Slashdot Mirror
Electric Vehicles Might Not Benefit the Environment After All
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.
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.
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.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
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.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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%.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank