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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."
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.
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.
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.
Most of those aren't facts but bad estimates without any context on models, age, etc. Every other part is also wrong considering the actual proven facts about the environmental damage from NO chemistry - acid rain, acidification of lakes, oceans, streams, and every other open water source including those for direct human consumption in waste water treatment centers. Then on the nuclear angle, the decades of construction required and the massive investment required make them less useful than every other power plant, including coal itself in terms of economics. And coal has such horrible costs that every other plant is better than it.
Palm oil is made from the seeds.
Ethanol and bio-diesel make for an interesting alternative, but the consideration then must include the factors for its generation to be comparable. That means the messy shipping-grade diesel powered farm equipment with no exhaust filtering systems at all, the comparable transportation of palm seeds/corn/every other organic source in 30+ year old diesel trucks, etc. That makes it a different problem that needs to be investigated. However, scale is a major issue as ethanol production pales in comparison to petrol itself and especially in comparison to electrical power. That is before the processing and mixing, which is another constraint on volume.
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.
Where are you getting your figures? Because the last time I looked at this, Lithium batteries are around 99% efficient.
http://batteryuniversity.com/l...
BEV vehicles are far more energy efficient than ICE vehicles because the ICEs are at best 30% efficient. And then there is regeneration.
Yes, but it would be nice if you included some actual facts in your post.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
And you seem to have the facts around NOx and Methane back to front:
http://www.ghgonline.org/metha...
"However, our emissions of other atmopsheric pollutants, such as nitrogen oxide (NOx) gases (see NOx page) may reduce the levels of OH radicals in our atmopshere, so prolonging the lifetime of methane in our atmosphere.,"
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
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
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?
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)
I believe it is mostly that deadly Hydrogen Monoxide that is killing us all.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
No. Hydrogen is either produced from steam reformed natural gas, in which case it self evidently is not a viable transitions away from fossil fuel. Or it can be produced from electrolysis. The hydrogen cycle is a wasteful process with huge heat loss both the splitting of water, the compression of the hydrogen to 700 bar and heat loss in the fuel cell. The combined loss is so great that you end up using three times as much electricity than a battery car. So any issue you might have with a battery electric car is thus three time as bad in a hydrogen fuel cell car.
HOWEVER++ they are talking diesels. DIESEL ENGINES ARE ACTUALLY GREENHOUSE NEGATIVE! WTF you say?
The danger from diesel is albedo. Soot in ice and snow from causes the ground to reflect less solar radiation and therefore retain more heat. Diesel exhaust emits a lot of soot and is therefore a major contributor to this process.
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.
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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.
He pulled his figures from his backend. The efficiency of an internal combustion engine isn't the whole story. There are also very significant losses in the transmission needed in order to use said ICE. This has been analyzed over and over again and the EV almost always comes out on top, especially as coal makes up a smaller and smaller percentage of power generation. Hybrid vehicles improve the efficiency but as far as I know nobody makes a hybrid diesel-electric passenger vehicle.
The differences between diesel and electric vehicles are far more than 10%, especially when this moves to large vehicles such as in this CARB study comparing battery electric trucks compared to conventional diesel vehicles.
He gets especially erratic when he talks about NO and being greenhouse negative. NO is NOT something you want in the atmosphere, and it in no way would be greenhouse negative since the goal of modern diesel vehicles is to limit NOx and soot due to the negative effects of both in terms of human health.
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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.
They likely didn't consider ethanol powered cars because ethanol is a terrible fuel. Thailand is a tropical nation and so can grow plants that are more efficient at converting sunlight into fuel. Much of the rest of the world is not so lucky. Here's some data comparing the different plants:
http://withouthotair.com/c6/pa...
Any biomass fuel is terrible at converting sunlight into energy we can use. Why it's being used so much now boggles the mind. The math is not hard to figure out. We'd be better off using that land for solar panels to charge batteries. Even better is using that land to grow food and look for energy from somewhere besides the sun. Where would be a better place to go for energy? Anywhere. When food competes with energy then you'll have people needing to decide if they will have to cut down their apple tree for firewood and risk starvation in the summer, or keep the tree and risk freezing to death in the coming winter.
You can claim some future advancement in genetically engineered crops and/or better biomass conversion will change this but that's not going to happen in ten years. Go ahead and try, but I think we'll need a backup plan.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
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.
Hydrogen cars don't have that nice energy recuperation feature of electric cars. Hydrogen-hybrids on the other hand...
Except disel emissions regulations haven't been enforced due to massive organized deception at BMW and others. The standards have no relationship to actual production functioning, and there has been little push-back except to ban diesel all together in urban areas, while letting those responsible carry on their merry ways.
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
Alcohol is a terrible motor fuel. It's not as bad as hydrogen, but it's a close second. Alcohol is hygroscopic, it attracts and absorbs water. As a result, it tends to corrode fuel system components. Now all that stuff has to be made with expensive coatings to avoid that. Instead we could be using the ABE process to make Butanol, but BP and DuPont's company Butamax is actually using a patent developed at a public university to prevent GE Energy Ventures' company Gevo from producing and selling Butanol — a 1:1 replacement for gasoline made by bacteria from any organic material.
If I could nuke one corporation tomorrow, it would be BP
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
We do not need any advance. We could use current technology to replace all of our transportation fuels with biofuels using land nobody is particularly interested in now. Your feedstock is algae, which can be grown almost anywhere (except places which are continually frozen) and which produces both lipids and plant matter which can be used for making diesel and butanol respectively. We can't have it because BP and DuPont hold the obvious patent which was developed at a university, partly with our money, and re using it to prevent Gevo from selling fuel. Remember when Chevron licensed the battery tech from the Honda Insight and then refused to license it to anyone until it was so old that it was useless? Yeah, this is exactly like that.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
However, the fuel cell stack is very expensive. It would be much cheaper and simpler just to add some more batteries to the vehicle. Fuel cells really make no sense in a normal car.
Honda and GM have a fuel cell partnership and while GM is only doing research projects, Honda has actually brought a product to market so that they can get the experience and grow the fueling network. The primary product of this partnership is a reduced-cost fuel cell stack which Honda claims will make FCVs profitable to sell. This change is literally coming in the next generation of FCV, so expect it within a decade.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The first diesel engine ran on peanut oil. in fact, diesel fuel does grow on trees
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ethanol, usually made from palm oi
That does not really make sense.
Why (and how?) would one convert perfectly fine oil into ethanol?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Well, ... and you don't complain about that loss for your microwave, why do you complain for charging your battery? ... the problem of NO is in the lower atmosphere, it never reaches the upper atmosphere to react with CH4.
Batterires efficiency is around 99% and above.
If we talk about transmission loss, why do you mean? From your plug to your battery? The loss ther is basically zero. The grid haas a loss but that is hardly more than 5%
Then again, when we talk about oil and gas, you seem to ignore the losses, too? Do you think oil and methane tracel through a pipeline or with a tanker 'for nothing'?
Then again you argue about CH4 and NO
And then again you complain about CH4 being a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, this is true. But unlike CO2, CH4 is a zero sum game (as long as you don't leak it out of a gas field. CH4 is reduced in the upper atmosphere by UV light, so all the cattle we breed basically only sets the 'footprint' or baseline. In other words: natural created CH4 would find a balance on a certain level. Only the level is different if you e.g. produce more during farming or breeding cattle.
The net effect of your average diesel car is a LOWERING of the atmospheric greenhouse gas effect!
No it is not, for that it would need to exhaust several magnitudes more of NO and you need a magic way to get it into contact with CH4.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, facts are so inconvenient, aint they..
This! Facts are very inconvenient .... and you are incredibly inconvenienced.
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.
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.
... last time I looked at this, Lithium batteries are around 99% efficient.
Lithium ion batteries are definitely not 99% efficient - wikipedia gives 80-90% range for charge-discharge energy efficiency. The reason is that, despite excellent charge efficiency, the battery's voltage increases during charge and decreases when discharged. For example, 4.2V is the typical charging voltage as the battery approaches full charge, but the open circuit voltage drops below 4.0V after the charge cycle (and a rest period) and the delivered voltage drops significantly lower than that under load.
we'd be better off using that land for solar panels to .... Even better is using that land to grow food
Why should Thailand - or the US for that matter - grow more food?
When food competes with energy then you'll have people needing to decide if they will have to cut down their apple tree for firewood and risk starvation in the summer, or keep the tree and risk freezing to death in the coming winter.
