Electric Cars Would Save America Huge Amounts of Energy (bloomberg.com) 401
An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from Bloomberg, written by Liam Denning and Elaine He: Electrifying U.S. vehicles wipes out the equivalent of our entire current power demand. The U.S. consumes a lot of energy; last year, about 100 quadrillion BTUs (equivalent to 17 billion barrels of oil; which, we'll admit, is only marginally less abstract). But only about a third of that is ultimately used in terms of actually lighting lights, turning wheels and so forth. The second law of thermodynamics means, for every unit of thermal energy we actually put to useful work, roughly another two end up wasted as heat. How we don't use energy is just as important to understand as how we use it. Here's a simplified version of a Sankey diagram from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory showing the various inputs to the U.S. energy system and where they end up.
Large-scale waste is unavoidable with a thermal energy system, or one where we mostly burn stuff or split atoms (97% of the inputs in 2019). Burning fossil fuels also generates the carbon emissions causing climate change; so wasted energy is a proxy for the damage being done (apart from nuclear power). In contrast, renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower capture energy directly from infinite sources. While a small amount is lost in transmission, the vast majority is used. So here's a thought experiment: What if the entire U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet (currently about 270 million cars and trucks) were electrified by 2030 and we expanded wind and solar generation at a rapid pace, while eliminating coal power, at the same time? The result is that we not only end up with a drop in U.S. carbon emissions of almost 30%, but also a far more efficient system overall.
Large-scale waste is unavoidable with a thermal energy system, or one where we mostly burn stuff or split atoms (97% of the inputs in 2019). Burning fossil fuels also generates the carbon emissions causing climate change; so wasted energy is a proxy for the damage being done (apart from nuclear power). In contrast, renewables such as wind, solar and hydropower capture energy directly from infinite sources. While a small amount is lost in transmission, the vast majority is used. So here's a thought experiment: What if the entire U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet (currently about 270 million cars and trucks) were electrified by 2030 and we expanded wind and solar generation at a rapid pace, while eliminating coal power, at the same time? The result is that we not only end up with a drop in U.S. carbon emissions of almost 30%, but also a far more efficient system overall.
Thermodynamically efficient but still expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thermodynamically efficient but still expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you claiming that vehicles normally run forever? 80% of the cars on the road now will be scrapped within the next 20 years, and replaced with new ones. This is normal and does not need to be included in some "cost/benefit analysis of making the switch" as it will happen no matter what the power source of the vehicles.
No one is proposing a sudden recall of all vehicles and replacement with new electric ones (which would be impossible given how "making things" works).
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You are correct of course, but the article is LITERALLY "proposing a ... recall of all vehicles and replacement with new electric ones", not "sudden" but over 10 years. Light duty vehicles, the actual subject of replacement, last a lot longer than that.
Re:Thermodynamically efficient but still expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a pretty myopic viewpoint. Each year about 17 million vehicles are sold in the U.S. Over the next decade, ~170 million, in a nation that already has ~300 million vehicles. Many, if not the majority, of those new vehicles are in one way or another replacements for existing vehicles. Those existing vehicles will get scrapped. (A lot of each car can be recycled.) The cars built in the next decade require energy inputs, raw materials, and lock in a particular energy source (gasoline, diesel, electricity, hydrogen, etc.) for their entire lifetime.
Suppose one were to suddenly build 17 million electric vehicles each year, instead of the ~0.5 million being made today. Do you not think that the cost of batteries would decrease? Probably even to the point of "cheap" - however you define that. It needn't be $50k Teslas in every garage to realize the beneficial effects.
And gas is not quite as cheap as you may think. The price at the pump is relatively low, but largely because the externalities of climate change and environmental degradation have not been factored in. On a cost-per-mile basis, electric vehicles are (on average) already less expensive than gasoline - the fuel is less expensive, as is the maintenance.
In the end, what the author proposed is a thought experiment - a way to frame the magnitude of what we're discussing. Maybe it's off by a factor of 2 in terms of energy or financial cost - in either direction. It's probably not off by a factor of 10.
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Is that a count of NEW vehicle sales, or new and used vehicle sales? If the latter, it's a horribly misleading number....
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17 million NEW light vehicles (passenger cars and light trucks), not including about 40 million used light vehicles.
Those are 2019 numbers, BTW.
