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.
Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
What about building the cars itself? Battery production pollutes quite a bit.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Please show me any battery chemistry that operates at 100% efficiency, either on charging or discharging.
Re: (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 i
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's still better than 30% for a typical ICE, but worse when you combine the 35% efficiency of a coal-fired powerplant with transmission line losses and 60% efficiency of the car itself. That said, we've got way more coal than oil.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's a factor consumers and policy makers need to be aware off. Where I live in Texas most electricity is produced by coal burning plants. If I'm trying to reduce my carbon footprint by carpooling, limiting my travel, and operating a fuel efficient ethanol burning vehicle, and then switch to an all-electric vehicle I might fool myself into thinking that all the energy consumed is clean and green. I might drive more often, longer distances, leave the vehicle running in idle to keep the A/C on, use the vehicle as a portable power source, etc. The impact of such behavior may lead to more total air pollution from the power demanded from the coal burning plants.
Alternatively, if I built my own off-grid power system of wind turbines, solar panels, micro-hydro, and a digester with bio-gas turbine generator, I may end up with an energy surplus if I oversize the system or if I expect a need for all the power sometime in the future. The same frivolous consumption of electricity would not necessarily be as hard on the environment than when tied to a coal burning plant.
When it comes to sustainability there is no one single fix or cure. Energy and resource conservation will alway be an important element. The equipment you own and operate needs to be manufactured with as little embedded energy as possible. Recycling will be important to keep landfills manageable. Reduced use, proper handling, and safe disposal/recycling of hazardous materials will be essential (ideally, moving away from such materials altogether).
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Informative)
80% of the fuel you put in your tank goes up as useless heat.
It's less useless during the cold times of year.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Electricity is mostly used as an energy transfer medium because it sucks as a method of storage. It does have loss, too, from resistance, inductance, and capacitance of the conductors. Shifting the energy to/from electric/magnetic fields, a typical process for any electric device, also incurs loss. The fact is, per mile driven, it's more efficient to store the carbon on site and burn as needed, than it is to burn it in a plant and transmit the resultant energy down electric power lines.
Energy generation is the real issue. The only zero greenhouse gas emission technology that can generate the scale of power needed is nuclear, and the earth firsters won't go for that. Things like wind and solar are ok as supplements but they cannot possibly meet the current growing energy needs, never mind such needs plus electric cars. The more exotic systems like ocean wave energy are experimental at best. We need a stepping stone if we want to move to all-electric. At the moment, that stepping stone is nuclear. Without it, electric cars are actually worse for the environment than the current situation.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Informative)
That's just not true, as long as you're considering fixed power plants that are efficient, e.g. nuclear. Other renewable sources can also be considered efficient even if they're not (e.g. solar) because the energy is effectively 'free' so it doesn't matter how much goes to waste.
The inefficiency is always at the chemical energy to (whatever) conversion stage, once it's in electrical form, it can be transmitted relatively efficiently and certainly traction motors are very very efficient compared to IC engines.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
It does have loss, too, from resistance, inductance, and capacitance of the conductors. Shifting the energy to/from electric/magnetic fields, a typical process for any electric device, also incurs loss.
Loss from inductance and capacitance is imaginary loss. Any energy you lose to charging up the capacitor or building the magnetic field in the inductor, you gain back when the capacitor is discharged or the field in the inductor is released. The only real loss is resistance. Electrical lines can leak to ground though. It is a bit of a stretch, but I hope that is what you meant.
The fact is, per mile driven, it's more efficient to store the carbon on site and burn as needed, than it is to burn it in a plant and transmit the resultant energy down electric power lines.
That assumes the power plant and the car are of similar efficiency. They aren't. Power plants can use much more efficient external combustion engines and run at the optimal rpms. Under optimal conditions (for the car) the power plant is roughly twice as efficient as a car. Typical conditions favor the power plant even more (because it always runs at optimal). Given all of the losses in getting the power from the plant through the car and to the road, it is a wash for same fuel power. However, large scale power plants don't run on gasoline. If powered from petroleum, they run on natural gas which is a lot easier, cheaper and more efficient to produce.
Energy generation is the real issue. The only zero greenhouse gas emission technology that can generate the scale of power needed is nuclear, and the earth firsters won't go for that. Things like wind and solar are ok as supplements but they cannot possibly meet the current growing energy needs, never mind such needs plus electric cars. The more exotic systems like ocean wave energy are experimental at best. We need a stepping stone if we want to move to all-electric. At the moment, that stepping stone is nuclear. Without it, electric cars are actually worse for the environment than the current situation.
Nobody is suggesting that we switch to a single source energy. The great thing about the energy grid is that you can just keep tacking on more generators as they come online. As more green plants come online, every device powered from the grid is that much greener.
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Loss from inductance and capacitance is imaginary loss. Any energy you lose to charging up the capacitor or building the magnetic field in the inductor, you gain back when the capacitor is discharged or the field in the inductor is released. The only real loss is resistance.
So, you've contradicted yourself, right there. There's no "imaginary loss" at all. There's a current flowing around as the energy is transferred between the inductance and the capacitance, and that current dissipates energy through the resistance of the infrastructure. It heats the wires all right.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Informative)
The only zero greenhouse gas emission technology that can generate the scale of power needed is nuclear, and the earth firsters won't go for that. Things like wind and solar are ok as supplements but they cannot possibly meet the current growing energy needs, never mind such needs plus electric cars.
That is straight up bullshit. If you covered 2% of the Sahara Desert in solar panels, it would generate enough electricity to replace every power plant and combustion engine in the world.
Transmitting the power from the sahara to the rest of the world is obviously a stupid idea, but it demonstrates that solar power really is capable of generating large amounts of power. A few hundred installations spread around the world easily cover our needs. Energy storage is also relatively straightforward, for example you can collect solar energy as heat and store it with a high temperature liquid for long periods of time (molten glass for example, is stable at around 5,000 degrees celsius and easily stored in big ceramic tanks - expose water to that and generate power from the steam, just as you would do in a nuclear power plant). Another option, which is being used in the USA today, is to pump water into a dam with solar panels, and release water from the dam through a hydro power plant.
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The fact is, per mile driven, it's more efficient to store the carbon on site and burn as needed, than it is to burn it in a plant and transmit the resultant energy
That fact is actually wrong. Modern cogeneration plants can have efficiency exceeding 70% due to higher temperature (Carnot limit) and reuse of waste heat for municipal needs. The powerplant can burn cheap, locally extracted methane, emitting 30% less carbon dioxide than petrol (methane has more hidrogen, which burns to water). It can also do carbon sequestration. Transmitting electric energy and transforming it to mechanical energy are very close to 100% efficiency (except for the battery).
Meanwhile, petr
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The fact is, per mile driven, it's more efficient to store the carbon on site and burn as needed, than it is to burn it in a plant and transmit the resultant energy down electric power lines. (in a car you mean)
Exactly that is not the case.
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)
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:4, Insightful)
Yes, building a nuclear power plant does involve enormous amounts of carbon released. I believe most of that is from the concrete poured, not from the dozing of land and transportation of construction materials.
Once built a nuclear power plant produces no carbon emissions and can do so for a good portion of a century if properly maintained. It produces enormous amounts of electricity in that time, which more than offsets the carbon emissions from its construction.
The only electric power source that produce less carbon per kilowatt hour produced is hydroelectric. Every other form of electricity either produces more carbon or exists only in the imagination.
Calling nuclear power a zero emission source of electricity may be a bit of exaggeration but it's as close to zero as we are going to get.
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I'm going to take issue with your assertion about every other form of electricity "producing more carbon or existing in imagination."
Producing electricity does not magically create new carbon atoms that weren't there perviously, at worst it takes ones that were previously sequestered and releases them into the air. And there are definitely options for burning things that won't change the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, such as burning trees or harvesting methane from landfills.
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:4, Insightful)
Only if you believe mining of the uranium ore, purifying and enriching it and producing fuel rods and transporting them and cleaning up the waste and transporting/refining/recycling and storing it does not use any energy ...
If it produces more energy that what "mining of the uranium ore, purifying and enriching it and producing fuel rods and transporting them and cleaning up the waste and transporting/refining/recycling and storing it" needs, your point becomes moot since the process can power itself without generating CO2.
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If it produces more energy that what "mining of the uranium ore, purifying and enriching it and producing fuel rods and transporting them and cleaning up the waste and transporting/refining/recycling and storing it" needs, your point becomes moot since the process can power itself without generating CO2.
It could, but it doesn't, because all the vehicles used are running on fossil fuels. Sure, they build transmission lines in to those sites to run any heavy stationary equipment...
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Lol. Nope. Charging / discharging the battery, you will take a hit. Transmission over power lines? Taking a hit.
Now, it may, in the long run, be superior to petroleum tech, but let's not start lying.
Re: (Score:3)
Transmission over power lines? Taking a hit.
To be informative, the average transmission loss in America is 6.5% of produced energy, which is estimated based on the difference between national electricity production and national electricity sales.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh Wait, that's the inefficiency that is pushed upstream to the coal fired generation plant.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps, but this misses the point of EV or fuel cell vehicles. At present, it stands so that these will push power generation to coal or oil fired power plants in many areas.
BUT:
1. Power plants will be transitioned as well, and it is substantially easier to place efficient and centralised greenhouse reducing technologies in a couple of power plants than in 2 billion cars.
2. Fuel will run out, and a transition must be starting now in any case.
3. In some places, most electricity already comes from nuclear / hydro / wind / solar (e.g. France and Sweden).
The transition away from petrol and diesel to battery or fuel cells, is not so much as cutting green house gasses now, it is about enabling a new infrastructure that is easier to control and manage. The being clean argument does however help to sell the electric vehicles now.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Informative)
Sweden has some clean energy, but definitely not alls.
Also, we aren't expanding nuclear power plants and a majority in our parliament are against expanding it (basically, all right-wing parties except one are for it, but since it's a core belief of one of them that it is wrong none of them can push the agenda farther along, the lefties are all against it and the racist party is ambivalent).
In the winter, we import energy, mostly from polish and german coal.
Re: Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong.
Sweden is about 50/50 hydro/nuclear and some wind at the margin. The nuclear plants have been upgraded recently and added capacity comparable to a new power plant.
With wind being expanded Sweden mostly exports electricity.
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it uses the word will, but it takes time to prepare for the future. It is arguably so that, currently, EV does not really improve that much considering the average electricity plant in the world. But, we cannot ignore the future just because we live today. The fact is that we have to face the realities of today and the inevitabilities of the future.
Granted, an individual cannot really plan for the future in the same way as a society can, which is why a person not switch his brand of cigarets because of long term benefits. However, assuming either your private or public health care system offered you discounts if you switched your cigaret brand (or extra taxes on the old brand), because society see that on the whole, they will save money this way, would the average smoker still not switch, even if he/she saved money here and now?
As I mentioned, a society or a larger organisation have the ability to plan in long term in a way that you as an individual cannot do. Though the society can influence you to make the "right decision" in various ways. Meaning that, even something that may not make sense for an individual today from a utilitarian perspective, will make more sense from a financial perspective. In other words, society can plan for the "will happen" part and ensure that the current realities, at least in financial terms align with the future and the "will happen" part.
In addition to this, the fact is that infrastructure take a lot of time to build. Therefore, in order to build the infrastructure for the future, we need to invest in it today, because rest assured, at current consumption, oil (and natural gas) WILL run out (in reality it will just become ridiculously expensive, but that only gives us some additional time for the transition). When that happens, there better be a working infrastructure for EV (including fuel cells) in place, because neither coal nor nuclear is viable for direct installing in cars.
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All of this. While I agree with the reservations on EVs as 'vehicles of the future', we should not underestimate or, worse, forget, that a car running on petrol, diesel, etc. will always use non-regenerative fuel sources. An EV could - I repeat: - could be running from electricity coming from hydro-energy, wind energy, solar energy ... you name it.
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If Pike had lived during Edison's time, I'm sure he would have made a strong case for staying on good old woodburning stoves and gas lamps and none of that newfangulated, electrothingamajiggy, no sirree.
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Do you also think that recycling plastic violates the laws of thermodynamics because you also don't get more energy out than you put in?
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
So does lead-acid production yet we've gotten a handle on that. And nobody seems to care about battery pollution when it's for PCs, smartphones and flashlights.
It'll be a while until EVs start increasing that by a significant fraction.
I'm not saying there aren't problems but they are manageable - if the environmental standards are strong and enforced.
In some places, that's a big if, at the moment.
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Nothing to do with power requirements, in fact my new laptop takes a lot less power than my old one. The real reason the battery won't fit is so they can over charge you for replacement batteries.
you want to look at all details and aspects? (Score:3)
more than oil refining? more than shipping oil, with the inevitable spills? I'm all for taking the total cost of a system into account, but half estimates on one side of the discussion results in decisions made on incomplete or downright wrong information.
Re:you want to look at all details and aspects? (Score:5, Informative)
Stipulating that at present *every* method does not include all the externalities, the actual cost of any product, method or system reflects the environmental cost to the extent that the cost has been de-externalized. One way that happens is that, increasingly, cleanup costs are charged to and paid for by the producer/shipper and their insurance companies. And reporting is at least one, maybe two orders of magnitude better than it was 30 years ago. That _should_ be true for oil, for wind, for solar, etc. And it is increasingly true. At this point it's probably more true for oil than for any of the others (I suspect coal is still getting a break but I dunno.)
One example of externalities not presently charged to the electric vehicle industry is the lack of cleanup and mitigation in Canada and Russia around the big nickel mining areas, where according to legend 100s of square miles of territory are devoid of living vegetation. (/.ers: is this true? I keep hearing it...)
As it turns out, shipping the oil is not one of the bigger costs of oil. IIRC from two-three years ago, the cost of shipping is only about 18c per gallon (US cost). I think the actual bulk-carrier-tanker-ship part of that is only two or three cents - my memory may have failed me on that but Wikipedia agrees. That includes the cost of insurance and the overall amortized risk to the companies involved (if it were not, the companies would have been out of business long ago). Which means that it includes the costs to the companies including fines and mitigation costs, of all the oil spills and other pollution. It also includes the costs of the newer double-hull ships with additional spill prevention and mitigation equipment that is now required. One cost that isn't being included yet is the smokestack pollution from the tankers, and all other shipping.
To the extent that externalities of all the methods are included, that cost demonstrates that pollution is actually not a very large problem for oil _compared to total production_, so electric vehicles and their power sources (wind, whatever) will have to work hard to match the true cost/benefit of oil.
Discussion: people don't realize the sheer volume of oil that goes through the system every day - counting fuel and products, around 150 million barrels (6+ billion gallons, 24+ billion liters) per day. As of 2000, the total amount spilled in 20 years in the US from causes was about 300 million gallons (about 1/576000 over 20 years), and had decreased by 50% in that 20 years. The rate has continued to decrease since then. This is equivalent to about 2/100 of one cc out of a barrel - or an invisible speck that pops out of a bubble when you open a carbonated beverage and little bubbles pop.
note: some of this data was loosely adapted from this analysis [epa.gov]. Also, a USA Today article followed that trend - from 2005 to 2009, there were an average of 22 spills per year of more than 50 barrels (down from some 8000 in 1980. This is not to excuse, but to provide perspective. Interestingly, the New England states had the highest number of spills per square mile 1980-2002.
Re: (Score:3)
Regarding your contention about nickel mines. 100s of square miles of bare earth should easily be visible from google earth, no?
I'm too lazy too look, but someone should... :(
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think hybrids are a good option. It's essentially a highly efficient fuel vehicle even before they add the batteries, and the batteries smooth out the variations in engine work rather than acting as pure electric motors, plus regenerative braking, plus the feedback to the driver to encourage better driving. So you're still getting all the power from gasoline instead of the power grid, but it uses it more efficiently.
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.
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Contrary to what you might think, your car should ALWAYS be charged by running the engine unless you happen to be on wind, nuke or hydro power.
If you charge your car with coal, you're producing far more pollution than burning gasoline. Since the mass of our power comes from coal, its a safe bet that for you, its stupid environmentally to charge your car from coal rather than just burning the gasoline required.
If if you happen to get SOME power from non-coal sources, you're likely still getting the majority
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Contrary to what you might think, your car should ALWAYS be charged by running the engine unless you happen to be on wind, nuke or hydro power.
But people get their power from the power grid. Every joule of energy you leave in the grid by using your internal compustion engine results in a joule of energy that doesn't have to be generated. But the generation plants that shut down due to relaxed supply are not those burn coal. Coal is cheap so power producers use coal first when possible. It's the oil and natural gas plants that will slow down when demand drops.
Buring gas in an internal compustion engine is less efficient then either oil or na
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It's not that black and white as you try to state it.
Sure a lot of electricity comes from coal, which produces relatively much CO2 and other pollutants. However modern scrubbers can take care of most of these other pollutants, allowing coal fired plants to be pretty clean. So how much pollution the electricity you get has caused, depends a lot on the overall technology, not just whether it's coal or nuclear or wind.
Small-time gasoline engines like used in hybrids are usually less efficient than large-scale
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not quite. First, "EVs produce lower global warming emissions ... even when the electricity is produced primarily from coal in regions with the “dirtiest” electricity grids." [ucsusa.org]
Next, most EVs are sold in California [autoblog.com], state in which only 8% of electricity comes from coal [ca.gov]. Furthermore, 39% of plug-in drivers have solar panels [energycenter.org] on their home/garage.
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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).
Along those sames lines, I always thought using GPS to track the location and power requirements along any given road could help with automatic transmissions. One really notices the problem when driving up inclines. Espically with lower powered cars, the automatic transmission should know to not change gear all the time. For this to happen the transmission needs to know future power requirements - something that could be obtained via GPS and past driving history.
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I think the greatest off-set is in the research. It might not be the electric car itself but the research into power storage and efficient electric motors will at least further engineering and give more options to engineers and scientists in the future.
In the end a green car is probably going to be a small, few-thrills, high-miles per unit energy vehicle no matter what fuel/unit energy you're using, at least for long-distance single person transport.
Real efficiency will come from mass transit.
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Also, electric cars and hybrids can use regenerative braking. So you can theoretically get back a substantial portion of the energy you put into accelerating, so it's down to a fight against just friction and air resistance. In a gas powered car, 100% of the kinetic energy you manage to build up goes up in waste heat from your brake pads.
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The DragTimes YouTube channel claims the Tesla Model S uses 1.1 kWh for a 12.3 second 1/4 mile drag race but recaptures 0.5 kWh through regen braking. That's very impressive.
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This isn't necessarily true. You can have a regenerative braking system [wikipedia.org] in essentially any vehicle, electric or not.
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You can also do smart things you can't do with ICE, like putting the motors right in the wheels. IIRC Goodyear's patent on that, which has been holding back the industry for at least a decade, is due to expire next year.
Halt it right there. Putting the motor in the wheels is a terrible idea. You want the wheels to be as light as possible so that they tracks the up's and down's of the road as rapidly as possible (remember F=ma, F is constant due to the cars weight so accel of the wheel depends solely on it
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Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize that solar power is another example of 'causes more pollution during production than it will ever save during its lifetime' right?
Funny, that's not what some think [acs.org]
Re:Depends on the energy source duh! (Score:4, Informative)
You do realize that solar power is another example of 'causes more pollution during production than it will ever save during its lifetime' right?
This was perhaps true 3 decades ago.
Now a solar panel has energy and CO2 break even after 1.5 years (and that includes the aluminium framing and other installations).
We've been saying this for over a decade! (Score:4, Insightful)
Unless we switch to solar, wind and/or nuclear for the bulk of our electricity generation, all electric cars do is concentrate where we burn the hydrocarbons to power them.
LK
Which has multiple benefits (Score:5, Insightful)
The central power station is not making its emissions a few feet from the sidewalk. Its pollution controls aren't restricted by weight or the need for portability.
It's also way more efficient.
Electrifying the vehicle fleet is like modularizing your code. Instead of being tied to petroleum, with an electric fleet you can snap in nuclear, tidal, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever else turns out to be a good idea.
Re:Which has multiple benefits (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, yes! And every time we use the Moon to slingshot spacecrafts, we cause an orbit decay that will ultimately result in a collision with the Earth!
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Im pretty sure I played that game, the key is to use your ocarina to get another 3 days every time the moon tries to ruin things.
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So after skimming that presentation, I wondered: would it also be accurate (by the same logic) to say that the Earth doesn't orbit the Sun; it orbits the galactic center (and is perturbed by the Sun)? Serious question; I'm curious as to whether there's a qualitative difference between the two that astrophysicists would identify, or if it's just a matter of scale.
Yes, there is a qualitative difference: the force exerted by the Sun on the Moon vs the force exerted by the Earth on the Moon - the former is greater. As a consequence: the Moon's orbit around the Sun is convex (and it would be the same if the galaxy exerts on the Earth a greater force than the Sun).
For example: by contrast, the Jovian moons are "Jupiter bound" in respect with their respective Jupiter/Sun attraction force - (complete their orbit around Jupiter in a matter of days while the Jupiter orbits
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Will will not find an internal combustion engine with an efficiency over 20% anywhere on a road vehicle. If you want that 35-40% you're only gonna get it on a massive container ship engine - and then you're likely burning bunker oil anyway so any environmental benefits from the increased efficiency are completely overshadowed.
And it takes one gallon equivalent of energy to deliver four gallons of gas to your car in the first place - well-to-pump efficiency (pumping, refining, transportation losses) is rough
Re:We've been saying this for over a decade! (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if we don't make the switch to cleaner sources, it's still a win. Collecting or cleaning up the emissions at a few thousand power plants should be easier, more efficient and cost-effective than doing it at tens of millions of tailpipes.
Plus, it means that you don't get the smog-forming exhaust and ground-level ozone in your population centers. You also get some noise reduction since EVs are quieter and there's no engine idling.
Re:We've been saying this for over a decade! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a pessimistic point of view.
All other things are equal, one could argue that concentrating the hydrocarbon production might be a good thing, because it at least gives us the opportunity to efficiently process those emissions in one place instead of spewing it from millions of cars (or installing millions of scrubbers). I'm not saying that they WILL do better -- just that they could, and that it would likely be more efficient than anything you could slap onto a few million cars.
Similarly, we would have the ability to start switching everyone to green power if everyone has an electric vehicle. Seen that way, keeping everyone on fossil fuels has a very high opportunity cost, because you can't switch a gasoline motor to solar/wind/nuclear.
Re:We've been saying this for over a decade! (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless we switch to solar, wind and/or nuclear for the bulk of our electricity generation, all electric cars do is concentrate where we burn the hydrocarbons to power them.
and that's a good thing because the concentrated hydrocarbon cremation facilities can generate energy with >80% efficiency, while a car burning the same hydrocarbons generates energy with only 20% efficiency. This means you need to burn about three times as much hydrocarbons if you burn it in the car instead of at a power plant.
The portable power plant you find in a car (internal combustion engine) does not even come close to the efficiency you find in a stationary power plant. The car simply wastes most of the fuel's energy as heat, and then wastes even more energy to get rid of all that heat it by swirling liquid around in a "radiator": a device whose sole purpose is to waste as much energy as possible to prevent the engine from melting itself. What's more, is when you step on the brakes all of the car's kinetic energy is wasted as even more heat. The whole thing is hugely wasteful and inefficient.
Geopolitics vs Environment (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it isn't any cleaner, but I'd rather have my car using power from natural gas or nuclear than other sources that are more likely to come from outside my country. The geopolitics of sending our dollars to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or elsewhere unfriendly isn't a good idea, so even if the pollution level is the same, electric is superior to gasoline/petrol.
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Most of the US oil imports come from Canada.
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I was talking to the guy who doesn't want his oil money going to certain countries.
Using your logic then, it doesn't matter if he doesn't buy ANY oil because those certain countries will still be selling oil to someone.
Which is true.
It doesn't matter if the US or Europe goes oil-free tomorrow. That oil will still be burned by someone else. Because it is a commodity.
In fact, a massive drop in demand will likely lead to lower prices and increase demand elsewhere.
