David, if I accept your analysis over my source’s then I can conclude only that a gasoline fired power plant produces less CO2 than a coal fired plant does.
So for the sake of discussion let’s accept those numbers and say that coal produces 15 - 16% more CO2 per unit power produced. We are still left with the simple fact that EVs are much more efficient vehicles. Take the Tesla, for example. This is no slouch of a car. It outperforms many expensive and gas-guzzling sportscars. Yet its efficiency is 2.18km/mj compared to 0.68km/mj for the Prius! That is why their analysis with the entire mix of US power generating mixed in still had it with superior scores, with a well to wheel efficiency of 0.83km/mj compared to the Prius’s 0.56km/mj well to wheel. And of course compared to the average car … whoa.
Now that’s for a powerful roadster going 0 - 60 in 4s. How about for the Phoenix sport utility truck? Its battery holds 35kwh and has a range of 130 miles. Going through the conversion that’s 0.60km/mj (feel free to check my math). Okay a hair less than the Prius but it’s a goddam sport utility truck!
So I stand by the claim. Even with today’s powerplants powerful and big EVs produce less total CO2/mile traveled than comparable ICE powered vehicles and at a savings in daily costs of use and maintainance over the vehicle’s lifetime. Any future improvements in carbon capture will magnify that advantage as will any additional increased use of renewables or nuclear power. Cost of initial outlay is the kicker. At current battery costs and current gas costs the savings from usage costs do not offset the cost of initial purchase of full EVs capable of performance at or above ICE cars. Plug-in hybrids and related concepts like the Volt might be able to be offered at a more attractive price point. Meanwhile battery technology will get less expensive and better performing (this research already being driven by the laptop industry) while the expense of gas will on average continue to rise as world demand increases at a faster rate than world suppply.
Even if current plug-in hybrids don’t eliminate CO2 emissions for vehicles, they serve an extremely important purpose: By putting cars on the electrical grid, we decouple our transportation system from oil. Transitioning to another energy source for cars today is difficult and expensive because the entire infrastructure is built around oil.
But when you use electricity in your house, you don’t know or care whether the electricity came from coal, natural gas, hydro, or nuclear. It doesn’t matter. So the entire electrical consumption infrastructure is decoupled from the electricity producing infrastructure. We could transition to all-nuclear tomorrow without replacing our appliances and ripping up our electrical grid. Or more importantly, we can slowly bring new ennergy sources into the mix. There can be competition in energy. This allows the market to work better, and will drive innovation. Even a small company with a small wind farm could put it on the grid and make a profit, if they can get the cost down below the cost of other sources.
In that sense, plug-in hybrids are a great transitionary technology.
Another big advantage is that they smooth the shock to the economy of fluctuating oil prices. If you have a plug-in hybrid and oil drops below the cost of electricity, you can choose to not plug in and run more on gas. If gas prices skyrocket, you can choose to run purely on electricity and plan your driving accordingly. So you have alternatives that kick in when oil gets to expensive.
The result of this will be to make the demand for oil more elastic with respect to changing prices, which is a good thing. Today, one of the big problems with oil is that the demand is so inelastic. So if the price skyrockets, indicating shortages, we just pony up and pay it rather than reducing demand. This leads to a more rapid rate at which oil is depleted, and puts less pressure on oil producers to maintain lower prices.
I think we’re going to see a major transition in the way we use oil in transportation in the next ten years. All the ducks are lining up now to make it happen.
I did check your math and I think you shorted yourself. The way I figure it 130 mi. is 209 km and 35 kWh is 126 MJ for 1.66 km/MJ.
Well, I guess we’ll see when there are Teslas on the road.
I’m all in favor of hybrids. In fact, the Tesla described by DSeid is a hybrid having dynamic braking same as the Prius. The claimed advantage over the Prius appears to be the superior battery in the Tesla.
I agree with all of the plusses you list in your post, but they are economic and political advantages and not necessarily environmental.
Should the Tesla live up to the claims made then there won’t be much argument left. That’s the best environmentally. Assuming that the cost of lithium doesn’t skyrocket and its production and use in the battery is environmentally sound.
I agree to a point. Modern gasoline vehicles are enormously cleaner than they used to be, and diesels are making a lot of progress. There are a couple of problems that electric vehicles can help with right now, though. The first is cold starts. Starting a gasoline engine after its been sitting all night (or even all day in cool/cold temperatures) results in a lot of unburned hydrocarbon emissions that end up playing a big role in forming particles and ozone. Electric vehicles would get rid of that and make a lot of progress toward improved air quality. The second benefit would be to move the emissions away from densely populated areas. I have not seen a comprehensive life-cycle analysis of either electric vehicles or plug-in hybrids, so it’s hard to say whether they are more “green” than other options. Even with such an analysis, the end result is often a shift of emissions from one pollutant to another, one medium (air vs. water, etc.) to another, or one location to another. Being green in one place can mean being less than green in another.
Well no, it’s not a hybrid but it does recover some of the energy required to speed up when it slows down.
Good point. I’m curious. How do unburned hydrocarbons promote the formation of ozone?
I’m not sure that moving the pollution away from congested areas is all that good a psycological move. If the congested areas are smoggy enough it might lead to quicker action to do something because that’s where the population is. If the junk is moved up to isolated areas like where I live the urban population will think that things are OK, or at least better than they really are.
As an illustration of that, when we first came to the desert we could see mountains 100 miles away. Then the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (DWP) increased the volume of water in the aqueduct. This cut the amount of water into Owens Lake, a big playa about 65-70 miles north of here. That resulted in drying up the sub surface water in the playa and huge amounts of dust in the air. Now we have days where you can’t see the Sierra Nevada range only 10-12 miles west of us.
DWP is under court order to do something about it and they have been playing with various methods to get some dust control for the last 8 or 10 years. I think their plan is to have it under control by 2050 or so (sarcasm) because there is no real public pressure on them to speed up.
As much as I hate to admit it, I’m agreeing with my Canuckistani pal, Sam, on this issue. And when oil-powered electrical plants cannot survive in the market we’ll either get more nukes (generally a VERY long term construction issue) or other, faster to build, technologies, like wind farms. And with printable solar panels on the NEAR horizon and the largest part of my roof facing south (my church is in an even better position, with a roof almost optimally canted) I can see a plug-in hybrid in my future. Especially if my boss doesn’t pay too much attention to the electric bill (I have to get home, don’t I?), but, as he says, and I’ve learned as his purchasing guy, NOBODY is cheaper than rich people.
As far as the movement of pollution away from congested areas, you’ve hit on a major issue. Nobody wants to be the ones to get the pollution caused by what people far away are doing. I used to live in New Mexico, near a power plant that sent a lot of its power to Southern California. That wasn’t a terribly popular issue in New Mexico. California continues to import coal-fired electricity but won’t let it be generated in the state, so they can say they don’t allow coal. That’s dishonest in my view. I agree that those that use the service should bear the burden. But it is still a lot easier and cheaper to control pollution from a handful of power plants than from a million cars.
Maybe. However, the engine system can be designed and built in the factory to reduce pollutants to the minimum that current technology allows. Then the maintainance of that performance can be policed by conducting a test of performance every time you relicense the car.
The record of governmental inspectors, whether state or federal, in policing industry isn’t all that great and the record of self-policing by industry is even worse. Maybe if the power plant had to be relicensed every couple of years proper maintainance and operation of their pollution control system would be better assured.
Bumping this thread because I just heard about the new Tesla Roadster. All-electric; seats two; goes 200 miles on a single charge; 0 to 60 in 4 seconds; top speed 130 mph.
Thanks BrainGlutton but I did originally bring up the Tesla Roadster in a previous post dated 06-29-2007, 02:52 PM. Which everyone giving me a hard time about the electric car ignored completely!
Looks like a fun vehicle. Some way to go yet though, what with dropping $100k on each one they sell. Wonder how the world supply of lithium would cope with the mass demand?
Even so, it would be fun to get one, label it with one of those ELECTRIC VEHICLE signs they put on the back of milk floats and so on, and take it out in traffic.
A question, please, since there are such knowledgeable people contributing: How much energy is required to refine a gallon of gasoline from crude oil?
RR
Tesla is probably losing 100,000 per unit if you factor in their development cost and amortize it over expected sales. It’s entirely possible that if they had priced it at $200,000, they would have lost even more per vehicle because the huge development cost would have to be amortized over fewer sales.
As long as the incremental price per unit is under $100,000, then they could indeed make a profit by selling in volume.
The other possibility is that the vehicle costs $200,000 because there is extensive manual effort involved in each car, and Tesla is taking losses hoping to get the sales volume to the point where they can get investment capital to invest in the automation needed to bring the per-unit price down.
And when oil-powered electrical plants cannot survive in the market we’ll either get more nukes (generally a VERY long term construction issue) or other, faster to build, technologies, like wind farms. And with printable solar panels on the NEAR horizon and the largest part of my roof facing south (my church is in an even better position, with a roof almost optimally canted) I can see a plug-in hybrid in my future. Especially if my boss doesn’t pay too much attention to the electric bill (I have to get home, don’t I?), but, as he says, and I’ve learned as his purchasing guy, NOBODY is cheaper than rich people.
