This blogger/homewoner has already dropped below the 8 cent per kwh barrier with his own solar panels, and in New Jersey of all less than optimum solar sites!

http://msmith.typepad.com/smithelectricco/solar_energy/

And the cost of wind electricity from large machines in high wind speed areas has dropped to 3.5 cents per kwh and still falling.

Of course a move to electric cars also needs to see a move to solar and wind electric power.

Your comments seem to be in the realm of obsfucation if not outright sophistry in the cause of continued fossil fueled transportation.

Have you been conferencing with Jeremy?  Gristmill is becoming so "fair and balanced" lately.  Going for the FAUXNEWS audience?

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

There are regions of the US where electricity is produced much less carbon-intensively, such as the Pacific Northwest (lots of hydro) and Maine (biofuels such as wood). A move toward electric vehicles might be a good environmental decision in regions like that.

By my calculations based on industry figures 20% of oil used is burned for heating refineries to process oil.  

http://blogdrx.blogspot.com/2005/05/refineries-heated-by-burning-oil-huge.html

As far as powering wells, pipelines, ships, tanker trucks?  That all uses oil too I believe.

You realize of course that a plugin hybrid using these new batteries and rechgarging in say 5 to 10 minutes, would get upwards of 100 mpg average.

Throwing another monkey wrench into the cO2 calculations.  You forgot road tax on the electric power too.  I would recommend that the government eliminate that for electric cars, but will they instead go out of their way to collect it?

That is my guess.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Were the reality that your home was on fire, would you call the fire department, or let it burn?

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

That 100 billion plus going to the oil wars per year would buy a lot of clean power equipment!

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

But your figures are not really fair, because you are comparing an electric to an ordinary car.  When compared to a hybrid, the CO2 emissions aren't nearly as favorable.  The new IC engines (Atkinson cycle) found on the Ford Escape and Toyota Prius, are closer to 34% efficient, which means they can extract closer to 10 kwhr, per gallon of gasoline.  This would raise the gallon-equivalent for the batteries (because they are competing against a more efficient engine) to something more like $3.00 per gallon.  That's JUST for the batteries, not including the electricity at all....

So there is some promise here, but is by no means a slam dunk.....

-Jim  (being very much UNLIKE George "SD" Tenet...)


Build plugin hybrids that run on renewable methane. That's all that's needed.

Whether or not using electric cars would significantly reduce net emissions right away, emissions would be cut in the long run as more power is eventually produced by alternative sources.  It would only be one step amoung many, but it would be progress.

Frequently asked technical questions about Grist's newsletters and website.

It's called moving the center.

Now people who love nature and find spiritual sustenance from it are classified as possible "dirty hippies" or pagans.  Cute ain't it.  Hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Your comments seem to be in the realm of obsfucation if not outright sophistry in the cause of continued fossil fueled transportation.

Regarding the renewables, obviously it would be less carbon intensive to use the electricity to power your car if the electricity was from renewables. I was concerned that the average American might wind up emitting more carbon (but still feeling good about themselves) if they moved to electic cars because, as bhurley kindly pointed out, we do get over 50 percent of our electricity from coal. You'll notice that I did not use the 2 pounds per kwhour, the figure for coal, but rather 1.4 or so, to reflect the national average. That's also why I used 10 cents per kilowatt hour; the national average is actually about 7.5 cents, but I used 10 for a round number and to account for the fact that if everyone plugged in their cars, we would almost certainly see a jump in electricity prices across the board.

jimbeyer, when you say 1000 cycles for the life of the battery, do you mean that you can charge/recharge the battery 1000 times? Or something else?

Your article was an  interesting analysis, although somewhat flawed.

I favor a comprehensive strategy involving wind, solar, hybrid plugin vehicles, biofuel, energy efficient building design, and heat pumps, from the home scale all the way up to the industrial.

And I believe that free and fair markets, attained either by cutting subsidies for fossil fuel and nuclear or instuting equivalent subsidies for renewables is necessary.  As well as making nuclear and fossil fuel energy pay it's own way for these oil wars, pollution, and waste disposal.

I also think that government purchase for it's own use on the federal, state, and local levels will be enough to get mass production going and asllow these better technogies to compete in those free and fair markets.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Given a market for batteries for plugin hybrids that could be a million  times the size it is now, how much will the cost drop?  How much did the cost of computer chips decrease with mass production overe the last few decades?