So, thanks to the inevitable "prices as a commo
Re:Geopolitics vs Environment (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Yes, because those areas aren't volatile enough yet, we need to have them energy-starved (and likely literally starving) as well, while we Westerners continue to enjoy our remaining energy reserves in front of them. If you think they generate too many terrorists now, just wait for real desperation to set in. You're going to need all those oil reserves for defense...
Seriously though, in the long run there is no "homeland-only solution". Either the entire world figures out how to survive without fossil fuels, or modern civilization mostly collapses when the fossil fuels run out, and we (well, those of thus that survive) go back to a pre-industrial lifestyle. Hoarding fuel only delays the inevitable, whereas developing renewable energy makes the exhaustion of fossil fuels a non-issue.
No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if ALL of the electricity to power EVs was generated from the dirtiest coal plants, it would STILL be cleaner than every single car carrying around its own heavy, petrol burning, ICE. Also you have the benefits of localizing pollution somewhere less populated. This smells like a big oil hit piece.
Now, there is a separate conversation about other forms of transportation being even better than personal automobiles. Trains and even airplanes might be better in some scenarios than everyone racing around pell-mell with their own car, but that's a different issue. If we, as a society, have decided that everyone will be driving their own vehicle, the question is how to make that scenario least damaging; and the answer is electric vehicles.
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Are you sure? The studies I've seen suggests that with a lot of power generation mixes, hybrids can be better than electrics.
ICEs are not heavy, they weigh a lot less that batteries. The comparison is between central plant -> transmission losses -> battery losses, vs. auto ICE. With the same fuel the electrics usually win, but coal generates a lot more CO2/energy than gasoline so I suspect it doesn't win.
Re:Agreed. Gas vehicles have hit physics limit (Score:5, Informative)
Perhaps you should RTFA [rsc.org], which points out that, in the UK, power stations are only about 36% efficient at delivering energy to end users. Add in the 80% efficiency of an electric car and now you have something similar to that of a gas (petrol)-powered car.
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By large, you mean container-ship sized?
Yep.
Those are some of the most polluting engines on the planet.
Not inherently: mostly because they run on filthy cheap fuel full of sulphur. Either way they would be impractical for large scale power generation.
Actually my figures put coal at slightly better. They hit 49% electrical efficiency, whereas the big diesels are 51% efficient at the shaft. If used for generation, there would be additional generating losses, putting them below coal.
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Who says EVs are limited to batteries? That's just our current best effort. Won't always be true. Super-capacitors still count as EV. Fuel cells are still EV. Meanwhile the laws of physics put a cap on how efficient an ICE can ever be.
Electricity sources are fungible. The car doesn't care where the electricity came from. ICE needs oil pumped from the ground and transported to a refinery, then it has to be refined into petrol, then it has to be transported to where the cars are. It's dirty at every step, sca
Efficient-market, inefficient-energy hypothesis (Score:4, Funny)
Energy means fossil fuels. To a first approximation, other energy sources can be ignored. And in the modern economy, money ~ energy. When fuel (i.e. energy) prices go up, the effect ripples through the whole supply chain, touching absolutely everything that is manufactured and shipped. The costs associated with most products are dominated not by human labor costs but by energy costs. And since our modern agriculture essentially exchanges energy for food, even human labor comes down to energy costs.
Therefore, TO A FIRST APPROXIMATION, the cheaper of two alternatives is better for the environment.
Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline cars, and often would never exist except for subsidies. If they were really more economical, they would already be popular. Ergo, per The Theory, they are worse for the environment.
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Part of the problem of this theory is that polluting is free. You don't pay for polluting the air, or the soil, or whatever. While I agree that the cost of a product is a measure of how much energy it takes to produce, it does not take into account the pollution it causes - during production, use, and disposal.
It is possible to account for energy use during normal use of the product (which is what makes a CFL cheaper than a traditional incandescent bulb). It is not possible to account for cost of pollution
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According to my "the cheapest thing is the best for the environment" theory, this was easily predictable.
You must be an economist. Only an economist could hold on to a theory completely in contradiction to easily observable facts and keep promoting it as a predictive technique and a way to reason about the world.
paul revere on a bicycle (Score:5, Insightful)
"Should environmentally minded people really revere electric cars?"
I'm environmentally minded. Guess what I revere. Yep, you got it, since it's a no-brainer: bicycles. Best machine humans have ever created. Good for the body and good for the earth. I've never owned a car, and I don't want to. I use car sharing programs when I need to drive and bicycle or use public transportation (or both) otherwise.
And before anyone says "Well, but bicycles don't work for everyone: kids, job, blah blah," let me just squash that fallacious argument. Bicycle advocates *never* are saying we *all* have to ride bicycles. Just more of us. Everyone who wants to should feel they can. I bet you want to. Wind in the face, endorphin high, the feeling of doing things with your body, the joy of not destroying the earth to do the daily drudge: who doesn't want that?
