New York State To Launch Electric Vehicle Rebate (foxnews.com) 119
An anonymous reader shares an AP report: New York state will soon launch a rebate intended to make electric vehicles more price competitive with traditional cars. Officials said they'll launch the initiative by April 1. The rebate of up to $2,000 will be available for zero-emission and plug-in electric hybrid vehicles. It's part of an effort to reduce automotive carbon emissions, the state's largest climate change contributor. "We want to make electric vehicles a mainstream option," said state Assemblywoman Amy Paulin, a Westchester County Democrat who leads the Assembly energy committee. "They are becoming more affordable and we need to encourage them." Environmentalists supported the rebate when it was approved by lawmakers in 2016 and have been eagerly awaiting the launch.
Well...which? (Score:1)
Well...which is it?
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Both.
Cars, Cows, and conversion concepts (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither. Why: 1) Most power is still generated by burning fossil fuels. You're just moving your tailpipe elsewhere.
Half true. Points to consider:
(1) "most" is not "all"
(2) electric power is capable of transitioning to solar, and in fact car charging is a good application for solar,
(3) there is economy of scale. Large power plants are more efficient in producing energy, even from fossil fuel sources, than small engines (like car engines). This should be obvious: if car engines were more efficient than gas turbines, a power plant would consist of a million car engines. Large converters can use bottoming cycles to utilize the low-grade waste heat. Cars, on the other hand, just reject the waste heat; it's not worth the effort to do a bottoming cycle on such a small engine.
2) Cars don't contribute anywhere near as much to greenhouse gasses as we are led to believe. Cow farts are actually the #1 source.
Nope, not even close. You are right that methane is a better infrared absorber than carbon dioxide, but cows just don't produce that much methane. Methane-- all sources-- produces about 15% of the anthropogenic contribution to greenhouse warming, and cows produce only a small portion of that.
http://eesc.columbia.edu/cours... [columbia.edu]
The rest of the post consists mostly of unsourced assertions.
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You're just moving your tailpipe elsewhere.
"just"? That's the entire point about legislation like this. Cars are much filthier than large power plants and they dump all the crap exactly where people are rather than elsewhere. Electric cars are a great way if improving air quality in cities.
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Details. (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Most power is still generated by burning fossil fuels. You're just moving your tailpipe elsewhere.
While at the same time, there are detailed analysis (google is your friend) concluding that :
- Even in countries that mostly produce electricity by burning fossils - like TFA's US - electric cars still have a better carbon foot print simply because this "moved away giant tail pipe" is much more efficient that the "original small one" attached to an ICE.
In other words: yup, us power plant also produce carbon. BUT us power plants produce less CO2 per km than would an ICE, simply because the are optimised mostly for their efficiency, whereas the ICE is also optimised for size and for peak acceleration.
- In country that don't burn fossils that much for electricity (e.g.: lots of central or northern european countries), carbon foot prints are even better than the above.
- Very few countries like China, India, Australia and a few african countries (so nothing to do with NY) are so much reliant on dirty electricity that, electric cars and ICE don't differ that much in their emissions.
2) Cars don't contribute anywhere near as much to greenhouse gasses as we are led to believe. Cow farts are actually the #1 source. Buying basic goods made abroad also contributes significantly to the problem.
Yes the industry (including agricultural industy) also produce greenhouse gasses, and in bigger quantities than cars.
That doesn't mean that you shouldn't use electric cars, that only means that you *should also* try to recude the industry's greenhouse gaz emission.
(Which is beyond the point of TFA. Also, I don't know in the US, but several countries in Europe are also working toward lowering industry/agriculture emitted greenhouse gazes. e.g.: encouraging local grown food. So it's not as if electric cars were at the detriment of fight emissions in the industry)
3) The manufacturing of batteries in electric and electric hybrids is an incredibly dirty process.
4) The batteries in these cars aren't recyclable at all and will have degraded significantly after about 5 years of use. ICE cars don't need a new fuel tank every 5 years.
Yeah because ICE cars grow on tree. Organic trees.
Not.
Check detailed studies, most of the serious one also take the battery manufacture into account.
So again, in anything but the few top most fossil heavy countries, the production of the battery is still offset by the reduced emissions while driving.
That includes the US (even if it relies more on fossils than others and thus the advantage is less visible).
6) ICE cars can actually be carbon-negative. Boeing developed a workable method to grow ethanol in the world's deserts. Think about it: the Sahara Desert turned into a carbon sink. (Link: http://energypost.eu/exclusive... [energypost.eu]). With such a fuel, it would actually be better if everyone drove a gas guzzler until we meet an agreed upon level of carbon in the atmosphere.
Nice story, bro. But :
- It's still only one of those dozens "soon, new technology will make everything better..." over-hyped big media spin on some scientific advance. (I don't want to denigrate the scientific advance, but it takes a lots of steps between the lab and actual mass production). It's still only a story in some news paper.
Whereas electric cars are currently available from several manufacturer. And low-emission electricity is also a reality in lots of countries.
Until Boeing starts producing and selling huge amounts of their bio-fuel, it makes sense to support electric cars.
- Carbon foot-print gets negative *only if* this production method consumes more carbon than the bio-fuel releases at the end.
(e.g.: if only the fruit of a plant are used for fuel, and the rest of the plant stays keeping its carbon
Again, everything is in the numbers (Score:2)
ICE cars, and their engines, are made from recycled and recyclable materials. {...} And again, Lithium Ion batteries are nothing but toxic landfill when they've outlived their ability to hold a meaningful charge.
And again, over the whole lifetime of the vehicle from manufacturing, through using, to decommissioning, the numbers in current report tend to show that even when factoring everything in, electric cars are still a bit (US) or some (EU) better. (Unless your country is China. Then it's basically the same).
(Don't forget that over their lifetime, ICE will release a significant of poluant too. It's a slow trickle, compared to decommissioning a car battery. But it builds up to very large total quantity. You just
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I will respond in the traditional trump way:
1) This statement is stupid and you are stupid for making it. ... don't... I got to go, you make me want to punch my screen and the carbon footprint of replacing it sounds like it's HUGE.
2) Wrong
3) WRONG
4) OMG Wrong!!
5) WTF Are you smoking? WRONG!!!!
6) I just
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OK, and what I found is evidence of lithium ion battery recycling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Perhaps you meant to actually give directions for someone to be mislead into believing that they aren't recycled?
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$2000 rebate on a $40000 electric vehicle (Score:4, Insightful)
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But how much of a rebate would most people need?
I couldn't afford a $40K electric car unless there was a $39K rebate on it.
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Part of it's knowing how to make money, but part of it's knowing how to manage the money you make.
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Manufacturers reduce costs with economies of scale. Short term subsidies like this are what helps manufacturers to ramp up mass production to that end.
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Not only will a rebate at that point be pointless, but long before then the govenment will be slapping an annual tax on electric vehicles because, you know, roads must be paid for and gas isn't keeping up the tax base anymore.
This happened in the Netherlands 30 years ago when you could convert your car to dual-burn also natural gas, which was way way cheaper. You had to drive about 20,000 km a year to break even over the tax.
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that is the game here (Score:2)
A subsidy for you is a tax on everyone else. It's not like the Government of NY produces money, everyone else in your State pays for it.
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A subsidy for you is a tax on everyone else. It's not like the Government of NY produces money, everyone else in your State pays for it.
And...?
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When the manufacturers ramp up production to the point that a new or used electric vehicle will be sub-$15,000, this would be great, albeit unnessecary at that point. At the current price of electric vehicles, this is just a rebate for the upper class.
And air travel used to be affordable to the upper class only.
