Are Electric Cars A Pointless Effort?

[BPSCG]

So I hear on the radio this am that we'll soon be able to buy all-electric cars - another year or two. One of the ramifications they spoke of was that your electric bill could jump as your gasoline bill dropped, and that electric companies might charge more if you recharged your batteries during peak demand hours as opposed to off-peak.

How would all-electric cars solve any of our energy problems or pollution problems? The electricity from your local power plant is probably coal-fired or oil-fired, in the U.S., anyway. The oil that doesn't get refined into gas for your car to burn would get burned by your power company.

What am I missing here?

 

[Ziggurat]

How would all-electric cars solve any of our energy problems or pollution problems? The electricity from your local power plant is probably coal-fired or oil-fired, in the U.S., anyway. The oil that doesn't get refined into gas for your car to burn would get burned by your power company.

What am I missing here?

Two things: first, America has lots of coal, so using coal for transportation may not be an environmental improvement, but it would be an energy security improvement. Second: nuclear. If we expand our nuclear power capacity significantly, that could make a difference to both environmental impact and energy security. But that is, unfortunately, a big "if" for political reasons.

I don't think electric cars are ready for prime time yet, though. Energy storage densities are still too low, making them a niche product. That won't change within the next few years.

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Several things actually.

Some 9.5% of electricity in the U.S. is produced from renwable sources (source), but I grant you the bulk of the remainder if produced from fossil fuels. The cogenerating gas plants are marvels of efficiency, but natural gas prices are almost inversely tied to oil prices, so a change in price might render them financially unsupportable. Coal's going to be with us as a power generating fuel for a long time, but renewable sources are economically viable right now. Still, 91.5% is less than 100%, which is the proportion of fossil fuel in my car. Solar panels generate power at prices as low as $0.12 per KwH, which is higher than coal, for example, but power companies need to keep fuel burning supplemental plants around that run at as much as $.20 per KwH. they keep those plants around for peak load times, typically hot summer days when solar panels are most efficient. Wind power is taking off like crazy, and if more states liberalized energy, allowing residential comsumers to sell power to the company through the grid, it'd likely lead to the sort of explosive sales of rooftop solar panels that have been seen in Japan, leading to an even larger share of power generation being renewable.

Besides cost, there's efficiency. It's more efficent to generate power centrally, transmit power to your home, charge the car battery, and run the car than it is to burn fossil fuels to transport fossil fuels to stations where you fill up. Batteries have a 90% efficency rating between storing and transmitting power, and every stage along the path between the power plant and you is comparable. Gasoline is only 30% efficient (source.) Even if the technology never advanced, using electric cars would still save energy, and produce fewer green house gas emissions. As it is, renewable energy almost certainly won't entirely displace fossil fuels in power generation, but they're definately going to share center stage.

 

[drkitten]

Several things actually.

Some 9.5% of electricity in the U.S. is produced from renwable sources (source), but I grant you the bulk of the remainder if produced from fossil fuels.

Besides cost, there's efficiency. It's more efficent to generate power centrally, transmit power to your home, charge the car battery, and run the car than it is to burn fossil fuels to transport fossil fuels to stations where you fill up.

Another factor to consider is that almost all of the "emerging" energy technologies --- geothermal, tidal, wave, and so forth --- generate electricity, so as these alternate technologies improve, the cost-effectiveness of electricity as a power source is going to be greatly increased relative to fossil fuels.

So is an electric car worth it today? Maybe, maybe not. Idaho, for example, has some of the most expensive gasoline in the USA and some of the cheapest electricity (all those mountains that have been dammed for hydro plants). It may be worth it today. It's probably not worth it in New Jersey, which has the opposite. In fifty years, I suspect electric cars will be worth it everywhere, but we need to build bad electric cars today to know how to build good ones in 2058.

 

[Bikewer]

This month's cover article on MIT's Technology Review:

http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=specialsections&sc=batteries&id=20570

Is about a new form of nickel/hydride battery that is more efficient, more stable, and longer-lived than anything done previously.
By using a nanoparticle matrix in the electrodes, the designer has apparently solved a number of the problems with these batteries for vehicle use, including a tendency to catch fire/explode when impacted.
GM is already looking at this new technology for their Volt plug-in hybrid.

Doesn't solve the problem of where to get the electricity.