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Watch out, you're harming the environment by breathing too much when you ride a bike to get that endorphin high.
http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/03/04/1238258/state-rep-says-biking-is-not-earth-friendly-because-breathing-produces-co2 [slashdot.org]
The best solution is to just stop breathing, which would eventually result in death (if not the other way around). Then the problem would be that your dead, rotting corpse is probably not 100% environmentally-friendly either... I guess it all depends on what organisms and s
Re:paul revere on a bicycle (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that the effort required to put the necessary calories into your body is a lot higher, and less environmentally friendly, than burning a few gallons of gasoline in a car engine.
What makes you sure of that? I think it would depend a lot on what kind of food you ate, and how the food was produced.
But even if it were true, it wouldn't matter... because you were going to eat those calories anyway. So the environmental costs of producing the food are present either way; the only question is whether you want those calories to go towards making you fat, or to be used as part of your transportation and/or recreation.
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I'm pretty sure health gains received from burning all of the unhealthy surplus calories the majority of sedentary people consume and drastically improving their cardiovascular health could practically offset the entire expenditure on gasoline. (factoid: in the US in 2011 $500B was spent on gasoline, and $3T on healthcare).
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You probably defecate more unspent calories than riding a bike would consume and you'll burn off the fat getting around, instead of doing exercises that waste your time anyway.
That said, a normal person in the US can't give up their car, even if they choose to bike most places. I live in an almost ideal place for bicycling. I can bike commute to work (I'm a mile from light rail). I can bike over to the store for a sixpack and be back in about the same time as it would take to drive there and back. I still n
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I found this blog post [globe.gov] from somebody who put together some related numbers. It doesn't exactly relate to the carbon costs of farming the food and collecting/refining the gasoline, but it discusses the carbon mass per unit distance emitted by the various modes of transportation.
Here are the interesting numbers. CO2 produced per 3.2 km of travel above what is produced by breathing at rest:
By car: 0.88
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What is the value of flexibility? (Score:5, Insightful)
While charging your electric car with coal power sounds like a bad deal in the short term. The electric doesn't care where that power comes from, so in the long term that gives us the flexibility to operate an energy economy that is based on a wide range of sources. Also, diversity in the market also means stability and theoretically fair prices. (but we'll probably cock that up)
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Right, the electricity does not care where it came from. There are still considerable issues in the environmental impact in the rare earth metals used in their construction, the disposal of the heavy metals in the batteries at the end of their useful life, and the poisonous materials released in the process.
There are also other issues with electric cars. Their range is limited. This limited range may not be an issue for most if the "refuel" time took minutes like an internal combustion engine instead of
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.
Slow erosion of freedom (Score:3)
Yeah, yeah, get your mu-metal hats on. But think about it. How many choices for gasoline are within driving distance? Half a dozen or more? How many choices for electric power? Most likely one. What happens when that one source decides to restrict your usage? And then what happens when usage restriction become geographic?
Fundamental problem (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically we keep looking for "green" alternatives that don't require us to be even slightly inconvenienced or to change our lifestyles at all - and it's probably not possible.
Location Based Pollution Control (Score:3)
Yah lets not account for (Score:3)
Pollution from drilling for oil, manufacturing the gas, getting the gas to the station, using electricity to power the pumps etc. and lets throw in some accidents once in a while where we waste more gas powering the machines that clean up the spill. Right....
Not convinced (Score:3, Informative)
I'll admit I didn't read every word of TFA, but my antennae went up when the author spent lots of time comparing the environmental impact of gasoline engines to electric autos supplied by coal-generated electricity. Then, comparing different types of generation, he matches up nuclear and natural gas rather than either of those two relatively-clean alternatives and coal. Completely absent is any mention of thorium-fueled reactors, though several countries are at the testing stage with such generators, and unless some major problems emerge, they seem likely to take over from uranium-fueled reactors in the next generation.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seemed to me that the author was most interested in raising his profile by generating controversy. It's an old academic trick when ideas are scarce and the bosses are hinting that it's time to get a few papers out there...or else.
Where to start with this mess... (Score:3)
When looking at comparative efficiencies and pollutants, you have to look at the whole chain. From hole in the ground to rotating wheel. Even burning "Dirty" coal, Electric Vehicles have a distinct advantage. The losses and energy use involved in drilling/mining, transporting, burning and generating, transporting (considerably less loss) and finally turning wheels pales in comparison to the ICE requirements of drilling/pumping oil, transporting crude, upgrading/refining to petroleum (Which takes HUGE amounts of energy and is almost never mentioned), transporting petroleum, burning it and finally using it to turn wheels. For an ICE, you can generally only find information about the latter stages, and that is less than 40% efficient. Electric cars are 90%+ efficient with power from the wall, and the whole chain comes in at around 60-75% (So far, this is getting better all the time). Electric cars don't have, or need, cooling systems (in fact, the opposite is often the case, where heaters have to be installed as there is no "Waste" heat generated to warm the passenger cabin).
But, even if that wasn't the case, and pollution from both methods was exactly equal, it's much MUCH easier to introduce measures to clean up the products from 1 smokestack (recirculation/sequestration etc) than it is to do the same thing with hundreds of thousands of tiny, mobile, tailpipes.
Of course, as renewable resources come online in the power grid, the Electric car gets greener automatically (as it's power is being produced in a more green manner) without the owner having to do a thing about it, and that's also not considering engine oil changes, transmission fluid etc. Try doing that with your gas-guzzler.
Batteries for electric cars aren't perfect, they do require some digging in the ground and a little bit of chemical work to make them (Though ICEs also need batteries, along with the odd and rare elements they require for durability and longevity) but once made they are 99% recyclable. And even with that, they're still cleaner than the parts and ancillary equipment needed for ICEs
Regenerative braking and lack of idling engine (Score:4, Insightful)
Two of the biggest benefits to an electric car are:
(1) When you're stopped, your motor doesn't keep running. Think of all the fuel you've wasted either letting your car warm up, or sitting at a light, or stuck in traffic.
(2) Regenerative braking technology converts your momentum back into usable power instead of just wasting it as heat.
These, combined with the fact that your car doesn't care where it gets electricity from, and that a coal plant is still more efficient overall than thousands of independent engines, is precisely why this article is probably OPEC propaganda. :D
Another BS piece looking for click-through (Score:3)
Start with the math
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
Now let's look at some of the statements
"Solar cells contain heavy metals"
SOME solar cells contain heavy metals. Those are the CdTe thin-film models which were in vogue for a while but largely out of the market today. In these, the metals are locked in compounds which make them no less safe that the poisonous chlorine gas or flammable sodium metal in your salt. The panels people are actually buying today, pSi and mSi, do not contain heavy metals. They consist almost entirely of silicon, with a small amount of silver, aluminum and copper wiring.
"and their manufacturing releases greenhouse gases such as sulfur hexafluoride"
Their manufacture USED TO release GHG's, but the industry has reduced leakage to just about zero since about 2007.
"For instance, Richard Pike of the Royal Society of Chemistry provocatively determined that electric cars, if widely adopted, stood to lower Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions by just 2 percent, given the U.K.’s electricity sources."
Now think about this for this statement to make any sense whatsoever, Pike is saying that if we all switched our cars, an astonishing technological change, that the generation would *not* change.
In fact, the opposite is much more likely. As I type this wind turbines are going up all across the UK, and they are lobbying to be the European end of the Iceland-Europe undersea HVDC link. The first of these, especially, is a perfect counterpart for electric cars or PIH's.
By the time significant numbers of electric cars are on the road, the generation mix will have already been radically altered.
"Last year, a U.S. Congressional Budget Office study found that electric car subsidies “will result in little or no reduction in the total gasoline use and greenhouse-gas emissions of the nation’s vehicle fleet over the next several years.”"
Well *duh*. With very few electric cars on the road, it's pretty obvious to everyone they'll have little impact.
"The lifetime difference in greenhouse-gas emissions between vehicles powered by batteries and those powered by low-sulfur diesel, for example, was hardly discernible"
Considering that adding batteries to a diesel engine decreases it's GHG emissions by about 1/3rd, this seems unlikely unless you select places in the world where the majority of the power comes from crappy coal plants. Like the US, or China. You know, like this
"University of Tennessee studied five vehicle types in 34 Chinese cities"
Argue all you want, the math, as noted in the link above, is clear.
Re:Even if its electricity from fossil fuel... (Score:4, Informative)
There's a powerful smell of bullshit coming off that link.
For example - "Additionally, electric car batteries must be replaced after about four years". REALLY??!!?
Most of the RAV4 EVs and original Priuses are still on their original batteries, some after more than 200,000 miles. And every carmaker selling EVs is guaranteeing battery life of approx 8 yrs. They can't all be so stupid to guarantee free replacements for twice the expected life of the product.
And, the batteries are not exhausted after those 4 or 8 yrs but reduced to ~70% - that still a heckuva lot of life and can be recycled or refurbished into other products such as UPSes or some other stationary storage with weight and performance characteristics that'll stomp lead-acid.
By the way, have a look at the bios of the good people at the IER - not a single scientist or engineer among them
http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/staff/ [institutef...search.org]
Re: (Score:3)
I have only anecdotal evidence about Prius battery life but the link below has lots of names and locations of owners claiming anywhere from 100000 - half a million mile s (this last I find implausible).
Feel free to let them know what lying sacks of shit you think they are. Let us know what they have to say and thanks in advance.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mr-roadshow/ci_23057096/prius-goes-530-000-miles-same-battery [mercurynews.com]
Re:Even if its electricity from fossil fuel... (Score:4, Informative)
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Not only smaller, but if it is run only at a single speed/load point (the most efficient for the engine) and the engine is optimized for that speed/load point, the engine can be much more efficient than a traditional car engine.
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.
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Vastly more, since you can build them big to squeeze that last little bit of energy out of the steam with multiple turbines and you don't have to worry about how heavy they are. You also don't have to worry about losses from having to move a heavy cooling system around.