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Electric cars neither as useful nor as green as their proponents claim
- ax0n 16y agoHere in Kansas City, 87% of our electricity comes from coal. 11% from nuclear. Wind makes up the lion's share of the remaining 2%. One of the Sierra Club's members had his soul crushed when a friend of mine pointed out that he was, in fact, piloting a coal-powered car. That's not to say the tech isn't cool. But it's not any more sustainable than a good high-efficiency gasoline or diesel-only car.
- ugh 16y agoBut it's not any more sustainable than a good high-efficiency gasoline or diesel-only car. It’s at the moment not any better or even worse than the best gas or diesel cars but I do think that it’s more sustainable. Cars with internal combustion engines will always have the same CO2 emissions. The day they leave the factory and twenty years from now. Electric cars are independent of any specific energy source and as a consequence have the CO2 emissions of the energy source they use. They are mostly coal or oil powered at the moment but it’s very much possible to turn them into nuclear powered cars in the future. That’s why electric cars have the potential to be great.
- kijinbear 16y agoThis is really cool. For example, Canada's primary source of power is hydroelectricity (over 60%). Electric cars in large parts of Canada would be literally running on water!
- ax0n 16y agoFor the most part, that's true. It's mostly localized. Seattle, for example, gets nearly 89% of its electricity from hydro, and another 9% or so from nuclear and wind. In places like that, pure electrics start to make a lot of sense. There's still the issue with how the batteries are built, shipped and disposed of, most of which would make many green consumers turn pale with discontent.
- pyre 16y agoThe difference being that if everyone was driving an electric car, we the transition from coal to nuclear (or whatever) is just a 'simple' infrastructure change (similar to providing a bugfix to a library that many applications dynamically link against, rather than requiring app to need a recompile due to static linking).
- NickM 16y agoIt's a common fallacy that electric cars are just "moving the emission source" and therefore no better than gasoline cars. However, even if 100% of the electricity is generated from coal, an EV is actually much more environmentally friendly than any gasoline-powered car. It all comes down to efficiency numbers. Power plants and electric motors are just massively more efficient than gasoline engines, and it's much easier to scrub the emissions on one pipe than many. Of course, they also make it easier to transition to renewable sources (replacing one power plant vs. replacing many cars), but that's just icing on the cake.
- hugh3 16y agoAlso, if you don't care too much about the CO2 side of things (which I don't) then the world has a lot more coal than it has oil.
- ax0n 16y agoHow efficient is the transmission of electricity from generation to end point? How efficient is the charging circuitry? The motors? How many kilowatts need to be burned in a coal plant to put a kilowatt of energy to the pavement in an EV? I assure you, EVs themselves may be very efficient, but the archaic technology that 70% of the US (via coal/NG/oil smoke-and-fire generation) is using to generate and transfer electricity is not.
- NickM 16y agoIf you're interested, there's been plenty of research done on the matter. Search for "well to wheel" studies. You can find a good number of them online if you look, and electric cars beat the pants off of everything else.
- jbooth 16y agoLoose coupling. If we make the electric vehicle part work, then we can drop in whatever kind of electricity we want behind it. Which is likely to be increasingly non-coal going forwards.
- Teckla 16y agoFrom the article: "But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative." So the author of the article is advocating against electric cars because 1% of trips require more range? Has he never heard of a rental car?
- stretchwithme 16y agoOf course. but they are very fashionable, so we must subsidize them massively. Of course it might make more sense to tax the pollution than for government to try to pick the next technology. Didn't George Bush tell us it was going to be hydrogen cars? Now its supposed to be electric, but who knows what will actually happen in reality? When you pick one technology and give it all of the advantages, it makes it all that much harder for competing technologies to succeed. A level playing field is best. We have an entire industry of people trying to figure out what technologies will win. They compete with each other and have all kinds of different backgrounds and differing opinions. And they learn as they go, something Washington seems incapable of doing.
- NickM 16y agoI don't think the government is interfering as much as you think it is. EVs have been in the pipe for a while now, and the tax credits for them (at least in the US) are only a couple years old. If there were some other promising type of alternative vehicle coming out, I'm sure there would be tax credits for them as well, but right now there aren't really any other practical alternatives to EVs.
- stretchwithme 16y agoIts $5000 from California and up to $7500 from the Feds. Which is exactly how much interference I think it is. And all policies start. After a couple of years, a tax credit is always only a couple of years old. I don't see how long a policy has been in please is relevant in deciding whether it should be.
- jseliger 16y agoConsidering the foreign policy externalities that our oil consumption generates (even leaving aside the environmental ones for now), I wish the feds and the states would subsidize electric cars more and fight wars in the Middle East less.
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- hristov 16y agoI am not sure how they come up with their numbers. Wikipedia says that in the US an electric car would emit less than half of the CO2 of a gas powered equivalent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Carbon_dioxide_emissions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Carbon_dioxide_emi... And it seems that the UK uses less coal power than the US. Thus, the emission reductions in the UK should be even better, i.e. more than 50%. But the article says the emission reductions are only 20%. I wish they would tell us more about their calculations. With these types of estimations, one can bring about drastic changes of the conclusion with subtle changes of the assumptions in the estimate.
- stretchwithme 16y agoMaybe they consider the extra CO2 to build it. Yes, more info would be helpful.
- moxiemk1 16y agoIf they do, hopefully they are including the C02 to build the gasoline car, as well as all emissions in all stages of procuring the fuel for both drivetrains. Doing a dust-to-road analysis of impact is very hard.
- lukifer 16y agoThe fact that such a huge portion of electricity comes from coal is a much bigger problem than all the commuter cars on the road combined. Switching all those power plants over to nuclear makes sense environmentally, politically, and financially.
- Zak 16y agoUnfortunately, not politically. Large portions of the general public are still afraid of nuclear power plants. They often like the idea in principle, but don't want to live anywhere near one, and will fight tooth and nail to prevent them from being constructed near their cities.
- lukifer 16y agoEr, my bad; I was thinking of terms of international policy, "politically" was the wrong word choice. Public opinion has been shifting in favor of (or, less opposed to) widespread nuclear power, but not nearly fast enough to make it a reality.
- tbrownaw 16y agoFirst, although electric cars are nippy, stylish and as easy to drive as conventional vehicles, electric motoring has some distinct disadvantages. Such as...? Second, they are not really as green as their promoters claim. So? I care about convenience (less/no trips to the fill-up station) and overall cost. But that final 1% of journeys presumably includes the summer holiday when people pile into the car and head off for the coast. Hopping on the train laden with suitcases and children may not be an attractive alternative. So rent a gas car. Plan for this when figuring the ongoing costs of your electric car. And even the relatively short ranges that salesmen advertise may be optimistic. On a cold, wet night when lots of electrical systems are running and the vehicle is laden with passengers and luggage, a car may lose around a third of its supposed range. So require that this be disclosed, so people know to get something with at least 1.5x the range they'll need in a day. I guess those two things were the "distinct disadvantages" mentioned earlier. Neither is terribly convincing. Although electric cars may not themselves produce greenhouse gases, generating the electricity they use does. How green they are depends on the fuel mix at the power plants in the country in which they are driven. This should solve itself in a decade or two if we stop letting the NIMBYs block nuclear plants. And all the already-sold electric cars will benefit just as much as the not-yet-sold ones. The only efficient way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions is to impose a carbon tax. And here I suppose we have the purpose of the article. But why not just stop subsidizing it before adding a tax?
- shin_lao 16y agoThey forget to talk about noise pollution. Electric cars are extremal quiet, that's a huge bonus for big cities.
- theklub 16y agoTrue, but unfortunatly blind people maybe not let the seeing keep the cars quiet.
- nutjob123 16y agoI actually know a blind guy who walk around NYC based on sound. These quiet cars are going to produce noise soon or else interest groups will force them to by pushing for legislative action. http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/19/autos/electric_car_noise/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/19/autos/electric_car_noise/ind...
- kaitnieks 16y agoDoesn't he hear the tires?
- lurkinggrue 16y agoNo, they are silent electric tires.
- chrismealy 16y agoShorter Economist: carbon taxes are better than electric cars so let's have neither.
- nutjob123 16y agoI would like to see a full carbon cost for some of these "green" cars. I bet that between manufacturing 5 to 6,000 batteries per car and production of the additional electronics they are creating a lot more waste than people realize.
- rudin 16y agoOne does wonder if this article was financed by oil companies. Richard Pike, the specialist the article referred to had a 25 year career at BP [1] and has put forward arguments that oil shortage is a myth [2]. I am adding The Economist to my list of untrustworthy new sources. [1] http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2006/NewCEO.asp http://www.rsc.org/AboutUs/News/PressReleases/2006/NewCEO.as... [2] http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/oil-shortage-a-myth-says-industry-insider-842778.html http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/oil-...
- Empact 16y agoOther points aside, the last point this article makes is a good one: a carbon tax would be a far more effective way to create a more efficient transportation system (and broader economy), than attempting to pick the winner from the start. It's sort of the "I, Pencil" problem - the interactions in the economy are far too complex to manage in a centralized manner. In this case, we have individuals attempting to predict the winner based on very limited information and applying a subsidy, which may or may not be anything more than arbitrary. The alternative is to have all the millions of decision-makers be informed and influenced by price differences emanating from the pollutants themselves, motivating them to seek more efficient solutions. The effects are far more wide-ranging and actors are guaranteed to be rewarded in proportion to their benefit to the environment. The same holds for other subsidies: for solar, for weatherizing homes &c. It's a shame our current advocacy & media landscape leaves little room for someone like me who supports a carbon tax but not cap & trade or direct subsidies. Here's to hoping http://votereports.org/ http://votereports.org/, or something like it, gets us there. Actually, I just emailed http://www.carbontax.org/ http://www.carbontax.org/, hopefully I can get them in the system in time for the election.