Are There Exceptions to the Rule that Going Electric Reduces Emissions? (arstechnica.com) 120
"Averaged over the globe, electric vehicles (EVs) already represent about a 31-percent emissions savings" writes Ars Technica, noting results from a study which also found similar savings from energy-efficient home-heating pumps. "Even in the scenario where these technologies are promoted but the grid isn't cleaned up much, there's a substantial benefit through 2050."
But the researchers also separated the world into 59 regions, then used data on the "greenness" of each country's electricity grids, considering the full range of available vehicle types and home-heating methods as well as their predicted "uptake" of green technologies from 2015 to 2050. And this did identify a handful exceptions, Ars Technica reports: Compare, for example, Switzerland's exceptionally low-carbon grid to Estonia's, which runs primarily on oil shale. Swapping an internal combustion vehicle for an electric one in Switzerland cuts emissions by 70 percent, and a heat pump will cut them by about 88 percent. But in Estonia, an electric vehicle would increase emissions by 40 percent and a heat pump pushes that to an eye-watering 120 percent. A more significant exception can be found in Japan. In the scenarios with little progress on grid emissions, a decade from now, the combination of Japan's dirtier grid and preference for hybrid vehicles means that swapping in EVs doesn't quite pay...
As time goes on, emissions from manufacturing electric vehicles accounts for a larger share of their total life cycle emissions, the researchers note. You can make the vehicle efficient and the grid clean, but you'll also have to clean up industry to keep shrinking that carbon footprint.
The article notes that the researchers also predict continued improvements in the efficiency of electric vehicles -- with an unintended side effect. "As time goes on, emissions from manufacturing electric vehicles accounts for a larger share of their total life cycle emissions, the researchers note.
"You can make the vehicle efficient and the grid clean, but you'll also have to clean up industry to keep shrinking that carbon footprint."
But the researchers also separated the world into 59 regions, then used data on the "greenness" of each country's electricity grids, considering the full range of available vehicle types and home-heating methods as well as their predicted "uptake" of green technologies from 2015 to 2050. And this did identify a handful exceptions, Ars Technica reports: Compare, for example, Switzerland's exceptionally low-carbon grid to Estonia's, which runs primarily on oil shale. Swapping an internal combustion vehicle for an electric one in Switzerland cuts emissions by 70 percent, and a heat pump will cut them by about 88 percent. But in Estonia, an electric vehicle would increase emissions by 40 percent and a heat pump pushes that to an eye-watering 120 percent. A more significant exception can be found in Japan. In the scenarios with little progress on grid emissions, a decade from now, the combination of Japan's dirtier grid and preference for hybrid vehicles means that swapping in EVs doesn't quite pay...
As time goes on, emissions from manufacturing electric vehicles accounts for a larger share of their total life cycle emissions, the researchers note. You can make the vehicle efficient and the grid clean, but you'll also have to clean up industry to keep shrinking that carbon footprint.
The article notes that the researchers also predict continued improvements in the efficiency of electric vehicles -- with an unintended side effect. "As time goes on, emissions from manufacturing electric vehicles accounts for a larger share of their total life cycle emissions, the researchers note.
"You can make the vehicle efficient and the grid clean, but you'll also have to clean up industry to keep shrinking that carbon footprint."
clean power? (Score:3)
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"They take the coal and they clean it" once said a world leader.
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Especially if you consider the types of ICE motors used in places like India. Shitty 2 cycle engines that pump out the pollution in lots of cases and few really clean engines.
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Good points. This is a conversation here in Canada. I've been paying a Provincial carbon tax for about 15 years and the rest of the country is also now paying. It was a big thing in the last Federal election here with over 60% of voters voting for a party that supported the tax.
The problem is the parts of the country that depend on oil for their income and have refused to change, just blaming everyone else for not helping get the oil to market and getting more and more freaked out on the rest of us.
In some
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The oil producing nations sell a constant amount of oil which is burnt somewhere. If cars are electric the demand for oil goes down and the auction prices go down and becomes viable in places where it didnt [sic] end being viable previously. Thus the same amount of oil is burnt regardkess [sic] of how many electric cars are in service. We need to start having the conversation about how to stop oil producing countries pulling it nout [sic] the ground. I have not heard this subject even spoken about, and i dont [sic] see why oil rich countries (usa included) would voluntarily stop mining.
