Electric Vehicles Might Not Benefit the Environment After All 775
New submitter countach44 writes "From an article in IEEE's Spectrum magazine: 'Upon closer consideration, moving from petroleum-fueled vehicles to electric cars begins to look more and more like shifting from one brand of cigarettes to another. We wouldn't expect doctors to endorse such a thing. Should environmentally minded people really revere electric cars?' The author discusses the controversy and social issues behind electric car research and demonstrates what many of us have been thinking: are electric cars really more environmentally friendly than those based on internal combustion engines?"
Reader Jah-Wren Ryel takes issue with one of the sources, and offers a criticism from Fast Company.
Comparing analyses... (Score:5, Interesting)
The linked article takes you to a 1-page analysis. They must have put a lot of time into that! Corporate mission-statements frequently use more ink.
By comparison, the union of concerned scientists made a more robust, and likely more earnest attempt at understanding total fuel consumption using the "well-to-wheels" benchmark. You can read about it here: http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/clean_vehicles/electric-car-global-warming-emissions-report.pdf
Page 11 (of 48) gives at least an approximation of CO2 consumption as measured in equivalent MPG for EVs, depending on what what's being used to push the electrons to the car in the first place. Coming in first place is geothermal, with an eMPG or 7600, and coal comes in last at 30 eMPG.
Whether somebody involved in this study or that study has erred or has been disingenuous is hard to say, but my guess is that the union of concerned scientists probably followed an actual scientific process where their work is available for full scrutiny by the rest of the scientific community.
Re:Geopolitics vs Environment (Score:2, Interesting)
For example, wouldn't it be preferable for Saudi Arabia and Syria and Egypt to be out of natural resources in 50 years, but the socially-compassionate countries still have theirs?
I'm politely saying you are a short-sighted --- but well intentioned --- dumbass, but even more so I'm trying to get you to expand your thought process to see why you are so very, very wrong. Perhaps after thinking about what I say, you might see my angle here --- you certainly are bright --- just not connecting the dots long-term.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems like hybrids would benefit from a gps and software, so it can know my routine, and whether or not a low battery should be charged by running the engine (I'm at the start of a long trip), or not (I'm about to pull into my driveway and plug in).
so far, I haven't seen any coverage of anything like this.
Re:Yes they are. (Score:4, Interesting)
electric cars are not green
On an absolute scale, nothing is green except killing yourself and your children,so that you stop using Earth's resources. Which nobody is prepared to do, so that definition of "green" is irrelevant.
The relevant question is relative green-ness: given that a new-car buyer is going to buy a new car(*), is it better to buy X or Y? How much more (or less) energy does it take to produce an electric car instead of the gas-powered car you would have bought instead? How much more (or less) energy does that car require over its service life? How is that energy generated? How will it be generated 10, 20, 50 years in the future?
These questions don't have easy or obvious answers, and conditions change all the time. If electric cars aren't "more green" this year, they might easily become so next year (as advances in battery technology make batteries more powerful and/or less carbon-intensive to produce). But what remains true is that at some point, fossil fuels will become sufficiently scarce, and/or the costs of carbon loading in the atmosphere will rise, to the point where gas-powered cars aren't practical anymore; and at that point will we be glad we have electric-car technology on hand to transition to.
(*) I'd personally rather see more people go by bike instead, as bikes are significantly greener and healthier than any car... but if that's not an option for someone, then it's not an option for them.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:2, Interesting)
As for the third point - maybe people in France and Sweden should buy electric cars, but no one else. It is also the case that The power those countries are producing is already being used. To convert their entire vehicle fleet to electric would mean massive power generation increases. Maybe in an ideal world that expansion would also consist purely of nuclear/hydro/wind. Maybe they will figure out cold fusion. Maybe, one day, electric cars could be viable somewhere...
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
Other problem with nuclear is the enourmous power generating capacity of a reactor: it requires equally enormous backup for the inevidable times the reactor is offline! That is a miss conception.
Your miss conception indicates that if you have 10 nuclear power plants you need a back up for each of them. That miss conception is then transformed by the anti solar and anti wind crowed into the idea that every solar/wind plant needs a coal/nuclear plant as back up.
Fact is: your coal plants need a backup, too!
Those "back ups" are called reserve power plants or even "cold reserves".
You need them _regardless_ how you generate your power. The amount of reserves you need is determined by
a) your total energy production, typically roughly 7% - 10%
b) the amount of energy you like to sell dynamically at the market
For b) you decide if it is worth to activate a reserve or even a cold reserve plant (because both types have a cost overhead, that is the main reason they are used for reserve and not for continuous power generation) or if you rather sacrifice a bit of your profit *or* if you simply increase production on the base load plants (see below).
Keep in mind that coal and nuclear plants are usually run at roughly 90% of their peak power.
That means if one of your 45 power plants "unexpectedly" has to power down only 20 of those 45 plants have to increase their production by 5% each!
In other words: for 10 of your power plants you need one reserve plant. As the total number of your plants increases (or blocks, most plants consist of a couple of independent blocks) the percentage of reserve plants you need goes down.
All this is completely independent from the way your plants generate power.
On top of that: all european grids are interconnected from the Icelands to Mongolia and Siberia. It is likely even more easy (cheaper) to import power than to activate a "cold reserve" plant.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, it's not like 7% of the electricity produced is lost before it even reaches your home right? :) http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=105&t=3 [eia.gov]
Then you know when your charge cord heats up that is electricity lost. The fan kicks on to keep the battery cooler while charging (heat is electricity lost, fan is not used for the purpose of travel)
I wouldn't be surprised if the number comes out to be around 10-15% loss just to get it to the battery.
Then you have the conversion rate of the battery which is probably around 50% of the electricity in making the car move. http://evbatterymonitoring.com/WebHelp/Section_3.htm [evbatterymonitoring.com]
I think I saw something that had graphene cables able to conduct electricity with a better loss rate.
http://conversations.nokia.com/2013/02/07/hero-material-10-fascinating-facts-about-graphene/ [nokia.com]
Then with those super capcitors, I bet they get a better conversion rate.
In the end, that number for conversion will get better by leaps and bounds, as there's lots of room for improvement.
I don't think there's that much room for improvement with gasoline cars.
I think we just need more batteries on the road to help drive that innovation.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Interesting)
The numbers in the two articles are wrong anyway ... (claiming only 36% of the energy produced in a plant is converted by the car into movement is just nonsense)
I could easily believe that. Thermodynamics is a lossy game, and if you wanted to get really anal about it there are a lot of steps in the process where you could compound that loss. What i _don't_ believe is that doing the same math in the same detail on the entire chain for combustion engines, from when the oil comes out of the ground to when you put the pedal to the metal, would come out anywhere near as good as 36%.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:3, Interesting)
Do we also have a way to count the foreign policy costs of oil-based energy? I mean, we've been fighting or enforcing no-fly zones in Iraq for most of the last 25 years (8-9 years of straight up war, 12 years of zone enforcement), and there's pretty good reason to think that oil was a contributing factor in our interest.
This may have contributed to the "bad rap" that oil-based ICE gets.
You want to talk about environmental damage, keep this in mind. Whenever they talk about the BP spill, they qualify it as the largest accidental oil spill.
The Kuwait oil fires burned a million more gallons than the entire BP spill each day, and burned for ten months.