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White House Wants 1M Electric Cars By 2015
coondoggie writes "The White House has outlined a wide-ranging plan for putting one million of what it calls 'advanced technology vehicles' on the road by 2015. Most observers would say that is a good start, but is it reasonably doable? The next White House budget will include a number of investments and enticements to make the goal achievable in theory. Of course, not all of the provisions are likely to make the cut."
I'd love an all-electric vehicle.
Except for a couple of things (I think).
I drive a hybrid car now, and in the LOVELY Minnesota winter, the batteries just DIE. I'm not kidding, they've had to be replaced. Even when they work my mileage almost halves in the winter. This makes me a it worried about an all-electric vehicle. A surprise "Hey your vehicle's range just dropped form 100 miles to 50 miles with no notice!!!!" is NOT a good thing.
Second, I want to be able to plug the thing into a regular ol' outlet.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
The energy equivalence between gas and electricity (gal to kWh) is not very interesting although I know the EPA is trying to make such an equivalence to say what the MPG equivalent value for the Leaf is. The reason that it is pointless is that efficiencies at the production end and the consumption end are different between the two energy delivery systems. So why not use a metric that roughly tracks efficiency (not counting subsidies) - cost:
If the Nissan Leaf gets 3.4 miles per kWh (http://gas2.org/2010/11/22/epa-gives-nissan-leaf-99-mpg-rating/) then those 3.4 miles costs 10 cents or 34 miles/dollar (2.9 cents/mi) assuming your 10c/kWh number.
My 2005 Prius averages around 45 mpg and gas is around $3.40 where I live, so 45/3.40 = 13.2 miles/dollar (7.5 cents/mi).
So the Leaf is 2.5 times better than the Prius on cost per mile basis. Now the cost of the Leaf's batteries must be taken into account of course, but it is at least possible that future battery technologies and gas and electric costs will result in a trade where it is cheaper to run electric cars over their life than it is to run gas cars. I sure hope so - I hate gas cars for their noise and their pollution which is never as good integrated over their lifetime as an electric car.
Except that many parts of the grid heat up during peak hours, and the engineers who designed it did so with a dependency on low power consumption at night, which would allow them to cool down. If you have a bunch of cars in an area charging at night, there won't be enough time for the transformers (etc.) to cool off before companies open shop in the morning and start heating those components up even more. Then one day, BOOM!
It's not just peak performance of the grid that matters, it's the minimum, peak, mean, and average.
The difference is in energy conversion efficiency. An internal combustion engine is about 25% efficient. Add in mechanical losses and gasoline refining/transport costs and you're at about 15% of the energy from the oil that comes out of the ground to drive the wheels of your car.
Electricity has about 40% efficiency from a coal plant (higher for nuclear and renewables), 95% transmission efficiency to a person's house, and about 80% for battery conversion and electric motor efficiency. So overall about 30% of the energy from the coal drives the wheels of your car. Roughly twice as efficient as an ICE. Also note that the price you pay per kWh already takes into account the losses from the first two steps. So on a $ per mile basis, electric is about 5x cheaper than an ICE, assuming $3.40/gal gas.
The same reason is why hydrogen generated from electrolysis is a dead end as a fuel. You're talking about 40% efficiency from coal plant to electricity, and (optimistically) 65% efficiency from electrolysis, then 70% for a hydrogen fuel cell, and 95% electric motor efficiency. Overall you're at 17% of the coal's energy driving your car's wheels, which is pretty much the same as existing ICE vehicles. Factor in the storage and transport problems along with lack of infrastructure, and hydrogen is worse than oil. It only becomes viable if we can get nuclear or renewables to generate most of our electricity, and realistically, only nuclear has a chance of that in the next 20+ years.
(DIsclaimer: All numbers are ballpark what I remember off the top of my head. They may not be exact.)
This. Trucking gets use subsidies in the form of roads that rail can't match. This means our rail system sucks.