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What Does the Future Hold for Low Emission Vehicles?
Bryan Andersen asks: "While searching for information on electric vehicles to make an EV Hot Rod I came across this Op Ed piece at EV World about James Cameron's Dark Angel series for fall. It got me thinking just what would it take to get low or zero emission vehicles common place? What has to change? What do people think is the future of low or zero emission vehicles? And just what is the state of the art in both manufactured and home built ones? What cool technologies are down the pike? Electric vehicles are something that I very much like the concept of. Every year or two I get the crazy idea of building an electric vehicle. Last time it was doing a motorcycle. This time it's a street rod. A few years before that it was for a hybrid/electric drive for an RV."
Your claims are rife with inaccuracies and misleading statements. Look at just a few of the real doozies.
Modern oil-fired and coal-fired plants are getting 35-40% efficiency ratings. This compares wonderfully with the 25% efficiency of petrol engines or 30% efficiency of diesel engines. Even with ridiculously inefficient transmission, storage, and final conversion, electric cars are still more efficient in terms of quantity of fuel used. An ICE also produces far more toxic emissions due to not having the benefits of high-quality scrubbers and catalytic convertors (though you did comment on the reduced quantity of emissions, you didn't mention that the gasses produced by ICE are thousands of times more toxic to plant and animal life than power plant emissions).
This is just an outright lie. Even factoring in ridiculously high transmission losses from plant to car (say 40%), and even given a highly inefficient electric motor (say 75%), an entirely electrically powered car is still going to be more efficient and result in fewer emissions to the air. The quality of air produced by fossil fuel plants is amazingly good compared to an ICE so there's simply no comparison here.
Solar Power Plants don't ever rely on solar photovoltaic cells or panels. Not only are they far too expensive, the cells "wear out" after only 10 years usage. Modern solar plants use the tried and true heliocentric model. Mirrors or chromed surfaces reflect large areas of sunlight into a single point (either a tower with a collection point at the top, or using new trough technology with a copper pipe running down the centre of the reflective trough). These plants are in operation RIGHT NOW in Australia, and are turning 6c/kWh which is very favourable compared to the 4c/kWh of coal (currently the cheapest source of electricity).
I also see no mention of true, realistic, and even commercially viable zero-emission plants. They do exist but your rant seems to imply every person pushing for zero emissions is living in fantasy land and none of this is possible. Let's take a look at some of the zero emission plants in operation right now.
Hot-rock power is a new finding in a joint Australian-American investigation. You send water pipes 2km into the crust then use the temperature difference between surface and bedrock to drive a steam turbine. Estimates are that a single 2km cube of rock in the Australian desert could power the entire of Australia's power needs. Still in the experimental stage.
Wind power, currently the best bet for future zero-emission plants. Currently pushing 5c/kWh which is better value even than nuclear. It's in the running for beating oil/coal plants in the near future. People are concerned about the ugly nature of wind farms, but these same people never seem to complain about open-cut mines or tailings dams or the unsightly fossil fuel power plants.
Dam power, such as found in the hydro-electric power plants in Australia. Uses the natural water cycle (evaporation, condensation, water flow) to produce vast amounts of power. These plants have no emissions, are very cheap to maintain, and the high construction costs are easily offset by the long running lifetime.
This argument is ridiculous. By the same token nobody should ever have built modems, because at one stage there weren't enough ISPs to dial into. Power plants take a while to build (the typical estimate is 10 years per plant) but electric cars won't magically appear overnight. They'll slowly phase in alongside normal cars and power plants can be built to meet demand. The people who build and run the plants already know how to figure in rising demand: they've been doing it for decades.
I agree electric cars aren't a magical panacea but there's no reason to be a cynic just because they aren't 100% perfect. Electric powered vehicles are an incremental evolutionary improvement. Crying "I won't consider anything that isn't 100% emission free and costs nothing to run and has all the infrastructure already in place" is the attitude the oil barons want you to have.