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Electric Cars Emit 50 Percent Less Greenhouse Gas Than Diesel, Study Finds (theguardian.com)
entirely_fluffy shares a report from The Guardian: Electric cars emit significantly less greenhouse gases over their lifetimes than diesel engines even when they are powered by the most carbon intensive energy, a new report has found. In Poland, which uses high volumes of coal, electric vehicles produced a quarter less emissions than diesels when put through a full lifecycle modeling study by Belgium's VUB University. CO2 reductions on Europe's cleanest grid in Sweden were a remarkable 85%, falling to around one half for countries such as the UK. The new study uses an EU estimate of Poland's emissions -- at 650gCO2/kWh -- which is significantly lower than calculations by the European commission's Joint Research Centre science wing last year. The VUB study says that while the supply of critical metals -- lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite -- and rare earths would have to be closely monitored and diversified, it should not constrain the clean transport transition. As battery technology improves and more renewables enter the electricity grid, emissions from battery production itself could be cut by 65%, the study found.
... Jeremy Clarkson isn't going to like this.
That study is a eco-warrier lie. Even cars burning coal direckly produce less Carbon Die Oxyde then cars burning soler pannels.
Stop giving my money to soler greeny SJW warriers and you are not going to get my gasoline car until you Prius from my cold dead hans.
Hail a Murka! We are Nummer One!!!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
It's cool that you......believe.....that but there's a study here that shows otherwise. Maybe you'd at least like to give some reasoning to back up your assertion? If you do, that would be interesting (implying that your current comment is lacking interest).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Indeed. Particularly has Diesel is a hydrocarbon, and so half of its bonds are to hydrogen, not carbon-carbon. Coal power stations are pretty efficient, but so are modern ICEs. Plus there are transmission and battery losses for EV.
The basic theory is that an Electric drivetrain is ~90% efficient, compared to ~30% for IC. This means that even after ~40% power loss from cable transmission, coal ends up not being too bad, because generating in bulk is way more efficient than many small generators.
Where's the link to the Guardian article? I want to read it...
Also, let's compare keeping an old Japanese gasoline 4-cylinder for 25 years rather than some diesels. I'm on years 19 and 11 with mine, and neither show any signs of dying soon. And they get better mileage than most of the new models from both of their manufacturers.
I suppose ending is better than mending though, good thing we crushed metric shit-tons of perfectly usable already manufactured (the carbon-cost to make them was already sunk) cars under the guise of environmentalism to prop up the auto industry during the recession.
Once the electric fad is over...
Whenever an electric car puts on brakes, they charge their battery. So yes, even an electric car powered by a coal burning power plant will be more efficient than a normal gas engine. A quick look at gas mileage, show good gas engine is about 30mpg, hybrid is just less than double that mpg, and electric is about 4 times as efficient as a gas engine. That factor of 4 is why even coal burning charging an electric will produce less pollution.
Carbon capture in a centralized production location like coal plants is much more efficient than in distributed consumer cars. That efficiency comes at significant capital cost but that is part of running the plant itself. Regardless of how energy is generated, the promise of EV transportation etc. is precisely that the pollution is more concentrated in production both for the energy and for the vehicle. Both cases are much easier to control and filter to avoid environmental damage that kills people and damages property.
Please learn to spell. Even creimer winced when he tried to read that.
Unfortunately batteries are only about 80-90% efficient (lifetime average), electricity transmission is around 90% (allowing for max/min usage transitions), and the generation of the electricity is about 60% efficient.
and no, an electric drivetrain has only a small advantage over an IC drivetrain unless you have wheel motors-which no one does - probably in the region of 10% better.
Now, static generation Is more efficient that an IC motor, by around 20%.
So, if you are talking about hydrocarbon power for both, electric has 2 additional losses (batteries, transmission) which acount for around 20% loss, but IC is about 30% lower from the motor and drivetrain.
So we are talking about 10% or so difference.
HOWEVER, if the power is from nuclear (and no, solar/wind are not going to produce enough for a nation scale car fleet any time soon) then electric is HUGELY better for CO2 - but not if it is coal/gas electricity..
HOWEVER++ they are talking diesels. DIESEL ENGINES ARE ACTUALLY GREENHOUSE NEGATIVE!
WTF you say? Well they produce NO (which is what everyone complains about). That reacts with atmospheric methane and removes it! methane is thousands of times worse as a greenhouse gas than CO2. The net effect of your average diesel car is a LOWERING of the atmospheric greenhouse gas effect!
So, what we need to battle greenhouse effect are more nuclear power stations, and more diesels!
Sorry, facts are so inconvenient, aint they..
1) The study only takes into account the CURRENT methods of production of electricity. So (a point in electric cars favor), as solar power grows, so will the CO2 efficiency of electric cars. Instead of sitting in the company parking lot, those cars could be plugged into the grid, with solar also plugged into the grid, charging during the day you're at work, the car is doing nothing, and the sun is out generating electricity.
2) In petrol cars favor, they don't consider E85 powered cars. Here in Thailand E85 is widely available, it's 85% ethanol, usually made from palm oil, and lots of cars can use it without modification (and before that E20 , 20% alcohol previously could be used by most cars in the last decade). Grown alcohol is CO2 neutral, so I assume an 85% alcohol car would beat electric cars in these current numbers because it would generate only 15% of the CO2.
i.e. it's nice to compare *today's* diesel against *today's* electric. But if you're deciding what to do next, then your effects won't be there for 5 years, so shouldn't you use the future estimates 5 years from now, 10 years from now etc.??
It may turn out that switching cars to E85 works out better in terms of CO2, or some hybrid situation where short term cars are migrated to e85 (including those currently on the road), and longer term switching to electric, but this report doesn't dig those numbers.
Actually that's exactly what they're telling you.
No way that a hundred million dollar power plant could be more efficient than a $30,000 car?
Plus i would assume they use average power generation which includes solar, wind and hydro.
Your ICE requires a lot of energy to find oil, extract it, transport it to refineries, refine it, transport it again, then gets burned in your car/truck.
If that study is well made, they included all the steps on both sides, EV and ICE.
#DeleteFacebook
Are you trying to impugn the veracity of an Anonymous Coward? That is offensive, sir, and you owe the entire non-study-reading population an apology.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Those numbers are the little end of the deal, irrelevant.
Lets look at the environmental cost of manufacturing batteries and disposing of them at the end.
That is the big nut to crack.
There is another fallacy in the green car BS the carbon cost of producing ethanol is a ridiculous number over what is saved, it actually causes more pollution than gasoline.
Huh?
It follows pretty obviously that as countries clean up their power grid, electric vehicles become a better idea. The data shown in this paper, though, does not indicate that electric vehicles are cleaner to use compared to diesel or gasoline cars in every EU country. The reference data from the linked paper is from 2013, but this "old" paper was only published three months ago, not last year. In three months, we now have updated data? That's great, and it makes sense that electricity is cleaner today than four years ago, but where is that new data? Are we talking about a newspaper article or another peer reviewed publication? This is a horrible summary.
Is all the greenhouse gas released from making the electronic cars. It's worse.
Define "worse"? Worse as in tar-sand for fuel worse?
You're ignoring the whole bit where they mumble about having to "closely monitor" production and wildly speculate that maybe those emissions might someday possibly be cut enough to make their math work.
Yes, good luck getting China to let you monitor jack shit. That would expose how huge they already lie about emissions.
But hey, as long as we're shitting in someone else's country it doesn't count, right?
I assume the lifetime of a car is predefined? I'd expect an electric car that lasts 10 years to produce less carbon waste than a diesel car that lasts for 20 years.
That study is a eco-warrier lie. Even cars burning coal direckly produce less Carbon Die Oxyde then cars burning soler pannels.
Stop giving my money to soler greeny SJW warriers and you are not going to get my gasoline car until you Prius from my cold dead hans.
Hail a Murka! We are Nummer One!!!
Bah!! Electric caveman!! Coal rat!!
Ah, the good old strawman argument, with America-shaming thrown in at the end for good measure. Triggered
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It sounds like you're trying to throw in a misleading statement ("ecological disaster") to noise over a simple issue. E85 is 85% alcohol from carbon neutral oil, it is not an ecological disaster, quite the opposite, its a farmed crop.
Palm TREES are a crop that is cultivated in large plantations, and the number of palm trees is increasing as the demand for palm oil increases* (they simply plant more plantations). Palm OIL is made from palm seeds (and misleading AC below confused coconuts and palm).
Since E85 is 85% ethanol from renewables and assuming the processing is about the same as the distillation and extraction of oil, then an E85 driven car generates only 15% of the CO2 of a diesel car. The technology for burning ethanol, and diesel is very similar otherwise.
So I'm from The Netherlands and I've had the chance to drive a Renault Zoe now, for a couple of times. Its range is 400 km (250 mi). My commute is 66 km (41 mi) one-way. Parts of that, I can drive 130 km (81 mi) per hour, so I turn off "eco mode" and just set the cruise control to 136 km/h or so. So if you drive like that, the effective range in a modest Autumn is about 180 km, or much more if you stick to 100 km/h (60 mi/h). With this range, I have no range anxiety whatsoever. I just don't give a shit and drive. And it's very silent inside. Personally, I think it's magnificent.
Can anyone comment on whether the Renault Zoe is available in the US? I guess you guys just get the Bolt, right?
