Very cool. It would be nice to see a breakdown of where the energy he received while plugged-in at home came from. I think it's great that we are reducing our dependence on fossil fuel, but at the end of the day if the energy to power that car is being generated by dirtier or more costly ways... it doesn't really matter.
>if the energy to power that car is being generated by dirtier or more costly ways... it doesn't really matter.
Maybe theoretically, but if you do the math then even 100% coal isn't dirty enough – the Tesla Model S gets 24 MPGe in that case, compared to just 17 MPG for the BMW M5. Energy cost compares favorably as well – charging in Hawaii (37¢ per kWh!) would only cost 14¢/mi, compared to 20¢/mi for the M5 (@$3.50).
The question has never been, "which is the cheapest/cleanest to operate?" Batteries have been the clear winner for some time. The challenge that faces EVs is, "does the high initial price of batteries negate the lifetime savings?" We're not there yet for family cars, but for full-size luxury sedans it seems to have arrived.
In my Golf TDI I have a demonstrated of $0.114 per mile. That's in less than ideal conditions, with lots of city driving. If I drove almost all highway, I'd be getting more like 45mpg rather than the 34mpg lifetime I have, so at the current price of diesel ($3.90/gal) that'd be more like 8.6c/mile.
It does because instead of directly burning said fossil fuel, you are indirectly burning it. This abstraction if you will allows change or improvement to the source of the electricity in a way that you cannot do with gasoline.
if the power plant generating the electricity is equal to the automobiles burning the fuel
It's not. Even the worst, dirtiest coal plant is going to be more efficient than your car engine, since it converts much more of the energy (given of as heat) into electricity. Economies of scale definitely apply to power plants.
You're right but then you get into a whole new can of worms: the inefficiency of energy storage and transportation. Gasoline loses less energy over time and distance than electricity does. And storing electricity in batteries is also 'lossy' as well.
I really do think the downvotes were unfair: that site's layout is appalling. So appalling that I could only just now bring myself to read the bit that you think supports your statement. (perhaps there's more but there's no way I'm digging through all that chartjunk)
The paragraph on that page that mentions batteries is not at all rigorous - it doesn't attempt to be. The statement "It could be predicted that most Priuses will be junked at age 10 years" strikes me as pretty contentious.
Keep in mind that there is a variable cost to transport the gasoline as well; you need to fuel tankers, power refineries, and fuel the trucks to transport the fuel to the pump.
Yes, it would be a pretty ridiculous situation where the EROEI [1] calculation would favor gas-powered car engines vs. coal-powered electricity pumped through grids and stored in batteries.
Gas powered motors are still less brittle than grid-powered ones - it'd be tough to power a military force on grid power for example, but at that scale we should be using local fission powerplants anyway (ie, nuke subs).
Don't forget that the story of gasoline begins with crude oil deep in the ground. This substance loses a lot of energy over time and distance between the ground and your tank.
This is a very good point. Like throwing a load balancer in front of a server. You can then replace that server or put 10 in it's place and the outside world has no idea. Similarly, if you unify the ways to receive energy into one single interface: a power plug or wall outlet, it makes it easier to change what's going on in the background. Thanks for your comment it really opened up my brain.
Can you further explain? Maybe I misunderstood you but if the power plant generating the electricity is equal to the automobiles burning the fuel, in the end, isn't it a wash?
Similar to hybrid cars. They are better for the environment but that isn't that offset by the production of the batteries needed for the hybrid engine?
> if the power plant generating the electricity is equal to the automobiles burning the fuel, in the end, isn't it a wash?
No. By abstracting the source of the energy, we can make one change in the method of power generation and immediately make a large number of electric cars "clean". So if we replace a coal plant with a nuclear or hydroelectric or solar plant, then everyone charging their electric cars with energy from that plant will suddenly be using clean energy. This isn't possible with the millions of gas cars out there, because they are only capable of using gas.
>Similar to hybrid cars. They are better for the environment but that isn't that offset by the production of the batteries needed for the hybrid engine?