There is a bit of a fallacy here. It would be highly unlikely that the drop in oil usage by moving to electric vehicles would be equally matched by an increase by people that could afford the now cheaper oil (assuming the oil even drops enough in price to make it "viable in places where it didnt [sic]" end being viable previously"). Sure the oil prices may drop from a surplus due to more electric vehicles but the more likely result is that oil producers will limit production to keep the price up. Thus, an i
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Re:clean power? (Score:5, Insightful)
There's lots of losses in getting the crude oil to the gas tank as well. Especially with some types of crude.
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Battery charging should be over 96% efficient, it really should be over 98%.
WTF are doing to get 80%, using a bunch of USB chargers in series?
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5-15% loss in ac-dc-ac conversions (Batteries are all DC, the grid and most major consumers are AC, including things like EVs. Then a ~10% charge/discharge loss. Modern Li-ion have very high coloumbic efficiency, similar to the numbers you quote, but the do not have that great voltaic efficiency. You need to charge the battery at a higher voltage than the voltage you get out, hence there is a loss. A ~20% loss in a battery storage system is quite reasonable.
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5-15% loss in ac-dc-ac conversions (Batteries are all DC, the grid and most major consumers are AC,
Nope, there is no loss.
including things like EVs. Then a ~10% charge/discharge loss.
Nope again.
You need to charge the battery at a higher voltage than the voltage you get out
You could do that.
hence there is a loss.
Nope, voltage has nothing to do with it, and higher voltage usually implies lower losses.
A ~20% loss in a battery storage system is quite reasonable.
Simply: nope.
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"5-15% loss in ac-dc-ac conversions (Batteries are all DC, the grid and most major consumers are AC,
Nope, there is no loss."
Please enlighten us - there's no loss of energy, but some of it is released as heat from the charging/controller circuits, and not forwarded on to its destination. You're being obtuse. It's well-established that battery systems have energy losses when converting from DC to AC and vice versa.
I'll be impressed when you can show me a battery storage and charging/discharging system that do
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1) The motor is a 3 phase motor. If it is called AC or BLDC doesn't matter; it is switched DC at the battery voltage, there is no conversion at all of any sort between the battery and the motor.
2) discharging the battery is nearly 100% efficient, The battery does not warm up by being discharged.
3) charging the battery is over 99% efficient, otherwise fast charging wouldn't exist. Most losses are in the conversion.
4) modern DC-DC converters with fixed input and output voltages such as found in a car charger
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OK so I'm basing my views on my own experience - off-grid PV with lead-acid cells, feeding an unregulated 24VDC circuit for lighting and some refrigeration, and a "dumb" sine-wave inverter for 240VAC power (and some lighting - pedestal lamps, etc). It's dumb because it was an early model, and doesn't have any external interfaces, just control circuitry to take care of undervolt, overvolt, overtemp, and a "sleep" function when the load drops below an adjustable value (but I don't use that). It's got a coolin
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What kills the efficiency on the home inverter is the isolation. With a car motor you don't need that.
Of course charge efficiency is a bit better at 240V than 120V in most cases.
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I think the point of the analysis is to compare the grid's centrally generated power vs distributed gasoline or diesel generated power. In some countries like Estonia and Japan, the thermal engine in the car beats the shale based generation and power losses of the grid.
Outside these oddities, the grid usually wins and its more environmentally friendly than multiple car engines. But I find these oddities to be far fetched... its rare that a car engine spends it time in an efficient or even useful state. A
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The ida that Estonia is mostly running on shale oil (for electricity) is absurd anyway. Where would they get it from? Why would they when they are interconnected to the European super grid? Why would they not have gas from Russia or Coal, or "normal oil" from Norway, or wind from the baltic sea?
Well, it is possible, just not really plausible. Ah, I see now, they run on "oil shale" not shale oil. Does not really sound worse than coal to me ... CO2 wise. But I don't know how good they are scrubbing their exha
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EVs can be part of the change from a fossil/nuclear powered grid to a clean renewable one. It doesn't matter when batteries are charged as long as they meet your daily commuting requirements, for example. With Vehicle 2 Grid becoming more widespread now they can help with smoothing and peaking too.
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EVs can be part of the change from a fossil/nuclear powered grid to a clean renewable one. It doesn't matter when batteries are charged as long as they meet your daily commuting requirements, for example. With Vehicle 2 Grid becoming more widespread now they can help with smoothing and peaking too.
