Five problems with your argument.

1) Gas burning engines are very inefficient. Less then 25% efficient on average. Electric motors can be 90%+ efficient. Burning fossil fuels at power plants (even when burning coal) and charging electric cars is still MORE energy efficient, and still puts out LESS pollution than a gas engine. That is even after transmission and charging losses.

The act of pouring gas in a fuel tank and burning it in an ~25% efficient engine is a bigger source of energy inefficiency than all of the energy losses involved in powering an electric car from a power plant. So just staying with gas cars doesn't make sense.

2) Just moving the pollution outside of major population centers to where the power plants are is a VERY GOOD THING in of itself. The health benefits and health savings alone would justify the switch to electric passenger vehicles. Do you know how many millions of dollars that automobile pollution costs the US healthcare system? How much automobile pollution has shortened lives?

3) Electric cars do have the unique advantage of getting greener each time a power plant is made greener. So if a single coal-fired plant that provides electricity to 50,000 homes is upgraded to make it cleaner, or replaced, then every electric car that was charged by that power plant instantly becomes cleaner. You can centralized your efforts to clean up a few thousand power plants, instead of having to address millions of individual vehicles. And your clean-up efforts have immediate results for the electric cars already out there.

If we stick to gas and diesel vehicles, you have to wait until the vehicle is replaced by a new vehicle with cleaner emissions in order to cut pollution/consumption. That means waiting until the old cars flush through all of their used vehicle owners. That can take decades.

4) There are multiple ways to make your electric car nearly coal and fossil-fuel free besides just installing solar panels on your house. In Colorado, it can be as simple as signing up for WindSource, and your electric car (and your entire house) can be powered by 100% Wind Power. Or you can do the same with your own wind generator..

You can't do that with a vehicle with a gas engine.

5) Even if the electricity is generated from US coal, or US/Canadian natural gas, or US nuclear, or US Hyrdo/Wind/Solar sources, the key is that we are N O T helping fund our enemies abroad running our cars on US generated electric power, unlike burning gas. Just this alone would justify the switch to electric passenger vehicles!


Clearly the best answer to the dilemma of whether to keep the car you have, or buy a new one, is to WAIT, and buy a plug-in electric car. Either with or without a range-extender depending upon your own personal needs.

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You make good sense to me, although I have heard transmission losses are over 50% at best. Still it might result in slightly less CO2 emission if your conclusions are correct.
I am in complete agreement with your last paragraph, but I still think you ought to charge your batteries with PV.

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To add to what harmar said, the electric engine "can" be 90% efficient, but how efficient is it really. Now combine that with the efficiency of generating the electricity. Toss in the 50% loss in getting the electricity to my home. Finally, with what efficiency is the electricity stored in the battery (at -20 degrees Fahrenheit like it was today)?

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harlanx6 - yes it would be very nice if everyone could power their future EV's/RE-EV's/BEV's/PHEV's. But that isn't a pre-requisite for these vehicles making sense.

Brn - Pour a gallon of gas into your car and burn it. The engine is only approx 25% efficient. That means you just lost approx 75% of your energy in your gas. Now compare that to your figures for electric cars.

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Where you are getting your electricity makes a difference. We need to move toward renewable sources. It doesn't have to be done today. I am not a believer in this tipping point business. People trying to scare you to death with this stuff always have their hand in your pocket one way or another. It will take time, but we will move to renewable sources, not because it is the right thing to do, but because it will become the economical thing to do. Our ranch here has been running on electricity for about 100 years, and we have never paid a power bill. Now that is freedom. Electric vehicles really make sense to us because our power is free and produced with 0 carbon emissions. It doesn't matter how efficient it is. We are just waiting for better electric vehicles to be developed and offered at a reasonable price. They will come.

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harlanx6 and Brn -

Where are you getting such ridiculous electrical transmission loss figures?

As of 1995, total electrical transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2%.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Losses

http://climatetechnology.gov/library/2003/tech-options/tech-options-1-3-2.pdf

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Where are you getting those figures, Phil? That would be great if transmission losses were that low, but considering what must be done to get power to the customers that's unbelievable.

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harlanx6 -

I supplied links for the figure I quoted; see the original post.

The figure came from a report by the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program.

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I buy wind power for my entire house at 1 cent per kwh.
It costs me an extra $5 per month.

$4 of renewable energy should get you around 200 miles in an electric car.

You would be better off using residential solar for hot water & heating because it is cheaper and more efficient. Wind energy is more promising for electric vehicle charging.

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Nixon:

"1) (....) Burning fossil fuels at power plants (even when burning coal) and charging electric cars is still MORE energy efficient, and still puts out LESS pollution than a gas engine. That is even after transmission and charging losses."

The Energy Information Administration (part of the Department of Energy) tells us that in America, coal for electricity releases on average a hair under 1000 gCO2/kWh, the existing US grid mix emits about 600 gCO2/kWh, and natural gas generation emits just over 400 gCO2/kWh.

Electric vehicles consume about 250 Wh/mile, as measured in battery capacity. Taking conversion losses of ~16% and transmission losses of ~7% into account, it takes ~320 Wh generated to move an EV 1 mile. Looking at our three potential sources, a mile of travel produces 320, 190 or 130 gCO2 respectively.

Burning a gallon of gasoline produces ~9000gCO2. So running on pure coal electricity has the carbon footprint of (9000/320) ~28mpg, on the US grid mix has the carbon footprint of ~47mpg, while running on natural gas has the carbon footprint of ~69mpg.




"4) There are multiple ways to make your electric car nearly coal and fossil-fuel free besides just installing solar panels on your house. In Colorado, it can be as simple as signing up for WindSource, and your electric car (and your entire house) can be powered by 100% Wind Power. Or you can do the same with your own wind generator.."

Except in the extremely rare case of transmission constraints, renewable resources will produce electricity whenever they can. By using an electric car rather than a fossil-fuel powered one, you are increasing the total energy demand on the grid. That change in demand will NEVER be met by turning on wind or solar sources, because those sources are always on. It will be met by turning on resources that are "dispatchable", like natural gas, hydro, coal, nuke etc..

While I fully endorse and encourage distributed renewable generation, the deployment of PV arrays and wind turbines is independent of whether your car runs on dinosaurs or sunlight. The one connection is that EVs can be a dispatchable load, and so can facilitate the greater market penetration of non-dispatchable generation sources.... but that's getting a bit ahead of ourselves.

I fully agree with everything else you said.

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"Replacing an old guzzler with a new(ish) car reduces emissions pollution and reduces gas consumption. Done en mass, there are significant reductions in pollution and gas consumption."

No. It depends upon the cars being compared. Also, "emissions" have to be considered at all levels of production. The "emisions" resulting from the production of a new car are huge, whereas there are no "emissions" involved in the production of a car that already exists.

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Jeremy's agenda is not evil, so much as silly. He just REALLY loves it when one of his posts gets a lot of comments. Often what he writes appears stupid and pointless, and only when you look at it from that angle does his motivation become obvious. Whether he's trying to feed his ego, or just make the site appear busier is for him to answer. But I'm with you, I find it very annoying.

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Steel is not a free resource, if you can drive the vehicle forever at higher efficiency than the higher efficiency wins. However, believe it or not the cost of adding components can in principle make a car that has better 'efficiency' less 'green'.

Same is true with other things. If you operate a single crystal solar cell for less than about 4 years more energy went into making the panel than you ever get out of the panel. The cost in terms of both energy and carbon footprint should be thought of before implementing anything. Typically there is a high correlation between energy and cost. Clearly they cannot give you the extra energy that goes into producing something without loosing money unless they pass that cost on to you. In a hybrid that cost is transparent to the end user. Though the cost is a worst case, unless subsidy skews the market...

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"Idiocy. Scrapping a car doesn't add carbon emissions; it *reduces them*, because most of the car is either parted out or recycled, which prevents other emissions that would otherwise have occurred from occurring. It doesn't reduce them as much as the energy that goes into making the car, but it at least significantly reduces that quantity."

The amount of energy that goes into making a car is huge, whether or not the parts are recycled. It's the mentality that making a car requires little no energy that is the problem. Where are the factories and transportation systems that are using no energy to produce goods and deliver them?

Again, the used car usually (not always) wins out.

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Who the heck scraps their somewhat-used car when they buy a new one? Most of the time it gets resold to somebody else with an even older car (eventually getting scrapped but only after 2+ owners). This prevents the other person from buying a new car, thus preventing the emissions from manufacture... so ultimately a car will be used until it dies, and all new cars are coming out at about the same rate as the ones that are dying (maybe slightly more new cars if you count the entire planet with developing countries)... so the emissions from manufacturing are relatively constant and people shouldn't worry about it.

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