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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.
Of course it depends on the energy source. I purchase wind powered offsets to power my focus electric. This changes the equation greatly.
Because you can get the electricity from clean renewable sources.
Unless we switch to solar, wind and/or nuclear for the bulk of our electricity generation, all electric cars do is concentrate where we burn the hydrocarbons to power them.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Perhaps it isn't any cleaner, but I'd rather have my car using power from natural gas or nuclear than other sources that are more likely to come from outside my country. The geopolitics of sending our dollars to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, or elsewhere unfriendly isn't a good idea, so even if the pollution level is the same, electric is superior to gasoline/petrol.
Even if ALL of the electricity to power EVs was generated from the dirtiest coal plants, it would STILL be cleaner than every single car carrying around its own heavy, petrol burning, ICE. Also you have the benefits of localizing pollution somewhere less populated. This smells like a big oil hit piece.
Now, there is a separate conversation about other forms of transportation being even better than personal automobiles. Trains and even airplanes might be better in some scenarios than everyone racing around pell-mell with their own car, but that's a different issue. If we, as a society, have decided that everyone will be driving their own vehicle, the question is how to make that scenario least damaging; and the answer is electric vehicles.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
According to my "the cheapest thing is the best for the environment" theory, this was easily predictable.
Energy means fossil fuels. To a first approximation, other energy sources can be ignored. And in the modern economy, money ~ energy. When fuel (i.e. energy) prices go up, the effect ripples through the whole supply chain, touching absolutely everything that is manufactured and shipped. The costs associated with most products are dominated not by human labor costs but by energy costs. And since our modern agriculture essentially exchanges energy for food, even human labor comes down to energy costs.
Therefore, TO A FIRST APPROXIMATION, the cheaper of two alternatives is better for the environment.
Electric cars are more expensive than gasoline cars, and often would never exist except for subsidies. If they were really more economical, they would already be popular. Ergo, per The Theory, they are worse for the environment.
"Should environmentally minded people really revere electric cars?"
I'm environmentally minded. Guess what I revere. Yep, you got it, since it's a no-brainer: bicycles. Best machine humans have ever created. Good for the body and good for the earth. I've never owned a car, and I don't want to. I use car sharing programs when I need to drive and bicycle or use public transportation (or both) otherwise.
And before anyone says "Well, but bicycles don't work for everyone: kids, job, blah blah," let me just squash that fallacious argument. Bicycle advocates *never* are saying we *all* have to ride bicycles. Just more of us. Everyone who wants to should feel they can. I bet you want to. Wind in the face, endorphin high, the feeling of doing things with your body, the joy of not destroying the earth to do the daily drudge: who doesn't want that?
The central power station is not making its emissions a few feet from the sidewalk. Its pollution controls aren't restricted by weight or the need for portability.
It's also way more efficient.
Electrifying the vehicle fleet is like modularizing your code. Instead of being tied to petroleum, with an electric fleet you can snap in nuclear, tidal, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, or whatever else turns out to be a good idea.
...I can scarcely imagine how it could be less efficient than everyone carrying around their own personal combustion engine and fuel supply ON the vehicle itself.
more than oil refining? more than shipping oil, with the inevitable spills? I'm all for taking the total cost of a system into account, but half estimates on one side of the discussion results in decisions made on incomplete or downright wrong information.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If you consider each and every ecological impact, no vehicle can ever be considered green.
Me, I use a velomobile to get around. It uses no oil on the face of it, yet it burns people's fat (that's food that needed to be grown and shipped, which is a lot of oil), it's made of non-recyclable fiberglass and aluminum (manufacturing aluminum is a HUGE source of pollution), etc... So even an ultra-efficient bicycle isn't green if you look closely.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Well, there is that pesky nickel smelting problem for the nickel foam thing that is required by the vehicles that you Earth-Firsters think is going to save the world.
Kriston
While charging your electric car with coal power sounds like a bad deal in the short term. The electric doesn't care where that power comes from, so in the long term that gives us the flexibility to operate an energy economy that is based on a wide range of sources. Also, diversity in the market also means stability and theoretically fair prices. (but we'll probably cock that up)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
As long as it works. I'd take an electric car if, performance-wise, it could compete with internal combustion engines while saving be the hassle of regular tune-ups, oil changes, etc while being decently-priced (which, right now, they are not). Whatever's convenient... the power has to come from somewhere, and until we start using natural, renewable resources like sunlight it will obviously not be a huge step up for environmentalists. But then, I don't give a damn what environmentalists say. They're just another annoying extremist group.
Despite the fact that he's a loud-mouthed git, Clarkson has been saying this for years although Andy Wilman (producer) is probably putting the words into his mouth.
Wait, Clarkson doesn't need anybody to put words into his mouth. From the production of the materials for the batteries to the charging problems of range and overall production of the electricity to charge them up, the technology just isn't there. We'd all be better just making moonshine in our backyards and feeding 100% alcohol into our cars (with mods of course)
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
This is exactly why I don't kneel to the gods of environmentalism. I honestly don't care which company gets my energy money. I do care when the government decides to regulate markets just because the sun feels hotter today than yesterday.
I want proof that the current markets are causing a problem, and I want proof that the regulations are going to obtain the desired results. Otherwise, it's political posturing.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
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.
Yeah, yeah, get your mu-metal hats on. But think about it. How many choices for gasoline are within driving distance? Half a dozen or more? How many choices for electric power? Most likely one. What happens when that one source decides to restrict your usage? And then what happens when usage restriction become geographic?
Really though, what else do you think those of us not educated in physics are supposed to do but trust the experts in the field? Personally, I think humankind is at it's zenith when it comes to understanding every little detail that controls it's very existance.
Seriously, the only algorithm I'm left with is this:
If( It_Will_Make_Someone_Money)
ignore:
Else:
back_fully;
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Basically we keep looking for "green" alternatives that don't require us to be even slightly inconvenienced or to change our lifestyles at all - and it's probably not possible.
#DeleteChrome
Within a century (easily) we will be able to live mostly off of renewables for the purpose of transportation and energy. Any given time you google "Solar breakthrough", there will be a couple advancements within the last month that enables greater efficiency--
http://cleantechnica.com/2013/06/11/new-class-of-solar-cell-reaches-new-efficiency-breakthrough/
Hell, it could even be a paint-- http://cleantechnica.com/2013/05/15/caution-wet-solar-power-new-affordable-solar-paint-research/
Plastics without fossil fuels is also quite forseeable in the near future: http://www.themoldingblog.com/2013/06/12/ibm-is-close-to-breakthrough-use-of-bioplastics-in-computer-servers/
Also, "they would already be popular"? Really? Do you have any idea what goes into something being "popular"? Advertizing, buddy. Watch the docu Who Killed the Electric car for an example of how automakers can manipulate peoples' desires with advertizing, pressuring them towards vehicles that're more costly to maintain (internal combustion engines), and away from more economic choices that the government may force them to offer.
You also forgot to mention petroleum subsidies, which artificially lowers the market price of oil. All in all, your "theory" is very short-sighted.
With a fossil fuel based car, you HAVE to burn those fossil fuels. With an electric car, you have a choice. This article seems a bit black-and-white to me when there are many shades of grey. Yes, cars take up a lot of space and have a host of other problems however improving one problem DOES help, even if it is only one piece of the puzzle.
Additionally, all of the subsidies the author writes about are a carrot for investing in the future. Sure, solar panels and cars and whatever other example may take fossil fuels to make now but 1. petroleum burning cars require fossil fuels to make as well and 2. if we are learning to build a machine to use an alternate energy source eventually that technology, when it is cheaper, will reach the manufacturing process.
It's like saying a computer uses more energy to print out a letter that you then need to mail via snail mail. We eventually realized we could bypass printing entirely. Clearly different batteries, charging processes, manufacturing processes etc would need to be and will be developed. While I appreciate calling attention to the defects in electric car manufacturing and quality this article lacks vision and cannot see the potential in the future.
The ieee article keeps mentioning the National Academy, which admits on their own webpage: "Do the National Academies perform or fund research? The Academies have no research laboratories. Study committees generally evaluate and compile research done by others rather than generating original data." When we're discussing a topic that is highly controversial, and when the article itself mentions "To get a sense of how biases creep in, first follow the money." - lets do that. Oil & Gas contributions to buy politicians.... both contributions and lobbying funds, is a multitude more than that of any environmental organisation or, even if automotive companies WERE pushing for pro-electric studies which I see no presented evidence of and only presumption, automotive manufacturers are a tiny fraction of the contribution/lobbyist funds that ultimately go towards the people who apparently fund the "National Academies" stu...wait, it's NOT a study, it's a collection of bits of other studies which could be collected in absolutely any way they see fit to promote any agenda they like, since there's so much conflicting "data/fact" here. Just a bunch of nonsense.
I drive a 110cc motorcycle everywhere I go. I do ~60km every day. It goes up to 95km/h, it fits anywhere, I don't have to worry about parking, I just leave it in the sidewalk right at the door wherever I go, I never get stuck in traffic since I can fit just about anywhere. If the road is truly congested, I just driver over the yellow line, nobody ever seems to use that space anyway ;)
And my fuel consumption? I go through ~1.5 liters of shell v-power every day, or around 1.6 dollars taking into account the fuel price and exchange rate where I live (Argentina).
It's a lot more fun and enjoyable than riding a car, it's cheap as fuck, and it's certainly more eco-friendly than the most advanced electric car.
If I have to travel out of town, I take a motherfucking train.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
The aggregate effect may not be advantageous, but if you change where the emissions or pollution occurs, you have one hell of a difference when it comes to smog.
Like a train, let the engines charge the batteries, the the electrical motors drive the wheels. Because acceleration is tied to the electrical motors, you can gear engine size towards average load, not maximum peak of acceleration. Smaller engines = automatic fuel savings.
Also, since the engine only charges batteries, they will be easy to swap out and smaller engines are also cheaper to swap out. Today, hardly anyone would refit their car to run on hydrogen or alcohol or whatever. Expensive, voids the warranty, you might fuck up the entire car. With a series, swapping out the engine becomes less like touching the OEM parts of your all integrated mac and more like taking out the PSU of your PC.
Alcohol becomes cheap? No problem! Switch it. Same with biodiesel. Batteries advance significantly? Take the engine out completely and throw some of those in there instead! A lightweight small stirling engine becomes viable or the wave disk generator actually gets off the drawing board? Cool, go with that. Whatever. Real modularity.
