According to USA Today, plug-in electric hybrid vehicles (PHEVs) like the Chevy Volt can actually increase air pollution in some areas. The executive director of the Environmental Law & Policy Center reckons "plug-in hybrids are perhaps not good for all areas." Howard Learner explained that for "states that are heavily coal, that equation doesn't work out very well for the environment." With almost half of the nation's electricity coming from coal-fired plants, the Center equates running a PHEV in some areas to driving a coal-burning vehicle. The Natural Resources Defense Council said there's a "possibility for significant increases of soot and mercury" because of the increased demand on the plants, So a PHEV would produce 11 percent more greenhouse gas than a non-plug-in hybrid. A study by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found PHEVs could also increase the amount of sulfur dioxide, a key component of acid rain, and CO2. Charles Griffith of the Ecology Center in Michigan admits "It seems a little premature to think of it being a problem – but there are a lot of issues we should have been thinking of sooner," including the use of land to grow crops for ethanol fuel vs. for food. Since when does rational thinking have anything to do with federal regulations, the environment and energy independence?
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First Ethanol doubles greenhouse output, then we learn that diesels are the dirtiest vehiles, now we discover that PHEV’s don’t always work? OMG this must be the work of Big Oil!!!
Using coal as a source of energy is an extremely dumb macro-economic decision. That’s true of China, and that’s of course even much truer of the U.S. (which has the technological resources to develop other forms of energy).
This said, this applies not only to PHEVs but also to air-conditioners, TVs, and all appliances. Nuclear is the way to go.
We may have the resources, but surely not the poitical fortitude. As soon as anybody as much as thinks about building a nuclear power plant, environmentalists will scream Three Mile Isand, Chernobyl, and scare people silly with ’24’-like doomsday scenarios where terrorists attack a nuclear power plant, spreading death and destruction wherever the winds carry radioactive fallout.
I’m all for nuclear power. People need to get over the past and realize that *gasp* we learned from those incidents.
All the same I’d like to see plug-ins. Then one can choose to recharge overnight, or pay a premium for clean electricity, or even generate one’s own. And if gasoline gets scarce, or rationed, one can cut back to EV range driving without sitting in pump lines.
As far as nukes, if they’re so great, then let private enterprise put up the cash.
There’s also the fact that it’s easier, assuming the technology can be developed, to clean a dozen powerplant smokestacks than it is to clean a million tailpipes.
And yes, nuclear is necessary. At least until we invent cold fusion…
I read about using the reactors sized for aircraft carriers to power whole subdivsions. Maybe , in a meltdown senario , a reactor of that size would be managable and not as scary. I might be kidding myself. At minimum , a plant that size could be constructed overnight.
And yes, nuclear is necessary. At least until we invent cold fusion…
I already invented cold fusion. All I need are a few investors who aren’t afraid of the responsibilities (and potential STDs) that come with world domination.
“I read about using the reactors sized for aircraft carriers to power whole subdivsions. Maybe , in a meltdown senario , a reactor of that size would be managable and not as scary. I might be kidding myself. At minimum , a plant that size could be constructed overnight.”
I like this idea… BUT!
Two words: SECURITY NIGHTMARE.
All this stuff will end with the conclusion that keeping our current system is more effective lol
This enviromental thing is getting silly, really.
Of course it is needed to reduce the greenhouse gases emissions, but it has to be clear since the beginning that EVERY solution will have its costs.
The fact nobody is pursuing the use of CNG or LPG or install methane plants at farms or landfills makes me curious.
CNG, LPG and methane can help reduce the CO2 emissions by half, technology is already there and in the methane case, can be taken from cows crap (pointed also as culprits of global warming, go figure, so we should not eat meat, WTF?) or garbage (in landfills as by-product of material descomposition).
Also would work to masify the use of WVO for diesel cars. Oh, I forgot diesel cars stink because of particulate and black smoke, but with modern diesels that argument is mostly bull$hit.
All the buzz is on hybrids (an expensive toy that doesn’t solve anything) and ethanol.
Maybe I would give credit to a diesel hybrid, but the gas version, given the fact that euro diesels flat out beat them in fuel consumption makes no sense for me.
Who cares about the facts when emotion rules. remember, your being proactive about the environment by buying one of these things (maybe in the future) and no one bothers to ask where the power comes from.
I read an interview with some geek who converted his Prius to PHEV and he bragged about recharging for “free” at work. That makes using the office fax machine, surfing the web, and copier usage seem like small potatoes compared to drawing 20 amps from your bosses electric meter.
What would be the costs if everyone decided to do that?
A fifth generation CNG kit is worth between 1000 and 3000$. I would rather install that in my car than buy a Prius. It’s a more cost effective solution in my opinion.
Fact is that here in my country we have plenty of CNG and no happily no Prius (save the 2 or 3 imported by individual people).
To me the hybrid thing is not about being pro-active but more like a fad. And a fashion, fad or whatever never takes into account rational arguments.
Coal is cheap and the US has more reserves than any other nation. Those are two very compelling reasons for its continued development.
Even though I’m in the coal industry, I agree that new nuclear development should also be a national priority. We’ve got a lot of uranium too.
AKM
There is nothing “extremely dumb” about clean coal. the technology is developed (IGCC)thanks to US taxpayer money, and being built.
Add CO2 capture and it will be a significant clean power generator. In addition to others, Nuclear, wind, solar etc.
http://search.doe.gov/search?output=xml_no_dtd&sort=date%3AD%3AL%3Ad1&ie=UTF-8&client=default_frontend&y=6&oe=UTF-8&proxystylesheet=default_frontend&x=14&q=igcc&x=3&y=4
Coal may be cheap, but when we were looking at rice coal furnaces in central PA, I asked around and was told that the coal suppliers aren’t taking new customers and that it is hard to get good anthracite coal anymore.
One of the Peak Oil memes is that we have 250 years worth of coal if we continue using it at the present rate. Continued population growth could halve that. If we also start converting coal into transportation fuel, our resources could be used up in a lifetime.
http://www.physicstoday.org/vol-57/iss-7/p47.html
Juniper
There is nothing “extremely dumb” about clean coal. the technology is developed (IGCC)thanks to US taxpayer money, and being built.
Yes, but how long will it take and how much will it cost to either upgrade or replace the current “dirty” coal plants? And what do we do in the interim?
Donal,
True, anthracite and stoker coal is rare these days and it always has been the least abundant type. The sub-bituminous coal of Wyoming and Montana’s Powder River Basin is what I liken to the Wal-Mart of coal. It is tremendous in abundance and very cheap (the price is rising though, as with everything), very easy to extract (very low stripping ratios), though the quality is not so good (from a heating standpoint. Sulfur content is very low however so it is much more eco-friendly from an SO2 point of view). Once power plants adapted to using the lower-grade product, the PRB has become what some folks call the Energy Capital of America. PRB would not cut the mustard in a furnace application, but it is a tremendously viable source of electrical generation.
Seems like a bit of scare-mongering.
I think PHEV’s will create a new market for intermittent renewable energy (i.e. wind, solar etc). So it’s unlikely that all the load would transfer to coal-fired generation.
PHEVs store energy so they can use intermittent (cheaper) generation. The renewable generation could communicate via the internet to the PHEVs, turning their charging on and off with the availability of the intermittent energy.
You can’t do this at the moment. Electrical energy is sold at the same price throughout the day so there’s no incentive or mechanism for cheaper intermittent energy to sell itself to non-instantaneous loads (e.g a PHEV which has a 10 hour window in which to recharge). And there is no significant load which has storage (except maybe night storage heaters and ripple-controlled hot-water heaters)
There’s a real limit to the % of renewable generation you have have on the grid at present. It needs to be back-up by predictable generation (coal, nuclear, hydro etc) because there is no supply-and-demand mechanism to control the load. There’s no incentive for a load to switch off when the instantaneous energy price goes up (e.g. the winds stops blowing etc).
It might be something like this. You plug your PHEVs in at the night. Via the internet the charging gets turned on and off by RenewableEdison. In return you get cheaper energy. If one night there’s no renewable then the next day your PHEV will run on gasoline.
The suphur dioxide thing sounds like a red-herring as well. Flue-gas scrubbing at power stations is a well-developed technology. And there’s lots of development in “clean coal” technology (e.g. Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle).
It’s a shame there aren’t more journalist’s who are technical.
cheers
Malcolm
malcolmmacaulay,
I’d be curious to see how solar power would do much good at night. Kudos, though, for bringing up IGCC. It has lots of potential.
The biggest problem I’ve seen with most renewable ideas is that they are not densified. Fossil fuels are wonderful from an energy density point of view; lots of power in small volumes. Fossil fuels are created from solar energy that in turn created chemical energy through biological processes over the lifespan of organisms. Add a little geologic time for this biomass to collect and then some more time for geologic processes to compact the mass and you’ve got yourself some energy rich material. Wind and solar simply do not allow enough time for the energy to condense in some form. Bio-fuels and hydro power are also solar powered but a little more densified as they typically depend on annual cycles to grow crops and surge rivers. Renewable sources of energy are a noble cause, but they have a long way to go before they can match the efficiency of a barrel of oil, a ton of coal, or an MCF of natural gas.
And that plug-in electric car can also be powered by solar and wind generated power too. You know, make power that way when we can (peak sun or windy days) so we can throttle back on hyrdo or coal or nukes as much as possible.
C’mon – so we should just put our head in the sand and keep driving gasoline burning vehicles just because electrics might change the way we do business? Not hardly. Use the electrics where they work best (short distances) and put the big vehicles out on the interstate where they do their thing the best. In fact put the diesel sedans and wagons out on the interstate where they do their best.
Should I drive a school bus just in case I need to haul a dozen people later in the year? Or a snow plow because it might snow in 6 months? We collectively do this all the time buying and driving the largest vehicles we can afford b/c a few times a year we need to passenger capacity or b/c a few times a year we need to tow a boat.
I agree with one of the earlier commentors – easier to clean a dozen smokestacks of power plants mostly running at a steady state than it is to clean up the emissions of 50,000 cars doing the cold-start warmup-cycle three or four times a day. And let’s talk about all those internal combustion engine parts not getting used up by 50,000 vehicles everyday hauling folks to home-work-home or to school or to the stores.
SELL me an electric car now. Think Golf hatchback or Astra or Civic with 75 miles of range. Hell, even 50 would accomplish my needs.
When we need to go to Grandma’s house we’ll take our other car or in case we have two electrics at some point, we’ll take our “occasional use only” minivan/SUV/large station wagon out of the garage and warm it up for a weekend’s travel.
Heck for that matter I could afford to rent a vehicle for a weekend and save money over the cost of depreciation and insurance on the garage queen. I’d prob just keep one in the garage anyway. My vehicle, just the way I like it, etc etc.
I think this article (and most articles trying to ding the credibility of the electric car as a useful mode of transportation for suburban/commuter Americans) amounts to a lame attempt at maintaining things just the way they are right now. Keep the money feeding the car companies and the supplier networks just the way we have for 100 years now. I don’t see them as intrinsically evil but I do see them as trying to slow progress so they can make as much money as they can off of existing technology.
It’s an excuse to keep us doing the same old thing. It’s like the battery argument. “We can build the car but the batteries just aren’t available yet.” Available to do what? Carry a family of four in a 5,000 lb vehicle 350 miles with a 15 minute recharge? Of course they aren’t. But there are batteries available that can carry a reasonably sized vehicle for 100 miles and charge overnight. Perfect for what precentage of commuting Americans? 60%-80%?
And these batteries have been available since the mid-90s. And the Toyota version of that technology has been in service since then for the lucky owners of the RAV4-EV. A number of those owners apaprently charge their vehicles with solar making no pollution at all and at no profit to any company either.
This is the short coming of business when you are the consumer. These comapnies aren’t going to do anything that might put themselves out of work. No one is going to build a car that can be rennovated forever so the customer doesn’t ever need to buy another. Obviously, they want our cars to rust out and wear out and send the owner back again for another.
Hmmm, EVs will cause more pollution…
Let’s see there is gasoline which requires energy to find, energy to drill, energy to create the oil recovery systems (platforms, pipelines, tankers), energy to man, energy to transport, energy to refine, pollution side effects of the refining process, energy to store, energy to transport again (refinery to depot), energy to transport (dept to station), energy to transport (gas tank of your car), pollution from consumption, pollution from filling your tank (vapors from pump nozzle), side effect pollutions like oil to lubricate the engine that consumes it, exhaust systems, warm up cycles, and what else? Anyone able to flesh this out with numbers?
So electric cars could be larger polluters than a gasoline powered vehicle which is generally heavier and larger b/c it has to be (I mean what’s another two liters of engine capacity? Displacement is cheap to build and reasonable to operate).
No we should just put our heads in the sand and ignore the drawbacks to electric vehicles. Or, at least that’s what I hear. Way back in college, I was in a writing class for engineers, and we had to give presentations on various subjects. Basically, make a sales pitch for a given technology, construction of a methane plant, whatever. An electrical engineer expounded on the greatness of electric vehicles. A mechanical engineer and myself (chemical) started asking him the exact questions seen here. How are you going to produce the power to charge all of these vehicles and what do you do for disposal of the batteries in 10 years being just a couple of the questions. Being a true believer, he had no answers and didn’t appear to have thought out his topic too well (the liberal English professor wasn’t too happy with us, of course). Until we find a safer energy technology or accept the risks that come with nuclear power (like Europe did many years ago), electric vehicles will not be a clean or even cleaner solution.
we here in connecticut are proud to have the “filthy five” coal burning plants, grandfathered in (as with all other plants at the time) by the Clean Air Act with the expectation that they would soon be mothballed and replaced by cleaner coal plants soon. Haha, jokes on us! We’d be better off replacing the plants with an equal amount of Honda engines.
N85523 :
malcolmmacaulay,
I’d be curious to see how solar power would do much good at night.
Come on man, you get the idea :-). My comment would be especially boring if I tried to spell out all the situations. Anyway if your PHEV is plugged in during the day, then solar energy could come into the mix.
Wind is the big one though. And maybe tidal in the future (think underwater wind-turbines). Wave is getting a lot of development in Europe but that’s just concentrated wind energy, in a sense.
Regarding energy density. Yeah it’s hard to beat coal, gas etc. But they have problems. And wind isn’t too shabby either – a 160 MW wind farm sits rather nicely on a real farm.
cheers
Malcolm
Lumburgh21, you’re a chemical engineer and you don’t understand how easy it is to recycle the chemical contents of batteries? I’m really getting tired of hearing this old wive’s tale over and over, particularly from people who should know better. Shame on you.
Stephan Wilkinson :
Lumburgh21, you’re a chemical engineer and you don’t understand how easy it is to recycle the chemical contents of batteries? I’m really getting tired of hearing this old wive’s tale over and over, particularly from people who should know better. Shame on you.
Well said.
# gzuckier :
“We’d be better off replacing the plants with an equal amount of Honda engines.”
FALSE. There’s a nice principle that says small machine –> small efficiency, big machine –> big efficiency.
Having a ton of the most efficient IC car engines will give you less efficiency than a well designed rankine cicle, effectively raising polution
Ha, reading this thread makes it obvious yet again why progress and change is so hard. For every good idea there are legions of naysayers who are afraid of the change or who have convinced themselves that they are well informed enough to be making critical judgments (wrong, 99% of the time).
And you wonder why politicians don’t rush through programs to support your own pet idea…
Since when does rational thinking have anything to do with federal regulations, the environment and energy independence?
What a sad and true statement that is.
A lot of the blame, I think, should go to the greens, many of whom seem to be motivated by anti-everything hysteria. I am all for cleaning up the environment and doing things more efficiently. But when you are bent on destroying the evil Big Oil, you should at least have a viable alternative, one that is developed enough for immediate implementation.
Even worse is when some of these people sanctimoniously declare that earth can support only 2 billion people (how do you even calculate that?), implying genocide for the remaining 4.5 billion (70% of the population) while being careful not to explain it in so many words.
In short: To be relevant the green movement needs more technical know-how and less activism. Put up a solution, or shut up.
Engineer: A lot of the blame, I think, should go to the greens, …
That’s kind of like blaming the lookouts for seeing the approaching privateers. “Blast you, Blakeney! I was having the most fantastic dream about Lord Nelson!”
That’s kind of like blaming the lookouts for seeing the approaching privateers. “Blast you, Blakeney! I was having the most fantastic dream about Lord Nelson!”
I know. I am a bit hard on the greens. That said, somebody has to develop the technical know-how to make green dreams come true. If the greens won’t do it themselves, they risk being overtaken by someone else…