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Verily my good man. I apologize for the converse of the contrapositive of what I said.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Fig 3 shows how GHG emissions from the use of EVs varies across the EU: while in Sweden the use of BEV would produce only 7–9 gCO2eq/km, in Latvia EVs emit 169–234 gCO2eq/km and the EU average is 65–89 gCO2eq/km (the first number of these intervals refer to the 14.5 kWh/100 km BEV while the second to the 20.0 kWh/100 km BEV). According to these figures, the use of BEV in countries relying on big shares of nuclear or renewable electricity would contribute to reducing GHG emissions at the national level, while, in countries with a highly carbon-intense electricity mix, electric cars would not necessarily contribute to GHG emission reduction targets than relying on ICE vehicle fleets.
tl;dr the paper itself says if your country has clean energy then electric vehicles are cleaner than diesels, whereas if you have dirty energy, like much of the USA or worse, India, electric vehicles are a wash.
Id add that looking at fig3 it also looks like the worst countries would benefit more CO2 wise from hybrids than electrics at least in the short term till the power isn't so dirty.
The study does include upstream emissions and transmission losses for electricity generation and battery charging losses.
It is not a study of ICE emissions, but they do overlay a diesel and a gasoline ICE reference figure on a graph for comparison.
Uh. There's no study linked here.
Actually, it's not a comparison of purely coal generated electricity. They use the combined CO2 emissions for all the power generation methods in each EU nation. There's a lot of nuclear, wind and solar used in Western Europe.
If you look at the figures for some the the eastern European nations, the EV is about the same as the reference ICE figures.
Hey good job, you actually read the paper. Keep it up!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Maybe it has something to do with the 40% of efficiency of large coal plants and 20-30% of efficiency of your regular car combustion engine? Not to mention the possibility of waste heat recovery for municipal heating in case of coal plants... And regenerative braking of electric vehicles in city traffic.
Ezekiel 23:20
Did you just misspell creimor?
Ezekiel 23:20
Coal? We use nuclear.
To say that electric cars are producing CO2, unless by burning brakes or any other compound that contains C and it's being oxidized into CO or CO2, is a lie, propaganda, nonsense, and crime against life on this planet, playing right into the fossil fuel industry narrative.
Hello sheeple, now say baaa.
Because, the RIGHT thing to do is to identify CO2 sources in the energy PRODUCTION phase, ie. the plants. Put it right there and talk about it right there, and only then can some progress be made to reduce pollution THERE.
Because if our society is to thrive and grow, we need electricity in massive amounts, we need stuff powered by it, and we need it produced cleanly.
As long as you fucking idiots think that electric cars are producing CO2 (unless by directly oxidizing C somehow), you're being blinded to the actual problem, and are part of that problem.
Indeed. Particularly has Diesel is a hydrocarbon, and so half of its bonds are to hydrogen, not carbon-carbon. Coal power stations are pretty efficient, but so are modern ICEs. Plus there are transmission and battery losses for EV.
As a chemist, I can tell you the first half of your comment makes no sense at all. Methane is an hydrocarbon, none of its bonds are carbon-carbon (since it only has one carbon atom) and it still produces CO2. In fact, you'd have to go to a pretty unsaturated hydrocarbon to have half and half (e.g. benzene which no one wants in a fuel because it's carcinogenic). So what's your point with that?
I probably shouldn't have kept reading, but I did. The rest makes pretty little sense either. ICEs are anything but efficient. The Carnot cycle limits their efficiency and even a quick look at Wikipedia will show that engines suck. They mention most engines have an average of "18%-20% efficiency" with Formula 1 engines having up to 47% efficiency. Of course, GM isn't going to sell you a cheap car with a F1 engine... In contrast, electric engines have a much higher efficiency, around 90%. Sure, there are some battery losses, but you're going against an engine that wastes 80% of the energy of the fuel, how hard do you have to make it? As for transmission losses does your ICE car roll without one of those?
So the question is... do you actually believe the stuff you say?
Do you want to breeze a moderately fresh air with no exhaust next to your location, or do you want to keep your cancer inducing concentrated poison emitting gaswagen next to you?
Forget about emissions. Buy an EV because they are awesome cars. I have a Tesla and I get a kick out of racing from every liquefied dinosaur burner out of the traffic lights. Every wannabe in a BMW, Mercedes, Subaru, Porsche that tries loses. Every. Single. Time. Sometimes they even get angry. That really makes my day.
yes, some 5 percent (f'rom 1 link i googled : https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs... ) . but LESS than the loss in ICE from engine to wheel. (I heard 15% as a rule of thumb)
How much value do you put on your health? Exhaust is a soup of highly toxic chemicals.
Yes.
You must not be much of a chemist.
Burning hydrocarbons produces as much H2O as well CO2. So more energy per carbon. And probably per Kg too.
Cars are about 30% efficient. Coal power stations about the same. You forgot that you need to burn the coal to produce the electricity, which is where most of the loss comes from.