I really think that research and mass production will solve the problems of cost, energy density, and recharge time of batteries for these applications.  The new toshiba quick charge lithium ion battery is a good example.

Were government to order signifigant numbers of plugin hybrids, capital would flow to this manufacturing effort.

Why isn't the capital flowing already?

Well witness the case of coal gassification power plants, they are much cleaner and more efficient, but cost 20% more than normal coal fired power plants.  

The lendors who finance power plants have instituted rules that favor investment inb the lowest initial cost alternative regardless of all other factors, pollution, rising fuel costs,and waste disposal.  

That is how capital is monopolized to support the staus quo.  the corporate, short term bottomline.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin

Plug-in hybrids are just another compromise. You would need more battery capacity because the batteries would be used much harder (be discharged further), and for that same reason, they would also have shorter lives, meaning you would have to replace them sooner. If you let the battery discharge too far, it could not assist the engine when extra power is needed, making the car dangerous on a highway because it would accelerate too slowly. You would then need a bigger engine to contend with that situation. In short, a plug in car would cost a great deal more because it would require a bigger battery pack and a bigger engine. Both of which weigh more and you begin to spiral down the efficiency toilet at that point by lugging a heavy engine around when using the batteries and vice versa when using the engine.

The hybrid car engineers know all that already and that is why hybrids are not designed to recharge on grid power. Those people who are installing after-market kits (for thousands of dollars) on their hybrids don't understand that they are getting almost no benefit because the charge system of the car never lets the battery discharge very far. The battery must remain at near full charge to be safe for sudden high power needs (like accelerating onto a highway or out of the way of half-dead old engineers).

The fact that they would be cheaper to operate would, over time, help offset those costs and with rising gas prices, they might pay for themselves.

As an aside, assuming you are still awake, the reason your electric car analysis comes out much cheaper and less polluting is best explained with the following analogy:

Our electricity is produced by giant gas turbines that rotate generators.  Likewise, a turbofan jet engine consists of a fan in the front half powered by a gas turbine in the back. The Rolls Royce Trent engine on the 777 puts out 90,000 horsepower at take off. Picture driving that fan with 100 Toyota Tercel engines (each rated at 90 horsepower) hooked to one long driveshaft. Today's internal combustion engines convert only about 30% of the energy in a tank of gas into useful energy, the rest is lost as waste heat. It is simply more efficient to generate electricity with giant turbines at centralized locations. Even though energy is lost in the turbine, the transmission lines, and battery charging, those losses pale in comparison to the losses of millions of small internal combustion engines. Another analogy, try powering that Tercel with 10 lawnmower engines (each rated at 9 horsepower) and see what kind of gas mileage you get.

If one is competing against an IC engine (such as a diesel or Atkinson cycle) that gets close to 30% efficiency, then we have about 10 kwhrs extracted from a gallon of gasoline.

To replace this with batteries:

Assuming:  $300/kwhr X 10 = $3000 (to store 10 kwhrs, or 1 gallon of gasoline equivalent)

Assuming: 1000 cycles, so $3000/1000 = $3.00 per cycle.  This is the amortized cost of the batteries to store the equivalent energy in gasoline.

The problem is that electricity stored in batteries can be used very efficiently, but it is very heavy, bulky, and expensive.

Gasoline, in constrast is very light and not at all bulky.  It is getting expensive, or its priceless, given that is a finite resource.

These two energy stores complementary benefits need to be made to work together somehow. Anyway, it's this balance that hybrid cars are trying to achieve.  If done just right, we could possibly have a car that accomplishes all the performance goals of a regular car (including price, in theory) while at the same time powered by renewable energy at a price comparable to gasoline or diesel.

[Renewable methane is a reasonable compromise to replace the fuel component of plugins.]

I don't want to come off as slanted against renewables.  I'm not. I own an Escape hybrid.   I'm working with calcars.org.  I think this stuff, with a bit more effort, could really work.

But I'm also very honest and self-critical about this technology.  There's no point in glossing over problems, because the REAL critics will tear them to shreds. It's better to iron out the problems that we know will arise when the technology is to compete in the market.

A big positive improvement for hybrids and plugin hybrids may be from ultracapacitors.  I won't get technical here, but they may play a valuable role in limiting the costs of batteries and improving overall performance in hybrids and plugin hybrids.

-Jim
 

Build plugin hybrids that run on renewable methane. That's all that's needed.

That, in turn, involves transmission loss, which reduces efficiency. Now, superconductive transmission lines -- which the industry has been studying -- would all but eliminate this drawback, but not the aesthetic and other impacts of high tension lines and their corridors going through our environment. Broadcast power, anyone? Shades of Tesla!

Beyond that,we'd still have hundreds of millions of cars on the road, burning rubber tires and creating thermal pollution, and probably spraying toxic window wash and other lubricants all over hell. Beyond THAT, while coal is our number one energy source for electric power production, we also rely on nuclear power. And all major power plants have environmental impacts.

However, I submit that this is a transitional issue, not a deal killer. Indeed, going to the long-throw grid to charge our electric cars would have drawbacks but would help the power industry localize itself, in all likelihood.

Even in the current power production environment -- be a step forward. Later, we can assume that plug-in vehicles would create demand for localized solar power generation -- wouldn't a garage rooftop be a natural, er, extension of having an electromobile? Hell, at some point, plug-in cars might well begin to feature solar panels on their roofs and other vertical surfaces, too. It's trickle charging, to be sure, but every little bit helps and it's free, once you buy the panels -- at some point a GM option and a Toyota standard feature, probably.

This means that plugin hybrids may be effective in reducing our oil dependency, but it is not neccessarily the most effective way to reduce CO2 emissions.

Some Swedish researchers studied CO2 emissions and found we could basically burn up all the remaining conventional oil and natural gas reserves and not affect CO2 levels all that much.  They would still be below 400 ppm.

The problem is coal and burning of old-growth forests.  That's where the real CO2 emission problem comes from.

It's important to not mix those two issues up -- (CO2 emissions vs. oil and natural gas depletion) though they are both important.

My view is that the cheapest method of carbon sequestration is to leave coal in the ground....

-Jim

Build plugin hybrids that run on renewable methane. That's all that's needed.

Friedman wants to get the US off foreign oil and has included greens in this "geo-green" alliance to do so, since hey, they don't like global warming, and using oil causes that, right?

If the goal is simply to get the US off of foreign oil by any means necessary, and if those means include essentially switching the source of energy from oil to coal, Friedman is going to be left with just a "geo" alliance, sans the green.

That's what I was trying to get at with the post; as always, though, the discussion has helped to refine, so thanks to all :)

If we assume the wholesale price of gasoline is about $1.50 or $2.00 per gallon (that's without tax) then you are paying about 4 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour for the energy it contains.  But it's worse than that, because you can only extract a small percentage of that energy via an engine of some sort.  If we assume (a bit optimistically) that we can get 30% efficiency (see previous posts) then we are paying about 15 to 20 cents per kw-hr for the energy that we can actually USE from the gasoline.

Compare this with coal, which is cheap enough to produce electrical power for about 3 to 5 cents per kilowatt-hour.  But, as mentioned earlier, coal is much dirtier than oil.  It produces much more carbon dioxide for the energy it produces.  But it's also much cheaper.

So we have a bit of a perversion here.  If one has a wind turbine, for example, do they send the electrical energy to the grid, saving CO2 emissions, but displacing a cheaper energy with a more expensive one (wind is about 10 cents per kwhr) ---  OR ----

do you charge up your plugin hybrid, and displace 20 cents worth of gasoline with 10 cents worth of wind energy?  [The battery costs raise the overall costs further than just the energy input, however.]

If we use renewable electric to try to displace coal, it's a complete money loser until some kind of carbon tax or penalty is in place.  If we use renewables to displace oil, the economics are better, but the emissions reduced are less.

What to do?

In my opinion, I think we should go with the money flow.  Displace oil FIRST, and over time, the added renewable energy input can make some inroads on coal.  But we have to build, build, build.  Starting yesterday, if possible.  The hidden costs of oil (fighting wars, getting into bed with sheiks, etc.) are probably high enough to offset the battery premium from hybrids.  So some kind of subsidy, if needed, would be supportable.

A plugin-hybrid that someone actually sold could help motivate that.

The alternative (displace coal first) is a tougher route because it needs to be subsidized.  Some of the power companies will do it on a very limited basis, but if enough wind turbines are built, they will start to scream.  Then you have to get the government in to provide the subsidy... yucko...

There are arguments to be made either way, but that's how I see it.

-Jim  

Build plugin hybrids that run on renewable methane. That's all that's needed.

Try 2 cents, that is what screws up all of your careful "engineering", hehey.

It is really imagineering.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin