Buried in this article is a little gem:
Now first off, the source of this quote is MSNBC, so it's not exactly a primary source, and we can take it with a small grain of salt for now. I'm going to hunt down the Duke University paper and see what I can find before I finish this rant. But before I do, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider this question: why are electric vehicles not "greener" than hybrids? And why are hydrogen vehicles not either?
Answers coming when (if) I can chase down the Duke paper (and some other primary sources on power generation costs, CO2 creation, and transmission losses per used kilowatt-hour).
More to come, if I get around to it.
But increased electricity use could drive up utility costs and ultimately force the construction of new plants. If electric utilities generate that power by burning natural gas, coal or oil, shifting to plug-ins would do little to address climate change or energy efficiency. In fact, researchers at Duke University suggest that regular hybrids may be more cost-effective than plug-ins for reducing CO2[sic] emissions (unless gasoline rises to $6 a gallon).
Now first off, the source of this quote is MSNBC, so it's not exactly a primary source, and we can take it with a small grain of salt for now. I'm going to hunt down the Duke University paper and see what I can find before I finish this rant. But before I do, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to consider this question: why are electric vehicles not "greener" than hybrids? And why are hydrogen vehicles not either?
Answers coming when (if) I can chase down the Duke paper (and some other primary sources on power generation costs, CO2 creation, and transmission losses per used kilowatt-hour).
More to come, if I get around to it.
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xaetognath- xaetognath
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You left as assumed (for anyone else who may read this) the problem of the power surge that would be required to tank up that theoretical perfect battery, too - imagine the 100kAmp circuit that would have to be made available for a 30 second fillup, eh? That kind of pull would black out a neighborhood for a half minute or so. That's no longer a battery, that's a capacitor! (What would that be? Three or four Farads? That would rock!)
Hybrids are a great idea, because we get regenerative power out of braking, and use that again on acceleration. But the thing that caught my attention was that whole "$6.00/gallon" break even point for coming out ahead. That's an awfully large number for the whole "we have to go all electric" argument. If we go all electric (in the future), it will nearly have to be "hybrid" in the sense of regenerative. The current generation of "hybrid plug-in vehicles" are a nice step in the right direction, but they don't really account for the Not In My Back Yard cost.
The problem I have with electric vehicles at all is that it's another example of the NIMBY issue at work. People in big cities don't really mind the cost of energy, if it's not happening in their back yard. If we push the energy release "out of sight" of the cities in which the majority is consumed, it gets much easier for the people consuming it to move it "out of mind." For example, the obscenely (old) rich folks out on Nantucket and Martha's Vinyard (yes, I mean you, Kennedy clan) don't really mind poor kids choking on coal-ash fumes from the Dirty Dozen power plants on the mainland that provide them their power, but put in a clean wind farm off their coast? God forbid! It'll spoil the view.
Electric vehicles are something similar: Electric cars are seen as clean! No exhaust pipes, see? No nasty, smelly gasoline in my nice, clean New York City (or Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Washington, DC, or...). But the electricity has to come from somewhere. And when it's generated, it's likely to have been done at the cost of damming up a river, or burning a couple of tonnes of coal. Fine and dandy, as long as it's not done in my back yard, eh? And screw efficiency: most people are willing to lose power to waste heat along the way, so long as it keeps the power plants out of their sight.
Hydrogen? The same issue, and doubly so. There are two commercial ways to get hydrogen right now: hydrolysis of water (using electricity), and catalyzed stripping of hydrogen from hydrocarbons (yielding hydrogen and some scary byproducts). The energy isn't clean, it's just done somewhere else. Plus, the conversion efficiencies can be very, very low, depending on which generation technology is used. To add to the mix, hydrogen (like helium) leaks out of tanks. It migrates right through the containers, the way helium leaks out of rubber balloons. And it makes the metal brittle on the way through, forming unstable metal hydride compounds, then leaving behind weird fracture patterns and metal fatigue on the way out.
My point of the post (and I'm shocked and pleased that you read it and are willing to discuss it), is that if the magic number for something as promising as a HPV is still $6.00 gasoline, then we're in a lot of trouble with all electrics, and they're nothing like a panacea. As usual, the eco-lemmings haven't thought this one through to the end points. It's just Al Gore's biofuels problem all over again - except that the end point isn't a bunch of people starving because fuel manufacturing burned up the food supply.
Your thoughts? I welcome your further response.
Oh, there's certainly plenty of "Cleaner For Show" elements to the current popularity of electric vehicles.
But I was in another discussion (wish I could remember where well enough to find it) in which several of us went through a lot of different calculations and it became pretty obvious that which one won the race depended on your assumptions.
Electric -- what source? How many steps to the "pump"? What infrastructure? 90% efficiency, note, is LOW for modern transformers, especially large ones, which can exceed 98%.
On the one side, you could assume electricity generated by hydroelectric, which is nonpolluting. On the other, assume coal generation, which is both directly polluting, and indirectly in the very nasty effort involved in dragging it out of the ground.
Gas-fuelled cars, of course, are using oil, which has to be refined (which takes energy and makes pollution). Their efficiency is much, much lower than turbine electric generation, but they have fewer steps to the actual drive force.
Electrical power, however, once you HAVE it is much EASIER to turn into motive force.
The price point of "$6.00" gasoline is misleading. The key question isn't where the CURRENT electric vehicles are really both monetarily AND environmentally competitive, but whether you can actually ACCOMMODATE the electric vehicles. In point of fact, while you could probably make a reasonable argument that the electric vehicles WOULD reduce overall energy use, the problem is that even if you assume it would cut the total energy used by cars, trucks, etc., in HALF, you're still THEN going to put 50% of the energy used to drive America... on the back of our electric grid, which in many areas right now can Just Barely Handle the peak load.
I'm not sure exactly of the size, but I know that vehicles like cars and trucks use IMMENSE amounts of energy, and I would not be entirely surprised to discover that doing that would actually DOUBLE the demand on the grid.
In order to reasonably convert to electric vehicles you really need to build a vastly larger electric power supply, and there's only ONE available power source which you could use to quickly provide a long-term reliable high-density power grid of that sort.
Nuclear. Specifically, self-sustaining breeder reactors.
And THAT is where the NIMBY effect comes in -- even though modern nuke designs are EXTREMELY safe, and the total nuclear waste produced through a nuke plant's lifetime is absolutely MINISCULE compared to the waste of a coal-fired plant.
The best recent designs for "electric vehicles" actually combine the approaches, but not the same as current "hybrids" -- they have a fuel-powered GENERATOR on board, but use purely electric drive train and batteries. The generator keeps the batteries charged up and, due to efficiencies of generation, can do so at a FRACTION of the fuel cost of an equivalent IC engine, and you can always plug them in overnight to start out with a full charge.
I am a hard-core proponent of nuclear power. I would gladly move my family downwind of a nuclear power plant. I can even pronounce nuclear correctly, something that I've heard some talking heads make fun of George Bush for, just before THEY mispronounced it (snicker). I think that breeder reactors are the way to go, and that we should be using highly enriched nuclear fuel to run the rest of them, since that's a very good way to use up decommissioned nuclear weapon warheads.
I also accept your proposition that modern nuke plants are extremely safe (based on the testimony from and willingness of nuclear engineers to live in the shadows of the beasts they operate), and even hold forward that there are likely to be many fewer "unforeseen consequences" to deployment of many nuclear plants than there would be for nearly any other currently available energy technology (I should rant about this at another time [note to self: rant about this at another time]). Having said all that, I'm glad you came up with the nuclear option, since I was hoping someone would either do it for me, or ask "then where do we get the power, hmmm?" and then I'd have a perfect segue.
I also like the idea of the I.C.-to-electric-to-motive vehicle. It makes a lot of sense, and seems to me would greatly simplify the current technology surrounding hybrids. This is how diesel/electric trains work, and it can be very efficient, and VERY powerful (simultaneously) if designed and implemented correctly.
Turbines have come way down in size and complexity recently, too, though there are a couple of things about them that worry me (the frequent service cycle for one, and the question of what happens with 30-50krpm blades coming loose in a catastrophic accident for another). Turbine-to-electric-to-motive has survived quite a number of years in the locomotive industry, so there might be much to learn from them as well.
What scares me? That cursed deer tick that I pulled off of my backside a couple of weeks ago. I had to spend a day back in BOS getting a mega-dose of an antibiotic to kill any Lyme I might have picked up (yes, it was in exactly the embarassing location you might be thinking - this could have been a script from a particularly bad sitcom, and I couldn't sit comfortably for three days until the infection went away)1.
Radiation is not healthy, but it's not the evil that most of our generation have been knee-jerk conditioned to believe it is by the hippie generation. It's part of the environment, and while it's not healthy, in low exposures, it's not unhealthy, either. It's a lot like biologically active chemicals in orange peel. They're not healthy - in large exposures, some of them will eat through your skin, burn your eyes out, or trigger cancerous growth - but in low doses, your body is designed to deal with, correct, or excise any damage they may cause.
I'm with you: I'm more worried about coal plant radiation than I am about nuke plant radiation. And I'm more concerned about other people killing me than either of the two.
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1Funny thing about megadoses of antibiotics - they clear up any other incipient infections you might have going on, too - I had the beginnings of a sinus infection - it knocked it right out - so it wasn't all a bust (but my bum still hurt for three days)
Another problem is energy density measured in Watts per unit volume or watts per kilogram. Both space and weight are pretty tightly budgeted in a modern vehicle so unless you can get the same or better useful distance with the same sized "fuel" tank there isn't much point in buying the vehicle.
At this point I don't see any major improvements in the short term. research dollars being spent on advanced hybrids or alternate fuel vehicles will have the biggest impact with technology that is adaptable to gasoline vehicles. However if someone can create a gasoline fuel cell similar to the direct methanol fuel cells that would probably very quickly lead to electric vehicles. This would have to be a device where you pour gasoline in and get CO2, H2O and electricity out though.
I'm even keen on a two step process - manufacturing plants where they do Long Chain Hydrocarbons plus water ->catalyzed-> Methane + oxygen then ship the methane out as LPG for fuel-cell use.
That would be a brilliant step. It meets the current tech (mostly), we have LPG distribution points starting to be set up, and is shippable, even with some of the current pipeline infrastructure.
You are absolutely right about the tank constraints as well. That's one of the big problems with a battery in general - you can't drive from Massachusetts to the Grand Canyon in one (well, not quickly).
It used to terrify me (when I thought about it) when riding a 250cc motorcycle from Corpus Christi to Houston - a 3 gallon tank of gas, between my legs, had sufficient potential (chemical) energy to push me from one to the other, even WITH the huge waste heat loss.
LPG for fuel cells is nice, if the fuel cell technology ever actually reaches USABLE levels. Which it hasn't. That's why local company Plug Power has kept dropping steadily in value; they simply can't solve some of the basic technical problems.
Me, I'm MUCH keener on manufacturing diesel or gasoline using nuclear power. This turns it to a zero-sum carbon game (I take the carbon out of the air, add power to it in the right chemical combinations, and send it out to get burned, where it's returned to the air), AND takes advantage of all of the currently established infrastructure and motive technology. You don't have to change a thing, and you still end up greener.
A combination of technologies might be good, though. For example, electro-decomposition (or photo-decomposition, if we ever get that working) of water (to produce hydrogen) could produce hydrogen to drive decomposition of CO2 producing C~H bonds and H20. It would be similar to what plants do, but could probably be catalyzed by something simple like platinum or iron. In your scenario, carbon could be considered to be the energy carrier for moving energy from near the power generation point to the (mobile) use points.
What a cool idea. I could even recommend a couple of good places to set up. The Dead Sea valley is a prime location or producing melons, even with its horrific water problems. The secret: CO2 pools in low areas. One of the best sites should then be Death Valley or the Lake Bonneville basin. Come to think of it, Israel has long bemoaned the lack of petrochemical resources (though all of their neighbors have plenty). It's psychotic enough that it just might work.
I'm going to revisit this tomorrow. Today, I'm falling asleep.
Thank you again for a thoughtful response. It bears much to think about.
As they sit right now I don't think hybrids make sense for consumer vehicles. Conceptually they are great, howver I don't think the tradeoffs have been explored completely enough yet. On the other hand there is no question that hybrids are the way to go with other types of vehicles with different use patterns. For example delivery companies are experimenting with gasoline electric and gasoline hydraullic hybrids. This lets them take maximum advantage of regenerative braking and tune the gasoline or diesel engine part of the hybrid for maximum effiency. In either design the gasoline potion is completely decoupled from the wheels it either drives a pump or a generator. Unfortunately these systems have a minimum practical size and weight, which is larger than what is practical for passenger vehicles. Fortunaetly it is easy to see that progress is being made to reduce the size and weight required.
My only big fear about hybrids is the power involved. Again, it's the "two gallons of fuel between my legs" argument. There's enough quickly available (read "chemically unstable") energy in the battery packs of a hybrid to push the whole car from 0 to 60 in 10 seconds or so (I'm being a tad generous, but they're not too sluggish off the line). That energy is in huge packs under the floor, and electrically "focused" down into two huge copper bus bars running the length of the vehicle. In an accident, those cells can easily get crushed, distorted, burned, punctured, or otherwise treated badly. The bars themselves have multiple opportunities to be pushed into many different conducting body parts (car and passenger alike). This seems to me to be a recipe for badness.
Bend the chassis on my old Toyota Camry, and I lose resale value and the ability to drive straight. Bend the chassis on a new hybrid Camry, and what? It may be an unfair comparison, and I may be going too far into hyperbole, but it worries me.
Also, they haven't exactly shown as much benefit as originally promised. The hybrid Camry gets most of its mileage boost on the highway by intelligently shutting down unneeded cylinders (injecting fuel and spark into as few as 2 of 6) when cruising. Unless it's running in stop and go traffic, it doesn't get much better mileage than the Camry 4 cylinder manual transmission model. And the cost - in terms of complexity - is much higher.
Further, we (as a society) haven't yet addressed the ongoing costs of large numbers of lithium batteries wearing out, being replaced, being recycled (or worse, NOT being recycled), etc. Lithium is a "biologically active" element, and large, point-source releases could have disastrous effects on local ecosystems.
Again, thank you for the thoughtful response. I greatly enjoy the opportunity to think these things out with others.
BTW, you did leave out a 4th mode of transport for hydrogen in vehicles (just mentioning in the interest of completion): as a metal hydride. But the point you make in your argument still stands:
For that matter, what ever happened to Sealab? We were going to live down there, protecting whales from manganese nodule miners, weren't we?
Yes, CURSE YOU, VEHICLE EFFICIENCY IMPROVERS! CURSE YOU!