Likely it's correct that generating electricity by whatever means is cleaner overall than burning fossil fuels directly in the cars.
This process can be improved by more stringent controls on the power plants. But that's a stopgap at best; we need to get away from fossil fuel.
Coal does not seem to be an attractive substitute. Even for global-warming skeptics, there are many other downsides to coal, including health-decreasing pollution and environmental destruction.
Nuclear, supplemented by industrial-scale wind and wave power? Seems do-able, if we have the will. Fusion? Seems progress is mighty slow...
Orbiting solar collectors with power microwaved to collector stations in desert areas? Not likely anytime soon...

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Coal does not seem to be an attractive substitute. Even for global-warming skeptics, there are many other downsides to coal, including health-decreasing pollution and environmental destruction.
Nuclear, supplemented by industrial-scale wind and wave power? Seems do-able, if we have the will. Fusion? Seems progress is mighty slow...
Orbiting solar collectors with power microwaved to collector stations in desert areas? Not likely anytime soon...

Subbituminous coal's pretty low sulphur, and scrubber technology continues to improve. Part of the problem with coal is that the oldest, most heavily polluting plants are grandfathered into a system where newer plants have to spend more money meeting higher standards. To add insult to injury, those plants therefore have lower marginal costs of abatement (To reduce their own emission by X tons, they can take the cheapest measures, wheras their competitors have already done that, and must therefore take more expensive action to reduce emissions by the same amount), which means that in carbon credit trading, they have yet another economic advantage over their rivals.

Much of the trouble with coal is political. Coal will never be clean, but in the US, coal is so abundant we could burn our reserves for thousands of years, and it's cheap to get energy out of it. Unless and until renewable sources become even cheaper than coal, it'll stay around.

ETA: I'm frankly stunned every time I go out for a drive that there aren't net metered solar panels on the rooftops of city buildings. All that surface area within inches of the gird, and all that sunlight going to waste.

Solar'd be more attractive if we could produce better battery technology. Solar power tower systems are pretty good at generating power in cloudy and night time conditions from stored thermal energy, but I seriously doubt that technology can be adapted for consumer power generation.

 

[kedo1981]

you have to start somewhere and don't forget the eletric motor is the most efficient machine so far devised, so just using the resources to a higher efficiency would be worth doing.

 

[BPSCG]

Besides cost, there's efficiency. It's more efficent to generate power centrally, transmit power to your home, charge the car battery, and run the car than it is to burn fossil fuels to transport fossil fuels to stations where you fill up. Batteries have a 90% efficency rating between storing and transmitting power, and every stage along the path between the power plant and you is comparable. Gasoline is only 30% efficient (source.)

Are you saying that the amount of electricity generated by burning a gallon of oil at a power plant will make your car move significantly farther than a gallon of gasoline burned in the same car?

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Are you saying that the amount of electricity generated by burning a gallon of oil at a power plant will make your car move significantly farther than a gallon of gasoline burned in the same car?

Yes. The electric motor is more mechanically efficient than a gasoline engine. Power transmission is more efficent than fuel transportation. The bigest loss of efficency in an electric car based infrastructure is between the motor and the road, which is also the biggest loss of efficiency in a gas engine. It's a lot like comparing a new compact fluorescent light bulb to an incandescant bulb. the incandescant bulb comsumes more watts per lumen. Efficencies (expressed as a fraction of 1) are multiplied through the system.

If you multiplied the effiency of all the steps in a gasoline engine's fuel to even a fossil fuel plant + electric car system, the electric cars conserves much more the energy expended in the whole system. If you used a cogenerating natural gas plant, for example, which has peak efficiencies as high as 89%, but we'll use 60% as an example, the efficency would work something like this: Generation (.60) X Transmission (.90) X Battery storage (.90) X electric motor (.90.) = 43.7 %. Even if you look at the Tranmission through generation steps of a gasoline car system, you get much poorer results, especially in the "transmission" step, where fossil fuels are burned in an inefficent motor and in an inefficient drive train to move fossil fuels to a place where you can get it. Electricty can be moved around a whole lot more efficiently than volatile, flammable liquids.

I left out the steps comparing say, extracting natural gas, processing it and getting it to the plant when compared to the extraction, transport, and processing of crude beecause I'm not sure exactly how efficient the cracking process is in oil.

ETA: If I've said something like this before, it's because this is essentially my argument against hydrogen "power." Hydrogen is an energy storage medium that needs to be created, rather than an untapped energy resource. A hydrogen vehcile is just an electric vehicle with with a fuel cell strapped on, which just adds needless inefficiencies to an otherwise efficient system, including using up electricty to create hydrogen, and later getting electricty back out of the system by combusting it - why do the one just to do the other? Skip the middle man, I say, use electricity all the way.

 

[drkitten]

ETA: If I've said something like this before, it's because this is essentially my argument against hydrogen "power." Hydrogen is an energy storage medium that needs to be created, rather than an untapped energy resource. A hydrogen vehcile is just an electric vehicle with with a fuel cell strapped on, which just adds needless inefficiencies to an otherwise efficient system, including using up electricty to create hydrogen, and later getting electricty back out of the system by combusting it - why do the one just to do the other? Skip the middle man, I say, use electricity all the way.

My understanding is that the energy density (joules/kg) of hydrogen is much better than the best energy density (again in joules/kg) that we can get out of batteries.

My understanding is that broadcast power is technically possible but heinously inefficient. And speaking as someone that needs to make a multi-state trip in less than 48 hours, I assure you I don't want to try to do it with an extension cord.

 

[krelnik]

I wish there was a way to nominate an entire thread. Good discussion of an important topic!

 

[ImaginalDisc]

My understanding is that the energy density (joules/kg) of hydrogen is much better than the best energy density (again in joules/kg) that we can get out of batteries.

My understanding is that broadcast power is technically possible but heinously inefficient. And speaking as someone that needs to make a multi-state trip in less than 48 hours, I assure you I don't want to try to do it with an extension cord.

Yes, the edge for hydrogen is essentially that it has better energy density than batteries, and provides a better energy storage medium for some uses. I wouldn't object if, say, natural gas was used to produce hydrogen at a central location for long haul trucks, interstate vehicles, and other vehicles intended to take very long trips. However, given that a hydrogen economy where every car runs on hydrogen would recquire billions of dollars in infrastructure, and would be in total less energy efficient than an electric system - especially considering we already have an existing infrastructure for distributing electricity, I think hydrogen would best be used for specialized applications.

Ideally, if people want cars they can fuel for long, uninterrupted driving, one of two strategies spring to mind.

A) Batteries are modular, not fixed inside the car. If you stop at a station, you can trade your depleted battery for a fresh one, slide it into place, and take off. The problems are that such batteries would be big and heavy, and battery technology looks like it's advancing pretty seriously with regards to recharge time, so maybe that won't be a problem much longer. Plus, I can't see having completely interchangeable batteries in all makes and models unless either the government imposed standardization, or the industry adopted it, and that might strangle innovation.

B) Since a "hydrogen" car differs from an electric car only in so far as it has a fuel cell rather than a battery, why not have car manufacturers sell "touring" models of electric cars with an auxillary fuel cell and hydrogen resevoir? That way, you'd have cheap electric cars for relatively short range driving, and battery/fuel cell hybrids at a higher price for people who want more versatility.

 

[drkitten]

Yes, the edge for hydrogen is essentially that it has better energy density than batteries, and provides a better energy storage medium for some uses.

Exactly. I like to phrase it as "we're at least one breakthrough away from practical battery cars." I think we could make practical hydrogen/fuel-cell cars today.

Ideally, if people want cars they can fuel for long, uninterrupted driving, one of two strategies spring to mind.

Those are both potentially viable solutions, but you yourself outlined some major problem with them. Insurmountable? Probably not. But probably enough to keep electric cars in an extremely minor role for at least as far into the future as I can see.

The single biggest problem is the "versatility" issue. The problem is -- and I'm guilty myself of this -- people want more capacity than they use on a regualr basis. Let's take a "typical" electric car with a 200km range and a six-hour recharge time. My normal commute is fewer than 10km, and although I will sometimes take long trips to the suburbs, I rarely put more than 80km on the car in a day. About six times a year, however, I need to make "long" trips of 500km or so, either visiting family or doing professional travel to a neighboring city. It is both cheaper and faster for me to drive that trip that to fly or take public transit, esp. since I live in the States where the rail network barely exists.

Do I "need" a car that can do 500+km in a day? Well, 345 days of the year, I don't -- but what am I supposed to do on those other 20 days? Rent a car? Buy a second car with longer range?

It's like cargo capacity. I really like the Daimler "Smart"; it's a wonderful little car that will drive from here to Mars on a single teaspoon of lighter fluid. Unfortunately, if I decide that I need to buy a TV set, or a hundredweight of coal, or 20 square meters of drywall --- something that happens about the same 20 times per year --- I can't use the Smart. So I need a car with more capacity, or I need to rent a truck, or something. It's so much easier to buy excess capacity than it is to find it when I need it (often at short notice when some idiot puts a hole in the existing drywall).

I'm afraid that if you did sell electrics and hybrids, no one would want the electric....

 

[ImaginalDisc]

Exactly. I like to phrase it as "we're at least one breakthrough away from practical battery cars." I think we could make practical hydrogen/fuel-cell cars today.

I disagree. While the car-end of the electric cars across the nation idea involves short range and therefore arguably inferior cars the problem with the hydrogen cars across the nation idea is that we don't have a hydrogen fuel storage and distribution system in place at all. There's a big chicken-and-the-egg trilemma in getting consumers to adopt hydrogen, who don't want a car they can't fuel, and fuel providers to provide fuel service for cars that don't exist, and car manufacturers to make cars that people don't want because they can't fuel them. It'd take billions in investment to create a country where you could drive a hydrogen car anywhere you like, and even then, you'd loose billions of dollars into the system in the inherent inefficiencies of producing, storing, distributing, and burning hydrogen, when compared to electricity.

The single biggest problem is the "versatility" issue. The problem is -- and I'm guilty myself of this -- people want more capacity than they use on a regualr basis. Let's take a "typical" electric car with a 200km range and a six-hour recharge time. My normal commute is fewer than 10km, and although I will sometimes take long trips to the suburbs, I rarely put more than 80km on the car in a day. About six times a year, however, I need to make "long" trips of 500km or so, either visiting family or doing professional travel to a neighboring city. It is both cheaper and faster for me to drive that trip that to fly or take public transit, esp. since I live in the States where the rail network barely exists.

Do I "need" a car that can do 500+km in a day? Well, 345 days of the year, I don't -- but what am I supposed to do on those other 20 days? Rent a car? Buy a second car with longer range?

It's like cargo capacity. I really like the Daimler "Smart"; it's a wonderful little car that will drive from here to Mars on a single teaspoon of lighter fluid. Unfortunately, if I decide that I need to buy a TV set, or a hundredweight of coal, or 20 square meters of drywall --- something that happens about the same 20 times per year --- I can't use the Smart. So I need a car with more capacity, or I need to rent a truck, or something. It's so much easier to buy excess capacity than it is to find it when I need it (often at short notice when some idiot puts a hole in the existing drywall).

I'm afraid that if you did sell electrics and hybrids, no one would want the electric....

I think that depends entirely on the price difference. Fuel cells aren't at all cheap. As I said above, neither the infrastructure to fuel them. Iceland tried to switch to a hydrogen fuel cell automobile system, and even though they're the ideal place for it, it doesn't seem to be working. If my choice was between a cheap electric car today, and an expensive hydrogen/electric hybrid, plus the cost of helping to buy into a system of fuel production, transport, and fueling facilities, I think I know which one I'd prefer.

For me personally, having a cheap electric car that's very cheap to fuel is well worth giving up lugging around the versatility of a car I don't use. I drive a Volvo station wagon. It has miserable fuel efficiency. Sure, it has tremendous cargo capacity, which I've used three times in five years. If I'd been running on watts rather than octane, I could have rented a truck for the three times I needed cargo space, and I'd probably still be ahead a few thousand dollars.

Maybe it's time to face up to the possibility that Americans love cars that do more than we actually do need. I don't need a car that can do 100 miles per hour (mine can, I've done it.) I seldom need large cargo capacity. Is holding onto both worth a polluted atmosphere and the expense besides?

 

[Davo]

Electric cars

As already mentioned on previous posts electric cars are not a waste of time, on several points.

1. Less pollution CO2 emmisions.

2. You can now get 220 miles from a charge on an EV , which would cater for most peoples everyday useage. I suspect that a lot of people would retain or hire their petrol vehicles for longer distance trips.

3. Cost in repairs. Electric vehicles are far simpler in componentry. They don`t have radiator, water pump, large gear box etc. They would be far cheaper to service and maintain. Spare parts is where automotive manufaturers make a lot of their money currently.Perhaps one of the reasons why they shy away from electric vehicles.

4. High acceleration, more fun to drive.

Given this is the first production ev using Lithium Ion Batteries (Teslamotors.com), I think the future of ev`s is bright and that they can only improve in performance and lower in price.

 

[drkitten]

2. You can now get 220 miles from a charge on an EV , which would cater for most peoples everyday useage. I suspect that a lot of people would retain or hire their petrol vehicles for longer distance trips.