I believe it is mostly that deadly Hydrogen Monoxide that is killing us all.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The code word is "You".
Here - we get fresher air. Who cares about those unimportant sods living next to the nickel open pit mine
You personally can believe whatever you want. But factually, exhaust also contains Hydrogen Cyanide, petroleum byproducts, hydrocarbons that recombine into soot (a cancer inducer), particulate matter that clogs lungs, various prehistoric oils that nobody knows for sure what they are because they are not main ingredient of what is marketed.
So, you can live in denial and worship oil propaganda, but you won't escape the health consequences... And drug industry will happily oblige with more toxic chemistry to treat your cancers... if you can afford it.
Cars are typically far less than 30% efficient. As the previous poster stated the Carnot cycle limits the efficiency. There are also significant losses in the transmission, something that electric vehicles lack other than simple gear reduction. The transmission on an EV is far more efficient than a transmission for an internal combustion vehicle. For example, in my EV there are only two physical gears for a 9.73:1 gear reduction. Compare this to a typical transmission in an ICE vehicle. There is no clutch, torque converter, etc. It's a one-speed transmission with far lower losses than any multi-gear transmission or even a planetary gear assembly, which many hybrid transmissions use. While hybrids, and especially plug-in hybrids improve the efficiency by allowing the engine to operate in its most efficient mode with regenerative braking, it still falls far short of what an EV achieves. The battery losses for an EV are actually quite low. Good lithium-ion batteries are extremely efficient at storing electricity. In fact, there's a direct correlation to their efficiency and how long they'll last as is described in this video.
Also, at least in the United States, the use of coal for power generation is dropping significantly due to the lower cost of natural gas power plants and wind (regardless of what the politicians do). What this means is that the efficiency of EVs is increasing as coal usage drops since natural gas power plants tend to be more efficient and release around half the CO2 of an equivalent coal plant.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
Ever heard of industrial safety procedures? What is easier - to train personnel on safety and enforce it, or to educate every single moron and stupid bitch idling their vans in a parking lot?
Actually, the exhaust gas from some newer cars (especially diesels) is cleaner than the outdoor air in a polluted city. It does contain very little oxygen, though.
You are a fucking idiot. Where'd you crawled out from, 1960's?
Sounds like you guys are making the case for hybrids.
Couple a limited size Formula 1 engine for efficiency at optimum efficiency and your waste heat makes for high efficiency winter heat...
We know how to close the carbon cycle. CO2 dissolves from the air into any water exposed to the atmosphere and we know how to get it out very efficiently. Byproducts of this process on seawater is oxygen, hydrogen, and desalinated water. Take the carbon dioxide and hydrogen, run it through a process we've known about for 100 years now, and we get hydrocarbon fuels. The fuel produced not only closes the carbon cycle on transportation fuels (jet fuel, gasoline, diesel fuel) but has none of the sulfur and other nasty stuff that petroleum fuels have.
Here's a five minute video giving the highlights:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We don't need new cars, we need new fuels.
The average life of a typical car is about 10 years. A cargo ship or passenger airplane have lifespans that can exceed 30 years. Even if we were to switch to all electric cars today we'd still be burning considerable amounts of petroleum products for at least 50 years.
Switching to how we get our fuels means we can keep our vehicles, and much of our petroleum oil based infrastructure. If people still want electric cars then nothing will stop them from buying them. I'd think that new fuels, which would be just like the old fuels, would be a much easier sell to the public that want to keep their current cars.
Maybe getting the infrastructure needed to create carbon neutral fuels would also take 50 years. Since we already know how it's done the hard part is behind us, we just need to optimize the process and scale it up to industrial scale. There's no new technology involved. We can do two things at once. We can build electric cars AND research new fuels. If it works then we just cut the time to transition away from fossil fuels. If it doesn't then we still have electric vehicles to use.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Even to be mentioned in the same sentence as the great Creimer, Mangler of Language! The honour...it is too much!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Lets do at least a bit of math here. My starting assumptions are:
1) the statement about Poland's emissions -- at 650gCO2/kWh -- is correct
2) a typical electric car needs around 20kWh/100km (that's a number I remember from some real life tests in recent years). See https://greentransportation.info/energy-transportation/kwh-evcars-gizmos.html for example.
Then the 650gCO2/kWh translate to 130gCO2/km in terms of CO2 emission. Which is about the same a fairly economical IC car produces. Other countries than Poland may be much better if they use a lot of regenerative energies.
C - the footgun of programming languages
The very best cars might be around 30% efficient. The average car is not. So lets compare with the very best coal plant then. That runs at 49% efficiency for electricity generation and over 90% for thermal efficiency as it is also used for district heating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Though I admit most plants are not as efficient as this. However due to fracking there is no so much abundant natural gas that a combined cycle gas power plant with an efficiency just short of 60% is a better bet because the produce cheaper electricity due to cheaper fuel and being cheaper to run
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The side effect of the switch to gas is that you roughly half the amount of CO2 produced going from 910kg per MW/h down to 500kg.
Note that 81% of new power plants in the USA between 2000 and 2010 where natural gas. This is what is and continues to kill coal. Nobody wants it.
Carbon dioxide may be classified as a pollutant, but there is no clear evidence that it actually causes harm.
Yeah, just look at all the wildlife swimming around in my seltzer. The bubble shrimp are the funnest!
If you look at the figures for some the the eastern European nations, the EV is about the same as the reference ICE figures.
The usual argument for EVs is that it's easier to replace a few power stations with something less polluting than it is to replace every car. It's also likely easier to do carbon sequestration and to filter particulates from a large industrial installation than from a few million tiny portable generators.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Not disputing anything you said, but the summary and you both mention growing efficiencies w/o mentioning the fact that vehicles of all kinds have been getting more efficient. Now if one tech is improving faster than the other (is there evidence of that?) than we should point to that. Otherwise it seems to be a bit of a "so what?".
Just another day in Paradise
Am I the only one that find that comparing the GHG impact of the car and everything around it (the source of it's fuel/power production, the manufacturing process etc.) isn't giving us the real picture?
Yeah I understand, we can't ignore that electricity isn't always green. But the feeling I get from a study like this is almost like EV are responsible for the GHG impact of the electricity production. Hey, Tesla model S isn't so green when it's powered by a coal plant!
First, the choice of a car is a consumer one while the electricity production is (usually) government responsibility. So even if TFA told me that EV emit exactly the same GHG as diesel vehicle (and why diesel while I'm at it? Why not gas?), it's still a "mostly" consumer GHG responsibility VS a mostly government GHG responsibility. In my mind, this is an important factor that should be taking into consideration.
Furthermore, as many other said, it's stupid to put a "global average" of the GHG impact of electricity production while the standard deviation between country is so small (e.g. some country use mostly coal while others mostly nuclear and/or hydroelectric).
In the end, what I would like to know is the consumer GHG impact of EV vs Gas. Or, in other word, if we suppose that the electricity is 100% clean, what are the new number of this study?
Elok
You must not be much of a chemist.
Previous chemist Anonymous Coward here
Burning hydrocarbons produces as much H2O as well CO2. So more energy per carbon. And probably per Kg too.
You can't make a coherent sentence in chemistry terms and I'm the bad chemist? More energy per carbon than what? You have to compare to something and you only mentioned hydrocarbons. What are you comparing it to? Nuclear fusion? Burning hydrocarbons produces as many CO2 molecules as the number of carbon atoms. It produces half the water molecules as the number of hydrogens. A saturated hydrocarbon with n C atoms has the general formula: CnH(2n+2). Most of what is burned in gas are saturated hydrocarbons. The energy released upon breaking a C-H bond is higher than that of a C-C bond. So, for smaller saturated hydrocarbons (which have a higher ratio of C-H to C-C bonds) there is more energy released per carbon (per mole, per kg) than for bigger hydrocarbons. Even Wikipedia will tell you as much. Methane has a density of 55.5 MJ/kg, diesel 48 MJ/kg, and coal 24-35 MJ/kg depending on the type. And this is why new stations are made for burning natural gas (mostly methane) and not coal. There's more energy there. That's why even the US is replacing most coal plants with natural gas plants. Trump and his friends may like coal, but financially it makes no sense.
I won't even continue, nothing in your comment makes sense, but I'll say... stop focusing so much on coal. You sound like Trump!
You might want to incorporate the fact that "diesel" doesn't grow on trees. It is itself the byproduct of a wasteful process that cracks "regular" oil.
The first diesel engine ran on peanut oil. in fact, diesel fuel does grow on trees
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Keep spreading the lies and misinformation. Go back to 4th grade science class and try again.
As someone with a masters in mechanical engineering the 30% figure cited for many heat based engines bothers me greatly. This is only true if you have access to a sink colder than interstellar space. A more realistic efficiency is the relative one given the cold side temperature you have to work with. Under this metric, modern ice cars fare much better and can be over 80 even 90%+ efficient.
Next up, isothermal cycles and how the oft forgotten heat flow raises my ire.
Peanuts grow on trees?
News to every peanut farmer in the world.
If you only use the vehicle tailpipe emissions, you are missing a large amount of the upstream diesel emissions and it isn't a fair comparison. I would even say that oil spills and the clean-up, along with the fuel used by the workers to drive to the facilities should be factored in.
I would like to see them compare other pollutants as well, since the EV will be even better at reducing those.
No way that generating electricity from coal to power an EV is less CO2 intensive than an IC.
Well, that settles the whole matter. Thanks AC, for setting us straight!
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And I had a talk with a person where she used that fact as why big oil is evil.
