– Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The opinions expressed are her own. —
The world is falling in love with plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars. President-elect Obama wants to put 1 million on the road by 2015. GM features them, particularly the Chevy Volt, in its new business plan for a debut in 2010. The EU wants them to shrink greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 by 20% from 1990 levels. This week the Chinese auto company BYD began selling the world’s first commercially-available plug-in hybrid sedan.
No matter that these cars are not widely available; that they are priced far above traditional models; that many have a short range, making them useful only for local trips; that batteries may be prone to catching fire; and that many motorists park on the street, where charging is impractical.
For some, these issues pale in importance to saving the planet from harmful emissions of carbon, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide—all of which are released from internal combustion engine vehicles. If battery powered cars reduce emissions, environmentalists argue, they should be produced and consumers should be enticed to buy them.
But whereas electric cars don’t pollute when they’re running on batteries, they’re not pollution-free. Making the lithium-ion batteries is pollution-intensive and recharging the batteries uses electricity. And most electricity generation, from coal- and gas-fired power plants, still causes pollution.
Which means that pollution from the extra electricity for car batteries has to be weighed against savings from burning less gasoline. Whether battery power can trump the internal combustion engine, which is continually getting more efficient, depends on when drivers decide to charge their future cars, as well as how the electricity is made.
A 2008 study by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory projected U.S. power needs in 2030 if 25% of the car fleet used some form of battery power.
If drivers charged vehicles after 10:00 p.m., when household power consumption is at its lowest, then at most eight extra power plants would be needed for electric cars. In contrast, if drivers charged cars in early evening when household use is peaking, 160 new power plants would have to be built.
At issue here is the way that America will generate its electricity when Obama’s 1 million plug-in hybrids hit the road in 2015. Nuclear power plants do not generate harmful emissions, and are a far cleaner source of electricity than oil, natural gas, or coal. Yet America has refused to build them for fear of accidents and because of controversy about where to dispose of spent fuel. A third problem is long delays in winning government licenses for new plants.
Private companies don’t want to face litigious American consumers, trial lawyers at the ready, and so do not dare embark on nuclear power plants. Until Congress makes serious efforts to shield companies from liability, nuclear power won’t be viable. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has not licensed a new nuclear power plant in over 30 years.
France, on the other hand, does have nuclear power; it generates 78% of its supply from splitting the atom, far more than America’s 19% share. Electric cars in France, therefore, if they can overcome problems of range, safety, and price, would be more environmentally friendly than their American counterparts.
Until America can resume construction of nuclear power plants, it might be that the way to energy efficiency on the road is not through the electric car but by making improvements in the way cars burn gasoline. That would be a good use of the $25 billion that Congress gave to the auto industry last year to improve efficiency.
Call it a dual-highway route to saving energy on the road.
Diana Furchtgott-Roth can be reached at dfr@hudson.org. For previous columns, click here.
The solution is already here. I suggest you travel to California and test drive a Honda Clarity.
It uses a hydrogen fuel cell to generate electricty; the waste product is water.
The range of the car on a single tank of liquid hydrogen is approximately 280 miles.
It is expected once the car is in large scale production it will cost the same as a conventional 4 door saloon. A tank of hydrogen will cost roughly the same as your petrol.
I agree battery powered cars are a lame ducks but then so is the US auto industry (if not dead ducks).
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Nuclear is absolutely not the answer, just look at the numbers.
By 2050 estimates are the world will need 30 terrawatts of power per year. We could build a new nuclear plant every 1.6 days until 2050 and that would yield 8 terrawatts. We could cover every inch of earth with wind turbines, another 2 terrawatts. Or we can use solar which produces 800 terrawatts of harnessable power.
Solar is the only energy source powerful enough and plentiful enough to meet our energy needs. Anyone promoting other sources has a financial interest in the industry they are promoting. But math doesn’t lie.
I am pleased to see a critique of electric cars that factors in the pollution from making batteries and generating electricity. Perhaps you could take the same approach to the nuclear fuel cycle. It takes one ton of high quality uranium ore (a very limited resource, much of it not in the USA) to make a kilogram of nuclear fuel. The fabrication process is very energy intensive. There is for all practical purposes a ton of waste - everything from mine tailings contaminating water supplies (usually in arid areas) to high level waste that will be toxic for BILLIONS of years. Once the fuel rods go into the reactor, their practical yield is about 50% of their potential, due to embrittlement. Pipes in nuclear reactors are also subject to metal fatigue and embrittlement, a non-trival issue and one which cannot be addressed in licensing hearings because the NRC won’t consider “generic” safety concerns. Then there’s thermal pollution. You don’t need to heat water to the temperatures produced by nuclear reactors. Then yes, there is the issue of waste. Most countries that rely heavily on nuclear power have government controlled utilities and/or much stronger central governments than the US. Nukes can’t exist in the free market. They depend on heavy federal subsidy, and federally guaranteed liability insurance. Please, apply the same careful analysis to nuclear power that you have demonstrated in your critique of electric cars.
Looks like nobody can make a logical connection, even though both parts of the equation were mentioned in this discussion. If we develop plenty of nukes (better yet, harness the power of fusion - but that’s a whole separate topic), electricity will be clean, plentiful, and as a result thereof, cheap.
The simplest and cleanest way to produce hydrogen (H2) from water is by electrolysis of water, yet it is so energy hungry (read:expensive at today’s electric power rates) that it’s not a viable alternative to fossil fuels, especially in transportation. But if electricity were dirt cheap (nukes!), making H2 and either compressing or liquefying it (both methods also are energy hungry) would be also cheap. And with H2 as fuel, internal combustion engine suddenly becomes viable both economically (who would care about oil price then?) and ecologically (the only exhaust is H2O vapor). Even older cars may be retrofitted to run on H2. Who then would care about those plug-ins and hybrids?
Actually CH4 is the equation for methane. Natural gas is mostly made of methane, it’s true. It has to be purified like any other type of natural hydrocarbon. You folks know that with a natural gas microturbine operating in the winter you can generate electricity while capturing heat with an overall efficiency rate of about 98 percent? We can even create methane from compostable waste. Some countries extract it from landfill sites. But no-oooh, we like to tinker around with golf carts with expensive batteries.
Bicycles for intracity, and buses and trains for intercity. Why even care about cars?
Re 2 recent misconceptions: hydrogen can be made by smelting water with coal at high temperature, but this produces CO2, the most problematic greenhouse gas. (Not everybody is a cultic moron, but they can still be wrong.)
Natural gas is not clean. Its formula is CH4, and when it’s burned the C goes to CO2. The comparatively large amount of hydrogen (about twice as much as oil) means you do get much more energy for less CO2.
Nuclear power plants use up something that is pretty darn valuable - water. If we add the planning and construction cost to the permanent cost of decommissioning - in an environment with practically zero discounting - electricity from nuclear power is actually expensive. Lots of folks just kind of focus on the cost for electricity once everything is up and running, which quite frankly is oversimplistic.
I agree Diana that people aren’t thinking about the true cost of operating an electric car. Everybody with an older laptop or notebook computer should check how long a single charge now lasts on their Lithium Ion battery. Not long, right. But on a car the battery has to work well all the time. The replacement cost on a car will probably far exceed all of the gasoline a person uses during the same period. We can extract electricity directly from hydrocarbons via fuel cells. Really the best bet would be natural gas or some form of gasified solid fuel.
However, I’m pretty sure people will do what they want regardless of what is most reasonable from a technical standpoint. All we can do is exploit their ignorance, take their cash and spend it.
Here we go again. If it isn’t perfect we shouldn’t do it, huh? I can make electricity(non-polluting) at my house. Can anyone say the same for any of the alternatives? Can you make gasoline, diesel, ethanol, natural gas, highly compressed hydrogen in your garage? One of the main problems with renewable energy is that the sun may not be shining or the wind may not be blowing when we need the electricity. If only we had a place to store all this electricity when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing and then use it when we need it. What if we had thousands of batteries spread out across the country to store this electricity? Maybe we could put these batteries in cars so that people could use the electricity for the first 30 miles that they drive their cars. Over 70% of all vehicles in the US are driven less than 30 miles per day. So the same number of cars would never use fossil fuel. Also, power plants could use these batteries to level out the peaks and troughs of electric demand without having to power up and power down parts of their plants on a daily basis. This would make the power plants extremely efficient and therefore much cleaner. The downsides of plug-in hybrids are so tiny compared to the upsides but the press always seems to give the downsides a great deal of attention.
Diana nailed it. Instead of chasing the, lithium, rabbit down the hole; it makes more sense to use what is proven. Nuclear is the only viable option for electricity. Instead of mucking up the environment further, there has to be good ways to clean coal and turn it into fuel. We are sitting on one of the biggest coal reserves in the world. We should find a way to use it cleanly.
Natural gas is “natural” for hydrogen.
“Electric cars will not cure environmental woes”— the title says it all and is right on target! The electric car is just a panacea for the ignorant! The schizophrenia of the electric car supporters is laughable; their mantra for more electric cars followed by their demand of no more power plants shows vividly their total lack of understanding of the problem! Hydrogen power is another boondoggle that takes more electrical energy than energy it produces, anyone of you dreamers ever heard of entropy —- there is no perpetual motion, folks. Clean burning natural gas anyone? Natural gas, the real 300 year solution.
How does France deal with their nuclear waste?
Very valuable discussion and the topical umbrella (electric cars) is extremely important; but the key issues are not well clarified and elaborated, so my comments follow:
1. The primarily source of the renewable clean energy, which could satisfy ALL of our energy needs are Solar and Wind power. Btw, the Sun provides SEVERAL ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more energy that the mankind consumes.
2. Nuclear energy is not exactly “clean” due to tremendous issue of radioactive waste and incident risks. Most of traditional fission reactors are not “renewable” energy sources in a strict sense, because the splitting materials they use are subject for depletion in the same way as oil, gas, coal and other fossil fuel.
3. Problem with the Electric Cars is actually is a problem of Batteries, or more accurately stated, Electric Energy storage. The lack of efficient durable high-energy Batteries is a stumble block on the way to Clean Renewable Energy proliferation, especially in portable devices, cars, etc. UltraCapacitors (a.k.a. SuperCapacitors) is the answer to this problem. The author of these comments was a long time enthusiast, developer and promoter of the idea of UltraCapacitors (a.k.a. SuperCapacitors) replacing the electrochemical batteries and variety of applications, including commercial and military portable devices, ground vehicles, space technology. This concept was outlined in his “Green Electricity (GEL) Initiative, topping Google search list for many years.
What we really need is a political will and technological vision of our leaders to recognize this fact and make a strategic investment into Capacitive Energy Storage technology.
You can read more on this topic online: find the link to the text online in this comments or just Google on GEL Initiative. Thanks and regards,
Dr. Alexander Bell,
NY, USA
Producing electricity for domestically run cars means lower trade deficit. NOT importing green cars means domestic GDP rise. You miss the idea that the economy is trying to self correct itself pushing us towards domestic manufacturing, to reduce the outflow of wealth.
That is the bigger picture for green technologies in USA, reducing emissions is actually byproduct.
The title should have admitted that the article is primarily to advocate nuclear power. She seems to say that while there are problems with battery cars, nuclear power makes them worthwhile, so admit it. I wish this person would be more honest about the axes she’s grinding. I don’t value her columns much.
Battery cars are a great application for solar or wind power. If you accept battery cars, solar and wind are a better answer than nuclear. With a smart grid, you can automatically charge them at the least harmful times of day. And as far as parking on the street goes, the charging equipment isn’t very complicated, you don’t need any underground tank, and we can upgrade the power grid and charge them on the street.
Now, unlike her, I’m not sure battery cars are good because batteries go bad too often. I hate them, and so did my boss. That’s why I haven’t given up sympathy for cellulosic ethanol in internal combustion engines. We should be able to get to where cellulosic ethanol is carbon-neutral. Biodiesel is an idea, but I don’t know enough about it. The choice of “biological solar collectors” (green plants) is more limited if you want to get oil and not just cellulose.
WOW!!! Like a lot of people do not know that. EVEN THE PLUG IN ELECTRIC CARS HAVE THE SAME ISSUE!!!! So what is the solution?!?!?
The introduction of electric cars is a singular component of an overall transition, or shift, to alternative energy. Transitions are always rocky and require small steps upon which to build and perfect. The point of the elecrical car is to reduce production of co2. So, yes, the generation of electrical power must,therefore, be part of the entire picture. Given that electricity generation has more options for sourcing without co2 generation, this is a good choice for a vehicle. Electrical power generation may be done without the creation of co2, and may be done within a less risky mix of methodologies. To simply focus on nuclear alone is narrowing and limiting a the more useful and safer basket of electrical generation sources. You might say, putting all one’s eggs in one basket. Do we not learn from our mistakes? Wind and solar power are other methodologies that must be in that basket. Wind plants may be established on a large public scale, and private home owner solar may also be done to complement and reduce individual reliance on public electrical generation. Monies previously used for building public plants may be offered in form of tax credit for installation of personal solar equipment. Surely the great minds and leaders of our developed countries would not so limit us to nuclear alone based upon their own political inclinations, or narrow considerations. Particularly given the grave dangers to the continued existence of humanity if we do not get our act together.
Tell me something I don’t know. You miss the advantage of power plants providing the electicity for battery charge. Those are large scale plants and more effective pollution controls can be used than on automobiles.
Why get upset about Lithium batteries? We’ve already dumped anough Nickel-Cadmium batteries in land fills to kill millions of people. Maybe batteries should be controlled like Freon?
Electric cars are still a way better solution than gasoline run engines.
Especially as we find cleaner ways to produce electricity. Which we will and
we can. We need to make changes. The system we have right now is not working for the american people.
Right now we are funding big oil companies and the middle east. Both of
which do not! have our (the american people) best interest in mind. With electrical/hybrid
cars we would be funding more national energy companies, money that
is likely to be reinvested in the american middle class.
The fact that you don’t mention these major points in your article makes me wonder
what kind of “journalist” you are.
One additional question/thought. Why doesn’t the concept of hydrogen powered vehicles garner more discussion/research? It is true that current technologies make the production of hydrogen as pollution intensive as the refining of oil, the by-products generated at the point of consumption are far more environmentally palatable. And, there is an abundance of hydrogen rich resource available to tap.
At last, some commentary on the energy costs of manufacturing. We don’t need to make a whole new car every year! all we need to do is improve its performance and repairability. We had cars that got over 30MPG in the 50ies and could be repaired by the kid next door. I was one of them who went on to repairing Airplanes. Hey people. Do you wonder how and why we still can use the B-52. We keep many airplanes in like new condition by rebuilding what wears out. Why replace the whole thing when all that is needed is replacing a few wear parts? John