So my car spends eight hours charging while I snooze. I cant’ see the problem here.
Thanks, I always appreciate your posts in discussion on the energy industry.
That makes sense, but right now isn’t coal primarily mined in either the Appalachians or the Rockies, with smaller amounts from central areas like the band around Illinois south through Texas? I ask because I would assume that coal leaves those places by barge and by rail and gets to power plants all over the country.
Could not our pipeline and rail infrastructure move natural gas in a similar way? Now, I understand it would take a considerable time, especially the pipeline infrastructure as the government has been leery of approving new pipelines and they take a really long time to build and get online even when approved. So I know that isn’t a short term answer, but shouldn’t it be possible in the “long term” to nationally distribute gas like we do coal?
Or is it generally the case that the places far from the coal deposits don’t use it as much for electricity, and maybe we’d see something similar with natural gas?
If you could create a full-size CCS coal plant would it still be profitable? Basically, is the problem we do not have the technology to equip a BACT plant with CCS or that even if we did it would be prohibitively expensive?
As I see it, we would need to allow people who have parked and connected cars to enter into future contracts to store and sell energy back and forth to the grid. That way renewables can be stored and retrieved because at all times there will be millions of vehicles hooked up to the grid each storing quite a bit of juice.
The current grid cannot possibly handle all this electricity. Internal combustion engines on the road of the US use far more energy than is generated as electricity. I seem to recall hearing the figure of seven times, although most of that is lost in heat through the internal combustion process. Someone upthread got into the magnitude of the undercapacity of the grid to deal with this. If the govt were going to make a two trillion dollar investment, planning for a future and ever expanding grid would be a good place to start.
People on the road on long trips are going to need charging stations. Some exist. My brother has owned several electric vehicles, the latest being a Nissan Leaf, which he recharges at Nissan dealerships on his way to visit me. Takes about a half hour for a partial charge though.
As for electric cars, the Tesla S is apparently a success on every front other than price.
Ultimately that’s why the electric car is best left to develop on its own. I’m fine with some level of tax credit, but it isn’t to the public interest to leap with two feet into the thing via some massive government program.
Let’s give the technology time to progress and develop in the free market. Meanwhile where government can act is the State and Local level. Lots of State and Local governments use natural gas vehicles for fleets now. But electric vehicles fit a lot of the same use case scenarios. As range gets better electric vehicles could definitely make a big splash into the fleet vehicle space. As it is right now the occasional long distances required make natural gas a bit more attractive I think, since fueling is a lot faster than battery charging with presently deployed vehicles.
TANSTAAFL
Somebody has to pay for it some way some how.
This plan assumes that everyone would be happy to switch over to driving an electric car, and that is a faulty assumption.
I am not driving the thing as long as I have a V-8 muscle car in the garage. I really don’t care about the price of gas, it isn’t about cost, it is about the experience. If a car is simply a tool to get you from one place to the other you won’t understand.
Are you outlawing all gas powered vehicles? This is going to be a problem in the large travel distances out west.
Are you going to confiscate all the gas powered cars? Will I have to keep the Red Barchetta hidden away because of the Motor Law?
Give an electric car to everyone who wants one, I don’t. And I don’t give a rip about climate change issues.
Let’s try that again:
While I suspect that Dallas Jones would quite enjoy the ride of an electric muscle car (pure torque baby!) it is clear that the solution is not having any “the” solution including EVs.
Diesels make more sense for someone whose driving is primarily distance highway travel, for example.
If all I was doing with the one car was commuting, and realistically always had another distance capable vehicle available for those few occasions, then a pure BEV would make sense. OTOH most of the negative environmental impact of a plug-in is incurred in battery production (which is off set by the decreased emissions - even with pure coal generated electricity - over a few years of use); there is something to be said for the plug-in hybrid/EREV concept with a battery just right sized to cover most of most daily commutes while functioning as a decent hybrid the rest of the time. Hence, for example, my C-Max Energi’s 20 something all battery range covers most of my daily needs and still gives me nearly 600 miles with very good mpg between gas stops on the several long road trips I’ve taken this year (don’t ask).
No one solution will be the best solution for every driver’s needs.
One early concept for electric vehicles involved the idea of replaceable battery packs - you would buy the vehicle, then lease a battery pack that could be swapped in a few minutes at any participating provider. “Service stations” would maintain a warehouse of charging packs. I don’t know what happened to the idea - I long ago did some engineering exercises for my own amusement, designing a “spinal” battery pack system that would fit a variety of vehicles and slide in and out through approximately the rear license plate area - and I can’t see any other solution that will lead to widespread use of EVs.
Even the fastest conceivable full charge - maybe an hour? - becomes a limiting factor for sustained or long-distance use of them. It if takes longer than a gas fill-up, it’s going to be a huge hurdle to acceptance.
Per household? Sounds like an enormous marriage penalty.
My employer already gives me a transit pass (in lieu of parking privileges). Even over five years, and even counting two passes (mine and my wife’s), the value is only a fraction of that of an electric car. I’d rather take the new electric car, and immediately sell it. Or we get divorced for a day, take the two cars, and re-up.
As noted there would be more demand for natural gas. But on top of that, you haven’t considered that by reducing gasoline demand and price, people in countries that can’t afford electric cars will drive more.
Implausible for all sorts of reasons. As I’ve noted, gasoline use outside the US would increase. And if it didn’t quite make up for what was going on in the US, so what? People would still use up all the gas and oil in the earth, just maybe – and this is uncertain – a bit more slowly. So the seawall that needs to be built around Manhattan, Brooklyn and Staten Island could be delayed a few months. Is that really worth 3 trillion dollars?
I disagree. The OP assumption is that people don’t want to switch to electric, so we have to force them.
If we are serious about reducing fossil fuel use, reducing miles driven is probably more important than reducing the amount of fuel it takes to drive a mile. You may have noticed that environmentalists are so much more focused on better milage than on where people live and work. That’s because they are, IMHO, fundamentally unserious.
Then there’s the energy used to heat and cool large detached homes that are typical outside American cities. A modest proposal to fund the DMark plan: Pay for it by taxing people who live in detached houses. Wouldn’t forcing people into apartments save even more energy?
Politically impossible? Yes, but so are most environmentalist approaches to global warming. I say, accept the inevitable and start building seawalls.
We also should fund research on geoengineering approaches, like shooting water vapor into the upper atmosphere. But, more likely, we’ll have to defend some sea coast, abandon other stretches, and muddle through.
Well, someone would have to buy them, so they wouldn’t be free. At around $30k a pop and having to buy, say, 100 million or so of them to give ever household one you are talking something like 3 trillion dollars I think. And it’s going to be a moving window, since you can’t possibly get all those cars to every household at the same time. Since the cars batteries only last 5-10 years, you will have to be replacing the batteries or cars before you even complete getting them to every household I would expect.
I’m not sure about this one, even though it seems obvious I guess. In order to manufacture a hundred million new all electric cars you’d need to expend an incredible amount of energy. Leaving aside the fact that I think it’s impossible (not simply impracticable from a monetary standpoint), you’d need a staggering quantity of rare earth elements (that I don’t think are available either in the quantities needed for this, at least with the currently opened mines), not to mention all the mundane stuff like steel and plastic and such. Just shipping all the raw materials then shipping the vehicles to every household is going to cause a huge increase in air pollution (not to mention the other pollutions associated with mining rare earth elements, which IIRC are pretty nasty to mine which is why we don’t do that as much here in the US).
Would depend on how many you could realistically get to each household in any given year I guess. I think right now they are being produced, world wide, in the 10’s of thousands a year category. You’d have to ramp that up by several orders of magnitude. Then you’d need the logistics to get them out to every household, which is going to use some non-zero but larger than today amount of gas for the trucks to haul them, not to mention the gas needed for the equipment to mine the raw materials and transport them from wherever you are manufacturing them.
Overall I’d say it would be a wash in the short and medium term, and maybe a net plus in the long term (assuming they catch on and people follow through with them…and you don’t have a rebellion from folks who are paying much more in taxes than they did in gasoline to pay for all of this stuff).
Why would you not need to do this any more?? Still need natural gas for the power plants, and other countries will easily buy up the oil we aren’t using anymore…there would probably be MORE demand for oil if we tried to do this world wide.
Again, not seeing this. Oil will still be a valuable strategic resource even if you could pull off your plan. The need for oil globally would increase in my estimation, and we would still need it here even if every household had a ‘free’ AEV.
Doubtful.
No way. There is no free lunch and you are talking about upping mining, manufacturing and logistics by several orders of magnitude over what is currently being done. You’d need to make 10’s of millions of these things a year JUST FOR THE US, which outstrips the manufacturing of IC vehicles (IIRC, around 30 million cars are made world wide per year…you’d need to make that many a year just for the US to get them into the hands of every household on a reasonable schedule).
Again, doubtful. To manufacture on this scale you’d need to basically pick a design and then go balls to the wall on making it. Not a lot of room for innovation in such a situation. You’d actually be stifling the current efforts towards improving the technology by trying to do what you are proposing, IMHO anyway.
So, ‘free’ cars AND ‘free’ subway/bus transport too, ehe? 
What will you do with all the folks out of work who were part of the current automobile niche? Some of them would be ok I guess, but most of the dealerships would go out of business, since you are giving away ‘free’ cars and all. Then you have the folks who logistically support those automobiles…the folks who run and own gas stations and such. Going to suck for them.
But then someone has to pay for this, so most likely those savings will be overwhelmed by the massive new taxes you’d need to pay for all of this stuff. You’d be talking about adding trillions to the budget.
Here’s the thing…if you could save gas money by buying an all electric vehicle then folks would be doing that already. Not that many folks are doing it because it doesn’t actually save you anything in terms of money for gas. Scaling that up doesn’t change the equation.
Nope…none at all from just a cursory glance. Plus, it’s basically impossible to do in any case. I doubt we will EVER be able to manufacture AEVs on the scale you are looking at on the time table you are proposing. We can’t build IC vehicles on that scale over those time tables, let alone AEVs which take special (and limited) materials to build.
Oh, I think the electricity issue isn’t that difficult. You’d probably need to ramp up the grid a lot, but as long as you don’t try and get rid of that fracking stuff along with this other pie in the sky, and as long as we have coal (and perhaps nuclear) we’d be able to handle charging these things up. You’d probably be able to look into more wide spread fast charging stations, since you’d be forcing the AEV situation and folks would want to capitalize on it. The trouble would be that there isn’t a free lunch, so any savings in GHG and such you’d get by people using their shinny new ‘free’ AEVs would be lost in getting the materials and doing the manufacturing and logistics of getting the cars from where they are being built to folks homes.
The article relies on Smart grid technology to level out the demand. This technology is being installed at the cost of 20 billion a year and won’t be fully installed for another 20 years. If it works it could be great for the price of electricity but it is not ready for 100 million new electric vehicles.
I could be happy driving an electric sports car, if that was my only choice. The problem that I personally have with most of these proposed solutions to the climate change issues are that they all rely upon changing the behavior of the individual rather than addressing the larger causes. I see it as being about control of the population.
In this linked image you can see all of the natural gas from the oil fields in North Dakota being just burned off, you can see it from space.
The effect of radical changes in my own personal life style, over the course of my entire lifetime, are erased in a tiny fraction of a second by this. There is no infrastructure to transport the cheap natural gas so it is just burned off. Makes me not give a shit.
I am not a denier that these changes are happening, but I do have a problem in that the proposed solutions always start with the control of the individual.
There’s one thing I haven’t noticed anyone mention. How fast could these free cars go? If they can’t reach at least 60 MPH without having to press the gas pedal pretty much all the way down, then nobody is going to want them. It is very hard to force technology upon people if they realize there’s a price to pay in terms of convenience - how many times have there been calls to get rid of fossil and nuclear power, with the answer to “How do we replace them?” with “For starters, a significant amount of cutting back”?
Central planners always seem to underestimate or completely ignore the complexity of that which they want to muck with.
You can’t just mandate the construction of 100 million cars. Modern manufacturing requires chains of thousands and thousands of suppliers, all of whom are aligned with production goals. Raw materials and shipping routes have fixed capacities. The economy works because demand shift is slow enough or localized enough that the system can absorb it. Prices rise and fall, stimulating production and encouraging exploration, or reducing production as necessary.
Electric cars don’t just need manufacturing facilities - they need trained workers. They need more raw materials. They need a charging infrastructure. They need battery manufacturers. They need tow trucks capable of quick charging them or hauling them off the street. They need service centers and trained mechanics to work on them. They need the people to build the service centers and to train the mechanics. And on, and on, and on…
In the meantime, taking a gasoline car off the road that has a decade of life in it and destroying it would be a huge loss of capital and energy. I’m not sure an electric car would even be net energy saving if it replaced a car that had just been manufactured and the energy cost of manufacture had to be essentially duplicated.
In the meantime, you’re going to inject massive distortions in the economy. A household with several adults is at a severe financial disadvantage over households that have a single adult. The incentive to remain living apart would be great. The rapid price increases in raw materials would cause price fluctuations all through the economy, punishing some goods and rewarding others. It would be a winfall for existing producers of the in-demand materials - without having to worry about market competition they would be free to raise ther prices dramatically - which would then punish producers and consumers of all goods that use those materials. So then I suppose the next move of a good central planner would be to attempt to slap price controls on them - which would result in shortages of the materials you need.
And if you force people into electric cars, you are going to be necessarily putting them in the hands of people at the extreme ends of their range capability, which means there are going to be discharged electric cars all over the roads. And by the way, what happens to the guy who has no choice but to drive 300 miles for his job? Are we going to make such people go hat-in-hand to the government and plead for a waiver to drive a gas vehicle? Or are they simply out of luck? Is he going to have to buy his own gas vehicle while the guy with a smaller sales or inspection route gets a free electric car?
Here’s another big problem central planners generally don’t think about: When people get things for free, they don’t tend to take good care of them. Have a look at public housing projects. You give people free electric cars, and they won’t maintain them. Or is this a one-shot deal? If so, how are you planning to deal with 100 million electric cars in landfills in 10 years and a sudden spike in demand for gasoline vehicles as the electric cars die? Or are you going to make gasoline cars illegal? In which case, how do the poor afford to buy new electric cars?
I could go on all day. The economy is a complex system. Ideas like, “Give everyone a free electric car” may sound simple at a very high level, but as you peel back the layers of the economy and drill down into it, complexity rears its ugly head - complexity that central planning simply cannot deal with, and which tends to derail the carefully thought-out plans of those who believe they are smarter than the millions of people constantly striving for improvement in those areas they know best.
Look, the first, most obvious use for these cars will be for short and medium haul commuter cars, and toodling around on weekends. They greatly outperform gasoline engines in city driving. They may not be able to do eighty mph at first, but lots of people will take an additional five minutes on their daily commute in return for halving their fuel prices … especially as oil prices are going nowhere but up.
But pretty obviously that price point hasn’t been crossed yet, because AEVs are still a very niche product, even in Europe where, presumably due to population concentrations and such they SHOULD be taking off like the proverbial hot cakes.
The reality of AEVs is they aren’t ready for prime time…yet. My BIL has a Leaf and he loves it. For his normal, every day commute it’s perfect. But a few weeks ago he had to go get my sister and the kids from the air port mid day and drive them home then go back to work. On the way home the car abruptly stopped because it was out of power. He had to call some Nissan service to bring a truck out to give it a quick charge (20 minutes) which took several hours, just to get home. He’s lucky he wasn’t on a bridge because the car just stopped. It didn’t slow down like those old electric carts would when the battery started getting low…it just died and he had to coast off the street.
Multiply this little issue by hundreds of millions and you can see how this would be an issue. The performance characteristics and the cost are the reasons (well, along with others) that AEVs are and will remain a niche product that are only a few people will use (my BIL and sister lease theirs, which mitigates some of the larger ownership issues and along with a modest down payment is a lease price comparable to a decent IC car monthly payment…I think they are paying around $300 a month, and that includes some sweet damage protection and that fast charge truck service thingy too).
But the behavior of the individual IS the larger cause.
Contrast it to the pollutants that are greatly ameliorated by catalytic converters. Those pollutants were byproducts of how the car converts energy to movement, so it was a pure manufacturer problem. But, at the margin (nuclear and solar don’t count because they aren’t at the margin), global warming is caused by the actual conversion of fossil fuel to power. So addressing the larger cause does require hundreds of millions of people to greatly change their behavior, becoming less like Americans and instead like Hong Kongers (lowest energy use of any prosperous country). Reality is that people in rural – or suburban – America do not want to move to a high rise in Detroit or Pittsburgh, even if they could find jobs in the neighborhood. And that’s why I think addressing the root cause of global warming isn’t a very practical way to handle the problem.
The oil and gas companies have been gradually reducing this loss of their product, and will continue to improve. But oil and gas production will always produce a lot of greenhouse gases, roughly proportionate to how much is extracted from the earth. Which is in turn determined by how much energy people use. Which is turn is determined by individual behavior.
The fact that people don’t instantly respond to this that such energy intensive lifestyles – even driving 30 miles to work, or to a sales call – must change, shows you how unrealistic are most proposals to control global warming by getting at the root cause. Getting at the root cause would require people to not travel much, and live in small attached homes.
Remember that you can greatly decrease C02 emissions, and CO2 in the atmosphere will still increase, because the amount of time the old CO2 stays around is somewhere between decades and centuries. So greenhouse gas progress really is just about getting worse at a slower rate.
Now, someone might say that even if the problem is mostly to be addressed by sea walls, and breeding crops that can take more heat, we still should encourage lower energy consumption lifestyles. I’d agree with that. I even live that way.* I just don’t think our friends in Texas will.**
If I believed that, I’d be more optimistic. But see: The Case for $70 Oil.
- With the big failing that my wife and I do need our A/C!
** With exceptions. Didn’t GW Bush used to live in a condo? If I remember correctly, his campaign people told him that was an image problem, so he bought a ranch.
Maybe my understanding of what constitutes “smart grid” is different that yours but all this requires, up to a sizable percentage anyway, is real time pricing of electricity. The utilities know when the valleys are. Electricity during those times costs X; electricity at peak times costs Y; electricity at shoulder times costs Z. The cars are easily set up (there’s an app for that) to charge at particular times while you sleep, something many would do if the incentive was extant.
I do not know any plug-in, full BEV or plug-in hybrid, that does not perform at least as well as its ICE comparable. (Other than that range issue.) This recent review of the EV Chevy Spark is typical.