And right there's the killer.

Electric vehicles are not going to be substantially cheaper to own than gasoline ones, at least for the foreseeable future. Most Americans already sink a substantial sum of money (20-30% of their take-home income) into car payments.

Anyone who thinks people will be willing to spend 20% of their income on a relatively cheap car that still guarantees that they will need to spend 20% of their income on a second relatively cheap car for long distance trips is, put simply, bonkers.

Why spend 40% of your income for two cars you don't like when you can spend the same on one car you do?

 

[Bikewer]

The article I linked to mentioned the price point for GM's Volt as in the 35-40,000 dollar range. That's pretty steep; entirely out of my reach.

Even as these vehicles become more accepted/popular/necessary, and prices inevitably come down, there's going to be a substantial segment of the population that will have to nurse older gasoline-powered vehicles into the forseeable future.

For many of our cities, efficient mass transit is still a dream, and one that tends to cost more than anyone planned.
I ride the Metrolink halfway to work, which saves me a little gas an a lot of parking money. (I ride for free in uniform...) However, Metrolink is at present a very limited system, and one that exists at all only due to heavy subsidies. It looses money daily.
And, it cost some 300 million more than they said it would. Building systems like this from scratch is costly.
Cheap gas and the increasing sprawl of the suburbs has caused problems. Now, folks are talking about a move back to the cities....

 

[Davo]

And right there's the killer.

Electric vehicles are not going to be substantially cheaper to own than gasoline ones, at least for the foreseeable future. Most Americans already sink a substantial sum of money (20-30% of their take-home income) into car payments.

Anyone who thinks people will be willing to spend 20% of their income on a relatively cheap car that still guarantees that they will need to spend 20% of their income on a second relatively cheap car for long distance trips is, put simply, bonkers.

Why spend 40% of your income for two cars you don't like when you can spend the same on one car you do?

When you look at the cost of servicing a combustion engine vehicle and the price of gas at the moment, I would say electric is cheaper especially say after a 5 year period.

 

[drkitten]

When you look at the cost of servicing a combustion engine vehicle and the price of gas at the moment, I would say electric is cheaper especially say after a 5 year period.

Then you're on drugs. If you're suggesting that electric+gas is cheaper after five years than gas-only, the only explanation would be that you're on drugs.

Let's use some math here. The "standard" allowance for mileage, which ostensibly covers all costs, including maintenance and such, is about $0.50 per mile, so a typical driver who puts 10,000 miles on a gasoline car would spend about $5,000 per year in maintenance. Over five years, he "saves" $25,000, substantially less than the sticker price of the extremely-cheap electric car he would be buying and using for his day-to-day driving, and not including any of the maintenance or energy costs that he would incur while driving it.

(More realistically, he could probably shift 75-80% of his total mileage over to the electric car; most of the day to day trips are short, but the mileage of the long trips are still substantial. That's only two 500 mile round-trips.

A typical electric car can get something like two miles per kilowatt-hour, at a cost of, say, $0.10 per kw-h, or $0.05/mile. Arbitrarily doubling that to reflect maintenance costs -- after all, the tires cost the same regardless of the engine -- the 8,000 miles/year that he puts on the electric costs him about $800. So he spends $1,800 per year instead of $5,000 and saves $3,200 per year.

Now, how much did that electric car cost? Bikewer suggested $35-40,000, so it will take about twelve years to pay for itself.

And that's assuming that garaging the second car is free, which may or may not be a viable assumption.)

Basically, our hypothetical driver has a choice. He can buy a gas car and and electric car, and not afford to move either of them out of his garage, or he could buy a just a gas car and fuel it up (and use it for its intended purpose).

Because just an electric is simply not an option.


Now, you're right after a fashion. If fuel costs double, to $1/mile, then it would "only" take five years to pay for the costs of the second car in fuel costs. But are you seriously making long-term financial decisions right now on the likelihood of $7.00/gallon fuel? If you're doing that, and you're comfortable with a five year payback plan, a better plan would be to take advantage of the housing market and buy closer to the city....




Because electric-only is simply not in the cards....

 

[ynot]

My thoughts for electrical transport . . .

An electrified network of “main” routes that directly power vehicles for long distance travel. The vehicles have on-board batteries that allow for shorter travel independent of the network. The batteries are recharged when travelling on the network. This system could also be utilised to distribute electricity around cities and countries (better than ugly power poles and pylons).

What would the main flaws of such a system be?