=Smidge=
Re: Thermodynamically efficient but still expensiv (Score:2)
92 million new cars are produced every year: https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
There are about 1.3 billion cars in the world. That number is probably increasing some but for the most part as a car is produced, it replaces an existing car so each year 5-7 percent of cars are replaced
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The price at the pump is relatively low, but largely because the externalities of climate change and environmental degradation
...and some really quite expensive wars / armed forces too, plus the costs to treat all the respiratory disease, inflammatory conditions etc caused by tailpipe emissions
Re:Thermodynamically efficient but still expensive (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thermodynamically efficient but still expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Gas" is cheap
It is only cheap for you because your government effectively subsidises it by not taxing it appropriately.
Electricity prices may go up in the future but they will not go up as steeply. It is already cheaper per mile to use electricity than dead dinosaurs (or whatever it is). The gap will start to increase when you are charged the real cost of your fuel...
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With the cost of wind and solar still dropping exponentially, it seems more likely that the cost of electricity will come down, particularly in places where it's currently expensive. The cheapest electricity in the world is all in places that generate it using renewable sources, but so far those have all been limited to places with abundant hydro or geothermal.
Re: Thermodynamically efficient but still expensiv (Score:2)
Unless they try another boondoggle like âoecash for clunkersâ, no one is going to be trashing working cars. Cars are naturally replaced every 10 years or so. Just like most people didnâ(TM)t throw away perfectly good incandescent lights, if you stopped producing gas cars then they would quickly disappear as people bought new cars.
Trashing working cars is also a bad idea because the power plants need time to scale up for the increased demand. Much better to just let it happen naturally as c
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"cost/benefit analysis" is useless. Capitalism will not solve environmental problems.
Also, gas is NOT cheap when you are measuring it consistent with the topic of the article. That statement alone demonstrates the folly of using a "cost/benefit analysis".
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We should trade fossil fuel extraction for lithium mining in a heartbeat, the environmental devastation has a much smaller footprint, and far smaller volumes per year of material need to be fed into the vehicles to keep them running.
Trading bigger disasters for smaller ones is a good long term plan.
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It's amazing that people can so studiously ignore things like Deepwater Horizon, isn't it?
https://www.britannica.com/lis... [britannica.com]
Re:Thermodynamically efficient but still expensive (Score:4, Insightful)
1. Oil spills are a result of demand for oil. Less demand, fewer spills over time. It's not that tricky.
2. The same amount of negligence can have different impacts depending on what industry it occurs in, because the underlying risks are inherent in the substances being handled. So a shift to less hazardous substances cuts risks overall
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Well-to-wheel / TCO / life-cycle analyses repeatedly show that EVs are better than ICE, and that's before considering any potential benefits from further decarbonising of the electricity supply, or second-use and recycling of batteries, so it's implausibly conservative modelling, because all of those things are happening
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Gas is cheap. Batteries are not (yet).
Gas is an energy source. Batteries are an energy storage medium. You are comparing two different types of things.
Replacing every car would mean scrapping a lot of cars and build a lot of new ones.
The easiest way to do this would be to just replace cara as they wear out. The U.S. auto industry sold approximately 17 million cars and light trucks in 2019. There are about 275 million cars in the US, so the changeover would take about 16 years at the current replacement rate. That seems a reasonable timescale.
How about a cost/benefit analysis that includes the energy and funding need to make the switch?
It also excludes the ecological cost of making the batteries. While we do need to fix this, trading one style of disaster for another is not a good long term plan
LIthium isn't rare, and it is recyclable. Should be possible to design technologi
Re:Thermodynamically efficient but still expensive (Score:5, Informative)
It also excludes the ecological cost of making the batteries. While we do need to fix this, trading one style of disaster for another is not a good long term plan
Nothing compared to the ecological cost of making the ICE engine and all the gasoline and other automotive fluids that it will use (and spill on the roadway) during its lifetime. Consider that the average American driver is responsible for about 4000 lbs of gasoline usage just each year, whereas a Tesla battery pack weighs around 1200 lbs. So, after about 10 years, that's about 40,000 lbs of gasoline (and probably a similar mass of refinery waste of various kinds, but we won't go into that now), which is 33 times the mass of the Tesla battery pack.
You're promoting a false equivalence. A ridiculous one at that.
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How delightfully vague and dismissive. And, missing that important element to overall effect, you then proceed to use solid numbers as a comparison.
It was vague, and I did dismiss it specifically because the numbers were already bad enough for gasoline engines without even considering refinery waste. I didn't compare any solid numbers with refinery waste, I just ignored it and looked at the actual quantity of gasoline used by the engine over its lifetime. All I was pointing out with the comment about the refinery waste is that just the sheer quantity of gasoline doesn't tell the whole story.
If you really want to go into it, a 42 gallon barrel of oil pr
Re: Thermodynamically efficient but still expensiv (Score:2)
"And they have a much shorter lifespan (and higher extraction costs) than the iron and aluminum used in making, say, an ICE engine block."
aluminum is enormously energy intensive to refine.
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Battery production is a LOT more involved and polluti
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To refine from bauxite, yes. There's a LOT of Al that's already been divorced from its oxygen, though.
Yes, but consumption is increasing, so there's still need for virgin aluminum.
Battery production is a LOT more involved and polluting.
Yet it's getting cleaner all the time, just as solar panels have done already.
Aluminum and Rare Earths (Score:3)
To refine from bauxite, yes. There's a LOT of Al that's already been divorced from its oxygen, though.
So, what you're saying is "for ICE cars, we will assume that the materials are all recycled, and for Electric cars, we will assume that the materials are all not recycled.
To compare on a fair basis, if you're assuming recycling on one, you should assume recycling on the other.
Also, refining Al is, conceptually at least, a lot more environmentally friendly than rare earth metal extraction.
But there's a lot more aluminum used in cars. Only the magnet motors in electric cars are rare earth metals.
--it's also not clear that we can't develop methods of refining rare-earth elements that are environmentally friendly. Until
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I came here to make a similar comment. There are many other reasons to detest electric cars, but front and center is that the lifecycle costs aren't properly accounted for.
What a load of nonsense. As I pointed out in another comment, the lifecycle costs of the ICE engine have to include the gasoline used during its lifetime, which is at least a full order of magnitude greater than for the battery pack and electric motor (the actual mass of gasoline used came out to about 33X the mass of the battery pack even if you don't include refining and extraction waste). And that's ignoring the cost to make the ICE engine itself, which is not zero.
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Same With Space Heating (Score:4, Informative)
Using electricity with heat pumps cuts the consumption of energy for heating buildings by up to 75%.
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Compared to electric resistance heating in climates/systems where frost build-up on the outdoor coils is not a problem, true.
Compared to high-efficiency gas heating, heat pumps would not be cheaper to operate for heating my house.
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It's not really fair to say gas generator plant efficiency is 60% while solar is 20%. The gas generator is actually losing 40% of the energy in fuel that is burned (and that figure doesn't include the energy that has to be expended to acquire and transport the fuel). The solar panel is capturing 20% of energy that would be expended anyway.
What is with the obsession with solar and wind? (Score:4, Insightful)
Until we have efficient energy storage systems, neither is practical. But do you know what clean energy is abundant and available now? It's just that the irrational fear of nuclear power is greater than the fear of global warming.
Re:What is with the obsession with solar and wind? (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you call a few hundred million electric vehicles, except for an efficient energy storage system? Don't try to straw man by asking 'what happens when all of them want to charge at the same time?', because they won't. With numbers this large, the geographic and temporal distribution of energy sources and storage is not a serious obstacle.
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Electric car batteries seem a very expensive energy store.
We'll say the 1,000,000 mile battery exists, and we have a 300 mile car. That's ~3000 cycles.
At 10k for a car battery replacement, that's $3/cycle. I don't think car batteries will make good grid augmentation systems, I know I don't want to do it with my car (which is electric).
The EV as grid battery seems to be a bad idea to me.
Wake up from the steam era (Score:5, Interesting)
Nonsense. Storage is nice, but there are a lot of processes that do not need round-the-clock power. In fact, the things that do need stable power are... corn mills! Yes, the oldest type of windmill is actually the one that needs the most stable power! Power needs to far less stable for water pumping mils, sow mills, papermills, oil mills etc. For generating electricity, most modern wind turbines keep the frequency stable electronically. But hey! that did not stop the corn mills.
So even history proves you wrong. Wake up from the steam era. The Dutch had their golden age entirely on wind and hydro and lots of European countries sailed the world on wind. It was the arrival of the steam engine that forced us to do overproduction, working in shifts, etc, because steam engines were extremely cumbersome and costly to start.
But now we are on Diesel and electricity, we can turn engines on and off without punishment. We can build a grid that informs the connected machines to do their jobs when there is a lot of energy. Your washing machine does not need to be operational round-the-clock, and neither does your battery-driven drill, or the charging of your electric car.
Civilization got big on wind and hydro, but nowadays we seem to be too stupid and too backward for it.
Re: What is with the obsession with solar and wind (Score:2, Insightful)
"But do you know what clean energy is abundant and available now?"
Yes, wind and solar.
Nuclear isn't clean until we have a reasonable waste plan, which we do not. And the final death toll isn't available until the waste we already have lying around is cleaned up, for which there is literally no plan.
Re: What is with the obsession with solar and wind (Score:5, Insightful)
If nuclear power scares you more than global warming then why should I give the slightest care what you think of global warming?