Is not saying much - The few they have that work pretty well when new and well kept are rare, (The injectors are the weakest point). But drive behind an old one that smokes like a chimney or accelerates hard. . Ulgh! Diesel stresses the brain, scroll down a bit and see: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r... Diesel is bad, for lungs(carcinogenic): polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), adhere easily to the surface of the carbon particles and are carried deep into the lungs. http://www.jabfm.org/content/2... I'm hoping that all of this does not apply do Bio-Diesel engines. Rudolf Diesel originally invented them that way. Oil companies had other plans for his engine and him. He went "missing" at sea.
So how much greenhouse gas does the source of the electricity emit?
Also, at least in the United States, the use of coal for power generation is dropping significantly due to the lower cost of natural gas power plants and wind (regardless of what the politicians do). What this means is that the efficiency of EVs is increasing as coal usage drops since natural gas power plants tend to be more efficient and release around half the CO2 of an equivalent coal plant.
And the lower cost of natural gas is itself largely due to advances in hydraulic fracking. But mention that fracking is driving a huge net reduction in greenhouse gases and watch the more emotional (and less scientific) wing of the environmental movement start to spin around itself a bit.
It's also likely easier to do carbon sequestration and to filter particulates from a large industrial installation than from a few million tiny portable generators.
You would think so but on a social level it's actually not.
Firstly every attempt to sequester carbon has failed miserably. Hell there have been brand new coal power plants opening in the EU which have all sorts of great stats: Massive government co-funding to trial CCS which has so far failed to materialise even a single plant that sequesters carbon, lawsuits between governments and operators to recapture funding from the failed promises, hell MPP3 (the latest and greatest in clean coal) opened in the Netherlands last year and e.on instantly wiped 2.5bn euro off their value and are borderline being nonviable.
No way that generating electricity from coal to power an EV is less CO2 intensive than an IC.
IC engines have to spend a lot of their time accelerating, idling, or running at an inefficient high revs, times when they blast a lot more pollution than when they are running at optimum cruise. Now think of a hybrid in which when the IC is running it's always at cruise, no matter what the drive train is doing. Then add the economy of scale of a large generating plant, and even when you have to subtract transmission line and battery losses, the electric cars such an arrangement powers are still more efficient.
What about the 10 times the amount of so called emissions, pollution required to BUILD them, not to mention the toxic disposal of the battery?
Quantum sig! Hah!
Maybe it has something to do with the 40% of efficiency of large coal plants and 20-30% of efficiency of your regular car combustion engine? Not to mention the possibility of waste heat recovery for municipal heating in case of coal plants... And regenerative braking of electric vehicles in city traffic.
I took a tour of a combination power generation/heating plant in my city recently. It used a turbine generator to generate electricity from the hot gas, then since there was still a lot of energy left in the exhaust gas, they produced steam for residential industrial heating. The efficiency numbers doing this were pretty impressive, around 80 percent and up in practice. Note that is station efficiency, not end of the line efficiency.
They had converted to natgas from coal a couple years ago. And everyone there is damn happy about it. Much cleaner both on the handling and burning line, you don't leave work covered with coal dust, you don't breathe coal dust, and operation is mechanically much simpler.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Electric Cars don't "emit" any greenhouse gases. That's why there's no tailpipe. However, their powersources may emit carbon and that is extremely variable per vehicle, not just per region.
For context: https://www.epa.gov/energy/egr...
That map divides the nation up into various regions as determined by their emissions profile for electricity generation. But the profile isn't uniform throughout the region. While I live in CAMX where it's estimated that each MWh is responsible for X metric tons of carbon, there's a big variation between customers of Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric. Moreover, there's a large amount of rooftop solar here. One of my former employees has 2 electric cars would get paid ~$11/month by SCE because of the electricity he was sending into the grid. Thus, his two EVs were responsible for ZERO carbon emissions.
Moral of the story: you can't compare apples to oranges. Just as the MPGe figure is a horrible way to describe EV "fuel efficiency", saying that an EVs "emit 50% less greenhouse gas" is a really bad statement.
Incidentally, the Prius is a waste of a hybrid engine. The problem is the U.S. measures fuel economy in MPG. Fuel economy is actually GPM - how much fuel you burn to travel a fixed distance. Because MPG is the inverse of fuel economy, the bigger MPG gets, the less fuel is saved per mile driven. This is why the CAFE standards use a harmonic mean. That corrects for MPG being the inverse of fuel economy. e.g. Suppose you're going to travel 100 miles.
6.25 MPG tractor trailer = 16 gallons consumed
12.5 MPG SUV = 8 gallons consumed
25 MPG sedan = 4 gallons
50 MPG Prius = 2 gallons
100 MPG supercar = 1 gallon
Notice how every time you double MPG, the fuel saved is only half the previous step? The 12.5 MPG jump from a Suburban to a sedan saves you 4 gallons, while the what many people assume-to-be-bigger 25 MPG jump from a sedan to a Prius only saves you 2 gallons.
