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Tesla Motors Getting $10 Million From California For Model X Production
The California Energy Commission has awarded a $10 million grant to Tesla Motors for the company to buy equipment necessary for the production of its Model X electric SUV. Tesla will have to match the funds with $50 million of its own money. From the article:
"It was something of a love fest for Tesla at the energy commission meeting in Sacramento as commissioners and other regulators praised Tesla as an innovator that has brought automotive manufacturing back to California while creating clean cars and more than 1,500 jobs. 'Tesla has the unique distinction of being the only automaker to actually ask us to increase our targets under zero emission rules,' said Ryan McCarthy, the science and technology policy advisor to the chair of the California Air Resources Board. ... 'Tesla’s Gen 3 vehicle could ultimately be a game changer for electric vehicles and air quality and public health in California,' added McCarthy, referring to Tesla’s plans to build an electric car in the $30,000 range. Its latest car, the Model S sedan, sells between $50,000 and $100,000 and the Model X, which is based on the Model S platform, is expected to sell in that price range."
Nice to see California is flush with cash.
In Bob Lutz's "Car Guys vs. Bean Counters", Lutz writes that it was the Tesla roadster that woke up GM. Tesla made the first electric that could really zoom. That shook up the car guys; they thought electrics would be wimpy forever. GM was wary after the EV-1, where they lost money on every car. Lutz describes the session where the Chevy Volt was sketched out on a napkin.
Tesla is making rapid progress on price - a $100K car, a $50K car, a $30K car... That's very Silicon Valley. At last, batteries are good enough. Now they just cost too much.
Ah, somebody is thinking they can get some stories past us.
Your Jetta DOES run on an energy storage system, that's why you have to keep buying gasoline. Much of which is wasted in terms of heat. But don't pretend it's any different than a battery.
Most people drive short distances most of the time, they don't take long trips, they don't need to tow, they don't need to go a hundred miles at a time. And no, they don't need to haul hundreds of pounds of stuff. Sorry, but the reality is most people need a lot less car than you think.
As for maintenance, an electric motor IS a lot simpler than an internal combustion one. They're not expensive to maintain at all, and yes, the batteries can be recycled.
Unlike the pollutants spewing out the back-end of your Jetta. Those are just going to pollute the air.
And yes, there ARE electric trucks. And Tractors. Goodness me, don't you know anything?
Would still pollute a whole lot less actually. Coal power plants, while very "dirty" by power plant standards, are exceptionally clean by automotive standards.
That electricity comes from somewhere...
And that gasoline comes from somewhere too. Funny how people who drag out this dead horse of an argument so easily overlook that.
But whatever. For California the electricity source breakdown looks something like this:
46% Natural Gas
18% Coal
14% Nuclear
11% Hydro
11% other renewable (wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, etc)
Probably newer data out there but I'm fairly confident it's close enough for our purposes. So if we weigh emissions by source type and assume a miles-per-gallon and miles-per-kWh for ICE and Electric vehicles, we can get an approximation for how the two compare emissions-wise.
Natural Gas = 0.46 * 443 = 203.78
Coal = 0.18 * 1050 = 189 (being pessimistic here)
Nuclear = 0.14 * 66 = 9.24
Hydro = 0.11 * 10 = 1.1
Other = 0.11 * 30 = 3.3 (also pessimistic)
Total: 406.42 (Say 407) grams of CO2 per kWh generated. We'll bump that up a bit to account for transmission losses (90%) to 452 g/Kwh. Gasoline gives about 8,200 grams of CO2 per gallon. That's just basic a chemistry.
We'll be again generous and say 30MPG for gasoline and again pessimistic and say 3 mi/kWh for Electric - really stacking the odds against EVs here.
Gasoline vehicle @ 30MPG = 8200 g/mi / 30MPG = 273 grams CO2 per mile.
Electric vehicle @ 3 mi/kWh = 452 g/kWh / 3 mi/kWh = 151 grams CO2 per mile.
So even being pessimistic we see that driving electric vehicles, with their electricity coming from "somewhere", releases nearly half the CO2 as their gasoline counterpart. More importantly - and the brunt of what the OP was saying - is that the local in-city pollution is reduced to zero. Not only are you producing less pollution, you are producing that pollution away from population centers where it does the most harm.
=Smidge=
Renewable power does not run at peak all the time. It's the old forms of power - coal especially - that runs flat out 24/7 because throttling those kinds of powerplants is incredibly costly, inefficient and slow to react. It's called "spinning reserve" because the only reasonably way to reduce the output of a coal powerplant is to de-energize the generators and let the turbines keep spinning. If they turn off the furnaces it would take hours to get running again. Throttling a coal powerplant means complete waste of money and resources.
Electrical generation capacity is critically underutilized at night. You need generating capacity to handle peak demand, but most of the time you are running nowhere near peak demand. The reason why many people in CA are eligible for Time-Of-use metering is because increasing off-peak use actually reduces costs. Many utility providers desperately want people to plug in electric cars at night to "fill the tub" and level out the 24-hour demand curve, allowing more efficient and less costly operation.
Also, there's that lie again. See my other post in reply to you. But even if that were the case and electric vehicles were actually "coal powered" like you want to believe it's still cleaner than the typical gasoline engine. There are no areas of the country where electric vehicles have higher global warming emissions than the average new gasoline vehicle. (PDF warning, quote from page 11)
=Smidge=
Goalposts moved!
Alrighty then. This report conducts an analysis that includes manufacturing the vehicle itself. I've givem my opinion of the report and the overall conclusion is EVs are still a winning proposition.
specifically the batteries that use some very nasty chemicals, and toxic elements
More nonsense. All production EVs available now use some form of lithium chemistry. Lithium "mining" is comparatively benign with most of the lithium supply coming from salt flats where the brine is pumped to the surface and allowed to evaporate until the salt you want starts to precipitate out. The electrodes are usually carbon and/or aluminum and the electrolyte - while not something I'd want to be drinking - is typically a volatile organic compound and poses virtually no long-term environmental risk. You must be thinking of nickel batteries. No production EVs I'm aware of use Nickel batteries.
And they have to be replaced
So do engines and transmissions, or at least they need a major overhaul. And like traditional automotive parts, batteries are extremely recyclable.
Least you think you'd need to replace the battery every year or whatever, the standard warranty is equivalent to any other drive train warranty. Even the most pessimistic estimates place the estimated service life of an EV battery at 8+ years (level of abuse notwithstanding). So the issue of cost is moot. Battery packs are also serviceable, in that being highly modular you can replace individual cell sets if that's all that's wrong with it.
Not saying this is still not better
That's pretty much what you were implying, though, wasn't it?
Everyone calls them "zero emission vehicles"
The vehicle itself produces no emissions. "Zero emissions" is actually a legal definition. I seriously doubt any EV owners, much less EV advocates is there are any non-advocate owners, are under any delusion that their vehicle has zero cradle-to-grave environmental impact. Owners of gasoline powered vehicles, however, seem completely unaware - sometimes deliberately so - of the true environmental costs of their chosen mode of transport.
=Smidge=