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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

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 7y ago
Same could be said about the fossil cars. Most diesel cars can be used with HVO100 - 100% renewable
- melling 7y 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 7y ago
    2018 USA Electric mix: Fossil fuels (total) 2,651 63.5% Nuclear 807 19.3% Renewables (total) 713 17.1%
    - melling 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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_ 7y 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 7y ago
    We have seen this exact scenario in the US with corn-based ethanol for vehicle fuel.
  - JulianMorrison 7y ago
    Farmed fuel is probably sensible for aircraft. I'd say that was its longer term niche.
    - _ph_ 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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_ 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    Somehow those free market proponents did a really bad job.
    - bsaul 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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_ 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
      Your source goes to 2017, and considering Germany has been fast tracking their renewables effort, a jump of 10% isn't inconceivable.
      - ThomPete 7y ago
        It's misleading and very far from the truth though.
    - _ph_ 7y 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 7y 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_ 7y 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 7y 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.

staffanj 7y ago

Same could be said about the fossil cars. Most diesel cars can be used with HVO100 - 100% renewable

melling 7y 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 7y ago
  2018 USA Electric mix: Fossil fuels (total) 2,651 63.5% Nuclear 807 19.3% Renewables (total) 713 17.1%
  - melling 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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_ 7y 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 7y ago
  We have seen this exact scenario in the US with corn-based ethanol for vehicle fuel.
- JulianMorrison 7y ago
  Farmed fuel is probably sensible for aircraft. I'd say that was its longer term niche.
  - _ph_ 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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_ 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
  Somehow those free market proponents did a really bad job.
  - bsaul 7y 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 7y 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 7y 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_ 7y 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 7y 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 7y ago
    Your source goes to 2017, and considering Germany has been fast tracking their renewables effort, a jump of 10% isn't inconceivable.
    - ThomPete 7y ago
      It's misleading and very far from the truth though.
  - _ph_ 7y 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 7y 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_ 7y 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 7y 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.