Holy shit, did I just read that right? AmiMoJo is now supporting nuclear power...
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You didn't read it right. Check the very first sentence again.
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It doesn't matter when batteries are charged
Well, they need to be charged when I plug it into an outlet.
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A lot of people plug in but delay charging until they can get extremely cheap overnight rates.
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India has already doubled its renewables capacity from 40-80GW. It's well on the way to trading its coal plants for renewables.
"India plans to achieve 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022 through 100 GW of solar, 60 GW of wind, 5 GW of small hydro, and 10 GW of biomass-based power. At 82.5 GW of installed renewable capacity as of September 2019, India is nearly halfway to meeting its 2022 target.... India further commits to increase its renewable energy capacity to 450 GW..." by 2030. Its current grid-size is
In other words, there are outliers. (Score:3)
Which is hardly news. Estonia is tiny. It has a GDP that's only 3/4 the size of *Vermont's*.
The big dog here is *India*, which is on the list of countries where e-vehicles increase emissions and accounts for 3% of world GDP and 18% of world population.
Re:In other words, there are outliers. (Score:4, Informative)
If they hit their targets, electric cars might take over as the cleaner option within the lifetime of vehicles currently being sold:
https://ieefa.org/ieefa-india-... [ieefa.org]
If India doesn't hit their targets, it will be worse for all of us, and them.
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Have you seen the types of internal combustion engines used in India? Most are very dirty rather then fairly clean like in most western countries.
Replacing a shitty untuned 2 cycle engine with electric is still a win.
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Of course. I'm just going by the analysis referenced by TFA. Assuming that is correct, electric cars make the situation worse, but the situation could be remedied.
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Of course I didn't read TFA, but it seems that with India moving to more renewables and the state of things there, electric would still be a win, if only due to moving the pollution away from the city centres.
Some of these moves are going to be worst before getting better I'd also guess. Eg, more coal burning short term until more renewables come on line.
Batteries... (Score:1)
... Are not green.
Until we quit using batteries electric cars are simply shifting the non renewable resources from petroleum to minerals.
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2. You make hydrogen at the filling station;
People promoting hydrogen mobility often argue about how much power you need for fast-charging stations. But they're apparently too innumerate to also consider how much power a hydrogen filling station would need. A hydrogen pump with a 50% duty cycle would require around three megawatts of average power per nozzle.
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can retrofit the existing fuel distribution network
Seriously? I don't think you have an idea how much these things actually cost. The added cost of operating a pump is actually a substantial portion of end user cost of hydrogen mobility. Purchasing a more expensive vehicle but then saving 75% on gasoline expenses like you can with a BEV around here definitely beats purchasing a comparatively ex
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It is not free, it still have high capital costs.
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Producing H2 + O2 from water is about 70% efficient via electrolysis.
A fuel cell again is also only 70% efficient.
So for cars we would be around 50% efficiency, not counting transport or infrastructure.
Still twice as good as an ICE, but far away from a battery powered electric vehicle.
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Much worse measured how?
Energy efficiency. Hydrogen production by electrolysis wastes a lot of energy as heat (during electrolysis and then when hydrogen is compressed), while modern batteries are extremely efficient.
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A lot of Asian countries are taking fuel cells seriously, so it might just happen. But it takes a lot of government carrots and sticks to transform the market that way. It's the same reason hydrogen combustion engines never became a thing—in the short term carrying hydrogen won't be profitable for fueling stations so we need subsidies coupled with additional taxes on carbon fuels.
If fuel cells do take hold I think it would have to start with commercial vehicles: garbage trucks, buses, semis, etc. Then
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If we moved to all BEVs, then gas stations - which would be logical to convert to charging stations - would need to increase the number of "refill" stations by 12-20, based upon the lengthy recharge times of batteries.
I don't like BEVs, I believe them to be a novelty for people to virtue signal, exceedingly expensive with reduced capability to the point that they are luxury items. That said I still have a problem with your claim of needing so many more recharge stations with a switch to BEVs.
In my normal driving I'll fill my gasoline burner once per week and this takes perhaps a 15 minute detour from my normal commute home. With an electric car I'd never have to stop at a filling station with my daily commute because I
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Here's a video i used to get the above info and it details costs/advantages/disadvantages of processing hydrogen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Hydrogen is still too expensive and it seems silly to waste electricity to produce it when it could go
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I bet most of that hydrogen cost is because it's relatively rare right now. Yes, it takes more energy to produce, but if we have all that abundant, clean/free energy from wind and solar - that's a non-issue. Now, eliminating the costs (environmental and tangible) of a 1200 pound battery pack, and the costs involved in strengthening a vehicle to haul around that weight, and the wear and tear on wheels, joints, brakes and such for that extra weight - it should be included.