No. The oft-cited "Dust to Dust" report has been thoroughly debunked: http://grist.org/article/dust-to-dumb/ For just one example, they assume (with no real justification) that a Hummer will last 300k miles and a Prius just 100k. Invalidating that single assumption flips the result, and it's not the only one.
There's a false equivocacy going on in our heads when we fall victim to this kind of misinformation. "One advantage vs. one disadvantage. They must cancel out!" This is why it's important to do quantitative analysis. In reality, the addition of a battery and motor only adds about 10% to the embodied energy and disposal impact of a car, which itself is dwarfed by the fuel burned in its lifetime (by about 3:1).
The interesting question for me is: why do people worry about the Nickel in their car's battery but not in their car's steel-alloy frame?
IIRC, what worries some people is the REEs that go into the mfg of electric batteries. REE mining tends to be dirty and tends to be, for now, in counties with little in the way of enviro regulation monitoring mining methods, etc.
Consider the range of efficiency of driving depending on mode:
0 mpg - stopped at a light
15 mpg - typical city driving
35 mpg - typical highway driving
A powerplant is always running its turbines. It's like car motor that is always on cruise control on the highway, without giving up energy to stop in traffic or throttle down.
Keep in mind that power plants do indeed spin their turbines down and spin them up again. This is due to the greatly increased demand for electricity during the day and reduced demand at night. This is why electricity is cheaper at night. They want people to move energy intensive stuff to run at night so it smooths out the grid energy usage cycle.
The peak energy usage is normally right around dusk, since that is when people are getting home from work, lights are coming on, etc. If people charge their cars at this time that only makes things worse. Hopefully we get smart chargers that slow charging at this time, so while it doesn't cause a huge peak the car is still charging, and then increases charging power during the night. Just a thought.
I'd come here to mention the abstraction aspect. This idea is probably the least discussed when talking about cars/power, and we tend to veer towards other specific fuels.
"Oh, electric cars are no good - we need hydrogen cars!" Or something like that. Who's saying that? Seemed to be energy companies, but it's IIRC. Electric cars allow for any energy source to be used (as well as multiple), in the generation of the electricity. I suspect a lot of people don't want that flexibility/freedom, and would instead prefer to lock down a few more generations of drivers to one specific type of fuel, even if it's not gas.
Actually not too long ago Elon Musk mentionned this point, the fact that ultimately electricity does come from fossil fuels in many cases. And of course this is not good.
However, he made some good points:
* Fossile fuel electricity generators (utilities power plants) are often times more efficient than burning the same amount in your car
* Also, all the electric infrastructure needed to distribute electricity is much 'greener' than the system needed to distribute fossile fuels to your local gas station.
So even though the power is from coal, it's production/transport/consumption makes it more efficient than simply using your 'gasoline' powered car.
As much as these are interesting points, I have not broken down the real impacts Elon mentionned, but I thought they made a lot of sense.
> "Fossile fuel electricity generators (utilities power plants) are often times more efficient than burning the same amount in your car"
Replace "often" with "always". I don't know of any power plant that's less efficient than an automobile engine.
The efficiency increase just by going to fossil fuel grid power is pretty insane all by itself, even accounting for transmission losses. Even if we just kept burning fossil fuels in our power plants, and converted all cars to electrics, the efficiency increase would be incredible.
Not to mention I'm sick of breathing in smog and diesel exhaust. Heck, I live in Chicago. I can't imagine what its like in LA.
In the summer, on a clear day, I can look out my office window westward from the lakefront and see a thick cloud that covers everything past a certain distance.
LA is actually pretty pleasant these days, because California has had very strict laws on fuel particulates for a while now. Also, a lot of people in California's coastal cities drive Priuses and similar cars which burn very little gas.
Not necessarily true. One could put a coal power plant in the middle of a desert where it presumably doesn't affect the environment & population as much as it would have otherwise.
If we relied more on electricity than fossil fuels, you know renewable energy would continue to grow even more than it already is. This is not something to just write off for no reason.
Also, not everyone lives in America. 100% of electricity in my country comes from renewable resources.
However the driver lives in New Jersey, where only 10% of the power comes from coal (as of 2005). There, I find that it is only 0.713 lbs of CO2 per kwh, so he'd only be releasing about 1.5 tons of CO2.
It looks like there isn't any state where driving an electric actually produces more CO2 than driving a gas car. And that's before you include the CO2 generated from refining oil (which requires a fair amount of electricity).
That's a great map except they fail to state the MPG of the "Gas Car" they are comparing too. Given the numbers in that, I'd be willing to bet a Prius outperforms the Electric in some of the worst states.
Edit: Assumption is stated as 22mpg at the bottom of the page.
That's fair if you are comparing the Model S to a similar luxury car. It also means the Prius wins in a lot of states.
> It also means the Prius wins in a lot of states.
That's true. But I think Tesla is trying to sell the Model S to people who would otherwise buy a similar luxury car. There are a not-insignificant number of people in the world who just hate the Prius because it sacrifices handling, performance, and interior finish for the sake of fuel-efficiency. If Tesla builds and sells a car that those people like, isn't it still a net win? People who like hybrid Priuses can still buy them.
Yup. Electric cars are one half of the puzzle. Moving away from coal and towards other sources are the other half.
It's good that one half of the puzzle is mostly complete, as the electric car seems to be here for good. I think moving energy sources away from coal will be the more difficult and time consuming task.
On the other hand, one could in theory outfit the coal plant with equipment to capture much of that carbon and prevent it from being released into the atmosphere.
That's much harder to do for the car, because you only have a limited budget for space and weight to attach things to the car.
Snark like this is annoying and doesn't contribute in any way to the conversation. If you don't agree with someone's numbers, then take a few minutes and critique their data or do a little of your own research and post your findings. It's a lot more interesting and a more successful way to get your point across.
Well, if you care about the green house impact of his use of his car, it's pretty good.
Driving a regular car 12k miles will net you about 4.6 tons of CO2.
His 36 gallons of gas, plus his electricity consumption if we assume that he uses about 36 kwh/100 miles and that he lives in New Jersey (as per http://media.gm.com/media/intl/en/chevrolet/news.detail.html...), which does not just burn coal for electricity production, we can expect him to have emanated ~1/3 ton of CO2 with his Chevy Volt over that period.
Shh, we have to ignore all environmental externalities other than CO2 emissions caused by burning petroleum products. Otherwise we would have to face the fact that our lifestyles are directly at odds with the health of the planet we live on.
Industrial civilization is engaged in a war against entropy which it is destined to lose.
Sure, but my statement sort of has an implied time scale (e.g. a human time scale), and your implied time scale is cosmological. Maintaining the rational economic system that we live under requires immense energy inputs, and while it obviously can't be sustained for the next trillion years, it also can't be sustained for the next hundred.
While I wouldn't exactly phrase it like that, it is an important question to ask: Where did he do most of his charging and how does the electric utility in that area produce their electricity?
He must not live in a location where he needs to drive that much. I'm sure I'm a bit of an outlier, but I've driven 30k miles in the last 11 months... 12k in 2 years is practically unfathomable to me.
According to the DOT, a male 55-64 averages 15,859 miles per year. The average for the US, all ages, both sexes, is 13,476. I can't find a distribution for those numbers to say how much of an outlier you are.
Anyway, if you had read the article you would see that he also drive his wife's car for long distances and as a retired airline pilot he gets free air travel. He was picked not for being representative but because he was the first.
Eh, people worry about this but in my experience with storing vehicles is that it's really not that much of a problem. I put a motorcycle away for 1 year with zero prep. Next year, fired it up, ran the gas through (it seemed a little sluggish but nothing that can't be attributed to placebo), and filled it up fresh. And that's on a carburetor motorcycle with transistorized ignition, which is going to be much more finicky than a modern fuel-injected car with computer-controlled ignition.
There's also the issue of temperature. I'd be a little concerned about keeping a tankful of some summer gasoline blend (I'm sorry I don't know what any of the antigelling chemical additives are called) over the winter someplace really cold.
On the other hand, I really believe that engineers working in Detroit of all places would have considered this.