The 2 other real problems I see is that we're still building sexy sports cars or other wind pushing hunks of metal that aren't as aerodynamically efficient as say an Aptera. And that the US is a car culture more than most. That's the hardest to fix though. Entire economy has been swining on that since the idea of the suburb beens introduced since the 1930-1950s via the government's pathological want of everyone to get their own house (cheap mortgages yo) to the country becoming one continuously ugly strip mall.
The idea that every single human on the planet can haul their ass around in about 1000 kilos of metal and plastic on road, literally, paved with oil, is about as stupid as a plan ever devised by us monkeys. Whether by oil or lithium, it's still a remarkably stupid idea.
A mobile internal combustion engine has to have certain concessions for weight, vibrations, ease of maintenance, and other things that a stationary power plant does not need, and power plants can install expensive equipment and expensive maintenance to reduce emissions that a car cannot have.
.63 pounds of CO2. .52 pounds of CO2.
See for example: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=74&t=11 and let's assume that we are generating our energy according to 2012 rates http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_1_1 so that average CO2 production per kwh is 1.20.
Let's compare the 2013 RAV4 http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=33397 which gets 44 kwh per 100 miles (the worst I could find that has a gas equivalent). Compare that to the RAV4 2WD http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/Find.do?action=sbs&id=33425 which gets 26 MPG.
1 mile on the gas-powered RAV4 produces
1 mile on the electric RAV4 produces
(I used to do the same calculations on coal alone, but it appears that either coal has gotten more polluting or gas powered cars have gotten a lot more efficient since I last checked)
Pollution from drilling for oil, manufacturing the gas, getting the gas to the station, using electricity to power the pumps etc. and lets throw in some accidents once in a while where we waste more gas powering the machines that clean up the spill. Right....
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Can we stop pretending that a car will ever do anything good for the environment? We are taking something that is close to 3000 Lbs and accelerating it to decent speeds over and over again. Oh yeah, and there are millions of us doing it. It's easily solvable by looking at classic conservation of energy laws. We lose. Even solar, we are taking the suns energy and placing it into our atmosphere. I'm sorry but we lose there too. But wait, we get the sun's energy anyway right? Nope, we reflect a lot of it but with solar cells we are soaking it up. We lose.
Ok, So I'm not saying there is nothing we can do. There are plenty of things. But lets stop pretending our vehicles are ever going to help things out. Sure we can reduce the impact, but energy is energy, and our cars use lots of it.
Necessary but not sufficient is really tough for some people isn't it?
Perhaps you should RTFA, which points out that, in the UK, power stations are only about 36% efficient at delivering energy to end users. Add in the 80% efficiency of an electric car and now you have something similar to that of a gas (petrol)-powered car.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Actually, all of this just proves people are forgetful dolts.
We used to use horses, sail power and grow crops on farms.
So, of course we can live of off renewables --- humans lived off renewables for 49,900 of the last 50,000 years. Only forgetful barnacleheads and the people you seek to pacify are as stone-cold stupid as to need assurance that humans can live off renewables.
Dear spaghetti monster, 99.99% of human history is living off renewables and it is really, really sad someone like yourself seems so unaware of history as to think this is "hard". It isn't hard, as humans we've "already done that", "almost always did that" and thinking we can't do that tomorrow is shear ignorance of history. Our progress hasn't actually been fuel --- it has been vaccines, medicine, the practice of sanitation to prevent disease and the embrace of the scientific method --- human progress has NEVER been about the waste or even use of fuel.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
I should point one more thing out. The while the limits of the carnot cycle in a vehicle is limited at around 25-30%, in practice it is around 15% due to the non-ideal operating regime, transmission losses, etc..
"Geopolitical" tends to mean on a large geo scale, but it's worth noting that geopolitical solutions to transport-related problems exist on the small local scale too.
Many of the energy and environmental problems caused by transportation would be greatly reduced or even eliminated by discouraging the mass commute to work in the morning and back home at night. It's seriously dumb as rocks.
The only real blocker to decentralized white collar working is that managers don't like it, but with sufficient incentives that can be overcome. (Incentives is where the "political" comes in.) "Can't work at home" can be overcome too by providing very local work places to which people can walk or cycle, and teleworking from there. Lower work efficiency can be a problem in some cases, but that has to be set against the total waste of time and money involved in commuting. Good quality media connections can largely overcome the lack of direct personal contact anyway.
Sure, there would be some difficulties to fix, but if transport is considered to be a serious problem for the environment then why not try to reduce its volume? Commuting by default is pretty ridiculous.
Electric cars add a level of indirection. There are various ways to produce electricity, and as the economics change the production can be adapted without affecting the "client." Surely programmers and developers shouldn't even be arguing about this.
It's old skool but seriously, our fellow mammals are the most natural solution to our problem.
They benefit the local environment. The pollution happens somewhere else instead of at street level in a crowded city. That makes them useful in L.A., Beijing, Tokyo, Santiago or wherever you get a huge buildup of pollution from vehicles. If you want to benefit the environment in general you use an electric train or some other way to cut total energy usage instead of an electric car.
The electric car is the modern answer to the question of "I want a horse that doesn't crap on the street". While you still have a car you still have car inefficiency, versus motorbikes at one end and trains at the other.
Vastly more, since you can build them big to squeeze that last little bit of energy out of the steam with multiple turbines and you don't have to worry about how heavy they are. You also don't have to worry about losses from having to move a heavy cooling system around.
The critique that I am surprised hasn't exploded the electric car myth is only briefly flirted with in the article: We've reached peak parking. With people flocking to mega-cities, many with populations headed to about 10 million, there isn't close to enough land for either the wide-laned roads for people to drive any kind of car or the land for parking. This isn't exactly a new or unknown critique either. See for example Gary Hustwit's documentary Urbanized.
Using fuel is what made all those things possible, by freeing up human attention and labor from having to be all about getting the next meal. 99.99% of human history has also been without useful health care, without food security, without sanitation and without science - all because those times were also less energy consuming.
And say "Goodbye, Global Warming! And hello, Nuclear Winter!".
There are a lot of words in the article, but very few numbers. This type of question really needs to be answered quantitatively.
This is a very good comment.
Dont forget MORE wars over arable land, resources etc.
I'll admit I didn't read every word of TFA, but my antennae went up when the author spent lots of time comparing the environmental impact of gasoline engines to electric autos supplied by coal-generated electricity. Then, comparing different types of generation, he matches up nuclear and natural gas rather than either of those two relatively-clean alternatives and coal. Completely absent is any mention of thorium-fueled reactors, though several countries are at the testing stage with such generators, and unless some major problems emerge, they seem likely to take over from uranium-fueled reactors in the next generation.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it seemed to me that the author was most interested in raising his profile by generating controversy. It's an old academic trick when ideas are scarce and the bosses are hinting that it's time to get a few papers out there...or else.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
When looking at comparative efficiencies and pollutants, you have to look at the whole chain. From hole in the ground to rotating wheel. Even burning "Dirty" coal, Electric Vehicles have a distinct advantage. The losses and energy use involved in drilling/mining, transporting, burning and generating, transporting (considerably less loss) and finally turning wheels pales in comparison to the ICE requirements of drilling/pumping oil, transporting crude, upgrading/refining to petroleum (Which takes HUGE amounts of energy and is almost never mentioned), transporting petroleum, burning it and finally using it to turn wheels. For an ICE, you can generally only find information about the latter stages, and that is less than 40% efficient. Electric cars are 90%+ efficient with power from the wall, and the whole chain comes in at around 60-75% (So far, this is getting better all the time). Electric cars don't have, or need, cooling systems (in fact, the opposite is often the case, where heaters have to be installed as there is no "Waste" heat generated to warm the passenger cabin).
But, even if that wasn't the case, and pollution from both methods was exactly equal, it's much MUCH easier to introduce measures to clean up the products from 1 smokestack (recirculation/sequestration etc) than it is to do the same thing with hundreds of thousands of tiny, mobile, tailpipes.
Of course, as renewable resources come online in the power grid, the Electric car gets greener automatically (as it's power is being produced in a more green manner) without the owner having to do a thing about it, and that's also not considering engine oil changes, transmission fluid etc. Try doing that with your gas-guzzler.
Batteries for electric cars aren't perfect, they do require some digging in the ground and a little bit of chemical work to make them (Though ICEs also need batteries, along with the odd and rare elements they require for durability and longevity) but once made they are 99% recyclable. And even with that, they're still cleaner than the parts and ancillary equipment needed for ICEs
In addition to the local air pollution, electric cars greatly decrease the noise level in cities, which currently for many people is an even bigger problem.
I hate reading articles like this. Yes, the power company puts off pollution. Yes, charging your electric car technically still pollutes the environment because of the coal that is burned to produce the electricity. But here's the question: Is it easier to replace 1 power plant, or 1 million cars? Sorry, not phased by the report. Looking forward to eventually owning a plugin hybrid so that I can let the gas market compete with the power market and to help drive down costs through competition. Thanks.
Select from tblFriends where interesting >= 4;
Electricity is a much more easily created and stored form of energy, plus you can make it from almost anything, and it can power almost anything. This means they can be indirectly powered even by gasoline, maybe through a generator or something. Point I'm trying to make here is that once a car is electric, you can charge it through any way that generates electricity, and even if current green capacity can't foot all of the necessary electricity, any form can, and later on, when green technologies get better and produce more electricity than current tech, cars will still be able to accept the electricity if they're electric. Meanwhile, gas cars are going to always have a slowly dwindling supply of energy just by how it works.
IIRC, the UK is a worst case scenario for electrical generation pollution in the first world. Their main sources of power are coal and gas, solar isn't as viable as it is in many other countries, hydro and wind are underdeveloped relative to other first world countries, and alternate resources as a whole are relatively unused besides nuclear, which is still underused. If the electric vs gas car pollution comparison is even close to equivalent there, it should be a slam dunk win for electric vehicles in a lot of other places - and that's not even taking the factors that are unmentioned in that report into account.
Don't give us that crap, Sheriff. We all know good and well you drive a 1978 Dodge Monaco! A velomobile! That's just funny. COOO COOOO COOOOOOO!
I know I'm going to get legions of frothing "AGW is the doom of humanity" nitwits drooling all over me for this... but its really not a big deal. At worst this is something we have to watch for the next couple generations and possibly remedy it with some light geo-engineering. Short of that... its irrelevant.
