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"The electric car is one of the ways carmakers expect to lower their average fuel consumption and get to the 55 mpg average. The problem is, people aren't buyin

"The electric car is one of the ways carmakers expect to lower their average fuel consumption and get to the 55 mpg average. The problem is, people aren't buying, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrid. General Motors is struggling to sell 10,000 Chevy Volts this year, and Nissan has sold just over 8,000 Leafs. For context, about 13 million cars are expected to be sold in the U.S. in 2011... The bad news is that the technology is currently at a point where they have to make trade-offs," Giffi says. "So they want that same vehicle — they want it to look and feel the same. They also want it to perform the same." Nobody is expecting those capabilities anytime soon."[0] Nobody likes them, and for good reason. Teslas are cool new-ish technology and the best of the lot, and yet the range is still too low, the charge time is too high, the infrastructure will take quite a while to develop, and they're too expensive. They are the playthings of the Silicon Valley rich, but not practical for the everyday person, whose main purpose for driving a car is cheap and reliable transportation. Teslas and other electric cars are uncompetitive because they are too expensive for what you get, and the only way they become "competitive" is by artificially driving up the price of gasoline-powered cars and fossil fuels. They get a subsidy because they are ostensibly "saving the environment". As I pointed out earlier, the mining of the materials to make these cars (especially batteries) is an extremely dirty and energy-intensive process, mostly done in China by diesel-powered machines. Also, the cars are plugged into an electric grid which is run mostly on ancient fossil fuel plants[1] (as is most of CA's infrastructure), as hydro and nuclear have become basically verboten or phased out of existence. If being carbon neutral is the goal, driving your 20-year-old Accord into the ground would result in a fraction of the energy expenditure and emissions of having a brand-new car built.[2] Or, actually, a horse and buggy would be the most carbon-neutral solution. Californians may marginally start taking less fuel intensive options in terms of transportation, but most people want to live in suburbs where they have a some room to breathe in their backyard, the schools are better, and a car is necessary---higher prices will effectively force them to spend more on fuel (at the expense of other things). The people in Marin County driving their Teslas and Priuses don't really care, but the lower-middle and middle-class gets clobbered by high energy costs (and has been leaving the state in droves, for that reason and others). And it isn't necessarily because transportation is more expensive; energy costs affect the cost of heating and cooling your home, the price of farming and delivering your produce, the cost of your clothing and smartphone, etc.! These sorts of regulations have led to the mass exodus of companies and jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry (which used to be the way many middle-class Californians made a living) to other states and other countries. Let's not forget that the least wealthy people are usually the least mobile as well. Fossil fuels allow us to have an incredible standard of living. What if food, fuel, clothing, and transportation costs doubled or tripled overnight? This would certainly make the average person's standard of living a lot worse. And this is exactly what these foolish policies have accomplished and will continue to accomplish. [0]http://www.npr.org/2011/11/21/142464818/can-electric-cars-help-automakers-reach-55-mpg\ http://www.npr.org/2011/11/21/142464818/can-electric-cars-he... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali... [2]http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/aug/17/car-scrap-energy-efficiency http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/aug/17/car-scrap...

OrwellianChild 11y ago
I really appreciate the thorough, cited reply! There isn't enough of this deep dialogue on the 'net, much less on HN. Upvoted, for that alone. :) All of your concerns are rational considerations: integrated costs of materials, existing demand for electric/plug-in hybrid vehicles (though I think you'll see there's been growing uptake since your 2011 source!), sources of power on the grid skewing towards fossil fuels... The ultimate question (one that you and I may ultimately all on different sides of), is whether or not things will always be this way. Also informing this is where things are going to. I don't have my sources available for proper citation (happy to share them later if you are interested), but share of forecasted new power generation is dominated by solar. Graduated regulations are integrating the cost of externalities for sources like coal and other polluters that make them look less like the sure bet they were in the past. The battery density, range, and charging capabilities of electric cars are improving dramatically under concentrated R&D. Tesla's entire company objective is to bring their technology down to consumer-level with the Model 3 in 2 years time. These developments and more signal to me that we are moving to a much more friendly ecosystem for the technologies that could push gasoline cars to the sidelines in very short time. In this dynamically changing market, some companies (Fiat included, likely) will find themselves lagging due to a combination of internal organizational conflict or maybe just failing to "read the tea leaves" correctly. Witness GM and Chrysler going under when Ford stayed afloat in the 2008 crisis... Sometimes companies get it wrong and fail to innovate, and regulation like California is pushing is designed to incentivize the right kind of decision making out of even those who drag their feet. Thanks for being willing to have this discourse with me!
- SovietDissident 11y ago
  I'm mostly just avoiding the tedious task of refactoring some load tests, haha. Almost all solar power is heavily subsidized by the government, and is still more costly than its worth: "In spite of government’s best efforts to encourage innovation by solar energy companies and encourage Americans to rely more heavily on solar electricity, solar power continues to be a losing proposition. American taxpayers spent an average of $39 billion a year over the past 5 years financing grants, subsidizing tax credits, guaranteeing loans, bailing out failed solar energy boondoggles and otherwise underwriting every idea under the sun to make solar energy cheaper and more popular. But none of it has worked. Solar energy remains prohibitively expensive – often three times more than electricity produced from natural gas or other sources. As a result, less than 1 percent of the electricity consumers by Americans comes from solar energy sources."[0] Solar has a cost problem and an intermittency problem: "At first glance, it looks like [photovoltaics (PV)] could be competitive with coal or natural gas plants if the PV cost were to drop below 10 cents/kWh. But there is an important difference between PV and the traditional technologies which makes this simple cost comparison invalid. But first, take a look at the cost of electricity from a coal plant. The total cost is projected to be 9.5 cents/kWh per the [U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)] study. About 6.5 cents of this is capital cost and about 2.5 cents is the cost of the coal. Looking at the natural gas plant, one can see the capital cost is about 2 cents, and the fuel cost is about 4.5 cents. Solar has no fuel cost element but significant capital investment. But here is the rub. If you plan to power a city with PV, it is not sufficient to simply build a large PV array, because PV only produces power during the day. At night and during cloudy weather, a back-up power source is needed since there is no practical way to store the PV energy. So the city must also build a conventional coal or gas plant, which will sit idle on many sunny days. The real cost of the PV is not just its cost, but also the cost of the back-up plant. Coal and natural gas plants do not need back-up like PV does. So what is the real value of PV? It is principally the fuel savings which occur when the traditional plant can reduce output during sunny days. Or stated another way, PV is worth avoided fuel cost. The main point is that PV is not competing against the LCOE of coal or natural gas plants; it is competing against the variable operating cost of these plants, which is 2-4.5 cents."[1] Solar is fine for heating your pool or providing a little energy on sunny days, but if I'm on the operating table, there's not a snowball's chance in hell I want the doctors to be relying on solar power without a fossil fuel backup. Wind power is also very costly. It requires a lot of the rare earth mining I cited earlier and kills an est. 234,000 birds per year in the U.S. alone.[2] My point is that there are negative externalities associated with all types of energy production; I don't have any problem allowing new forms of energy to compete for adoption. But competition does not mean taking a superior form of energy production (oil, gas, nuclear, hydro) and artificially inflating the price through regulatory policy[3] so that inferior forms of energy production (solar, wind) may become "viable" on a large scale. Undo the bad law/regulation which shackles nuclear, fossil fuels, and hydro (outside of some basic stuff like the catalytic converter), stop subsidizing wind and solar (and oil as well), and let them compete! I keep coming back to this: cheap, reliable, portable, plentiful energy is what makes modern life possible---the more we can rely on machines to do the back-breaking work humans used to do, the better. The more energy a society uses, the wealthier and healthier its citizenry. As the name of that site I cited suggests, (fossil fuel, hydro, nuclear) energy production is the Master Resource from which all else is possible in a modern economy. Regarding your last point, you cannot say on one hand that it is a "dynamically changing market" and car companies simply need to adapt, while acknowledging in the same breath that government regulatory policy has placed these undue burdens upon the companies in the first place! It's like California creating the conditions for fuel costs to rise, and then blaming the oil companies! Let's see it in action: "Based on an Air Resources Board analysis, the Western States Petroleum Association last year extrapolated that cap and trade would add 16 cents to 76 cents a gallon to the retail price of gas. Other economists projected a 10-cent bump. Sure enough, gas prices skyrocketed this year, though it’s tough to disentangle the impact of cap and trade from other ill-conceived environmental policies. State and federal environmental mandates have forced several smaller, inefficient refineries in California to shut down over the past two decades. Only 14 refineries in California produce the state’s pristine-burning fuel, and most operate at nearly full capacity to stay cost-effective. Few refiners outside the state blend California’s reformulated fuel. In most of the country, a problem at one refinery won’t significantly affect retail gas prices. But in California, when one refinery shuts down, others can’t pick up the slack. And it can take weeks to import refined fuel by tanker. In the meantime, customers are stuck paying higher prices. Hence this year’s price swoon. Following an explosion at an Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, and a labor stoppage at a Tesoro plant in Martinez this winter, gasoline prices rose nearly a dollar. Eventually, imported oil helped cover the supply-demand gap. But recently a Tesoro refinery in Carson reduced its output to perform annual maintenance, which has again stretched supply in the Southern California market. In May Democratic state legislators held hearings to “investigate” the gas price spike. San Francisco hedge-fund grandee Tom Steyer has demanded subpoenas of oil-industry executives. “As everyone knows, the oil companies have been charging Californians up to $1 billion per month more for gasoline than if we paid the national average,” the billionaire environmentalist asserted. “It’s time to put an end to the Big Oil giveaway.”"[4] What I have done so far is offered an overview of a contrary position, which is basically a riff on this book: http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels-ebook/dp/B00INIQVJA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1438712813&sr=8-1-spell http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels-ebook/dp/B00IN.... I would recommend it to anyone interested in the other side of the debate. [0]https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power-issues/government-business-waste-with-solar/ https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power-issues/government... [1]https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power/solar-power-cost-intermittency-too/ https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power/solar-power-cost-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p... [3]http://www2.epa.gov/cleanpowerplan/clean-power-plan-existing-power-plants http://www2.epa.gov/cleanpowerplan/clean-power-plan-existing... [4]http://www.wsj.com/articles/sky-high-california-gas-prices-have-a-green-additive-1437174504 http://www.wsj.com/articles/sky-high-california-gas-prices-h...

OrwellianChild 11y ago

I really appreciate the thorough, cited reply! There isn't enough of this deep dialogue on the 'net, much less on HN. Upvoted, for that alone. :) All of your concerns are rational considerations: integrated costs of materials, existing demand for electric/plug-in hybrid vehicles (though I think you'll see there's been growing uptake since your 2011 source!), sources of power on the grid skewing towards fossil fuels... The ultimate question (one that you and I may ultimately all on different sides of), is whether or not things will always be this way. Also informing this is where things are going to. I don't have my sources available for proper citation (happy to share them later if you are interested), but share of forecasted new power generation is dominated by solar. Graduated regulations are integrating the cost of externalities for sources like coal and other polluters that make them look less like the sure bet they were in the past. The battery density, range, and charging capabilities of electric cars are improving dramatically under concentrated R&D. Tesla's entire company objective is to bring their technology down to consumer-level with the Model 3 in 2 years time. These developments and more signal to me that we are moving to a much more friendly ecosystem for the technologies that could push gasoline cars to the sidelines in very short time. In this dynamically changing market, some companies (Fiat included, likely) will find themselves lagging due to a combination of internal organizational conflict or maybe just failing to "read the tea leaves" correctly. Witness GM and Chrysler going under when Ford stayed afloat in the 2008 crisis... Sometimes companies get it wrong and fail to innovate, and regulation like California is pushing is designed to incentivize the right kind of decision making out of even those who drag their feet. Thanks for being willing to have this discourse with me!

SovietDissident 11y ago
I'm mostly just avoiding the tedious task of refactoring some load tests, haha. Almost all solar power is heavily subsidized by the government, and is still more costly than its worth: "In spite of government’s best efforts to encourage innovation by solar energy companies and encourage Americans to rely more heavily on solar electricity, solar power continues to be a losing proposition. American taxpayers spent an average of $39 billion a year over the past 5 years financing grants, subsidizing tax credits, guaranteeing loans, bailing out failed solar energy boondoggles and otherwise underwriting every idea under the sun to make solar energy cheaper and more popular. But none of it has worked. Solar energy remains prohibitively expensive – often three times more than electricity produced from natural gas or other sources. As a result, less than 1 percent of the electricity consumers by Americans comes from solar energy sources."[0] Solar has a cost problem and an intermittency problem: "At first glance, it looks like [photovoltaics (PV)] could be competitive with coal or natural gas plants if the PV cost were to drop below 10 cents/kWh. But there is an important difference between PV and the traditional technologies which makes this simple cost comparison invalid. But first, take a look at the cost of electricity from a coal plant. The total cost is projected to be 9.5 cents/kWh per the [U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)] study. About 6.5 cents of this is capital cost and about 2.5 cents is the cost of the coal. Looking at the natural gas plant, one can see the capital cost is about 2 cents, and the fuel cost is about 4.5 cents. Solar has no fuel cost element but significant capital investment. But here is the rub. If you plan to power a city with PV, it is not sufficient to simply build a large PV array, because PV only produces power during the day. At night and during cloudy weather, a back-up power source is needed since there is no practical way to store the PV energy. So the city must also build a conventional coal or gas plant, which will sit idle on many sunny days. The real cost of the PV is not just its cost, but also the cost of the back-up plant. Coal and natural gas plants do not need back-up like PV does. So what is the real value of PV? It is principally the fuel savings which occur when the traditional plant can reduce output during sunny days. Or stated another way, PV is worth avoided fuel cost. The main point is that PV is not competing against the LCOE of coal or natural gas plants; it is competing against the variable operating cost of these plants, which is 2-4.5 cents."[1] Solar is fine for heating your pool or providing a little energy on sunny days, but if I'm on the operating table, there's not a snowball's chance in hell I want the doctors to be relying on solar power without a fossil fuel backup. Wind power is also very costly. It requires a lot of the rare earth mining I cited earlier and kills an est. 234,000 birds per year in the U.S. alone.[2] My point is that there are negative externalities associated with all types of energy production; I don't have any problem allowing new forms of energy to compete for adoption. But competition does not mean taking a superior form of energy production (oil, gas, nuclear, hydro) and artificially inflating the price through regulatory policy[3] so that inferior forms of energy production (solar, wind) may become "viable" on a large scale. Undo the bad law/regulation which shackles nuclear, fossil fuels, and hydro (outside of some basic stuff like the catalytic converter), stop subsidizing wind and solar (and oil as well), and let them compete! I keep coming back to this: cheap, reliable, portable, plentiful energy is what makes modern life possible---the more we can rely on machines to do the back-breaking work humans used to do, the better. The more energy a society uses, the wealthier and healthier its citizenry. As the name of that site I cited suggests, (fossil fuel, hydro, nuclear) energy production is the Master Resource from which all else is possible in a modern economy. Regarding your last point, you cannot say on one hand that it is a "dynamically changing market" and car companies simply need to adapt, while acknowledging in the same breath that government regulatory policy has placed these undue burdens upon the companies in the first place! It's like California creating the conditions for fuel costs to rise, and then blaming the oil companies! Let's see it in action: "Based on an Air Resources Board analysis, the Western States Petroleum Association last year extrapolated that cap and trade would add 16 cents to 76 cents a gallon to the retail price of gas. Other economists projected a 10-cent bump. Sure enough, gas prices skyrocketed this year, though it’s tough to disentangle the impact of cap and trade from other ill-conceived environmental policies. State and federal environmental mandates have forced several smaller, inefficient refineries in California to shut down over the past two decades. Only 14 refineries in California produce the state’s pristine-burning fuel, and most operate at nearly full capacity to stay cost-effective. Few refiners outside the state blend California’s reformulated fuel. In most of the country, a problem at one refinery won’t significantly affect retail gas prices. But in California, when one refinery shuts down, others can’t pick up the slack. And it can take weeks to import refined fuel by tanker. In the meantime, customers are stuck paying higher prices. Hence this year’s price swoon. Following an explosion at an Exxon Mobil refinery in Torrance, and a labor stoppage at a Tesoro plant in Martinez this winter, gasoline prices rose nearly a dollar. Eventually, imported oil helped cover the supply-demand gap. But recently a Tesoro refinery in Carson reduced its output to perform annual maintenance, which has again stretched supply in the Southern California market. In May Democratic state legislators held hearings to “investigate” the gas price spike. San Francisco hedge-fund grandee Tom Steyer has demanded subpoenas of oil-industry executives. “As everyone knows, the oil companies have been charging Californians up to $1 billion per month more for gasoline than if we paid the national average,” the billionaire environmentalist asserted. “It’s time to put an end to the Big Oil giveaway.”"[4] What I have done so far is offered an overview of a contrary position, which is basically a riff on this book: http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels-ebook/dp/B00INIQVJA/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1438712813&sr=8-1-spell http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Case-Fossil-Fuels-ebook/dp/B00IN.... I would recommend it to anyone interested in the other side of the debate. [0]https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power-issues/government-business-waste-with-solar/ https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power-issues/government... [1]https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power/solar-power-cost-intermittency-too/ https://www.masterresource.org/solar-power/solar-power-cost-... [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_power https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_wind_p... [3]http://www2.epa.gov/cleanpowerplan/clean-power-plan-existing-power-plants http://www2.epa.gov/cleanpowerplan/clean-power-plan-existing... [4]http://www.wsj.com/articles/sky-high-california-gas-prices-have-a-green-additive-1437174504 http://www.wsj.com/articles/sky-high-california-gas-prices-h...