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Electric Car Environmental Impact: Power Source Matters
another random user writes with news of a study from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which looked into the environmental impact of electric vehicles — not just how they do when driven, but how they are produced and by what means they are charged. The study pointed out that the production of EVs has twice as much of an environmental impact as the production of typical gas-powered cars, which must be taken into account when comparing the two. Also, they say it's important to consider the source of the electricity used to charge the vehicles. In places like Europe, where a good chunk of the electricity comes from renewable sources, EVs do indeed provide a benefit to the environment. However, "In regions where fossil fuels are the main sources of power, electric cars offer no benefits and may even cause more harm." The study says, "It is counterproductive to promote electric vehicles in regions where electricity is primarily produced from lignite, coal or even heavy oil combustion."
We knew this. All it does is move the pollution. It may alleviate smog and guilty consciouses, but that's about all. The same is true of hydrogyen vehicles and how the fuel is produced. The answer is thorium reactors for electricity production and cracking water to hydrogeb, but we won't do it.
Silence is a state of mime.
Check out the thorium based LFTR, a proposed reactor that burns PWR/BWR waste too. It produces much less waste, that last much less time. It does not use high pressure reactors. Thorium is plentiful, easy to mine for fuel. It has anti-proliferation characteristics. It's been tested. If we don't do it, India or China will. It's mantra is "cheaper than coal", usually the cheapest long term utility fuel.
While the amount of pollution produced by an electric car depends on how the electricity is produced, a couple of advantages of an electric car, even with coal-fired power stations, are worth mentioning. First is, I don't live next door to a coal-fired power station. So the pollution generated by an electric car is happening somewhere else, not in my neighborhood. While global warming is a global problem, not choking on exhaust fumes ever time I walk down my street is, I think, a bonus. Second, even with coal-fired plants, it'll be easier to upgrade and eventually replace a handful of coal-fired power stations than to replace potentially millions of cars. If the government mandated all new cars had to be electric (and I'm not suggesting they do), it would still take decades for all the old cars to be retired.
I just leased a Leaf for 3 years. Minimal money down and $300/mo lease.
I was driving a Chevy Avalanche. I kept it because I need a truck a few times/month but was driving it every day. Now I only drive it when I need it.
I learned a lot about EVs. First, it costs me less than $0.75 for a full charge, gets me 80-100 miles in town. Compared to $150/month for gas in the truck.
Maintenance. In 3 years I will have to rotate the tires 5-6 times, replace windshield wipers as needed, and maybe replace the brake fluid once. That's it. No other scheduled maintenance.
It drives like a very peppy car. Quick off the line, good acceleration, good handling. Most of the toys are standard (cruise, navigation, XM radio, limited voice activation, ability to monitor from smartphone apps, etc).
I leased because I expect the technology to change in the next 3 years, and expect this car to be almost worthless by then, but I don't care as I can just turn it in and decide what to do then. And I will still have my truck so there will be no rush.
Is it green? Maybe. Is that why I bought it? No, I bought it to save green. We have my wife's car for distance, my truck for hauling, this is just a cheap commuter car. cheaper to own, maintain and drive.
I'm in NC, our power comes from coal and nuclear.
If your goal is to reduce air pollution TODAY, then quite probably electric vehicles don't help.
If your goal is to shift the technology base of the entire transportation system toward renewable energy sources, then electric vehicles are necessary.
In other words, don't blame the electric vehicle. Blame the lack of wind turbines. Electric vehicles will run just fine whether the generators the powers them is driven by coal or by wind. In contrast, gasoline and diesel vehicles tie us down to fossil fuels indefinitely.
If you have a better plan for long-term control of carbon emissions than cutting our dependency on the internal combustion (and diesel) engine, I'd love to hear it.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
When judging electric vs gas vehicles I feel that electric cars rarely get a fair shake.
The institution of gas powered vehicles has very many externalized costs that people take for granted because, well, it's always been that way.
Fuel transportation - This is a huge hidden cost. The amount of hydrocarbons burned to provide the massive infrastructure to move fuel is staggering. It's often one of the highest costs of fuel production itself. Do studies take in account the energy cost to move oil, refine it, then move the refined fuel? I really think this is one of the biggest benefit of electric cars is that an electric energy distribution could be a lot more environmentally friendly. Granted, we'd need to beef up our electrical grid too.