Here's some interesting data on the [toyota.com]
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Well, in Germany the H2 fuel equivalent of one liter gasoline costs more than gasoline. And 80% of the price of gasoline are taxes, probably more even.
Re: Batteries... (Score:2)
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Fuel cell vehicles still use batteries. The fuel cell can't ramp power up quickly enough to satisfy needs for quick acceleration so a battery is used as a buffer to give the fuel cell time to ramp up.
Re:Batteries... (Score:5, Informative)
Re "battery green-ness":
Except not. Emissions involved in battery manufacture have been dropping even faster than grid emissions per kWh. And not simply because the lion's share of said emissions are related to electricity consumption, and thus automatically get cleaner as the grid does (mining and fuel-fired heating are relatively minor portions). It's that reduction in energy consumption per kWh is something that's inherently tied hand-in-hand with battery cost reduction - and this trend continues. For example, currently the highest energy step, and a very expensive step, is operating the huge vacuum drying ovens and solvent recovery systems for anode and cathode manufacture, before calendaring. But the new trend is dry manufacturing, with calendaring doing the binding of the anode and cathode particles on its own - thus eliminating that primary energy consumption step.
Emissions per kWh in battery manufacturing are also directly tied with energy density. If a modification to the manufacturing process allows the storage of more lithium in the anode or cathode, or utilization of a higher percentage of it, that increases the amount of kWh produced but has nearly zero impact on the energy consumed in manufacture.
Lastly, vs. the notion of "shifting the non renewable resources from petroleum to minerals" - surely you can see the difference between something that is mined once, lasts the life of the vehicle (thousands of "refuelings"), and then is recycled, vs. something that is "mined" and then burned up into our breathing air every single time you fill up.
I find it really weird how mad people get about the fact that minerals are used in batteries, but couldn't care a whit about when they're used in other things. Nickel in stainless steel (the primary usage)? Nobody gives a rat's arse. Graphite in pencils, greases, refractory compounds, etc? Nobody cares at all. Nickel and graphite making up the majority of the mass of a li-ion battery? HORROR! Nobody cared about cobalt (which is on its way out in li-ion batteries regardless) when its primary usage was in industry and alloys - including in oil refining. But once li-ion batteries started becoming a major consumer, suddenly it's the worst thing on the planet (quick, everyone turn a blind eye to all of the mass-scale horrors around the world caused by oil production, including literally doubling the child mortality rate in the Niger Delta). Lithium - produced from A) brine**, in one of the lowest impact mining means on the planet, to the point that SQM's most serious environmental citation revolved around not reporting the death of about a dozen carob trees; and B) spodumene, relatively small-scale, nothing-special hard-rock mining - with low global volumes, because li-ion batteries just don't use that much lithium - has now somehow become the poster child for terrible mining impacts. I even heard someone complaining the other day about the manganese used in NMC batteries. Manganese, literally the most common alloying agent in every bloody car on Earth, and nobody makes a peep, but put it into a battery...
** - This has been the source of some of the most ridiculous writing I've ever seen, with people mixing up brine and freshwater, talking about how salar lithium producers are "taking million of litres of water from farmers in arid regions" - as if people are watering their crops with brine. The limitations on brine extraction - where there are any at all - generally involve around maintaining brine pools at the edge of salars wherever there's wildlife that needs them (salars themselves are generally lifeless); extraction rates have to be curtailed if brine levels drop below s
Re: Batteries... (Score:2)
But they donâ(TM)t last the lifetime. Not to mention battery fires are damned hard to put out.
Transportation requires taking your fuel source with you and batteries make no sense logistically.
Not to mention humans are terrible at recycling.
Fuel cells / Hydrogen is the future. I applaud Elonâ(TM)s push to get EV mainstream but current EV technology is really only feasible in population dense areas where public mass transportation should be the focus. Not personal EV
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How do you figure? I’ve had a model X for years, driven it halfway across Europe including through some fairly empty countryside and stayed in small towns, and it’s worked just fine. Much preferred to an ICE, in fact, since at home I never have to gas up.