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The rebates are not for any particular technology, they are for a particular highly desirable quality: zero emissions. Any vehicle of any design which has that quality can make use of those rebates. Even a gasoline powered vehicle if it were, say, equipped with an emissions capture system.
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In NY, you can choose your energy supplier - and you can pick 100% renewable. While it is true that you can't control where each individual electron comes from, you can certainly effect the balance of sources.
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No you can't?
Here are the choices available on the Upper East Side [chooseenergy.com]
And Poughkeepsie, just to keep it interesting. [chooseenergy.com]
Both have 100% green options.
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Short term subsidies like this are what helps manufacturers to ramp up mass production to that end.
Subsidies are an extremely inefficient way of accomplishing that. Car companies only spend about 5% of revenue on R&D, so 95% of the subsidy is going elsewhere. It would be far more efficient to just directly fund the necessary R&D.
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Don't forget the almost-$4k of sales tax you'd incur in NYS... So $40k car turns into $44k car just by being bought in NYS.
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You hit the nail in head. This is a tax cut for the wealthy disguised in environmentalism BS.
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Or about the price of a Ford F-250.
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Or a well-done Crown Vic, had Ford not killed the American vehicle platforms off.
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$38,000 for a car isn't that much. my CR-V was $30,000 when i bought it 6 years ago. the subaru my wife wants is like $35,000. and i see a lot of $40,000 cars around here
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Actually, the working man is still out 40k since the working man is also the one paying for the rebate.
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Electric cars are not $40k. Maybe list price, but only idiots pay that. I bought a new Nissan Leaf in December for about $20,000, top spec Tekna model. Even without the tax break it would only have been about $24k.
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The working man now only owes $38,000. Environment and affordability problems solved. Praise the lawmakers.
The average USA new car price is $34000. Yes the lawmakers actually moved you 25% closer.
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This isn't just for full electrics, but also for plug-in hybrids.
For example, Prius Prime, about $27,000 MSRP, minus (for that car, based on it's battery kWH, it gets $4,500 from the federal credit. If it gets even half of the NYS credit, that brings the price down another $1,000 to $21,500, which is definitely on the affordable side of new cars.
2020 to 2022 when e vehicles cheaper than fff (Score:1)
It's projected that the average car or truck will be cheaper in the fully electric or plug in electric long-range hybrid mode by somewhere between 2020 and 2022.
An easier way of doing this would be to remove the fleet vehicle deductions and expensing for business if they aren't all-electric.
However, since the time horizon is just a few years, a short subsidy will help.
phev rebates are a joke (Score:2)
phev rebates are a joke. they cause just the phev system to be subsidized. due to how cars are now taxed in most of the world by co2 tests, the phev gets cheaper as well.
the thing is, pretty much nobody plugs them in and the added weight causes them to have worse mileage than a 1995 honda civic making it all kind of silly and pointless.
yeah the phev is mostly popular due to it dropping the co2 in the test. it's the ultimate circumvention device really. for the consumer it's pretty much +- zero.
This is how poor people subsidize rich people (Score:1)
Taxpayers should not be subsidizing other people's new cars.
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NY has progressive income tax - net flow of subsidy is decidedly down.
Really? To lower pollution? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Burning fossil fuels in power plant is a lot more efficient than in individual combustion engines. Also, power plants can be outside cities. Global warming is a problem but local air pollution in big cities is another.
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I live outside the city too. It makes a lot more sense to build power plants in rural areas. Land is cheaper, local pollution is less a problem.
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Assuming you get your electricity from clean burning natural gas and not dirty coal here's the math.
Gas turbines are +/- 60% efficient right now but the electric grid isn't "smart" and about 5-6% of generated electricity is wasted in transmission. So overall you have 54% efficiency in delivering energy from the burnt natural gas to the battery. But here's where the fun begins. Batteries are not 100% efficient in storing charge. Even lithium ion batteries are only about 99% efficient and that's when they are
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You can put the natural gas directly in the car to solve that issue.
