9 ms·

Diesel is not better for the environment than electric

84 points by mhandley 8y ago

JulianMorrison 8y ago
The idea that you can say "oh, electric is based on fuel power plants" is just disingenuous. Electricity is fungible. Having electric cars lets you replace the fuel with renewables and the car doesn't have to care.
- staffanj 8y ago
  Same could be said about the fossil cars. Most diesel cars can be used with HVO100 - 100% renewable
  - melling 8y ago
    And clean? Electric cars have lots of options in addition to electricity from fossil fuels Nuclear, solar, wind, geo-thermal, hydro. We’ll probably need diesel for quite some time but electric cars do have more options.
    - staffanj 8y ago
      2018 USA Electric mix: Fossil fuels (total) 2,651 63.5% Nuclear 807 19.3% Renewables (total) 713 17.1%
      - melling 8y ago
        I’m not sure why the grid mix is relevant at this time. electric car usage in the US is less than 1 million cars. My point was that that the electricity can come from a variety of sources, including fossil fuels. Coal is dying. Natural gas is cheaper and much cleaner.
  - sliken 8y ago
    True. But how much HVO100 can you personally produce? Solar is easy to produce locally, even on your own roof. Also electric cars typically turn around 85% of the energy into forward motion. Because it's local there's minimal distribution costs. Additionally grid size installations are competing with coal, natural gas, and similar sources quite well on price. Gas cars are around 15% efficient, and diesels are only slightly higher. Anything like gas has substantial costs in distribution, and of course you have to drive to/from gas stations (instead of just charging at home/work. So even if HVO100 is 100% renewable, it's not going to be cost efficient, or energy efficient.... so why bother?
    - staffanj 8y ago
      Here in Sweden (with high taxes on diesel/petrol): Diesel - 16,54 SEK/L. HVO100 - 17,36 SEK/L. RIght now on one of the biggest petrol chan here in Sweden. https://m.circlek.se/cs/Satellite/m/SE1/sv_SE/pg1332347381321/pg1334077249884/Priser.html?c=Page&childpagename=SE1%2FMobileLayout&cid=1334077249884&d=Touch&lang=sv_SE&p=1332347381321&packedargs=lang&pagename=SE1MobileWrapper&sitepfx=SE1&sitepfx=SE1 https://m.circlek.se/cs/Satellite/m/SE1/sv_SE/pg133234738132...
    - sergiosgc 8y ago
      Gas car efficiencies are in the 30% range. Toyota got as high as 38%, there are large volume ICEs on the road with 35% efficiency. Even at those numbers, electric is better. There's no need to use old data.
      - sliken 8y ago
        Sure a Prius can get as high as 38% (at the cost of two complete drive trains). But what about the average vehicle sold in 2018? I suspect you'd be well below the 30% efficiency again. At least in the USA the Prius isn't particularly popular (except to trade in for a model 3). The demand is for the small crossover and SUV segments.
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    Fuel produced from anything farmed might be carbon neutral, but the process of farming itself has a huge impact on the environment. Also, we just have by far not enough farmland to come even close in supplying the traffic sector with fuels - while in many regions there still is a shortage of food. So with the exception of processing waste from food production, it is environmental-negative to use grown fuels. Solar cells are more than 10x more efficient per area used and can be mounted on top of roofs etc.
    - dillonmckay 8y ago
      We have seen this exact scenario in the US with corn-based ethanol for vehicle fuel.
    - JulianMorrison 8y ago
      Farmed fuel is probably sensible for aircraft. I'd say that was its longer term niche.
      - _ph_ 8y ago
        That is a very good point. We have quite a few applications, where we will need fuel for quite some time to come, let us reserve all the "reneweable" fuels for those applications. Electric cars are a thing, electric airplanes are unfortunately only at their very beginning.
  - JulianMorrison 8y ago
    There's good reasons beside carbon to avoid running your car on what's pretty much liquid margarine. Arable land can't be spared for it on a global scale. And it fills the air with the usual medically inadvisable smut and gases. Airplanes, on the other hand, that might be a good thing.
- pure-awesome 8y ago
  Do you mean that if you get electric cars running off coal power plants now, then that frees you up to replace the coal with e.g. solar power later on? (From a programming perspective - since this is Hacker News, after all - we could view electric power as an "interface" which hides the implementation of how it's generated from the car, as opposed to petrol which is "tightly coupled" to the car)
  - abraae 8y ago
    Always love the car analogies. They're really both interfaces, for petrol you get energy and CO2 emissions for a given quantity. However you don't know that the CO2 emissions are net - the fuel might have been produced via some synthetic process driven by renewables. Unlikely, but as an interface you can't really know the details of the implementation behind the scenes.
    - dTal 8y ago
      Technically, this isn't a car analogy - it's that rarest of creatures, the reverse car analogy, which uses programming concepts to explain things about cars.
  - JulianMorrison 8y ago
    Yes exactly, or natural gas plants, but same thing. Electricity is a universal interface. EVs free up their upstream to change at whim. That freedom means that greening of the power supply can be solved at a societal, rather than personal level.
- aequitas 8y ago
  Same goes for diesel. You can run cars exclusively on bio-fuel, the cars won't care. Only when you scale it up to current worldwide fuel consumption levels you might even make a worse impact on climate than fossil fuels would right now.
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    Well, thats the point - we know that bio fuels have a huge negative environmental impact and won't scale, while we have a clear path to base the grid on reneweable production.
- fock 8y ago
  We could also have had diesel cars with about 20-40% of emissions of the the current "fleet" for about two decades. But apparently nobody cares and now, instead of thinking about all the other stuff we need to replace fossils (heating, steel and concrete, chemical industry) and slowly phasing out those low-emissions cars, people debate about electric cars, which as of today are mainly used to greenwash the sale of inefficient SUVs and themselves are abominations of the green growth idea (name one advantage of the model x over a station wagon design)... As it stands now we are experiencing an all out bankruptcy declaration of the idea that free, unregulated markets (which allow monopolies and cartels to thrive) are gonna be beneficial for humankind in the long term.
  - bsaul 8y ago
    I don’t think there ever was an idea in economics that totally free and unregulated markets was a good thing. The most hard core free market proponents always said state should focus on the (minimal) sets of rules to let the market maintain fair competition between participants. That includes anti-monopoly and anti-cartel regulations.
    - fock 8y ago
      Somehow those free market proponents did a really bad job.
      - bsaul 8y ago
        One of the problem IMHO is that the concept of "market" in a global economy is very blurry. What is a monopoly in this context ? does having 99% market share in the US constitutes a monopoly if a chineese competitor has twice the number of users ? Are you going to dismantle google and amazon, only to see baidu and alibaba reap the market ?
- henryackerman 8y ago
  Exactly. Having electric cars means that you can generate your power however you want. Nuclear (fission or fusion), solar, fossil, biomass - it doesn't matter.
- ThomPete 8y ago
  That you can doesn't mean you do. Both wind and solar uses ex coal as backup and with only 1% of the worlds energy consumption being covered by those its safe to say that currently evs are powered by fossil fuel. Also look up capacity factor. We arent even close to be able to use solar and wind for anything big scale, although actually creating these giant farms are extremely big scale because the energy density is so low.
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    No big scale? Germany is in 2019 at 45% reneweables in the electricity mix so far. At the moment I am writing this, 30% of the electricity is provided by solar, 20% by wind energy.
    - staffanj 8y ago
      Are you using Nuclear power as renewable in that figure? https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... 35% renewable. 12% nuclear.
      - sk0g 8y ago
        Your source goes to 2017, and considering Germany has been fast tracking their renewables effort, a jump of 10% isn't inconceivable.
        ThomPete 8y ago
        It's misleading and very far from the truth though.
      - _ph_ 8y ago
        No, nuclear is not reneweable. The main sources of reneweable are wind, solar, bio mass, water. Depending on the source the exact numbers might vary for small differences in counting, but to see the overall development, look here: https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share_de.htm?source=ren-share&period=annual&year=all https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share_de.htm?source=ren-sha...
- reitzensteinm 8y ago
  Per capita per year, the US consumes 13.0 MWh of electricity and 436.6 gallons of gasoline. With ~132k BTU of energy per gallon, that's 16.9 MWh. Let's say electric cars are 50% more efficient in terms of energy consumption; that's still a 65% increase in the amount of electricity production required. As we move to EVs and renewables, this extra energy is going to come from keeping fossil fuel plants online that would have otherwise been shut down. Counting the energy use of EVs as potentially from renewable sources is just feel good and ignores reality. The marginal electrical consumption caused by Teslas coming off the line today will not come from renewable sources over the lifetime of the vehicle, even if you assume a very healthy exponential ramp from today. You're refuting one bad argument with another, which unfortunately is pretty much par for the course for discussions on energy policy. Even with this, the shift is still well worth doing, not least of which because the distributed storage it offers is likely the only way we'll be able to hit 100% renewables down the track.
  - _ph_ 8y ago
    I cannot comment on the US numbers, but the German numbers are as following: - total electricity production is around 600 TWh/year - switching all cars to electricity would require about 120 TWh/year (44M cars x 14000km/year * 20kWh/100km) That would be a 20% increase in electricity production required, but from that one can deduct quite a bit for fuel refining and distribution, better buffering of peak electricity production etc. If you take the energy content of fuel, an electric car is roughly 4x as efficient as a combustion engine. While combustion engines may reach peak efficiencies of 40%, the average over the whole driving cycle is less than 20%, as the peak efficiency is only reached in a narrow band of power productions - usually at highway speeds. That is the reason hybrid cars save fuel, the electric component reduces the inefficiencies of certain parts of the driving cycle.
    - reitzensteinm 8y ago
      I'm not surprised the German numbers are better. But even there, with Germany's remarkable progress, a Tesla bought today will be scrapped before Germany reaches 120% of today's electrical production in renewables. Fair enough; I should have used 25% instead of 50%. In my head I was multiplying by the energy efficiency of electrical production but that of course is not relevant to this calculation. The irony of correcting a bad argument with a bad argument while complaining about the same is not lost on me. I believe my point stands.
Galaxeblaffer 8y ago
Perfect example of how a comma can make all the difference in a sentence
simion314 8y ago
I do not understand the point "EVs are extremely useful for daily grid management." and the image https://innovationorigins.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Schermafbeelding-2019-04-30-om-22.51.12.jpg https://innovationorigins.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Sch... I am imagining most cars will be plugged in at night when there is no solar energy produced,do they imply you can buffer energy in the cars battery and you can extract some if is needed or that you can charge it in smart ways, like charge slower if the grid is not at full capacity. Are there disadvantages for the battery life or charging time?
- legooolas 8y ago
  Disadvantage to the end user of the car: Cycling the batteries more to do this will shorten their useful life.
  - sliken 8y ago
    Yes, this is true. It's not a huge factor. Keep in mind that the worst 1% of the days of the year are a serious strain on the electrical grid. They often require very inefficient and expensive peak plants to spin up to help ensure the grid doesn't fail. Not only are those peaker plants inefficient when running, they are quite expensive even when not running. Additionally even on those top 1% days (3.5 days a year) there's likely only a few hours where the load is near max. So if say 1M (2% or so of all cars) cars in a country like Germany would contribute say 25% of their capacity just 3-4 days a year it could make a significant difference and make the power grid more reliable and allow the least efficient peaker plants to be decommissioned. Even over a decade of use, electric car owners aren't going to notice 25% of their battery being used 3-4 times a year.
    - legooolas 7y ago
      If it's those sort of numbers then that would be fine - in everything I've read about this (which isn't a great deal) it's been very unclear as to how often such pulling back of power would be used. :)
- 8y ago
bdibs 8y ago
I don’t know if that many people today actually think their electric car is far better than traditional ICE vehicles, but that doesn’t matter. These intermediate steps are required to setup the logistics and economies of scale for a future when our primary energy source is a cleaner alternative.
- fock 8y ago
  just that some cars and their usage patterns won't matter for the kind of energy consumption required by residential heating, industrial processes and shipping. Those are the real things, where we need to setup logistics and economics and absolutely nothing is done. (Reasonable) Electric vehicles are nice and good and phasing out reasonable (think 50-60mpg) cars for them is an inevitable thing (at least in cities), but it's just the tip of the iceberg
- close04 8y ago
  > economies of scale This economy isn't new. Public transport, much of it electrified already, is the very definition of economy of scale. It will trade some comfort and convenience for increased efficiency and lower cost (not to mention some hefty side benefits like less congestion and reclaiming some land in cities). It could also free up city traffic and allow reclaiming some of the land. It's also not very popular with people who can afford an EV today which leads me to believe this is only about comfort and convenience at the budget you can afford. For some people this leads to an EV, for others to an ICE.
smoovb 8y ago
Chase that with this article - "Enough with the 'Actually, Electric Cars Pollute More' Bullshit Already" https://jalopnik.com/enough-with-the-actually-electric-cars-pollute-more-bu-1834338565 https://jalopnik.com/enough-with-the-actually-electric-cars-...
- jimjimjim 8y ago
  The jalopnik article was great. It's one thing for a tech or green website to dispel that narrative but japonik is a fairly hardcore car enthusiast/moterhead site.
NiekvdMaas 8y ago
TLDR: the study referenced is inherently flawed. Among others: * It used outdated NEDC tests instead of WLTP numbers. (Diesel) car makers are known to have cheated NEDC tests for decades, using corrected WLTP numbers changes the whole story. * It exaggerated the CO2 emissions for production of batteries, Tesla's Gigafactory emits 2.6x less CO2 per kWh than assumed. * It assumed a battery lifespan of just 150k km. Tesla's rated battery lifespan is over 2M km, so taking 300k as very conservative number changes the calculation significantly. * It assumed an energy mix of today, instead of an increasing share of renewable energy in the future. Using corrected data, the Tesla emits actually 63% less CO2 instead of 11-28% more.
- pdpi 8y ago
  > It assumed an energy mix of today, instead of an increasing share of renewable energy in the future. This is probably worth top billing. Even if electric vehicles were to produce more pollution _today_, they would still be a positive in that it would move a large part of the pollution problem upstream, where we have many more strategies available to solve it. Not entirely unlike an abstraction layer that produces worse performance today but enables performance-optimising refactoring tomorrow.
a13n 8y ago
How is this news?
rebuilder 8y ago
A bit of a sideline, but I'm inclined to agree that simply counting renewable energy produced as carbon neutral isn't right. I'm not even thinking of the emissions incurred in constructing e.g. solar plants. Energy is a liquid market, any consumption takes up a part of the total production of the relevant area, and it's the average emissions in that area we should be concerned with, IMO. It's probably not quite so cut-and dried. A gigafactory building solar to produce it's own energy certainly seems like it should get a steep discount in emissions. But where do we draw the line? I buy wind power. Does that mean it no longer matters how much power I use? That doesn't seem reasonable, either.
- jarvist 8y ago
  If you want to be more environmental, use power when the current carbon intensity of the grid is low. Effectively you are then providing demand-side management to reduce overall carbon dioxide production. https://carbonintensity.org.uk/ https://carbonintensity.org.uk/
  - mhandley 8y ago
    What you really want to know is what the marginal carbon intensity is. In other words, if I add demand now, what form of generation will supply that additional demand? This is somewhat different from what the current mean carbon intensity is.
    - ZeroGravitas 8y ago
      That's what this API provides: https://api.watttime.org https://api.watttime.org
- benj111 8y ago
  Its a choice how people decide to account for it yes, the correct answer probably depends on the situation. If electricity supplied to the grid is 50% wind, and 50% coal. You could sell 50% of your customers 100% green electricity, or sell 50% green electricity to all of your customers. The former allows customer to put their money where their mouth is, and directly support the green energy build out. The latter may be more suitable for govt mandated targets. The only thing that's unreasonable is counting green electricity twice.
mothsonasloth 8y ago
Is it just me or does anyone else not think in absolutes for cars, nuclear, renewables etc. Yes, fossil fuels should be phased out, however we should still continue research to make Diesel and Petrol more efficient and clean. A large proportion of the world still can't afford a car let alone an electric one, those that do buy secondhand imports from the Western world (5-10 years old). Equally logistics will be reliant on ICE for many years to come, so focusing on efficiency and reducing those emissions. Stop bashing either technology and focus on improving them together!
- aivisol 8y ago
  I agree with you, as I cannot see, for example container ships or Australian Road Trains [0] converting to electric anytime soon. Also what about freight trains in remote parts of the world? EDIT: freight trains are for the most part electric, they just carry their own diesel-powered power plants with them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train
- sddfd 8y ago
  I think it is clear that electric is the future, mostly because of better energy efficiency, simpler manufacturing, and falling battery prices. What I don't know is how quickly this future will come, and whether CNG/LNG (to which engines of cars already in use can easily be converted) is the right thing for the next 10 years until electric vehicles are cheap, and charging and range aren't a problem anymore. LNG/CNG burns much cleaner than diesel/gas and it is easier to refill than to recharge. As bonus, refitted engines retain the ability to run on gas if needed.
  - Theodores 8y ago