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current EV technology is really only feasible in population dense areas where public mass transportation should be the focus.
What makes current EV technology infeasible in suburban and rural areas? (Note: I live in a rural area and have a Tesla Model S and a Nissan Leaf.)
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"last the lifetime" is not a phrase in the post you are replying to. But it's also a weird thing to say. A typical EV battery is expected to be good for 1500 discharge cycles. For a small EV, say a Renault Zoe, that's ~230miles per cycle * 1500 cycles = 345,000 miles. I think most people would consider a battery that lasted that long to have lasted long enough, and for most people this is well over 10 years of driving. And just to be clear, "expected to be good for 1500 discharge cycles" means "the point at
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The most widely recycled object in the world is 12V car batteries, at 99,3%. The very nature of how cars are disposed - at centralized locations (scrap yards), where they're stripped - is highly conducive to recycling.
It depends on what you call "the lifetime". Abused (daily charge limit of 100%, etc), a Tesla battery will usually last in the ballpark of 200k mi / 300k km. Used normally, usually 300-400k mi / 500-6
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The ICE "vote" has to be taken into account (Score:2)
Even if your country's power generation is currently all coal, taking its cars electric removes one major "vote" for fossil energy sources. Car charging is also a good application for small renewable sources that fluctuate too much for use on a conventional grid. Which is cheaper, a whole new power grid or buying more EVs?
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part 1: electric cars.
part 2: non-fossil-fuel power plants.
It doesn't really matter if you do part 1 or part 2 first, both are essential to meet the goal.
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It doesn't really matter if you do part 1 or part 2 first, both are essential to meet the goal.
They have a misguided cynicism that makes them want to wait to do one, if the other is going to be delayed. They don't comprehend that both things are increasing at an increasing rate, and they'll continue until they replace the old technologies, because efficiency is cheaper than waste. It is really that simple. In every area, the "green" solutions are ones with less side effects, which by definition is less waste, more efficiency, less cost.
Estonia burns lots of oil because they're scared of Russia, that
Make planned obsolescence illegal (Score:2)
Hard to do, and the devil's in the details, but the savings in GGE's, non-renewable resources, and pollution, would be huge. It probably takes only a small incremental increase in energy (if any) at the manufacturing level in order to make an electric car, a smartphone, etc, that will last at least two or three times as long as the current products.
Much of this making stuff more and more disposable stems from people's feeling that they need new stuff with the latest features - we're being 'fashionably' self
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Making planned obsolescence illegal is one thing, however it won't change the fact that technological progress is based on that. You can't run Xbox One games on the first Xbox, for example.
So on top of your suggestion, you'd need to add another rule: upgrades have to be limited to every X years. I'd suggest 5 years, seeing how things are right now. So it would stop companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Intel, AMD and nVidia from releasing slightly-upgraded crap all the time, lowering the total output and thus
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Very good points - thanks. I agree with all of them.
Carbon aside (Score:2)
If you haven’t driven one, you probably won’t understand.
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My next car will be electric. Most of my trips are not long and the ability to "fill up" at home will be brilliant.
That said, electric cars are clearly not better for long trips. Yes, it's doable, and with planning, more than just tolerable. But it's something different to be able to fill up and drive 400 miles non-stop (yes, I know that is not recommended).
Re: Carbon aside (Score:2)
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With an ICE car, you can have a very short stop and be on your way again. With an electric, you are really looking at a half hour stop to get juiced up again.
That said, I think this is a very small use case, and I think people can adapt to it no problem. It's certainly more of a problem in people's heads than it is in reality. I think being able to juice up your car anywhere there is a socket is a huge improvement over having to go to a forecourt.
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There are exceptions to every rule (Score:3)
Part of that is because we're really good at finding patterns even when there really aren't any. Part of that is risk aversion leading conservativism. But it's a huge problem either way.
Americans seem especially prone to this, it's wired into the puritanicalism that's a big part of our culture. It prevents us from responding to change until major generational shifts happen. Normally we have one of those shifts save us from the damage. Young people come into their own as a voting block and make the necessary reforms. Like they did with the Civil Rights Movement.
But because of the massive post war baby boom that's not happening this time. The old guard conservatives are going to get a dose or brutal reality, but they are unlikely to 'wake up'. Research shows that when people tend to double down on such things. When they start dying in mass they're going to panic. We may end up in a dictatorship when they demand "Strong" leadership.
Rewrite! (Score:2)
1. Generating electricity by burning fossil fuels emits more carbon than nuclear or renewable resources.
2. This is true even when you consume electricity with electric cars alongside other uses.
Was there any other great insight from this that I missed?
Carbon tax (Score:3)
This is why a carbon tax is appealing. It directly taxes and discourages what you actually care about (CO2 emissions). The further you get away from that, the more opportunity there is for weird side effects and gaming of the system.
Not to say a carbon tax is without problems. That's just the huge advantage.
I use this line of reasoning about all sorts of government programs. For example, if you think people can't afford heath care insurance, enough food, and an adequate home, give them money. Then trust them to decide how to best allocate and spend the cash. If you create three separate programs, one for each need, you wind up with all sorts of bizarre and dysfunctional corner cases.
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This is why a carbon tax is appealing. It directly taxes and discourages what you actually care about (CO2 emissions). The further you get away from that, the more opportunity there is for weird side effects and gaming of the system.
A carbon tax will only work if there is a practical alternative for people to go to. Electric cars are not a practical alternative because they cost more and production is very limited compared to hydrocarbon burners.
Not to say a carbon tax is without problems. That's just the huge advantage.
There is no advantage to a carbon tax. It's giving money to the government and expecting them to solve the problem. Since when has the government solved anything that didn't involve killing people and breaking things? Our taxes should not be used to solve every social problem. That's not w
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You raise some interesting objections and I think you miss my point.
Let's leave aside for now how much gross revenue the government needs to raise. Assume for the sake of argument that a carbon tax is offset by lowering some other tax. Yes, yes, I know, that's wildly unrealistic (see: "Not to say a carbon tax is without problems.").
Higher taxes won't make alternatives appear any sooner. It may in fact delay it.
I respectfully disagree. An axiom of economics is people respond to incentives. If you make CO2 emissions more expensive, people will want to produce less of them. There will be
This argument again? (Score:2)
Which is why the main producer of electric automobiles, Tesla, has planned to make their factory powered entirely by renewable energy [tesla.com]
And yes, as long as an electric vehicle is powered by a coal / natgas burning plant, it will be shifting emissions from an internal engine to a remote power plant. Though, even when powered by coal [bloomberg.com], electric cars are more efficient a
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And obviously, there are huge benefits to shifting emissions from an internal engine to a remote power station, including:
1. It's remote, as you point out. So the nasty particulates aren't pumped out into our faces in the middle of villages, towns and cities. The engine noise is removed, as well.
2. Big plants are more efficient than small engines because they are highly engineered for efficiency
3. Power stations can be run more efficiently because the demand is not so dynamic. Dynamic demand really fucks up
Hydrogen "EV"s are a good example... (Score:3)
Most of the time hydrogne EVs are just Natural Gas with lipstick on disguised through an overly complex and expensive Fuel Cell Car.
It's loved though because you need very regular servicing, you can only fill at a gas station and the source is from the Big Oil corp.
One day we may truly have green hydrogen and an efficient delivery/conversion system... but we certainly don't yet with ~30% efficiency if you're lucky...
But true... water vapour is all that gets emitted at the consumer end of the process...
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Most of the time hydrogne EVs are just Natural Gas with lipstick on disguised through an overly complex and expensive Fuel Cell Car.
It's loved though because you need very regular servicing, you can only fill at a gas station and the source is from the Big Oil corp.
One day we may truly have green hydrogen and an efficient delivery/conversion system... but we certainly don't yet with ~30% efficiency if you're lucky...
But true... water vapour is all that gets emitted at the consumer end of the process...
Sure, but at least you've solved half of the equation -- creating demand. It's going to be hard to convince anyone to work on producing green hydrogen or an efficient delivery/conversion system if there is no demand.
If you seriously want to know (Score:4, Informative)
When you want to know the impact of doing something, you do a simple A/B comparison. What happened before you did it (case B), what happens after you do it (case A). Subtract the effect of B from the effect of A to find the difference. That difference is the net impact of doing that something.
So for example, you normally prepare your own dinner ($5 in groceries), but you want to know cost of eating out ($40). Subtract B ($5) from A ($40), and you find that the net impact of eating out is that you spend $35 more.
Or another more complicated example. What was the impact of industrialization on CO2 emissions? [newscientist.com]
The net effect (A minus B) is then.
Add up those differences and you get (70 + 26 + 6) = 102 GT additional CO2 released, (10 + 80) = 90 GT additional CO2 absorbed. For a net difference of 102-90 = 12 GT per year additional CO2 added to the atmosphere. So the net effect of industrialization is to add 12 GT per year of CO2 to the atmosphere. Far in excess of the pre-industrialization rate of 1 GT/yr due to natural CO2 emissions. Even though industrialization only accounts for about 3% of total CO2 emissions, the change in how the system behaves when we added industrialization means the entirety of the 12 GT/yr is attributable to industrialization.
So what happens if you do this to figure out the change in emissions due to swapping your ICE car for an EV? First, look at when you owned an ICE (case A).
Total CO2 works out to 4.67 + 4.53 = 9.2 tons/yr.
Now how about after we switch to an EV? (Case A)
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The answer is batteries + nuclear!
That will certainly be a large part of the answer. If we rank the top ten energy sources by lowest CO2 emissions, then rank the top ten by costs, we find onshore wind, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear coming out at the top of both lists. Solar power and offshore wind don't make the cut as they cost twice as much, and produce twice the CO2, as the others.
I've seen people claim that grid scale batteries will allow unreliable wind and solar to meet electricity demands. What batteries also do is allow our curr
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In other words, 100% of the additional electricity needed to charge your EV has to come from fossil fuel power plants
Nope, that's not true for EVs overall. If you bought an EV today and plugged it in to charge tonight, then the power consumed by that EV tonight would be provided by fossil fuels, sure. But over the entire lifetime of that EV? Nope.
The thing you need to realize is that we can build new power plants. On the timescale of a few hours our sources of electricity generation are more or less fixed, but on a timescale of months or longer we can build more, and the newly-built power plants don't have to emit CO2. In
I own a Tesla Model 3 (Score:2)
Where I live, peak electricity is $0.12/kWh. Much of that power is generated by coal. My Model 3 costs about $0.03 per mile. Ultimately, I'm paying about $20/mo for charging my car at home.
So whatever that is in coal burning are my "emissions".
All I know is, when it's -12F outside and I'm at a red light with other motorists, all I see is a fog of vehicle exhaust from all the ICE cars and none f
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If you were charging your car at home via solar panels, it would be a good comparison.
But since your car's exhaust happens to be at the coal plant, you can't see it - and that makes it a meaningless comparison, even though it's still probably less overall.
And before people jump in and say that you'd need to see the pollution made by the manufacturing of the solar panels, keep in mind we're also not discussing all the pollution created by the oil industry to go from a raw material up to the end product at th
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That fog is water vapor...
Electric vehicles are impractical (Score:2)
We cannot make an electric equivalent of a Boeing airliner. Ships traveling across oceans will not run on a battery. Large trucks will not be electric either. Even getting people into an electric car will be a hard sell with YouTube videos and blog articles talking about electric cars leaving people stranded because of a battery going bad.
I'll see people talk about how "practical" an electric car is during a Midwest winter by making a video of how they program in apre-heat the car so it's warm when they
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Guess what? I can blast the heat in my electric car when it's 10 below, drive my 30mile commute to work, blast the heat on the way home and still have range to spare. For 99% of people an electric car is entirely practical. Now if you're driving 100 mi to and from work each day you might not want an electric vehicle in the winter if there's no charging at the destination, but to worry about an extreme outlier and say "they're impractical" is like saying an ICE vehicle is impractical because you need to st
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If you think "a few novelty sport cars" are the only electric cars on the market, you might want to take another look. Almost all manufacturers have an electric vehicle in their lineup. The thing is, it's not like there's been a lot of development on batteries for electric cars in the past 100 years. Really only recently has there been a larger push.
In the end it's all just energy storage. An electric vehicle is much more efficient at driving than an internal combustion engine, but whether the energy is s
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(Some half-truth spew)
If these people fight for something — anything — you're less likely to be wrong being against it...
Or not. Why not look at the data instead of fighting about celebrities?
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Well, your statement is certainly true if you set some kind of absurd standard for "successfully decarbonised" and ignore the fact that we are in the middle of a process and not at the end. As the map you provided shows quite clearly, the UK is at 75% low carbon, and 58% renewables (with the difference coming from nuclear). Spain is 84% low carbon, and 58% renewable. Portugal is 76% low carbon, 60% renewable. None has meaningful quantities of hydro. All have lots of solar and wind. All understand, and are r