Even if you're burning hydrocarbons to produce power, I still think electric vechiles are a lot more forward thinking. What is more efficient: Having lots of cars carry little powerplants around with them, and pay for the fuel to be moved out to service stations where they can access it? - Or move power production to a few large production centers (power plants) where efficiencies of scale can be captured. Not to mention that, in theory, you could capture and sequester carbon emissiosn at a powerplant. They're large and stay in one place. You can't realistically sequester carbon emissions from millions of tiny cars that move around all the time.
That idea was propagated by CNW Marketing. They published a study in 2007, stating that a Prius' environmental impact was worse than a Hummer. Unfortunately, they made three critical mistakes:
The first was assuming a Hummer would drive several times as long as a Prius would (378,000 lifetime miles for an H1 Hummer, and 109,000 for a Prius). The second was wrongly distributing lifetime energy costs, by estimating the vast majority of a car's energy usage is in production, when in fact it's in operation (and there are half a dozen references in the linked article that contradict CNW Marketing's assumption). The third was explicitly penalizing new cars by dividing the costs R&D plus factory construction over the number of cars produced (at the time, the number of Priuses produced was relatively small).
http://www.evworld.com/library/pacinst_hummerVprius.pdf
Long story short, the idea that you got got its origin from misinformation propagated five years ago that refuses to die because it's long on truthiness, but short on actual truth. For a more realistic assessment, you should read up on the Argonne National Laboratory's GREET Transportation Vehicle Cycle model (specifically, the graph on Page 84 in response to your post):
http://www.ipd.anl.gov/anlpubs/2006/12/58024.pdf
Burning petrol or diesel might produce similar carbon dioxide to coal, but going from crude oil to the petrol pump takes a lot more effort (about 4 times that of coal).
Rocket Surgeon.
No it doesn't. But then your car's MPG rating doesn't take into account the oil rig, oil refinery, oil tanker, fuel truck, and gas station power consumption.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
That's because people don't understand how to do taxes. Stop electing these people!
It's dumb to tax pollution as a punitive measure, or to encourage/discourage the use of certain technologies or behaviors, or to raise general revenue.
It's smart to tax pollution to offset the public-born costs of the thing which is taxed.
Don't tax pollution to nudge people into abstaining from polluting; tax them whatever it costs to clean up their mess, and then spend that money to do just that. If someone is spewing greenhouse gasses, tax 'em to plant forests (or whatever, if you have a cheaper way to handle it) of the capacity needed to bind those gasses, and then actually do that (really plant the forests).
That alone may be enough to indirectly discourage them from polluting. Or maybe they'll pay to plant the forests themselves, since they can do it more efficiently (cheaper) than government contractors. Or if they're not discouraged: don't worry about it, because you got your offsetting forest and the pollution really did get handled.
If someone is spewing something harder to clean up, then use (and set) that tax to whatever it takes to deal with it. And if nobody has the magic or tech to deal with the pollutant, then the pollution (i.e. the liability) can't be paid for, so should be forcefully prohibited, rather than forgiven (i.e. subsidized at public expense).
Don't think in terms of saving the world; think in terms of turning externalities into actual liabilities.
Dependency isn't a problem if you handle taxes this way, because you don't use the pollution tax to pay for wars or Medicare or anything else which is unrelated to the tax. e.g. If people stop dumping CO2, then your forest-planting expenses just went down, so the demand for the revenue drops at the same time the supply does.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For those interested there is a report from a few months ago on the same topic with a US centric view (PDF warning) that comes to a similar conclusion. The main difference is Europe has much higher standards for fuel efficiency (both in legislation and public preference) so there is less potential gain for GHG emissions reduction to start with. For example:
Use phase energy requirements were assumed to be 0.623 megajoules/kilometer (MJ/km) for the EV, 68.5 milliliter/kilometer (mL/km) for the gasoline ICEV, and 53.5 mL/km for the diesel ICEV
To break this down into units most of us are more familiar with:
Electric: 3.591 miles per Kilowatt-hour
Gasoline: 34.34 miles per US gallon
Diesel: 43.97 miles per US gallon
Anyone in the US driving a vehicle made for the US market and getting those MPG figures would be justified in being a tad smug about it. Electric efficiency also seems generously high - I usually figure 3.2 mi/kWh, or pessimistically 3.0 to make the math easier, which correlates fairly well with anecdotal "real-world" reports from EV owners across the country. (5, 6 or even 7 mi/kWh is not unheard of, though these are usually your hyper-miler type drivers.)
Notable omissions from this report are include the energy and environmental impacts of obtaining the fossil fuels for either case. For example there is mention of the energy required to refine and process the metals used in battery production but no mention of the energy required to extract, refine and transport petroleum fuels. There is no mention of extraction costs for coal and natural gas for electrical production either.
There are several mentions of aluminum costs for production of EV components but having worked with both EVs and ICEVs I'm fairly confident there is more aluminum in an ICEV. Most of the engine block, come of the internal engine components, and most or the transmission body are aluminum. They are correct that there is more copper in an EV however.
Fossil depletion potential (FDP)may be decreased by 25% to 36% with electric transportation relying on average European electricity. EVs with natural gas or coal electricity, however, do not lead to significant reductions.
Nobody sensible has been arguing that EVs are magical. However, they are even at worst equivalent to what we are doing now but with the added benefit of future-proofing. A diesel engine will always need diesel, bio- or otherwise. It will always need a carbon based fuel. Always. An electric vehicle can get its electricity from carbon and non-carbon based sources alike. This means the bar to reducing fossil fuel use is dramatically lowered with the electrification of our vehicles.
tl:dr; Electrified vehicles are still a winning proposition despite not being perfect.
=Smidge=
We could start fixing the design of our cities. Build public transit instead of ever wider freeways. Build pedestrian and bicycle infrstructure instead of more parking. Add congestion charges to urban centers. Stop rezoning land so developers can build even more malls and retail strips a few miles farther out of town than the ones they are abandoning. Stop giving tax breaks to developers building on the fringes of the suburbs. Reduce speed limits in cities. Add traffic calming devices.
Car traffic in this country is heavily subsidized. In short, we just need to stop subsidizing it.
Of course, this is politically infeasible, because the auto instustry and oil industry have already paid for the politicians and the voters are not paying any attention. But it is technically and financially feasible.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
The advantage of the small diesel is that it can provide charging at all speeds including idle speed.
Actually, the big advantage of decoupling the IC engine from the drivetrain is that when the IC must be used, it can run at its ideal RPM range at all times, independent of vehicle speed. That means that 10 gallons of diesel burned in a hybrid vehicle will produce less pollution than the same 10 gallons burned in a conventional diesel vehicle.
That's neo-con disinformation, operating at several levels, that is being distributed by marketing organizations like CNW. Not only is it factually incorrect, it also implies CO2 is the most significant car exhaust pollution issue, which it certainly isn't, and ignores the fact that auto batteries are recycled (in the USA) at a rate exceeding 95%.
There's also the issue of "service life". We all heard the stories of how buying a new Prius battery would cost more than the car, and we'd have to do it every three years - yet I have 130,000+ miles on my ten year old battery pack and it has had zero maintenance and zero problems. Other people have gone 300,000 miles with no issues. Good quality electric motors, such as the traction motors in Japanese hybrids, have a 40 year service life before rebuilding - and if the bearings are replaced at the first sign of heat or noise brushless motors can last over a hundred years. I have an 80 year old electric fan in my house (it has hand-wound coils and hand-cut steel gears in the oscillating mechanism) and it works better than modern plastic chinese-made fans - pushes more air and uses less energy, because it's extremely well made. Service life estimates based on worst-case fantasies of hybrid haters are clearly not realistic.
Again, this is factually incorrect. Even if you accept the ridiculous definitions of pollution and service life, it's still just plain not true, and has been repeatedly debunked in peer-reviewed literature and in journals. Of course the Wall Street Journal and Fox News will keep repeating absurd anti-environment propaganda forever, but those are not reality-based news sources.
Didn't mean to make that an AC post. Been so long since I posted here ;-)
Here's the link to the DoE study on EV road wheel efficiency I took the figure from. Hint: it's 24lb's of COe