its fleet of Nuclear power plants is much larger.

The UK is relying on the French company EDF to build new nuclear plants and …until recently the Chinese to finance it. These deals are coming apart. EDF is making a hash of huge projects in France and may do the same in the UK. The only certainty is that the UK tax payer is going to pick up the bill for any screw ups. The cost of new plants are very high and the estimates increasing. The contracts the government has guarantee the price the price paid for electricity generation for the company operating the plant for decades. It is at the moment twice the price being paid for new offshore wind farms of a similar generating capacity. That bases load security is coming with a big price tag.

Here is a long article that tells something of the whole sorry saga. Suffice to say, it is best not to look at the UK for any bright ideas about nuclear unless the small reactors planned by Rolls Royce prove to be effective.

I think in France too, there is a lot of worry about nuclear. Not so much the environmental concerns, more the price tag.

Offshore Wind Farms look very economic and easy to install. The UK is building them at a fast rate in the North Sea. If a few Natural Gas power stations can deal with the problems when there is insufficient wind, that might work until we get some kind of scaleable grid storage solution. NG can be stored in huge quantities. We need something similar for renewable power generators.

It requires a cunning plan…