Here's what I think of global warming, so long as people claim global warming is of a lesser concern than nuclear power then I have nothing to worry about. Nuclear power is the safest and cleanest energy source we have. You want me to get worked up about global warming? Then consider nuclear power part of the solution.
Now, you think nuclear power is a good thing? Good, we just solved our global warming problem. With every complaint about global warming we just open up another nuclear power plant.
We have solved so many problems in the world we know have to make them up. Nuclear power is so much safer than anything else out there, including solar power, that we are killing more people the longer we delay in building some nuclear power plants. Once we get over this nonsense fear of nuclear power then we'd have solved the problem of global warming.
Then what will we have to get all worked up about?
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For the warm climates, solar does not even need storage. E.g. in Greece where I grew up, you had these surges in power usage due to all the ACs going on when the sun was up, which required spinning up extra power generators at a big cost (peak power costs were several times the non-peak), and still having trouble avoiding brownouts in places like islands etc. Solar panels pretty much solved that, their output is pretty much proportional to the demand, so they provide the most expensive kind of power. I adde
Re:What is with the obsession with solar and wind? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nah, it's the cost of nuclear power that is the problem. Do you really think some plebs objecting to it has any effect? We object to lots of things and they happen anyway.
It's just too expensive in the face of competition from renewables and gas, and gas is fast losing that battle too.
In fact it turns out that renewables will soon be so cheap that even most storage can't compete with them, i.e. it's cheaper to just build more renewables to guarantee capacity when needed. Finally the promise of cheap, abundant energy that nuclear failed to provide may come true.
https://arstechnica.com/scienc... [arstechnica.com]
Thermodynamics education needed (Score:2)
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For an electric system, that waste heat is dumped at the power plant
That would be the point of bringing up wind turbines and solar panels in the article.
Re:Thermodynamics education needed (Score:4, Funny)
For an electric system, that waste heat is dumped at the power plant
That would be the point of bringing up wind turbines and solar panels in the article.
Why would I read the article? That's precious time that I could be spending writing a comment about the article!
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Chevy Bolt is competitive with ICE new cars (Score:3)
A 2020 Bolt costs $20k, brand new off the lot [cargurus.com]. What ICE vehicle are you buying that is significantly less than that, NEW? Step into the market of off-lease low-mileage EVs, you can get a BMW i3 for around $20k as well [cargurus.com] (2018 with 11k miles).
I tend to own my cars for 15 ye
What is the relevance of this efficiency number? (Score:2)
But, what is the relevance of this internal efficiency of the economy? The benefit of reducing the rejected energy is normally a reduction of consumption of primary resources. But the resource itself comes for free for renewables.
Someone could also start a discussion about the efficiency of solar cells. It is usually just about 22
Important concepts represented with lies (Score:5, Insightful)
"And here’s a surprising answer: Electrifying U.S. vehicles wipes out the equivalent of our entire current power demand."
No it doesn't. The "entire current power demand" is ~100 quads, the suggested changes save 13%. They even say this:
"The result is a bigger economy running on 13% less energy inputs. In a word: efficiency"
Furthermore, here's actually what they propose:
"So here’s a thought experiment: What if the entire U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet (currently about 270 million cars and trucks) were electrified by 2030 and we expanded wind and solar generation at a rapid pace, while eliminating coal power, at the same time?"
So they propose more than simply "electrifying U.S. vehicles", that's a lie too. And worse, they assume that petroleum energy use goes to zero with this change but it does not (since they only electrify light-duty vehicles) and, of course, no accounting for energy use is made for the production of all those vehicles.
It's a shame that important ideas such as this are so dishonestly represented. It does not help anyone overcome bad faith arguments when you spot the other side everything they need to argue against you. All these things need to occur, but we really need the lying to stop.
Re:Important concepts represented with lies (Score:4, Informative)
It's a shame that important ideas such as this are so dishonestly represented. It does not help anyone overcome bad faith arguments when you spot the other side everything they need to argue against you. All these things need to occur, but we really need the lying to stop.
Stop taking yourself so seriously. Headlines like this are always contrived thought experiments that ignore lots of real-world complexities. Their claim isn't even provocative when you take a minute to think through the thermodynamics - take a fleet of ICE vehicles with around 33% conversion efficiency from stored energy to motion and replace them with a fleet of EVs with >95% conversion efficiency from stored energy to motion and it's obvious that we have the potential to come out way ahead as we make the change. It's not going to be apples to apples because of course some EVs will be charging off of coal, but that's less and less true as coal becomes uncompetitive, so instead those EVs are probably powered by natural gas or better in the majority of cases, and with the exponential growth and dramatically falling prices of wind and solar, things will only get cleaner going forward.
If you look at where the grid is likely to be 20 years from now, the EV/renewable transition will probably have replaced 100 units of energy supplied as gas with 50 units of energy supplied by renewables. That's the one important insight in the article: because of the improved efficiency of EVs our total energy usage will go down substantially. We only have to replicate a fraction of the oil sector's output in order to transition to renewable powered EVs, in other words.
Check their other articles just and this one (Score:2)
These 2 are just Op Edit opinion writers pretending to be hard journalist.
Most of their articles are just propaganda dripping with their personal ideology.
Not enough electriciy (Score:2, Insightful)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says we’ll need more electricity to power cars like his. A lot more. [yahoo.com]
And mining is a dirty business [grist.org]
The giant composite glass blades [chooseenergy.com] on modern windmills are not efficiently recyclable, so after theyre used up they end up in landfills, Bloomberg reported [bloomberg.com] in February 2020.
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The more part isn't a big deal, currently there is a lot of capacity overnight that isn't efficiently used. In the UK people get paid to consume it sometimes. I literally get paid to charge my car.
Failure (Score:2)
"By ignoring the waste heat at solar panels and wind turbines we can greatly reduce the amount of waste heat we consider in energy generation. To get a good headline we're going to gloss right over T&D and overgeneration losses too."
Putting the Cart before the Horse (Score:2)
The argument is nothing but irrelevant. It's not about energy but about cost. But even if we disregard cost - and disregard the energy cost in making the cars and their batteries, it would still be bogus.
As long as most electricity is produced by burning fossil fuel, the energy gain is limited to the difference in efficiency between a ICE and the power plant. As electric cars are not 100% efficient either, the actual gain is even less. Factor in transport losses and energy foodprint in production and you ar
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So current vehicles are our entire current power demand.
Nope, but reading something you don't want to agree with is hard.
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Re: wipes out the equivalent of our entire current (Score:3)
No, he is often angry at others due to his poor reading comprehension.
Re:foolish hu-mans (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: foolish hu-mans (Score:3)
The solar panels reduce land insulation by covering it up. Their back sides are white, so most of the heat energy is reradiated towards space. When the energy is used, most of the heat energy for that escapes too.
Cute troll though.
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Batteries have long lifespans and then get recycled or reused in a context where their reduced capacity is irrelevant. There are ALREADY battery recyclers, they just don't have much to do at this point because the batteries are mostly being reused.
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Just remember: The Sun shines on the Earth with 1.4 kW/sqm, of which about one third reaches the ground. A large nuclear plant might have a maximum power output of 1000 MW, for which a total of 3000 MW of thermal energy are released. That means, that the whole output of a nuclear plant (thermal and electrical power) is less than the Sun shines on ten square
Re:foolish hu-mans (Score:5, Interesting)
A modern EV sends maybe 5% of the energy from its battery out the radiator as waste heat, while for a modern ICE vehicle it's more like 66%. Also human waste heat has a vanishingly small effect on the system overall, even in the ultra-wasteful status quo. Next question?
Fun tidbit, a friend's engineering professor once calculated that piston ring friction alone had consumed something like 1/5th of the energy humanity has ever used.
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To avoid being nitpicked to death, I should add that 5% and 66% are approximate total waste heat amounts for both powertrain types and that amount doesn't leave through the radiator alone - EVs may be passively cooled and for ICEs, fraction of that leaves through the exhaust, where it can be partially recaptured by a turbocharger.
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While I agree with this statistic on personal and commercial vehicles, most power plants are much more efficient due to economies of scale (which also helps the electrification math)--even if they burn coal or natural gas--because the heat recovery systems can be implemented with more return on investment.
I would thus change the article narrative to read:
"Waste is highest from large numbers of smaller ignition-fuelled systems"
from
"Large-scale waste is unavoidable with a thermal energy system".
** Mental note
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So no, efficiency of electric motor over ICE does not show you the full picture.
Re:foolish hu-mans (Score:5, Informative)
Virtually all energy we use ends up as "heat" whether "we use it" or not.
Yes, but the electric car gets from point A to point B with considerably less energy input. A Tesla model S that holds 100 KWH has a low end range of 348 miles on a charge. One gasoline gallon equivalent of electricity is 33.4 KWH. In other words, the Tesla carries the equivalent energy of 3 gallons of gasoline. The range of the Model S may be a little higher than a typical ICE vehicle, but we'll just call it equivalent. A typical mid-size sedan has a gas tank of 11 gallons or larger, which is about 3 2/3rds times as much power stored than a 100 KWH Model S. There's some power lost during charging and power transmission, etc. However that's supply chain. If you dig back into the gasoline supply chain, a lot more energy is spent distributing and refining. So, if all the power ends up as heat either way, the equivalent ICE produces 266% more heat than the model S for the same trip just starting at a full charge/gas tank without considering how it got there. If you do consider the externalities of how it got there, there's even more energy waste in the whole process of refining and distributing. So, even if the electricity is ultimately generated by fossil fuels, the electric supply chain is more efficient. If you transition to renewables, it becomes even more efficient.
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I've wondered about this. In my situation, I don't have reasonable charging facilities at my driveway, and I live in a suburban subdivision so there isn't anywhere nearby I could use public chargers. I think I would have to:
1) Upgrade the electrical service to my home and the service panel ($?).
2) Run electricity to my detached garage as the charger will want to be inside for best results (~$3k estimates).
So I'm going to guess ~$6k just to get my house ready to charge an EV (not including the EV charging u
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Re: Environmental impact of insane production incr (Score:2)
All you need is a dryer outlet in a covered housing for overnight charging. It doesn't need to be inside your garage unless you park there.
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Dryers where I live are mostly natural gas, so we don't have the sort of outlet I think you're thinking of.
If they're only mostly natural gas, then you probably do.
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YMMV, but upgrades to electrical service are often paid for by the electric company, especially in cases where anticipated additional electrical consumption would add enough revenue to cover the cost in a reasonable time frame.
Re: Environmental impact of insane production incr (Score:2)
Good questions here and in other responses ... and that's the point.
A serious proposition would bring facts into the conversation instead of hand-waiving, pie in the sky prose and fancy graphics. For example, could existing gas stations retrofit their facilities for electric car charging and still have a viable business? Seems like a dubious assumption, but I don't know. Without supporting data and analysis, no one can reasonably argue one way or the other. This is just 1 of many, many details that cannot b
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This seems wildly expensive. We had an EV charging unit stuck on the outside of our house here in the UK for under £1k (and free to us, a combination of government grant and car dealer incentive paid it). The electrician did a very nice neat job upgrading the house fuse to 100A, putting in the isolation switch, earthing etc and connecting it all up. It took about 3 hours and was very straightforward.
Charging outside is no big deal, makes no difference at all. There's no benefit to chargin inside or un
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Not a serious discussion. A hugely important variable is blithely overlooked.
What is environmental impact of building enough electric cars to replace all gas burning cars within the next 9 years AND building the infrastructure required to charge them?
a) Most of those cars are going to be replaced anyway. It might as well be with electric ones.
b) Infrastructure is only installed once, wires don't wear out.
c) You forgot to subtract the environmental impact of extracting/refining/delivering all that oil. That will be gone.
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It's not like we aren't building a lot of cars already. (17 million sold in the U.S. per year.) The ~10-ye
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Which you apparently got from TFS, not the linked articles.
Citation needed.
They are not - they are assuming a move away from coal, being replaced by solar, wind, and high-efficiency combined gas cycles.
Re: No all transport petroleum goes to automobiles (Score:3)
They claim 14 quads of oil energy is replaced with 4 quads of electricity, which would require at least 8 quads of solar collection capacity, not the 4 they claim in the article (factor inverter efficiency to tie into the existing AC power grid and solar conversion efficiency).
I like solar, I even have solar on my house. I like EVs, they make sense for many applications. I have seen policy and legis
Re: What happens to all those huge dead batteries? (Score:5, Interesting)
"You actually think there's gonna be a mainstream, massive, battery dismantling operation all over the country"
No, all over the world.
There are already battery recyclers. They have to go begging for batteries because most used EV batteries get repurposed.
The original plan for Tesla powerwalls was to use reclaimed batteries from Tesla vehicles but they had to give that up because THEY COULD NOT GET ENOUGH OF THEM because randos were doing it first. Tesla, Leaf, and other used EV and hybrid batteries are in massive demand for home and RV solar storage.
So you deserve to be downmodded, not because of green whatever, but because you don't know what you are talking about.
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There are already battery recyclers. They have to go begging for batteries because most used EV batteries get repurposed.
Citation required.
Re: What happens to all those huge dead batteries? (Score:4, Informative)
Here are some useful links. Don't know if any of these speak specifically to the issue of not having many batteries to recycle. But Tesla took a super long time to get their recycling facility going specifically because they didn't have enough batteries to make it worth it for a long time.
https://www.instituteforenergy... [institutef...search.org]
https://www.reuters.com/brandf... [reuters.com]
https://blog.ucsusa.org/hanjir... [ucsusa.org]
https://www.greencarreports.co... [greencarreports.com]
https://oilprice.com/Latest-En... [oilprice.com]
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Re:What happens to all those huge dead batteries? (Score:4, Insightful)
Consider the alternative - spending a shitload of energy extracting a greater volume of material which then needs to be refined with at least equal amounts of energy, which then need to be fed into vehicles at a much greater volume over a given time period. Engines produce more waste oil than EVs would produce waste batteries but we've been able to manage that.