In other words, if the true goal here is to reduce fuel consumption, we should be concentrating on improving the efficiency of trucks. That's where we should be trying to add hybrid powertrains. Converting an economy car into a hybrid is barely worth the trouble. The MPG increase may seem big, but it's an almost insignificant amount. If you can improve a tractor trailer's economy from 6 MPG to 7 MPG (just a 1 MPG improvement or 17%), you've saved more fuel per mile driven than switching from a sedan to a Prius (a 25 MPG improvement or 100%). 100/6 - 100/7 = 2.38 gal saved per 100 miles. Vs 100/25 - 100/50 = 2 gal saved per 100 miles. You know how environmentalists scoffed at hybrid SUVs? That was actually one of the best types of vehicles to convert into a hybrid.
To avoid this problem of inverse fuel economy, the rest of the world uses liters per 100 km, which is analogous to GPM and a correct measure of fuel economy. This is the problem I have with the current push for clean energy - so much of it is about appearance and bragging rights (including calling EVs zero emissions when they clearly aren't), instead of actual results.
I like the idea of electric cars but not the reality - If you don't have a garage and don't work somewhere that has chargers, where do you charge it without spending time going out of your way and wasting 30 minutes on top of that every day?
And currently all electric cars are insanely expensive, not to mention *huge* and *heavy* - I'm seeing lots of people in Tesla Model S', and they are awesome on the motorway, but it's really funny watching them trying to move around in tight potholed streets and deep speed cushions. Even the smallest electric shitboxes like the fugly miev and the almost-normal-looking Leaf, which don't have the range to last me even a day, do not look like they cope with tight twisty potholed roads that are the day-to-day travel surface of Greater London.
I'm hanging into my tiny sub-3.5mtr-long 600-mile-per-tank diesel until someone makes an electric car roughly the size of an Aygo that has at least 300 miles of range. And a HUD. And AC. And a Sunroof. Sliding rear seats would be cool too.
Take one country that ranks in the middle of the pack in terms of green energy production. Replace all diesels with electric. Allow the system to run for 20-30 years and then evaluate the consequences. How many of the original vehicles will still be on the road? How often do their battery packs need to be replaced and at what cost in terms of both cost to the user and environmental costs of producing new packs and disposing of the old ones? (Yes, the Old Ones, the ones who made us). How often does the power generation infrastructure need to be replaced and what are the monetary and environmental cost associated with that. How does that country's GDP change over that 20 year period? The goal of the study is to evaluate sustainability.
At least you spell "honour" correctly :D ... ;D
Strangely it is red underlined while I type here
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You are right: peanuts don't grow on trees; but coconuts do, and have been made into biodeisel.
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13
Diesel can be synthesized, or if one is willing to use a process that takes a lot of energy (which is doable near a hydroelectric plant or somewhere where geography permits), one could take plastic trash, then use thermal depolymerization in order to get a usable diesel oil. It is energy intensive, but it removes plastic from the environment.
Of course, there is biodiesel and all the waste oil that comes from restaurants, as well as motor oil. Run that (B100) in a diesel engine, and the engine will run extremely clean.
I was bored once, and was running around with a CO meter to see how fast one would die if breathing exhaust from a modern car. Oddly enough, the CO level from the nearby vehicles was lower than the ambient temperature.
Of course, fire up a dirty little generator, and that generates enough CO to be lethal in a closed area quickly.
My net electricity use (including charging my Leaf) is essentially zero. You were saying?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I'll will sit in a closed garage in a polluted city for 1 hour while you sit in a closed garage in a clean city with a newer ICE car idling for the same time.
After that we can have a discussion as to who was breathing cleaner air.
Relative efficiency is a useless metric when considering carbon emissions.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Electric engines are above 99% efficient and batteries, too. :D
However I concur with your post
I have read about that F1 engine, it would be theoretically be limited to something around 42% ... astonishing that they beat that.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And how much CH4 do you emit into the atmosphere due to fracking?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Other studies show all battery vehicles containing nickel are far and away dirtier than plain ol' diesel vehicles. Mining, transportation and coal all being added factors in the green battery production. So, which are fact and which are fiction?
What greenhouse gasses do electric vehicles "emit", exactly? I understand that they have a greenhouse gas footprint, particularly owing to their manufacture, but afaik, the vehicles themselves are actually emissionless.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
You don't need to be that complicated.
Efficiency of an ICE: < 20% (not counting further losses in the drive track)
Efficiency of a coal power plant: > 40% (not counting grid transmission losses, battery and electric engine have basically zero losses)
Obviously a EV is twice as efficient than an ICV.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Was this particularly unexpected?
This sounds like one from the Bleedin' Obvious dept to me.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The study didn't count the real pollution to the Earth.
Chemicals that nature can't convert like lithium.
Perhaps the 50% number will help offset EV's horrible foot print to market.
Does this study take into account the strip pit mining of the lithium?
Wait, you point out how it's hard to do on a large industrial installation, but not how it's comparatively easier to do on millions of tiny units. How is the carbon sequestration on all existing cars going? Good? Is it good?
One important point in the discussion is where the pollution happens: I prefer ev's in town even if being powered by a coal power plant out of town. On the motorway, it doesn't matter so much as combustion engines are very efficient and not a lot of people live along motorways.
Dennis Onstenk
For ICE vehicles it's mostly in the fuel that's burned. Which means for biodiesel it's close to zero because it's a closed cycle (fuel -> CO2 -> plants -> fuel). For EVs, it's the process used to generate electricity (including transmission and charging losses).
Note that biodiesel has overhead in transporting the fuel as well.
With EVs, it's also possible to generate your own 'fuel' right at your house with solar panels. Kind of hard to generate your own biodiesel. :)
Ain't it a shore ta gawd lucky thang theys dozens an dozens o trucks onna road fir eechen avery car. I thank so anywayz. Coz if thet wernt the true, then it wood make a lotta sense ta make a hunnert or a thousint lil cars use soler then one big truck.
Muh haid hurtz.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
When the Chevy Volt came out, by the time you took into account the pollution footprint of the manufacturing of the batteries and the life expectancy of the vehicle, etc. The Volt had a larger pollution footprint than the Hummer. The lithium is mined in one county, shipped to another for refining, shipped to another country to make the batteries, and yet another to be installed in the vehicles.
Per BTU? Practically nothing.
Certainly the total GHG potential of what you released by fracking NG and then burning it for heat/power is less than the end-to-end GHG potential of the equivalent in coal.
Per BTU? Practically nothing.
A contradiction in itself.
Either you frack or you don't.
When you frack the gas can leak everywhere.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm thinking that this study should be submitted to the Ig-Nobel committee.
It's cool that you......believe.....that but there's a study here that shows otherwise. Maybe you'd at least like to give some reasoning to back up your assertion? If you do, that would be interesting (implying that your current comment is lacking interest).
A recent study shows that 107% of all studies may contain inaccurate figures.
> The usual argument for EVs is that it's easier to replace a few power stations
> with something less polluting than it is to replace every car
However, every car will be replaced on a time scale MUCH shorter than every power station. The average car lasts 11 years in the US, the average coal plant is something on the order of 45 years.
That said, when a power station IS replaced, its GHG emissions plummet by far more than a new car vs one that's 11 years old. A NG turbine has half the GHG of a coal plant, whereas wind and solar of course are thousands of times better.
You also have to consider the maximum possible efficiency of an ICE engine, which is about three times worse than a motor, including all upstream losses.
So generally, EV for the (massive) win:
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2013/02/22/wells-to-wheels-electric-car-efficiency/
> Then the 650gCO2/kWh translate to 130gCO2/km in terms of CO2 emission.
> Which is about the same a fairly economical IC car produces
Average emissions in the US are ~250 gco2/km, not 130. See:
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle-0
To get 411 grams of CO2 per mile. Divide that by 1.6 to get 254.
The very best hybrids do come close to this figure. However, this figure does not take into account the rapidly changing numbers on both ICE and BEV sides. When those are considered, the BEV side is untouchable, they are falling far faster even than the spikes caused when new CAFE rules come into play.
The average car lasts 11 years in the US, the average coal plant is something on the order of 45 years.
That's an interesting number. What happens to most of the 12-year-old cars? Are they scrapped, or sold overseas (ignoring the blip caused by cash for clunkers)? Is that a average a mean, mode, or median, and do you know what the distribution is (I don't doubt your numbers, I just wonder how many outliers there are - whether rich people are buying new cars every 2 years, poor people are keeping theirs for 20-30, or if this is a normal distribution)?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
> As someone with a masters in mechanical engineering the 30% figure
> cited for many heat based engines bothers me greatly.
So when you take the total amount of energy you deliver and divide that by the amount of energy in the fuel, and you get 30%, that bothers you greatly?
> This is only true if you have access to a sink colder than interstellar space
And THAT'S only true if you assume the only way to extract that energy is a heat engine.
And since we're talking about BEV vs ICE, that's obviously the wrong metric to use, because BEVs aren't heat engines. So when one does use tank-to-wheel comparisons of the two, a BEV is on the order of 70% efficient and an ICE averages maybe 16 to 18%. That IS an apples to apples comparison.
I see you completely ignore the transmission and distribution grid for electricity. Not to mention the charger itself. Every time you change the voltage or transmit electrons over a wire there are losses.
Probably, EVs are still more efficient. But probably less so than you imply.
OK. Why?