Unfortunately CNG cars never really caught on, about the only places you can fuel them are airports and government facilities (and perhaps your own house if you make the needed modifications to your gas lines assuming they are affordable and legal in your area).
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Is your car powered by natural gas? No? Then why are you comparing it to natural gas power plant? Oil power plants are much dirtier.
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On the contrary, it's pretty clear that electric cars are better from a global warming perspective, except in places relying heavily on coal and oil to produce electricity.
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Also ICE idling in the traffic is 0% efficient.
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Not a scholarly article, but food for thought:
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/... [wired.com]
And for an opposing viewpoint: Comparing oil sands to lithium extraction is just plain stupid [teslacentral.com].
Re:Really? To lower pollution? (Score:4)
I think you need to also include oil exploration, extraction, and refining for ICE cars. Lithium mines suck, but so to refineries.
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But there's a lot of pollution that harms the environment and DOESN'T contribute to global warming.
A gas car doesn't only emit CO2. The NOx are a major issue for urban air quality.
Re:Really? To lower pollution? (Score:4, Informative)
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These days a lot of lithium is recycled from batteries. EU directives require retailers to take used batteries for free and the ones with any value, like the lithium cells, are recycled.
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You don't seem to understand how lithium is produced. It's produced by pumping underground lithium brines (water with high concentrations of lithium salts, in particular lithium chloride) into evaporation ponds and then letting the sun do the rest of the work to separate the salts from the water. Those salts are then chemically separated using such horrible chemicals as soda ash (i.e. a common household cleaner!). There's no massive production of contaminated dirt like you claim. Hell, in addition to lithiu
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In addition to the other responses: you get to use your lithium battery thousands of times. You only get one use from a gallon of gas.
Also, many people have the option of getting electricity from a green supplier or purchasing their own solar panels to charge the battery.
Here's a study discussing mortality rate effects of the various forms of vehicle power: http://www.pnas.org/content/11... [pnas.org]
Two highlights: Battery production does cause some mortalities, but charge the battery from a natural gas pow
mass produce energy vs. car engines (Score:2)
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...plus the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway...
That depends entirely on there you live. In the jurisdiction I live in, 87% of all electricity is hydroelectric, with most of the rest being biomass, wind, and a very small amount of natural gas. We have no coal or oil generation whatsoever. In such an environment, an electric vehicle makes a lot of sense.
If where you live the majority of your electricity is produced by coal, driving an electric vehicle isn't necessarily going to add to emissions at the plant level. Coal plants are typically run as bas
Pollution vs. pollution (Score:2)
With current processes for extracting Lithium from the ground resulting in 0.02% lithium and 99.8% dirt that is now contaminated by the toxic chemicals used to extract the lithium and the resource depletion on local water sources as water is shipped to lithium mines in salt flats, plus the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway, I'm going to guess the net environmental impact of an electric vehicle over the course of its life is only nominally better than a combustion engine.
According to studies (google is your friend) it all depends on the country.
- In countries that rely very little on greenhouse gazes-emitting power production (e.g.: lots of central and northern european countries) : pollution generated by the manufacture of battery and production of electicity is still a lot smaller than the pollution generated by the production of fuel and burning it in ICE.
- In countries that rely more on greenhouse gazes-emitting electricity generation (e.g.: US - so including NY mention
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the fact that electricity to charge the cars likely comes from burning fossil fuels anyway
And you would be wrong! Even back in 2006, nationwide, about 30% of electricity is generated by non-fossil fuel sources. [wikipedia.org] Though if were talking about just the state of New York, in 2013 it was greater than 50%. [wikipedia.org]
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So you have the wrong process for extracting lithium, combined with the fact that lithium in batteries is recyclable, and combined it with a very outdated and studied to death view of the cleanliness of EVs (spoiler: You're wrong, they don't even approach ICE cars even if you run them on coal power).
The only thing you're kidding yourself about is your knowledge on the topic.
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Electric cars are a rich person's toy. Is the price difference less than a lifetime's worth of gas yet?
Last I checked - admittedly over five years ago - the premium cost of an electric vehicle (cost above a comparable gasoline vehicle in the same size and class) was paid for by fuel savings if you went with a least option. That is, the monthly lease cost for an EV minus the fuel cost savings was favorable to the monthly cost of leasing a comparable gasoline car.
Whether or not it's economical, however, depends on the cost of gas and how much you drive. When (not if) the price of gas goes back up to where it w
Re:Google Glass (Score:4, Interesting)
My monthly Volt payment is what I used to pay in gas alone for my previous car. My electric bill went up by $40/month and I end up putting $15 worth of gas in every two or three months, unless I take a long trip. Maintenance costs are also far lower. So in my case, yes.
FWIW I'm a happy Volt owner (Score:2)
I got mine (a 2014) used with less than 10K miles for a really good price. It's probably the nicest car I've owned. The instant torque of the electric drive is fantastic for city driving and commuting. I've had a series of four cylinder commuter cars over the years and the electric drive is by far the best "solution" to the typically gutless four cylinder engine I've found. My last car was turbocharged and while that was fun after the thing spooled up, it was by no means instant response. It was also not al
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I was thinking about a 2014 Volt myself, until I sat in one. The view out is very limited, compared to my current 29mpg Civic. The Volt would probably only save me 120 gallons a year, so I'm holding off in the hope that some newer EVs have better visibility.
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If the range isn't a big issue, Nissan is nearly giving away the Leaf right now. IIRC I saw some people talking about how they got it out the door for $13K (including incentives, so more like $23K without). The Leaf got shot down for our household since there are enough times we needed the extra range on the Volt. I work with plenty of Leaf owners who pretty much use it as a commuter / around town car and have a second vehicle for long trips. Aside from tires and wipers there's pretty much zero maintenance.
Probably a good investment to avoid pollution (Score:2)
Like most major cities I imagine cars cause a great deal of air pollution and noise. An electric or even a hybrid I imagine would help that situation as less oil burned means less localized pollution which does a great deal of harm.
Democrats helping the wealthy, again (Score:2)
This is how money is transferred from the lower classes to the upper classes. Buy an expensive car, get a check from the state. That's not going to help poor people, but it'll help people who already have money.
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A reduction in air pollution means a reduction in pollution related health problems, which means a reduction in health care costs for 80-90% of the population, and an increased quality of life for those suffering from the health problems. We lose $120 to $280 billion a year on health care and loss of life due to fossil fuel-caused air pollution. That's $500 per year for every man, woman, and child. Reducing air pollution also means a reduction in future weather related property damage, which again is someth
Mortality rates for car fuel sources (Score:2)
Here's a study discussing mortality rate effects of the various forms of vehicle power: http://www.pnas.org/content/11... [pnas.org]
Two highlights: Battery production does cause some mortalities, but charge the battery from a natural gas power plant and your total mortality rate is less than half the mortality rate of a gasoline vehicle. Charge with Wind, Water, or Solar, and you cut the mortality rate 80%. Charging from a coal plant would be a poor choice, however.
Step 1: Make an affordable (not Tesla) land-yacht. (Score:2)
"We want to make electric vehicles a mainstream option,"
Make a land yacht - something about the size of a Crown Victoria - that is within the reach of ordinary individuals. Get it to start around $20-25k and you have an option that people would want.
The only way the golfcarts are attractive is that they're all but forced into existence.
Make the yachts and they will drive them. (Score:2)
US citizens. The only reason golfcarts get driven is that they're the only things around in a price bracket - thanks to overzealous environmentalism.
Swap the small cars out for larger US-sized models, and they will drive them.
Something else legislators are looking at. (Score:1)
None too realisitic (Score:1)