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Plus, as batteries get more efficient and powerful, you can make the old materials go further in new cars. 1kg of Li can be used in more cells in the future than it can today, because of chemistry and mechanical improvements.
Re:What happens to all those huge dead batteries? (Score:5, Informative)
>You actually think there's gonna be a mainstream, massive, battery dismantling operation all over the country when so many millions of those vehicles are available, and that those batteries won't become horrible toxic waste as they usually do now?
The Nissan LEAF hit the market in 2010, with the Renault ZOE not far behind. That was 10 years ago.
Basically all of those cars are still on the road. Despite the LEAF not having a thermally managed pack and suffering pretty severe battery degradation as a result, vanishingly few of them have had battery replacements (I am aware of one shop that does LEAF battery upgrades, but they only install a supplemental pack and the original remains.) There are fledgling recycling companies ready to salvage used EV batteries, either to built aftermarket bulk storage solutions or recover the valuable materials for new batteries... their biggest problem, however, is a lack of batteries to recycle.
Turns out all the FUD about needing to replace EV batteries every so many years was in fact, just FUD. Huh.
And no, in terms of waste recycled Li-ion batteries aren't nearly that bad. But at least you CAN recycle them - really hard to recycle gasoline and diesel once you burn it.
> Also, do you think producing those batteries in the first place is an energy-cheap process? That it doesn't take a LOT of energy to produce them?
Here's a fun fact: A typical EV can drive about as far on the energy needed to extract, refine and transport a gallon of gasoline to your car, as a typical ICEV can drive on that same gallon. That's how lopsided the difference in efficiency is.
So sure it takes a lot of energy to produce them. Extracting and refining petroleum isn't free either, so maybe don't ignore that... especially when the energy invested in building a battery pack is a one-time deal, but energy invested in producing gasoline is ongoing. (Spoiler alert: batteries comes out WAY ahead over their total lifetime.)
> Also many others things but hey "it's green" and I WILL be downvoted, so whatever.
Or you'll be downvoted for spewing the same tired, discredited arguments that we've been hearing for over a decade now...
=Smidge=
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Although a massive battery recycling operation seems improbable because a *small* battery recycling operation is economically implausible, reasoning by extrapolation is faulty. A battery operation would only be practical *if* it were massive enough to achieve economies of scale.
Consider scrap metal. If you have thinking in terms of hundreds of pounds of material a week, you'd better be recovering gold. But if you are working on a scale of tons per week, it's profitable to recycle ferrous scrap and sell i
TFS is nonsense that contradicts itself (Score:5, Informative)
The fine summary links to a diagram showing that transportation, meaning cars, busses, semi trucks, airplanes, trains, ships etc make up 26% of energy usage. (It doesn't mention that 20% of that is large trucks).
It then says that electric cars would reduce total energy usage by 30%.
Since cars and light trucks make up about 13% of energy usage, you aren't going to cut energy usage by 30% even by getting rid of all the cars. It would be great if you could.
I'd love that. Unfortunately, 13 is a lot smaller than 30. That's just first grade math. The alligator mouth eats the 30%. If cars and pickups used no energy at all, that would cut energy usage by 13%.
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What if the entire U.S. light-duty vehicle fleet (currently about 270 million cars and trucks) were electrified by 2030 and we expanded wind and solar generation at a rapid pace, while eliminating coal power, at the same time? The result is that we not only end up with a drop in U.S. carbon emissions of almost 30%, but also a far more efficient system overall.
Re: Standard Nonsense Argument Follows (Score:5, Informative)
No one needs to scrap their existing gas cars. All it would take would be to stop producing new gas cars. Within 10-25 years as cars are retired, they would be replaced with electric cars.
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But to get people to start really buying electric cars in quantity, you do need the infrastructure largely in place. Our state has under 100 public charging stations in the whole state. Well under. That's enough to handle the few people who have fully electric cars and a few visitors. But until people are sure they can keep their car charged wherever they are, that cars will run between towns without needing to stop and be recharged when they get there (or in route) so they can make the return trip, most pe
Re: Standard Nonsense Argument Follows (Score:4, Insightful)
But until people are sure they can keep their car charged wherever they are, that cars will run between towns without needing to stop and be recharged when they get there (or in route) so they can make the return trip, most people will have no interest in buying.
You are leaving out the critical piece of owning electric that most people don't really appreciate until they experience it: you don't have to charge at a public station, because you charge every night from your own home, and hence begin every day with a full "tank". I have a longer-than-average commute at 90 miles round trip, and my Chevy Bolt (a medium-range electric by today's standards) could handle a commute twice that distance with a bit of room to spare.
Granted, this doesn't solve the problem for people who live in apartment buildings with no way to charge, or traveling salesman types who drive all day, every day. But there are a LOT of people who either own garages or have on-street parking that is compatible with charging themselves, and a LOT of people who have short commutes and hence could hit a public charging station once a week on their trip to the grocery store, or whatever.
So, honestly, I bet most people will have interest in buying in the next few years, when the total cost of ownership of electric becomes undeniably better than a comparable gas vehicle (it has been situational up till recently). A few years after that, we'll see electric cars with comparable or better purchase price than gas cars, and when you combine that with better acceleration and reliability, along with lower maintenance and fuel costs, ICE cars will become a niche offering for people who have really unusual range requirements, and people who just don't want to change for personal reasons.
The chicken and egg thing also has a kind of inertia once it gets over the initial hump - charging networks become more and more viable with every electric car that is sold, and electric cars become more and more viable with every charging station that is built.
Re: Standard Nonsense Argument Follows (Score:5, Insightful)
But do also understand that many people also need to have their one single vehicle to be able to handle all potential use cases in their life.
Yes, most of the time, maybe city drive to work and back, one charge...BUT, what do they do when they need to travel interstate for emergency or vacation, or....etc.?
I need my car most of the time for short trips, but I need it to be ready at quick notice to maybe evacuate for a hurricane, or some folks fires, etc.
I need to travel a few times a year on 400+ trips in a single day trip.
I would need the infrastructure to handle that.
Yes, most of my needs are the short ones, but I may not have the ability to have > 1 car to keep one around for only those long trip needs.
So, you need the infrastructure there to handle all cases because not that many people are going to buy and EV and then another for their special needs. They need their primary vehicle useful for all their use cases in their life.
Re: Standard Nonsense Argument Follows (Score:4, Informative)
BUT, what do they do when they need to travel interstate for emergency or vacation, or....etc.?
Rent. You're better off with a rental for long trips because the rental company can simply replace it if it breaks down. You're not stuck in a motel waiting for the local cooter to order parts for "that damn japanese import".
Anyway, there are many, many people who do not need anything but an electric. They get them first, then people make money off catering to their convenience by providing charging stations. Then there are charging stations for more people who just needed a station at location X. They buy electric, wash, rinse, repeat.
In the meantime people who need gas cars can just buy used.
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I would go along a great deal with what you say, with one difference.
Let the transition be based on consumer DEMAND and not artifici
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The infrastructure argument really supports a faster than you might expect transition to electric. If gas magically appeared in your tank then people might hold onto their gas cars for a long time. But if it gets to be hard to fill the thing, a lot of people are going to switch sooner than they might have otherwise. And those gas stations on every corner are awfully expensive to maintain compared to some charging stations.
Re: Standard Nonsense Argument Follows (Score:5, Insightful)
There are many issues with that line of reasoning. Horses - to use your illustration - were great for some things. They're still better than jeeps are now if you don't have to haul much or travel a distance. They always will be when traveling deep into mountainous wilderness off-road. Horses really sucked in big cities though.
And of course, you are right to a point. Roads were a joke when cars first came out. Tires were too. And you didn't really travel long distances by car. You went by train.
But as you say, that was a century ago. You aren't trying to get someone to switch to something with a huge advantage over what exists now. You are trying to get someone to switch from something that works great now with some known environmental impacts to something that works well in cities but not as well or not at all in rural areas with not as well known environmental impacts.
Nobody is saying that there aren't a lot of vehicles that could be replaced in some areas of some states and other than the questionable ability of the current or anticipated power infrastructure to handle the charging it would be a win for those people. That's a big question mark. Even in the cities of some rural states, people could consider an EV for an around town vehicle if they have the money to buy, insure, and license two vehicles along with the room to park or garage two vehicles. It would be potentially a win for them too. But those same rural folks who might buy an EV for day to day around town driving would still need to buy something else to travel around the state. There isn't much bus service (or enough rental car capacity at the other small towns to handle people taking a bus). There is no passenger train service. You have to have a second vehicle that can go between towns. To do away with all but electric in 9 years is a fantasy. To do away with all but electric till range issues are dealt with is also fantasy.
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