    We have had LNG/CNG for forty years. There have been huge fleets of public sector vehicles converted to it in the past but those vehicles were not replaced with more LNG/CNG vehicles. There was also a considerable tax incentive. It was a failed experiment. It never took off. Already electric cars have better infrastructure and higher uptake and it isn't as if governments are fleet buying electric vehicles for councils/utilities to use. They had been doing that with the LNG/CNG things several decades ago, and building some refilling infrastructure in depots. When you compare the success of diesel in the European market for small cars you can see a change of fuel is possible. Diesel isn't as cheap as it once was but it still commands a large part of the European market. I think we need to look to China and what they are doing. It is full steam ahead for electric. The diesel and petrol cars will simply get replaced with new vehicles, there won't be any conversion to LNG/CNG. We get the full Musk vision of robot taxi cars that do their fleet thing removing the need for car parks and making roads safe to even the lamest squirrel, but the real danger to the automotive status quo is affordable Chinese electric cars that pass the safety tests and are nice to be in just because they are electric. We have had the market changed before with Volkswagen and the Japanese cars coming along and actually being what people wanted, despite being alien to the established industry. Most cars you see reviewed are refreshes of the existing conventional ICE models, they have updated styling and updated infotainment systems with a revised version of the same platform. Despite the failings, Tesla are 7 years ahead in redefining the automobile product. The incumbents are not really trying, they are just running these ICE refresh vehicles. The market isn't going to be disrupted by them. Meanwhile, in China they have 5 and 10 year plans to dominate the automotive trade with fully electric cars. Plus the incentives in their domestic market make things possible at scale. Much like how the VW came along with a better value proposition the same can happen with Chinese electric cars. If the payments are easy and the warranty lasts forever with the running costs much lower than ICE then the market for second hand ICE cars will be reduced to scrap value. As soon as it comes to replacing a part such as a bolt buried deep in the transmission somewhere it becomes more sensible to scrap the thing.
StreamBright 8y ago
Depends on how do you produce electricity. In France where electricity is produced by nuclear power, it is certainly true. In countries like Germany for example where electricity is produced by burning coal, it might not be true.
_ph_ 8y ago
The critisized article uses 550g/kWh for the German grid mix, but in 2018 it already was down to about 480g/kWh and is on track to be lower in 2019 as reneweables are expanded. So that number is quite off already. H.W. Sinn has made a range of presentations (you can find them on youtube if you understand German) where he tries to show how reneweables are infeasible. Also there, he has the pattern to use slightly out of date numbers as basis of his calculations. I actually have met C. Buchal at university, but that is quite some time ago. He is a really nice guy and as a physicist he should have spotted the shortcomings of this publication. But from what I have read, he is working on synthetic fuels, so that might explain the angle.
T-1000 8y ago
Since the electricity produced in the EU is a part of the Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), one could argue that any electricity used will have no impact at all on the CO2 emissions. The reason is that in the ETS, there are a fixed amount of emission allowances. So if a coal power plant produces extra electricity, someone else will decide to emit less CO2.
- mathfailure 8y ago
  And one would lose their argument because having quotas on emissions doesn't eliminate the impact (because otherwise they won't be quotas, they'd be a prohibition).
  - T-1000 8y ago
    BKS argues that you cannot take solar panels on the roof of the battery factory into your calculations since "otherwise you just take away green electricity elsewhere". My point is that if you allow that reasoning (which I think is correct) then it also follows that using dirty electricity in the EU takes away dirty electricity elsewhere. Therefore, the calculated emission impact of electricity use should probably be much closer to zero. And since diesel use in transportation is not included in ETS, there is an even bigger impact of switching from diesel to EV: you stop burning fossil fuel in your car and the electricity you use will crowd out emissions elsewhere.
jacquesm 8y ago
The whole diesel/electric/petrol discussion is pointless, the only thing that is actually better for the environment is to drive less. The other three are all about a degree of being less bad, not better.
- julienreszka 8y ago
  How much is less.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    70% or so of all the daily commutes, and maybe 30 to 50% of all delivery van movements? The impact of that would be huge.
- Ygg2 8y ago
  That advise just fails miseably in practice. We can't go back to non-mechanical sources of power unless we want to economically regress to those times. Can you imagine ships taking months to cross Atlantic? Can you imagine horse being used for delivery?
  - franky47 8y ago
    The fact that delivery requires moving a couple of tons of vehicle to deliver at most 50kg of packages is where the problem lies. Larger delivery vehicles will obviously be required for remote locations and logistics, but for edge delivery (to re-use Cloud terminology) in urban spaces, there are many cases where soft mobility solutions would make much more sense, like electric-assisted cycling. DPD has started investing in those solutions [1]. As Dr Elliot Fishman said when Dominos announced pizza delivery by self-driving cars: "If the answer is a 1500kg ton car to deliver a 0.9kg pizza, you're not giving the problem your full attention". - https://twitter.com/ElliotFishman/status/907698051589869568 https://twitter.com/ElliotFishman/status/907698051589869568 [1] https://electrek.co/2019/04/10/p1-quadricycle-e-cargo-bike/ https://electrek.co/2019/04/10/p1-quadricycle-e-cargo-bike/
    - 8y ago
perfunctory 8y ago
Also in the news: "The European Commission has formally accused BMW, VW, and Daimler of colluding to impede the rollout of emissions limiting technology" [0] I really hope all these German carmakers become the next Kodak. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/5/18296540/european-commission-emissions-scandal-collusion-bmw-daimler-vw-diesel-petrol https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/5/18296540/european-commissi...
foxyv 8y ago
In the meantime electric cycling and public transportation beat both of these 2 ton couches on wheels. Anyone who has ever tried an E-Bike knows that they are freaking amazing. We can do so much better than electric cars.

84 points by mhandley 8y ago

The idea that you can say "oh, electric is based on fuel power plants" is just disingenuous. Electricity is fungible. Having electric cars lets you replace the fuel with renewables and the car doesn't have to care.

staffanj 8y ago
Same could be said about the fossil cars. Most diesel cars can be used with HVO100 - 100% renewable
- melling 8y ago
  And clean? Electric cars have lots of options in addition to electricity from fossil fuels Nuclear, solar, wind, geo-thermal, hydro. We’ll probably need diesel for quite some time but electric cars do have more options.
  - staffanj 8y ago
    2018 USA Electric mix: Fossil fuels (total) 2,651 63.5% Nuclear 807 19.3% Renewables (total) 713 17.1%
    - melling 8y ago
      I’m not sure why the grid mix is relevant at this time. electric car usage in the US is less than 1 million cars. My point was that that the electricity can come from a variety of sources, including fossil fuels. Coal is dying. Natural gas is cheaper and much cleaner.
- sliken 8y ago
  True. But how much HVO100 can you personally produce? Solar is easy to produce locally, even on your own roof. Also electric cars typically turn around 85% of the energy into forward motion. Because it's local there's minimal distribution costs. Additionally grid size installations are competing with coal, natural gas, and similar sources quite well on price. Gas cars are around 15% efficient, and diesels are only slightly higher. Anything like gas has substantial costs in distribution, and of course you have to drive to/from gas stations (instead of just charging at home/work. So even if HVO100 is 100% renewable, it's not going to be cost efficient, or energy efficient.... so why bother?
  - staffanj 8y ago
    Here in Sweden (with high taxes on diesel/petrol): Diesel - 16,54 SEK/L. HVO100 - 17,36 SEK/L. RIght now on one of the biggest petrol chan here in Sweden. https://m.circlek.se/cs/Satellite/m/SE1/sv_SE/pg1332347381321/pg1334077249884/Priser.html?c=Page&childpagename=SE1%2FMobileLayout&cid=1334077249884&d=Touch&lang=sv_SE&p=1332347381321&packedargs=lang&pagename=SE1MobileWrapper&sitepfx=SE1&sitepfx=SE1 https://m.circlek.se/cs/Satellite/m/SE1/sv_SE/pg133234738132...
  - sergiosgc 8y ago
    Gas car efficiencies are in the 30% range. Toyota got as high as 38%, there are large volume ICEs on the road with 35% efficiency. Even at those numbers, electric is better. There's no need to use old data.
    - sliken 8y ago
      Sure a Prius can get as high as 38% (at the cost of two complete drive trains). But what about the average vehicle sold in 2018? I suspect you'd be well below the 30% efficiency again. At least in the USA the Prius isn't particularly popular (except to trade in for a model 3). The demand is for the small crossover and SUV segments.
- _ph_ 8y ago
  Fuel produced from anything farmed might be carbon neutral, but the process of farming itself has a huge impact on the environment. Also, we just have by far not enough farmland to come even close in supplying the traffic sector with fuels - while in many regions there still is a shortage of food. So with the exception of processing waste from food production, it is environmental-negative to use grown fuels. Solar cells are more than 10x more efficient per area used and can be mounted on top of roofs etc.
  - dillonmckay 8y ago
    We have seen this exact scenario in the US with corn-based ethanol for vehicle fuel.
  - JulianMorrison 8y ago
    Farmed fuel is probably sensible for aircraft. I'd say that was its longer term niche.
    - _ph_ 8y ago
      That is a very good point. We have quite a few applications, where we will need fuel for quite some time to come, let us reserve all the "reneweable" fuels for those applications. Electric cars are a thing, electric airplanes are unfortunately only at their very beginning.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  There's good reasons beside carbon to avoid running your car on what's pretty much liquid margarine. Arable land can't be spared for it on a global scale. And it fills the air with the usual medically inadvisable smut and gases. Airplanes, on the other hand, that might be a good thing.
pure-awesome 8y ago
Do you mean that if you get electric cars running off coal power plants now, then that frees you up to replace the coal with e.g. solar power later on? (From a programming perspective - since this is Hacker News, after all - we could view electric power as an "interface" which hides the implementation of how it's generated from the car, as opposed to petrol which is "tightly coupled" to the car)
- abraae 8y ago
  Always love the car analogies. They're really both interfaces, for petrol you get energy and CO2 emissions for a given quantity. However you don't know that the CO2 emissions are net - the fuel might have been produced via some synthetic process driven by renewables. Unlikely, but as an interface you can't really know the details of the implementation behind the scenes.
  - dTal 8y ago
    Technically, this isn't a car analogy - it's that rarest of creatures, the reverse car analogy, which uses programming concepts to explain things about cars.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  Yes exactly, or natural gas plants, but same thing. Electricity is a universal interface. EVs free up their upstream to change at whim. That freedom means that greening of the power supply can be solved at a societal, rather than personal level.
aequitas 8y ago
Same goes for diesel. You can run cars exclusively on bio-fuel, the cars won't care. Only when you scale it up to current worldwide fuel consumption levels you might even make a worse impact on climate than fossil fuels would right now.
- _ph_ 8y ago
  Well, thats the point - we know that bio fuels have a huge negative environmental impact and won't scale, while we have a clear path to base the grid on reneweable production.
fock 8y ago
We could also have had diesel cars with about 20-40% of emissions of the the current "fleet" for about two decades. But apparently nobody cares and now, instead of thinking about all the other stuff we need to replace fossils (heating, steel and concrete, chemical industry) and slowly phasing out those low-emissions cars, people debate about electric cars, which as of today are mainly used to greenwash the sale of inefficient SUVs and themselves are abominations of the green growth idea (name one advantage of the model x over a station wagon design)... As it stands now we are experiencing an all out bankruptcy declaration of the idea that free, unregulated markets (which allow monopolies and cartels to thrive) are gonna be beneficial for humankind in the long term.
- bsaul 8y ago
  I don’t think there ever was an idea in economics that totally free and unregulated markets was a good thing. The most hard core free market proponents always said state should focus on the (minimal) sets of rules to let the market maintain fair competition between participants. That includes anti-monopoly and anti-cartel regulations.
  - fock 8y ago
    Somehow those free market proponents did a really bad job.
    - bsaul 8y ago
      One of the problem IMHO is that the concept of "market" in a global economy is very blurry. What is a monopoly in this context ? does having 99% market share in the US constitutes a monopoly if a chineese competitor has twice the number of users ? Are you going to dismantle google and amazon, only to see baidu and alibaba reap the market ?
henryackerman 8y ago
Exactly. Having electric cars means that you can generate your power however you want. Nuclear (fission or fusion), solar, fossil, biomass - it doesn't matter.
ThomPete 8y ago
That you can doesn't mean you do. Both wind and solar uses ex coal as backup and with only 1% of the worlds energy consumption being covered by those its safe to say that currently evs are powered by fossil fuel. Also look up capacity factor. We arent even close to be able to use solar and wind for anything big scale, although actually creating these giant farms are extremely big scale because the energy density is so low.
- _ph_ 8y ago
  No big scale? Germany is in 2019 at 45% reneweables in the electricity mix so far. At the moment I am writing this, 30% of the electricity is provided by solar, 20% by wind energy.
  - staffanj 8y ago
    Are you using Nuclear power as renewable in that figure? https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c... 35% renewable. 12% nuclear.
    - sk0g 8y ago
      Your source goes to 2017, and considering Germany has been fast tracking their renewables effort, a jump of 10% isn't inconceivable.
      - ThomPete 8y ago
        It's misleading and very far from the truth though.
    - _ph_ 8y ago
      No, nuclear is not reneweable. The main sources of reneweable are wind, solar, bio mass, water. Depending on the source the exact numbers might vary for small differences in counting, but to see the overall development, look here: https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share_de.htm?source=ren-share&period=annual&year=all https://www.energy-charts.de/ren_share_de.htm?source=ren-sha...
reitzensteinm 8y ago
Per capita per year, the US consumes 13.0 MWh of electricity and 436.6 gallons of gasoline. With ~132k BTU of energy per gallon, that's 16.9 MWh. Let's say electric cars are 50% more efficient in terms of energy consumption; that's still a 65% increase in the amount of electricity production required. As we move to EVs and renewables, this extra energy is going to come from keeping fossil fuel plants online that would have otherwise been shut down. Counting the energy use of EVs as potentially from renewable sources is just feel good and ignores reality. The marginal electrical consumption caused by Teslas coming off the line today will not come from renewable sources over the lifetime of the vehicle, even if you assume a very healthy exponential ramp from today. You're refuting one bad argument with another, which unfortunately is pretty much par for the course for discussions on energy policy. Even with this, the shift is still well worth doing, not least of which because the distributed storage it offers is likely the only way we'll be able to hit 100% renewables down the track.
- _ph_ 8y ago
  I cannot comment on the US numbers, but the German numbers are as following: - total electricity production is around 600 TWh/year - switching all cars to electricity would require about 120 TWh/year (44M cars x 14000km/year * 20kWh/100km) That would be a 20% increase in electricity production required, but from that one can deduct quite a bit for fuel refining and distribution, better buffering of peak electricity production etc. If you take the energy content of fuel, an electric car is roughly 4x as efficient as a combustion engine. While combustion engines may reach peak efficiencies of 40%, the average over the whole driving cycle is less than 20%, as the peak efficiency is only reached in a narrow band of power productions - usually at highway speeds. That is the reason hybrid cars save fuel, the electric component reduces the inefficiencies of certain parts of the driving cycle.
  - reitzensteinm 8y ago
    I'm not surprised the German numbers are better. But even there, with Germany's remarkable progress, a Tesla bought today will be scrapped before Germany reaches 120% of today's electrical production in renewables. Fair enough; I should have used 25% instead of 50%. In my head I was multiplying by the energy efficiency of electrical production but that of course is not relevant to this calculation. The irony of correcting a bad argument with a bad argument while complaining about the same is not lost on me. I believe my point stands.

Galaxeblaffer 8y ago

Perfect example of how a comma can make all the difference in a sentence

simion314 8y ago

I do not understand the point "EVs are extremely useful for daily grid management." and the image https://innovationorigins.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Schermafbeelding-2019-04-30-om-22.51.12.jpg https://innovationorigins.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Sch... I am imagining most cars will be plugged in at night when there is no solar energy produced,do they imply you can buffer energy in the cars battery and you can extract some if is needed or that you can charge it in smart ways, like charge slower if the grid is not at full capacity. Are there disadvantages for the battery life or charging time?

legooolas 8y ago
Disadvantage to the end user of the car: Cycling the batteries more to do this will shorten their useful life.
- sliken 8y ago
  Yes, this is true. It's not a huge factor. Keep in mind that the worst 1% of the days of the year are a serious strain on the electrical grid. They often require very inefficient and expensive peak plants to spin up to help ensure the grid doesn't fail. Not only are those peaker plants inefficient when running, they are quite expensive even when not running. Additionally even on those top 1% days (3.5 days a year) there's likely only a few hours where the load is near max. So if say 1M (2% or so of all cars) cars in a country like Germany would contribute say 25% of their capacity just 3-4 days a year it could make a significant difference and make the power grid more reliable and allow the least efficient peaker plants to be decommissioned. Even over a decade of use, electric car owners aren't going to notice 25% of their battery being used 3-4 times a year.
  - legooolas 7y ago
    If it's those sort of numbers then that would be fine - in everything I've read about this (which isn't a great deal) it's been very unclear as to how often such pulling back of power would be used. :)
8y ago

bdibs 8y ago

I don’t know if that many people today actually think their electric car is far better than traditional ICE vehicles, but that doesn’t matter. These intermediate steps are required to setup the logistics and economies of scale for a future when our primary energy source is a cleaner alternative.

fock 8y ago
just that some cars and their usage patterns won't matter for the kind of energy consumption required by residential heating, industrial processes and shipping. Those are the real things, where we need to setup logistics and economics and absolutely nothing is done. (Reasonable) Electric vehicles are nice and good and phasing out reasonable (think 50-60mpg) cars for them is an inevitable thing (at least in cities), but it's just the tip of the iceberg
close04 8y ago
> economies of scale This economy isn't new. Public transport, much of it electrified already, is the very definition of economy of scale. It will trade some comfort and convenience for increased efficiency and lower cost (not to mention some hefty side benefits like less congestion and reclaiming some land in cities). It could also free up city traffic and allow reclaiming some of the land. It's also not very popular with people who can afford an EV today which leads me to believe this is only about comfort and convenience at the budget you can afford. For some people this leads to an EV, for others to an ICE.

smoovb 8y ago

Chase that with this article - "Enough with the 'Actually, Electric Cars Pollute More' Bullshit Already" https://jalopnik.com/enough-with-the-actually-electric-cars-pollute-more-bu-1834338565 https://jalopnik.com/enough-with-the-actually-electric-cars-...

jimjimjim 8y ago
The jalopnik article was great. It's one thing for a tech or green website to dispel that narrative but japonik is a fairly hardcore car enthusiast/moterhead site.

NiekvdMaas 8y ago

TLDR: the study referenced is inherently flawed. Among others: * It used outdated NEDC tests instead of WLTP numbers. (Diesel) car makers are known to have cheated NEDC tests for decades, using corrected WLTP numbers changes the whole story. * It exaggerated the CO2 emissions for production of batteries, Tesla's Gigafactory emits 2.6x less CO2 per kWh than assumed. * It assumed a battery lifespan of just 150k km. Tesla's rated battery lifespan is over 2M km, so taking 300k as very conservative number changes the calculation significantly. * It assumed an energy mix of today, instead of an increasing share of renewable energy in the future. Using corrected data, the Tesla emits actually 63% less CO2 instead of 11-28% more.

pdpi 8y ago
> It assumed an energy mix of today, instead of an increasing share of renewable energy in the future. This is probably worth top billing. Even if electric vehicles were to produce more pollution _today_, they would still be a positive in that it would move a large part of the pollution problem upstream, where we have many more strategies available to solve it. Not entirely unlike an abstraction layer that produces worse performance today but enables performance-optimising refactoring tomorrow.

a13n 8y ago

How is this news?

rebuilder 8y ago

A bit of a sideline, but I'm inclined to agree that simply counting renewable energy produced as carbon neutral isn't right. I'm not even thinking of the emissions incurred in constructing e.g. solar plants. Energy is a liquid market, any consumption takes up a part of the total production of the relevant area, and it's the average emissions in that area we should be concerned with, IMO. It's probably not quite so cut-and dried. A gigafactory building solar to produce it's own energy certainly seems like it should get a steep discount in emissions. But where do we draw the line? I buy wind power. Does that mean it no longer matters how much power I use? That doesn't seem reasonable, either.

jarvist 8y ago
If you want to be more environmental, use power when the current carbon intensity of the grid is low. Effectively you are then providing demand-side management to reduce overall carbon dioxide production. https://carbonintensity.org.uk/ https://carbonintensity.org.uk/
- mhandley 8y ago
  What you really want to know is what the marginal carbon intensity is. In other words, if I add demand now, what form of generation will supply that additional demand? This is somewhat different from what the current mean carbon intensity is.
  - ZeroGravitas 8y ago
    That's what this API provides: https://api.watttime.org https://api.watttime.org
benj111 8y ago
Its a choice how people decide to account for it yes, the correct answer probably depends on the situation. If electricity supplied to the grid is 50% wind, and 50% coal. You could sell 50% of your customers 100% green electricity, or sell 50% green electricity to all of your customers. The former allows customer to put their money where their mouth is, and directly support the green energy build out. The latter may be more suitable for govt mandated targets. The only thing that's unreasonable is counting green electricity twice.

mothsonasloth 8y ago

Is it just me or does anyone else not think in absolutes for cars, nuclear, renewables etc. Yes, fossil fuels should be phased out, however we should still continue research to make Diesel and Petrol more efficient and clean. A large proportion of the world still can't afford a car let alone an electric one, those that do buy secondhand imports from the Western world (5-10 years old). Equally logistics will be reliant on ICE for many years to come, so focusing on efficiency and reducing those emissions. Stop bashing either technology and focus on improving them together!

aivisol 8y ago
I agree with you, as I cannot see, for example container ships or Australian Road Trains [0] converting to electric anytime soon. Also what about freight trains in remote parts of the world? EDIT: freight trains are for the most part electric, they just carry their own diesel-powered power plants with them. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_train
sddfd 8y ago
I think it is clear that electric is the future, mostly because of better energy efficiency, simpler manufacturing, and falling battery prices. What I don't know is how quickly this future will come, and whether CNG/LNG (to which engines of cars already in use can easily be converted) is the right thing for the next 10 years until electric vehicles are cheap, and charging and range aren't a problem anymore. LNG/CNG burns much cleaner than diesel/gas and it is easier to refill than to recharge. As bonus, refitted engines retain the ability to run on gas if needed.
- Theodores 8y ago
  We have had LNG/CNG for forty years. There have been huge fleets of public sector vehicles converted to it in the past but those vehicles were not replaced with more LNG/CNG vehicles. There was also a considerable tax incentive. It was a failed experiment. It never took off. Already electric cars have better infrastructure and higher uptake and it isn't as if governments are fleet buying electric vehicles for councils/utilities to use. They had been doing that with the LNG/CNG things several decades ago, and building some refilling infrastructure in depots. When you compare the success of diesel in the European market for small cars you can see a change of fuel is possible. Diesel isn't as cheap as it once was but it still commands a large part of the European market. I think we need to look to China and what they are doing. It is full steam ahead for electric. The diesel and petrol cars will simply get replaced with new vehicles, there won't be any conversion to LNG/CNG. We get the full Musk vision of robot taxi cars that do their fleet thing removing the need for car parks and making roads safe to even the lamest squirrel, but the real danger to the automotive status quo is affordable Chinese electric cars that pass the safety tests and are nice to be in just because they are electric. We have had the market changed before with Volkswagen and the Japanese cars coming along and actually being what people wanted, despite being alien to the established industry. Most cars you see reviewed are refreshes of the existing conventional ICE models, they have updated styling and updated infotainment systems with a revised version of the same platform. Despite the failings, Tesla are 7 years ahead in redefining the automobile product. The incumbents are not really trying, they are just running these ICE refresh vehicles. The market isn't going to be disrupted by them. Meanwhile, in China they have 5 and 10 year plans to dominate the automotive trade with fully electric cars. Plus the incentives in their domestic market make things possible at scale. Much like how the VW came along with a better value proposition the same can happen with Chinese electric cars. If the payments are easy and the warranty lasts forever with the running costs much lower than ICE then the market for second hand ICE cars will be reduced to scrap value. As soon as it comes to replacing a part such as a bolt buried deep in the transmission somewhere it becomes more sensible to scrap the thing.

StreamBright 8y ago

Depends on how do you produce electricity. In France where electricity is produced by nuclear power, it is certainly true. In countries like Germany for example where electricity is produced by burning coal, it might not be true.

_ph_ 8y ago

The critisized article uses 550g/kWh for the German grid mix, but in 2018 it already was down to about 480g/kWh and is on track to be lower in 2019 as reneweables are expanded. So that number is quite off already. H.W. Sinn has made a range of presentations (you can find them on youtube if you understand German) where he tries to show how reneweables are infeasible. Also there, he has the pattern to use slightly out of date numbers as basis of his calculations. I actually have met C. Buchal at university, but that is quite some time ago. He is a really nice guy and as a physicist he should have spotted the shortcomings of this publication. But from what I have read, he is working on synthetic fuels, so that might explain the angle.

T-1000 8y ago

Since the electricity produced in the EU is a part of the Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), one could argue that any electricity used will have no impact at all on the CO2 emissions. The reason is that in the ETS, there are a fixed amount of emission allowances. So if a coal power plant produces extra electricity, someone else will decide to emit less CO2.

mathfailure 8y ago
And one would lose their argument because having quotas on emissions doesn't eliminate the impact (because otherwise they won't be quotas, they'd be a prohibition).
- T-1000 8y ago
  BKS argues that you cannot take solar panels on the roof of the battery factory into your calculations since "otherwise you just take away green electricity elsewhere". My point is that if you allow that reasoning (which I think is correct) then it also follows that using dirty electricity in the EU takes away dirty electricity elsewhere. Therefore, the calculated emission impact of electricity use should probably be much closer to zero. And since diesel use in transportation is not included in ETS, there is an even bigger impact of switching from diesel to EV: you stop burning fossil fuel in your car and the electricity you use will crowd out emissions elsewhere.

jacquesm 8y ago

The whole diesel/electric/petrol discussion is pointless, the only thing that is actually better for the environment is to drive less. The other three are all about a degree of being less bad, not better.

julienreszka 8y ago
How much is less.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  70% or so of all the daily commutes, and maybe 30 to 50% of all delivery van movements? The impact of that would be huge.
Ygg2 8y ago
That advise just fails miseably in practice. We can't go back to non-mechanical sources of power unless we want to economically regress to those times. Can you imagine ships taking months to cross Atlantic? Can you imagine horse being used for delivery?
- franky47 8y ago
  The fact that delivery requires moving a couple of tons of vehicle to deliver at most 50kg of packages is where the problem lies. Larger delivery vehicles will obviously be required for remote locations and logistics, but for edge delivery (to re-use Cloud terminology) in urban spaces, there are many cases where soft mobility solutions would make much more sense, like electric-assisted cycling. DPD has started investing in those solutions [1]. As Dr Elliot Fishman said when Dominos announced pizza delivery by self-driving cars: "If the answer is a 1500kg ton car to deliver a 0.9kg pizza, you're not giving the problem your full attention". - https://twitter.com/ElliotFishman/status/907698051589869568 https://twitter.com/ElliotFishman/status/907698051589869568 [1] https://electrek.co/2019/04/10/p1-quadricycle-e-cargo-bike/ https://electrek.co/2019/04/10/p1-quadricycle-e-cargo-bike/
  - 8y ago

perfunctory 8y ago

Also in the news: "The European Commission has formally accused BMW, VW, and Daimler of colluding to impede the rollout of emissions limiting technology" [0] I really hope all these German carmakers become the next Kodak. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/5/18296540/european-commission-emissions-scandal-collusion-bmw-daimler-vw-diesel-petrol https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/5/18296540/european-commissi...

foxyv 8y ago

In the meantime electric cycling and public transportation beat both of these 2 ton couches on wheels. Anyone who has ever tried an E-Bike knows that they are freaking amazing. We can do so much better than electric cars.