I don't want an electric car because its good for the environment. I want an electric car so I can have energy freedom with my automobile. So I can fill it up with coal, nuclear, hydro, or even solar. But where the power comes from is less important to me then that it can come from anywhere. Where as my gasoline powered car is pretty intolerant on the subject. It will run on gasoline or nothing.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Two of the biggest benefits to an electric car are:
(1) When you're stopped, your motor doesn't keep running. Think of all the fuel you've wasted either letting your car warm up, or sitting at a light, or stuck in traffic.
(2) Regenerative braking technology converts your momentum back into usable power instead of just wasting it as heat.
These, combined with the fact that your car doesn't care where it gets electricity from, and that a coal plant is still more efficient overall than thousands of independent engines, is precisely why this article is probably OPEC propaganda. :D
In Soviet Russia, dot slashes YOU!
Currently, buying electrical cars is mostly being part of supplying demand for something better.
In reality, we need better batteries (especially charging and charge cycles, or, a good system where you can change batteries every five years or so combined with efficient recycling) and need better power sources in general (Thorium for instance) to support them.
Actually if you read the article (but hey, this is slashdot, who does that...), the author does make a valid point: "If legislators truly wish to reduce fossil-fuel dependence, they could prioritize the transition to pedestrian- and bike-friendly neighborhoods. That won’t be easy everywhere—even less so where the focus is on electric cars. Studies from the National Academies point to better land-use planning to reduce suburban sprawl and, most important, fuel taxes to reduce petroleum dependence. "
You really must be a dimwit not to understand that electric cars are much better for the enviroment than current combustion-vehicles..
Electricity can be generated completely clean, and even as long as it isn't it's still only at 'one' place compared to the millions of polluters on the road, it's easier to filter one coalcenter as having to filter a million..
And let's not forget, fuelbased vehicles need oil, oil is used for much more than fuel only, and oil is not infinitive (hell they even think we won't make it another 50 years), and it'll take a few decades before we even have replaced all fuelbased vehicles with electricbased vehicles, so we really need to start as soon as possible. Also the technology will only further by this, as more research is done when more vehicles are sold..
You have to look at it on the long run.. and in the long run, electric vehicles are the future..
The UK coal powerstations are old and not being replaced.
The best modern coal powerstations hit about 49% electrical efficiency (and 95% CHP), slightly worse than the best large 2 stroke Diesels which hit about 51%. The UK is busy installing lots of natural gas plants. A decentish COGAS plant can easily hit 60% electrical efficiency.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
LOL at this other comment of yours--
"According to studies done at Chernobyl. After a couple of years, new births rapidly stop being part of the cancer riddle group. It doesn't even take decades, just a few years."
Man, is somebody paying you? Kill yourself.
Of course, the distance from the Earth to the Moon was much too small in my calculation. It is really 3.8e8m, giving a force of 2.0e20 N, which is indeed less than that the Sun exerts. So you were totally right.
I live in a heavily trafficated area of our capital. It would benefit me and my environment if more cars were electrical. Less local emissions to air, and a lot less noise. It would surely help with the asthma cases in the area too.
So even if the climate and the environment as a whole won't be beneficially affected, it sure would help in heavily polluted city environments.
another factor is that all of the millions of cars are each emitting pollution from thier exhaust pipes, each need to have catalytic converters and other anti-pollution technology In electric cars, the pollution is centered at the power plant, meaning only one instance of anti-pollution technology is needed for all the cars charged by that powerplant. This results in cheaper and cleaner vehicles. In addition, the power cells of the cars are recylable at the end of their life
If you had been paying any attention to the barrage of people telling you that electric cars aren't good for the environment, you'd have heard that the production of the batteries is bad for the environment. You seem to have completely ignored that point from your comment. Still, electric cars are definitely a step in the right direction, we can't be stuck on petrol forever.
Sorry, bud, more horrid things happen when resource-rich countries education improves, enabling the people and their country to avoid undue foreign dependency. Take, for example Iraqi literacy and Doctoral rates in 1989 under the secular Baathist party; the highest in the Arab League; Bush Senior attacked in `91.
Take two, Moderately-conservative-Islamic-socialist Libya; highest rates of Arab League in 2009.
Take three, Syria, perhaps the only secular Arab government left (can this be true?!?), Baathist Party, top 5 percentile of Arab League countries in literacy and tertiary education.
Resource-Rich, becoming educated, internet-on-demand, the trends of development and national-self-determination materialise with increasing trajectory- BOOM, NEOZIONNAZI drone attack and corresponding media charade.
Bummer, too, really thought Obama was gonna allow the Gazans access to their own natural-gas the israelis have been ripping-off for years; cant catch nothing decent inside of two miles offshore......
And heat. I don't know if this has been studied but I really believe that the heat produced by engines and exhaust gases from cars do have some direct consequence with cities being hotter than rural areas. Of course there are more causes to this, but analog cars might be another one.
The best modern coal powerstations hit about 49% electrical efficiency (and 95% CHP), slightly worse than the best large 2 stroke Diesels which hit about 51%.