Thailand has no summer or winter and 3 harvests per year, at least for rice.
Go ahead and try, but I think we'll need a backup plan.
What about a plan at first hand? And then a back up plan?
Any biomass fuel is terrible at converting sunlight into energy we can use.
In comparison to what?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
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'
What is the expected watts per square meter of this algae fuel process?
If you cannot answer that simple question, and that number is not larger than current photovoltaic conversion, then it's not a process we should bother with trying to use at any scale. That's not saying it should be abandoned completely, perhaps the process can be improved, but if it cannot do better than what we have now then it's not sufficiently mature to bother with.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
If you cannot answer that simple question, and that number is not larger than current photovoltaic conversion, then it's not a process we should bother with trying to use at any scale.
There are other factors which may make it desirable, at least in the short term. It produces carbon-negative fuels which are direct replacements for things we're burning now, which improve emissions. There is going to be substantial time lag in converting to EVs in the best case, but we can be running these biofuels in just a few years and with our existing fuel transportation infrastructure. Actually, we could be buying them today if Butamax hadn't been preventing it. The legal SNAFU has been going on for years.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Any biomass fuel is terrible at converting sunlight into energy we can use.
In comparison to what?
In comparison to anything else.
Biomass fuels get at best 2 W/m^2 in the most ideal conditions, more like 0.5 W/m^2 for much of the world.
Photovoltaic gets about 5-20 W/m^2
Wind is not much better than biomass at 2 W/m^2
http://withouthotair.com/c18/p...
Nuclear is about 1000 W/m^2
http://withouthotair.com/c24/p...
Much of Europe consumes energy at a rate of about 1 W/m^2. This is an easy calculation, just take the national energy consumption and divide by the area. If a western nation is going to maintain it's standard of living, and get that from biomass, then it will fail. There just is not enough land per person in those nations. That's just land needed for energy, people would still need land for the growing of food.
Using wind to power most any European nation means covering half of the nation with windmills. Photovoltaic energy still means nation sized areas covered in solar collectors, taking up 5% of the area with ideal conditions but more like 20% with more realistic collection.
If you want energy that is "green", and have any kind of energy independence, then there is going to have to be some use of nuclear power. Relying on foreign oil (such as from the Middle East), or natural gas (such as from Russia), or even running electric lines under the Mediterranean Sea to collect the plentiful sun from Northern Africa means Europe will be at the whims of foreign nations for its energy.
Larger nations with lower population densities, like the USA, Russia, Canada, China, and Brazil, have enough land and diversity of geography to get sufficient wind, solar, and hydro to meet domestic needs if they must. This means avoiding biomass fuels as that is a waste of land area, and even then some reliance on more energy dense sources of energy like natural gas (not ideal but better than oil or coal) or nuclear.
Since the goal is to replace oil, such as for use as fuel for cars, then we need to account for current electrical needs, current energy use from oil, and account for any growth due to population increases. Sure, some efficiency gains can bring this down, but it's not going to get close to what biomass can provide unless a nation uses as little energy as some Third World nations.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
You have some very good points. To bad it's AC.
Saying that. H2 is actualy very hard to store more than days. It's small and excapes, causes metal embrittlement, and the methods to combat those are costly and make trasportation an issue.(like keeping it at -300c)
So much of the Fuel cell research has not bee in the cell it self, but in having the H bound to a more dense fuel that will make the problems of storage go away.(as well as have a denser fuel)
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
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
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.
> 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.
> Unfortunately batteries are only about 80-90% efficient
Total round-trip tank-to-wheel for an average BEV is about 70% (Tesla claims slightly better, but drivers report this number is good).
That means when running on you're average 60% efficient power plant, the well-to-wheel is .7 * .6 = 42%. That compares to the average ICE car around 16 to 18%, or the average hybrid around 20 to 23%.
Simply put, BEVs have end-to-end efficiencies *including generation and distribution and all other losses* roughly double that of ICE.
> and no, solar/wind are not going to produce enough for a nation scale car fleet any time soon
The US average car lasts 11 years. If we were to replace every car in the US fleet with a BEV over that period, the rate of wind turbines being added in the US is enough to power all of them.
https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/future-grid-energy-in-the-not-so-distance/
And yes, the grid is already capable of supporting them all, with some spot upgrades at the neighbourhood level to replace older transformers.