By large, you mean container-ship sized? Those are some of the most polluting engines on the planet.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Start with the math
http://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
Now let's look at some of the statements
"Solar cells contain heavy metals"
SOME solar cells contain heavy metals. Those are the CdTe thin-film models which were in vogue for a while but largely out of the market today. In these, the metals are locked in compounds which make them no less safe that the poisonous chlorine gas or flammable sodium metal in your salt. The panels people are actually buying today, pSi and mSi, do not contain heavy metals. They consist almost entirely of silicon, with a small amount of silver, aluminum and copper wiring.
"and their manufacturing releases greenhouse gases such as sulfur hexafluoride"
Their manufacture USED TO release GHG's, but the industry has reduced leakage to just about zero since about 2007.
"For instance, Richard Pike of the Royal Society of Chemistry provocatively determined that electric cars, if widely adopted, stood to lower Britain’s carbon dioxide emissions by just 2 percent, given the U.K.’s electricity sources."
Now think about this for this statement to make any sense whatsoever, Pike is saying that if we all switched our cars, an astonishing technological change, that the generation would *not* change.
In fact, the opposite is much more likely. As I type this wind turbines are going up all across the UK, and they are lobbying to be the European end of the Iceland-Europe undersea HVDC link. The first of these, especially, is a perfect counterpart for electric cars or PIH's.
By the time significant numbers of electric cars are on the road, the generation mix will have already been radically altered.
"Last year, a U.S. Congressional Budget Office study found that electric car subsidies “will result in little or no reduction in the total gasoline use and greenhouse-gas emissions of the nation’s vehicle fleet over the next several years.”"
Well *duh*. With very few electric cars on the road, it's pretty obvious to everyone they'll have little impact.
"The lifetime difference in greenhouse-gas emissions between vehicles powered by batteries and those powered by low-sulfur diesel, for example, was hardly discernible"
Considering that adding batteries to a diesel engine decreases it's GHG emissions by about 1/3rd, this seems unlikely unless you select places in the world where the majority of the power comes from crappy coal plants. Like the US, or China. You know, like this
"University of Tennessee studied five vehicle types in 34 Chinese cities"
Argue all you want, the math, as noted in the link above, is clear.
An that is only for coal fired power stations. For example the part of the UK that I happen to live in Scotland gets 20% of it's electricity from renewables (mostly hydro) and 30% from nuclear. That is 50% low to zero carbon where plant efficiency is basically irrelevant for the context of the pollution of electric vehicles.
Tell me which is easier
- Improving the efficiency of a single power station in a fixed location where weight is not an issue
- Improving the efficiency of a million mobile vehicles not in a fixed location where weight is an issue.
Even if electric cars are ZERO percent more efficient today, heck even if they are NEGATIVE today, they are still an investment in the future and the way forward. I don't get how people can't see this. Centralization always drives efficiency.
What does depress me is that we still haven't gone far enough with designing cars etc. for recycling. It's very hard still to separate the various materials when scrapping cars and requires either a large amount of labour to dissassemble them or else using a very large shredder machine and putting the waste stream through an automated separating process.
Electric cars complicate things with the nasty materials in the batteries.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
By large, you mean container-ship sized?
Yep.
Those are some of the most polluting engines on the planet.
Not inherently: mostly because they run on filthy cheap fuel full of sulphur. Either way they would be impractical for large scale power generation.
Actually my figures put coal at slightly better. They hit 49% electrical efficiency, whereas the big diesels are 51% efficient at the shaft. If used for generation, there would be additional generating losses, putting them below coal.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The average UK *fossil fuel* plant efficiency is 35%, but this doens't include the contribution from nuclear and renewables, since the efficiency is not as important for these sources for emissions purposes. Nuclear is a significant contribution and cars would mostly be charged overnight when most generation is nuclear base load.
Where I live, my electric bill has a check box that allows all my electricity come from wind and solar. With an electric car consumers can make a choice to protect the environment.
Greed is the root of all evil.
They could also end the oil and coal subsidies....
As long as we are looking 'big picture'.
While critiques of this sort are still a bit controversial, simply because a lot of guessing has to be performed to account for various stages of the vehicles life, they also have a systematic bias which fails to account for an even greater environmental cost generated by the support infrastructure and social changes related to an extensive road network for personal vehicles. The environmental cost of so many roads covering so much of the landscape causing runoff, requiring maintenance, and leeching chemicals, re-radiating heat instead of trapping it in chemical bonds, and creating risks to wildlife is only the beginning. Medium density 'suburban' areas far from work and shopping, with huge, mostly unused lawns are much less possible without ready access to personal transportation and the infrastructure that requires supports and in many ways encourages lifestyles which use a lot of energy and harm the environment. That doesn't even include the cost to human health, psychology, and society, which are all areas where suburbia has received much criticism.
A quote from an interview with Ulrich Baretzki, Audi Sports's engine guru: "... an electric car is emission free, it's a lie, it's a big, big lie. And people don't want to be lied at. They are lied at by politicians all year long. But technicians shouldn't lie." Audi Sport's Ulrich Baretzky Interview - /DRIVE UNCUT
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TAhWdVU3M4
Downsized electric cars used sparingly would convey large environmental benefits. Here's the context in which that would be true:
We'd need microgrids of peer-to-peer electricity generators using solar, concentrated solar-thermal, wind, geothermal, wave, and gasification of biomass. A diverse portfolio is a strong one. Electric cars are inherently versatile and adaptable to this scenario.
We'd need to reorient our production of vitals to be more local to begin with. Most of us just deal with an hour a day of commuting in a car, right? That's not the half of it. We're burning all kinds of oil to do industrial farming using energy-intensive fertilizers and minerals mined and shipped from all over the world, and in the process using pesticides which kill the soil microbes that are key to natural fertility. We need to replace sprawling industries and habitats with small, redundant, resilient local ones.
That's a whole systems kind of change, not a replacement widget for the existing system. Yes, electric cars fit into that, but you need a big picture to see why we're not just plugging a car into the lines near a coal plant.
The problem is a problem of perception not a problem of technology. In general society is looking for that silver bullet that just magically solves all our energy problems and environmental concerns into one neat little package. Until society is willing to accept a solution that includes a mix of energy solutions, we'll never be happy. This applies to transportation as well.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
In many, many instances secondary/tertiary/etc effects dominate. Plus, money expended is not the same as cost borne by the environment (as other have pointed out) due to differences between internalized and externalized costs. So until you've actually analyzed all these and concluded they are irrelevant, your terse, first-approximation theory has very little utility.
Seriously. Trading oil, pollutants, and wasteful designs for electricity, opportunities for more manageable pollutants, and less wasteful designs? This is so hard? This is controversy?
A full-on electric car today needs batteries that the equal of oil in pollution in manufacturing. Recycling is a positive, but not a solution. Ultra-capacitor storage sounds like an elegant solution, though I've seen the damage from a really large capacitor failure, and it will be spectacular to see one storing enough energy to get me to work and back for one day go up. Boom.
Hydrogen sounds like a working solution - crack water, discard the oxygen, repeat. Electricity to crack water is the issue.
All in all, electric cars, be they using batteries, hydrogen, or whatever/wherever the source of electricity, all move the pollution source from one place to another. If you have plug-ins, that gas plant down the road is the source, or the nuke plant elsewhere. Add in manufacturing impacts, and it is at best a wash, I suspect.
But having said that, I think electric is the way. Oil has so many problems, it had only the advantage of being practical at the time. We can do so much better today, from plug-in charging ports at parking lots to non-contact charging to much better fuel options.
If I could, I would hack together an electric car form a lightweight chassis, all the drive train stuff, and simple lead-acid batteries. All dependent on the smallest practical generator charging the batteries, driven by the smallest practical turbo diesel tucked away in a compartment. Allow for a spot charge to keep the batteries up, and be prepared to upgrade the batts when possible. It seems an electric drivetrain is very efficient. Of course I'm missing something.
But oil can be obsoleted. It's practical, and the solutions to the 'new' problems of electric cars are not insurmountable.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
My home power is 100% wind power. If I charge an electric car there is almost no polution (tires and a tad of grease here and there), so his argument is only valid if you don't make an informed choice to buy a renewable energy plan. I'm personally waiting for Tesla to come out with their $30k car and then I'll definately be looking to buy.
The energy density of electricity is far greater than that of even gasoline. You can do more with electrical power than you can with that gallon of gasoline.
Sure at the current moment there may be an environmental penalty but that's in the battery manufacturing process. Over time I expect that will be mitigated.
But you have to ask yourself - what are the environmental issues when you weigh an electric vehicle against a fossil fuel burning vehicle? Big differences.
The IEEE piece is nothing but a smash job, more than likely sponsored by manufacturers or big oil or both.
Did you know the averaged amount of energy (US) for the cleanest type of oil to be drilled, transported, refined, distributed and pumped is 6.6KWH per gallon? For Canadian tar-sands, which is near the dirtiest type of oil we can use, is it closer to 13.3KWH per gallon produced? So when you burn a gallon of gasoline, and go ~30 miles on it, remember you have both your car's direct emissions AND all the emissions used to generate the electricity needed to get it into your tank. So basically your car is twice as smoggy as you knew. Or... you could just put that same electricity into a EV, drive ~60 miles with no added emissions, and leave the oil in the ground. An EV uses a form of energy but an ICE car burns a finite resource. We can do better, why are we even arguing about the need to?
1 Dachshund + 1 Dachshunds = A Paradox.
Not all base load generators run 100% all the time.
They typically throttle slowly. e.g. for coal fired steam they control the amount of air that is being blown into the fire.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So long as all the batteries are made in China!
Ohhhh you mean the ENTIRE environment not just ours... Shut up stupid hippy and go back to woodstock!
At what stage of their service life? And what *is* their service life?
1. All of it, until something breaks, at least.
2. The life of an electric motor of the sort put into EVs should outlast the EV itself.
We have electric motors that have been in continuous operation for over a century. Given the limited mechanical wear, you should only need to maybe replace the bearings. Other than that you're looking at the breakdown period for the insulation.
Quick lesson on electric motors: The 'strength' of an electric motor is limited by around three major factors:
1. The voltage the insulation can withstand before it breaks down.
2. The amount of heat the insulation can withstand without breaking down
3. The amount of heat the motor can dissipate.
If the motor becomes less efficient, that means it's resistance has risen. That means it's dumping more heat into the motor itself, raising it's own temperature. While there's overhead, they don't put huge amounts of overhead in. That means that a electric motor that's operating less efficiently, for whatever reason, is going to either burn itself out or trip temperature safeties. Probably the latter for a motor in an EV. A computer fan burning itself out isn't a big deal; the motor in an EV is big and expensive enough to justify additional safeties/diagnostics.
Really, the most likely bit of maintenance would be replacing the bearing every so often, but outside of trouble we already have the capability of making bearings that are expected to last well over 500k hours. That's 57 years per bearing set...
I don't read AC A human right
" "If legislators truly wish to reduce fossil-fuel dependence, they could prioritize the transition to pedestrian- and bike-friendly neighborhoods. That won’t be easy everywhere"
pedestrian- and bike-friendly neighborhoods.would require pedestrian- and bike-friendly weather which is not the case in many areas of this continent.
(Although some of the effects of weather can be offset by building tunnels and covered walk/bike ways, the costs would be astronomical.
(and many people live further from their workplace than would be possible to effectively use human powered transport. I am lucky in that it is only 20 minutes walk for me in good weahttp://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/02/010230/electric-vehicles-might-not-benefit-the-environment-after-all#ther.
Even if electric cars are ZERO percent more efficient today, heck even if they are NEGATIVE today, they are still an investment in the future and the way forward. I don't get how people can't see this. Centralization always drives efficiency.
Two things to note. First, the investment can occur later. Second, centralization doesn't always drive efficiency. There are plenty of examples where the more centralized solution is a poorer one. For example, failure modes of centralized infrastructure tends to be much more destructive than failure modes of more decentralized infrastructure because more stuff is affected and the larger size of failures makes it harder to mitigate and repair when a failure occurs.
Polarizing language always sets off my BS-meter. To see such excessive use of it in an article in a trade magazine published by a respected society (IEEE) is disturbing, and smacks of political bias.
It also makes it hard to take anything in such an article seriously. For example, it portends liberal use of weasel words in any following logical or technical argument. And, to be honest, I don't have the patience to wade through deliberate use of logical fallacies in an opinion piece. I'd rather spend my time reading something unbiased, and one that uses reason.
Of course, I assume that the aim of the author of the article is to make it attractive by being controversial. He merrily skips a few important things: Air quality in general, air quality at street level, noise pollution, the fact that emissions concentrated on very localised spots are better controllable (Captain Obvious dixit) But of course, the author has to sell hist stuff and pay his bills
-- 29A the number of the Beast
Cars are unsustainable not because of their fuel type but because of the sheer amount of energy it requires to hurl ourselves around along with thousands of pounds of metal. It just not a great use of energy.
Elon Musk addressed this at the Model X event. Tesla says that if you live in CA and take power from the grid you end up producing 1/4 the CO2 as a gas car and in the worst case scenario where you live in West Virginia and get most electricity from coal you still only produce 1/3 the CO2.
Here is the relevant part of the clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=YoNd2eMsPHU#t=334s
So, let's give up the cities then?
How big was that cheque from the oil company?
The average car on the road is something like 11 years old, maybe older. Just because some people trade for a new car every 3 years does not mean their old one is scrapped -- they are driven into the ground, usually, unless totaled in a crash. And the typical used car ends up with 200-300 thousand miles before it goes to the crusher.
EVs really aren't designed to last that long. So whatever fixed environmental costs there are to manufactured the vehicle and later on to scrap it must be distributed over a smaller number of miles.
WTF is it with all this relativism (where every idiot is an expert) and magical thinking where people think you can get more out than is put into a simple reaction? Don't they teach very simple chemistry in high school any more?
There is the manufacture and disposal of a very toxic battery. Also the pollution from power plants including mercury and radioactive elements although the energy production is much more efficient than burning gasoline.. When manufacturing and disposal are taken into consideration, I seriously doubt they are less polluting over all. OTOH it requires far less energy than Hydrogen fueled cars. Hydrogen is (so far) the least efficient of any fuel in use and requires great amounts of energy to produce.
I've been trying to decide if I should upgrade from my '92 civic, which gets 30 mpg. Years ago one of the climate scientists at Berkeley National Lab, where I work, said over 60% of the carbon footprint of an automobile is in it's initial manufacture. Other climate scientists argued over the exact number, however the consensus amongst the climate scientists was the carbon footprint of the initial manufacturing is very significant making the 2009's Cash for Clunker's, decidedly negative for the environment, and purely stimulus to the auto industry. Based on this, I have been feeling carbon virtuous by driving my older, fuel efficient vehicle, rather than buying a prius, or other hybrid/electric vehicle. I recently read an article about electric vehicles, and how improvements in vehicle longevity, and improved batteries change this equation. Based on this more recent study, I could reduce my carbon footprint by purchasing a purely electric vehicle. I was thinking an electric motorcycle with a side car for my doggies, who could then wear fashionable Doggles, and striped scarves. :) It could also make putting solar panels on my house, economically feasible. (With my low electrical usage, I would currently lose money installing solar panels, with the panels dying before I break even. By increasing my electrical usage I could change the result of this equation.)
Whether or not electric vehicles help the environment now, they are an important step in developing the technology to become carbon neutral. With consumers and the government putting money into the industry there is money and interrest in improving battery technology. Green energy sources require storage of energy, and developing energy storage technology is ultimately good for the environment.