– 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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1. The main issue is how do we replace gasoline in cars and diesel in trucks? That would reduce oil imports by 40% to 60% and break OPEC.
2. Assuming that this is our chief immediate goal, how can we do this fast and cheap?
3. Each alternative fuel has pluses and minuses and each is still developing.
4. History has taught us that the marketplace can make rational decisions. No one, however, is going to buy a car or truck if they can’t get this alternative fuel. Battery vehicles can use the power grid at night or, in hybrids, use an engine to generate electricity. Requiring (by law) that vehicles be built with flex fuel capability can also essentially solve this “chicken and egg” problem of creating the necessary infrastructure (i.e. if gas prices go up, all the gas stations will want and pay for pumps for methanol and ethanol.
5. This doesn’t solve every problem, but it does stop money to going to people who fix prices and endanger western security.
“Mark” mentioned that Hydrogen is the answer. Good try. Hydrogen is technically not a fuel in the use that Mark describes… It is a form of energy storage AKA a “battery”. Hydrogen must be produced, usually from electricity, which usually comes from coal. If we could produce it from nuclear, then we would have something useful.
The electric car technology exists here and now, it is only a matter of time before it becomes commercially viable and competitive with internal combustion. The issue of power generation is crucial to reducing carbon emissions, if the bulk of the extra electricity used is generated through burning fossil fuel then emissions may actually increase. Significant and immediate investment needs to be made worldwide in hydro, wave, wind, solar and most importantly nuclear power. Already there is international collaberation on atomic fusion power and this needs to be given utmost priority. The world would be far better off if the billions handed over to reckless greedy bankers were diverted to this cause.
According to what I know of Obama’s intentions, his priority is set not on exclusively electric cars but on flex-fuel hybrid ones. These cars can run on fossil fuel, on non-fossil fuel like ethanol, and on electricity. Their purely electrical autonomy can be enhanced simply by adding more batteries.
A second point I would like to make: the security and ecological concerns about nuclear are legitimate. There is no multi-century-proof solution for the management of nuclear waste. This waste will remain harmful for much longer periods than the life-span of any known former country or civilization. Not thinking about the future and the consequences of out choices is what lead us to the present situation in the first place (and here we can add the current financial predicament to the ongoing ecological one as results of this attitude). This is the reason why I frankly don’t understand why you didn’t even mention any renewable energy source in your text. It is bizarre. No, the electric car - or even Obama’s intelligent solution of a flex-fuel hybrid - will not do the trick on its own, but it is not meant to. We can no longer think that way: changing a variable at a time: history and government doesn’t work that way. Electric and flex-fuel hybrids will have to work in conjunction with the introduction of new renewable sources of energy.
Finally I would like to comment on the “solution” someone presented in one of the comments, namely the hydrogen-powered fuel-cell car. Everyone who has ever looked at these questions knows hydrogen is not a solution simply because it takes a lot of energy to compress the hydrogen, more than 50% of the energy you will be able to take from the final product. To this you must add transportation… Electricity, on the other hand, flows through power lines and doesn’t have to be compressed… Also, hydrogen itself is not a source of energy, just a “battery”. However, as such it is much less efficient than the ones we have available nowadays.
In five pages of responses an important trend in the discussion has been revealed.
We need a vision as broad as possible at this time of change, so that the direction we move toward, and the solutions we develop, are the most sustainable, least environmentally endangering, most flexible, and most liberating or empowering as possible.
The agenda is swaying between the corporate and government interests of the current power elites, and the vital interests of the ‘common’ people interested in maximum personal ‘bang for the buck’.
Systems and approaches chosen at a major crossroads like the present opportunity, will direct our development toward ‘Distributed’ power generation and ‘Flexible’ sources driving efficient electrical propulsion systems from personal vehicles to rapid rail,,, OR confirm the victory of major corporations and the political parties and representatives they pay with ‘donations’, in keeping ‘us’ the consumer units, treading their profit mills and paying their taxes to the maximum (unsustainable) levels.
The ‘petrodictators’ and their political front men, live in ‘Amerika’ too, and they would love to become uranium merchants, or purveyors of any limited resource.
Here is hoping we choose solar panels on the roofs, and wind and water wheels where we can, to hook into our common utilities systems and keep each other electric motoring into the future.
regards, Pacificolumbian
Diana’s 100% right. Dose anybody really believe we should fuel our vehicles from our mountain tops? Why would anyone want to plug in their car for six hours into a global warming, inneficient, coal fired power plant just to drive 20 miles. “Green Diesel” cars already go 600 miles on 10 gallons of oil from a hole in the ground gaining us over 100% more efficency, and run just like regular cars. We need to stop severing the tops off our mountains and install wind generators otherwise the only mountains left will be from all the discarded batteries. Once we start miking electrisity without fire we can shift to something else likely electric trains and light rail. The transistion away from oil and coal will eventually be mandated by supply. Use less coal and oil now so the transistion will be realitivly peacefull.
EESTOR doesn’t appear to be an abject scam, anyway, and if they deliver their capacitor it’ll just about save the world. It all seems to depend on their fancy ceramic holding off a few hundred volts at a 1-micrometer thickness. The Technology Review (MIT alum mag) article cited a lot of skepticism, but what’s exciting is that apparently the electrical math works, so from there on in it’s all materials science. In theory, the materials are up to it; they have to be manufactured in practice. Sooner or later, this is likely to happen. They’re talking about production in 2009, and yes, Lockheed is involved. An interesting point is that a fully-charged one of these things could probably go off like 10-20 pounds of TNT in an accident, so maybe they’ll need a housing like a post-9/11 subway trash can.
[...] Yes, you heard it from Diana Furchtgott, the former chief economist U.S. Department of Labor, via Reuters. The gist? You know the drill, even though EVss don’t pollute when running on batteries, [...]
It seems “nuculer” energy is integral to the conservative agenda. Is this Bechtel or Haliburton or a similar corpration speaking? When conservatives are willing to stop excluding a necessary part of the solution to climate change for being insufficient, I’ll be willing to take their nuclear energy claims and any debate about them seriously. Until then, give me more solar and wind with all their deficiencies and shortcomings.
Diana who are you working for? Unbelievable!
Listen to this crap people are saying below:
“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”.
Look at all these pathetic excuses. They aren’t widely available because up until now the people and governments that have a financial interest in Oil & gas guzzlers have crushed this industry, and we all know it. So long GM, Ford, Chrysler.
Trying to scare people by saying they can’t afford them. We aren’t that stupid. We all know that when supply increases prices fall, simple isn’t it.
‘They have short range’. What crap. We are smart enough to figure out a solution to the battery issue. Put enough money on the table and the solution will magically appear.
‘Batteries catch on fire’. Last I knew so did gasoline. I also heard that the big 3 x US carmakers have just gone up in smoke, and guess what I think the Chinese have beaten you to the punch on the plug-in electric car.
‘Charging is impractical’. Really… I think sucking in toxic fumes, and paying through the nose to get around is a little impractical, but what would I know?
And what’s this arguement about Uranium is dangerous, and coal is polluting. Well the fact is we don’t need either. The keyword here is ‘RENEWABLE’. Uranium, Coal, Oil are not. We don’t need any of these for plug-in electric cars.
All you need to do is combine the renewable technology. Solar, Wind, Wave, Thermal, the list goes on. By combining these you cancel the arguements that ‘the sun doesn’t shine at night’, ‘the wind doesn’t blow all the time’. These are all BS arguements.
Then you have those that want to talk about ‘baseload power’. Another fools arguement. With all renewables combined, and adequate storage you will create excess energy.
See the great thing about an energy source being ‘renewable’ is that it doesn’t run out.
Their will never be a supply issue, like their is with Oil, Coal & Uranium. Leave that rubbish in the ground. We don’t need it for this revolution
Diana who are you working for? Unbelievable!
Listen to this crap people are saying below:
“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”.
Look at all these pathetic excuses. They aren’t widely available because up until now the people and governments that have a financial interest in Oil & gas guzzlers have crushed this industry, and we all know it. So long GM, Ford, Chrysler.
Trying to scare people by saying they can’t afford them. We aren’t that stupid. We all know that when supply increases prices fall, simple isn’t it.
‘They have short range’. What crap. We are smart enough to figure out a solution to the battery issue. Put enough money on the table and the solution will magically appear.
‘Batteries catch on fire’. Last I knew so did gasoline. I also heard that the big 3 x US carmakers have just gone up in smoke, and guess what I think the Chinese have beaten you to the punch on the plug-in electric car.
‘Charging is impractical’. Really… I think sucking in toxic fumes, and paying through the nose to get around is a little impractical, but what would I know?
And what’s this arguement about Uranium is dangerous, and coal is polluting. Well the fact is we don’t need either. The keyword here is ‘RENEWABLE’. Uranium, Coal, Oil are not. We don’t need any of these for plug-in electric cars.
All you need to do is combine the renewable technology. Solar, Wind, Wave, Thermal, the list goes on. By combining these you cancel the arguements that ‘the sun doesn’t shine at night’, ‘the wind doesn’t blow all the time’. These are all BS arguements.
Then you have those that want to talk about ‘baseload power’. Another fools arguement. With all renewables combined, and adequate storage you will create excess energy.
See the great thing about an energy source being ‘renewable’ is that it doesn’t run out.
Their will never be a supply issue, like their is with Oil, Coal & Uranium. Leave that rubbish in the ground. We don’t need it for this revolution?
And electric cars will not stave off Peak Oil impacts.
Independent studies conclude that Peak Oil production will occur (or has occurred) between 2005 to 2010 (projected year for peak in parentheses), as follows:
* Association for the Study of Peak Oil (2007)
* Rembrandt Koppelaar, Editor of “Oil Watch Monthly” (2008 to 2010)
* Tony Eriksen, Oil stock analyst (2008)
* Matthew Simmons, Energy investment banker, (2007)
* T. Boone Pickens, Oil and gas investor (2007)
* U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (2005)
* Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Princeton professor and retired shell Geologist (2005)
* Sam Sam Bakhtiari, Retired Iranian National Oil Company geologist (2005)
* Chris Skrebowski, Editor of “Petroleum Review” (2010)
* Sadad Al Husseini, former head of production and exploration, Saudi Aramco (2008)
* Energy Watch Group in Germany (2006)
Independent studies indicate that global crude oil production will now decline from 74 million barrels per day to 60 million barrels per day by 2015. During the same time, demand will increase. Oil supplies will be even tighter for the U.S. As oil producing nations consume more and more oil domestically they will export less and less. Because demand is high in China, India, the Middle East, and other oil producing nations, once global oil production begins to decline, demand will always be higher than supply. And since the U.S. represents one fourth of global oil demand, whatever oil we conserve will be consumed elsewhere. Thus, conservation in the U.S. will not slow oil depletion rates significantly.
Alternatives will not even begin to fill the gap. And most alternatives yield electric power, but we need liquid fuels for tractors/combines, 18 wheel trucks, trains, ships, and mining equipment. The independent scientists of the Energy Watch Group conclude in a 2007 report titled: “Peak Oil Could Trigger Meltdown of Society:”
“By 2020, and even more by 2030, global oil supply will be dramatically lower. This will create a supply gap which can hardly be closed by growing contributions from other fossil, nuclear or alternative energy sources in this time frame.”
http://www.energywatchgroup.org/fileadmi n/global/pdf/EWG_Press_Oilreport_22-10-2 007.pdf
With increasing costs for gasoline and diesel, along with declining taxes and declining gasoline tax revenues, states and local governments will eventually have to cut staff and curtail highway maintenance. Eventually, gasoline stations will close, and state and local highway workers won’t be able to get to work. We are facing the collapse of the highways that depend on diesel and gasoline powered trucks for bridge maintenance, culvert cleaning to avoid road washouts, snow plowing, and roadbed and surface repair. When the highways fail, so will the power grid, as highways carry the parts, large transformers, steel for pylons, and high tension cables from great distances. With the highways out, there will be no food coming from far away, and without the power grid virtually nothing modern works, including home heating, pumping of gasoline and diesel, airports, communications, and automated building systems.
This is documented in a free 48 page report that can be downloaded, website posted, distributed, and emailed: http://www.peakoilassociates.com/POAnaly sis.html
I used to live in NH-USA, but moved to a sustainable place. Anyone interested in relocating to a nice, pretty, sustainable area with a good climate and good soil? Email: clifford dot wirth at yahoo dot com or give me a phone call which operates here as my old USA-NH number 603-668-4207. http://survivingpeakoil.blogspot.com/
New battery technologies are coming to market next year, specifically the ceramic EESU from EESTOR. they have a page on wikipedia and are working with ZENN Motors and Lougheed Martin.
the battery refills in 3-6 minutes and is much less damaging to the environment.
You are 1 of the most simple thinking persons ever seen.
Please look around you on other continents and see what they achieved on car- development.
Check this 6 persons car, costs +/- 4000 dollar made in South Africa, topspeed 135 km/p/h. during 4 hrs.
Link: http://www.optimalenergy.co.za/
These cars are being sold in Europe within 2 years.
How can G.M. and Ford and Chrysler compete to that ?
Tell me at weballeycat@zeelandnet.nl
David Salzman said: “SOME PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS: One comment claimed that the Sun is dimming and we should burn fuels to warm ourselves up. A number of people have made equivalently loopy, uninformed comments about electricity being a flex fuel, which would only be the case if you planned to keep your car for more than 50 years.”
You’re looking at it from completely the wrong angle. The strength of BEV as a “flex” vehicle is not in each individual car, it’s in the fact that the entire fleet can run on anything that produces electricity. I’m not planning to keep any individual car for fifty years, but I would certainly like to know that we aren’t going to have to keep replacing the entire auto infrastructure every few decades because we keep picking short-term fuel sources. You go with BEV and then you gradually take the electrical infrastructure over to renewable sources as technology allows. I’m not sure how the fact that oil is finite isn’t a problem — it seems like the single biggest problem to me. Switch to something that, for all intents and purposes, is “infinite,” at least insofar as there are going to be sources of electricity for far longer than there are going to be people needing it.
To David Salzman, Ph.D. you are not much smarter than the rest. What we need to look at is the WHOLE picture not the small nitpicky items. What is the COST in dollars,energy,labor, and materials to build replacement gas cars every 5-7 years vs. electric which have fewer moving parts and have nearly ZERO GAS/OIL/GREASE components. The lifespan of a total electric car is far longer than a gasoline conterpart. Materials have energy costs too. Therefore we need a full side by side markup of costs and benefits from materials birth to death.
Recycling,overall Cost(A $50K car does not fly),
environmental,cost of fuel,a true accounting of subsidies, and national security(CONTROL of OIL and it’s TRUE COST) need to be added to the equation. When ALL these things are put on the spreadsheet the TRUE COST can then be stated. Until then this is all academic lip service. Who wants to sit down and run numbers?
Since folks are interested, according to the Energy Information Administration, USA Department of Energy, complete combustion of these fuels produces the following tons of carbon (as a component of gasses, we may assume) per billion Btu of energy (I assume based on 100% efficiency). (There are about 3.4 Btu per watthour, and about 2,500 Btu per horsepower hour. Note that as David says, every conversion to another form (e.g. chemical -> electrical -> chemical -> electrical -> mechanical) has an efficiency factor less than 1.0.
Coal ———— 26
Most Petroleum — 19-21.5
Natural Gas —– 14
David is probably right; I had food on the stove before and was anxious about it. Plug-in probably isn’t a green answer until we get a lot of solar on line. People will either need to charge swap-out batteries at home, or charge them where they park during the day, because there’s no solar at night. For night air conditioning, if we can’t make batteries work, it’s just possible that we’ll need nukes, but a lot of us are going to look really hard at that one! (And I’m still not writing off cellulosic ethanol for vehicles.)
Pathetic. Even if we were to produce electricity for electric cars entirely from coal, it remains that, with about a dollar of electricity, they run for more than 60 miles. It means that the coal needed for that electricity is very little compared to the fuel used by a normal car. OK, let’s go ahead with oil, the next recession is behind the corner, when oil hits again $100. This article is tantamount to saying that wind generation is anti-ecological because it kills birds. But coal power plants kill human beings. It’s either you are not well informed, or you serve the world’s most powerful and profitable industry, oil.
David, a utility-scale, fixed electric power plant is far more efficient than the little engine in a hybrid. That’s about the only thing you said that I definitely take issue with. You didn’t seem to say where to get energy without global warming.
As a physicist, I am appalled by the ratio of emphatic enthusiasm in the comments above to the thermodynamic realities.
The problem with oil is not that it is finite, but rather that it is dirty. And coal is even dirtier and more plentiful. The goal should therefore be to reduce the supply of coal-generating power plants. It is counterproductive to increase demand for electricity and expect the supply to fall in response. A few points:
HYDROGEN IS NOT A FUEL. Hydrogen is just a battery, moving energy from one time and place to another. All the energy it releases needed to be put in when creating the hydrogen in the first place. That can be done today by way of metallic gallium-aluminum meeting water, but the life-cycle efficiency of the Hall process for creating aluminum metal from aluminum oxide with non-carbon electrodes is only 28% (compared to 33% for wall-plug electricity). Perhaps it will be possible in the future to engineer a microbe to produce copious hydrogen gas, but that could be many decades away. As for solar (photovoltaic or thermovoltaic), wind, and other renewable ways to generate hydrogen or electricity cleanly, cars are the last place to use that stored energy, because fixed facilities are a more economic place to use the power, and efficiency is thrown away by every conversion into a different energy form, e.g. into and out of hydrogen. Sorry, but that’s physics, not engineering.
ALL-ELECTRIC CARS ARE FILTHY. Electricity is the ultimate NIMBY scam because 2/3 of the energy content of the coal used to generate the electricity is lost in generation and transmission. That means that it takes the energy equivalent of 32 lbs of coal at the power plant to deliver the energy equivalent of 1 gallon of gasoline (3.8 kg of coal equivalent to 1 liter), emitting 3 times the pollution. Thermodynamics tells us that the cleanest and most efficient way to consume a fuel is to do so at the point of use (the car), and not convert into any intermediary forms (like electricity). Even if the electricity is generated cleanly, increasing demand for it keeps those dirty coal plants online where reducing demand would retire them sooner. Gas-electric hybrids make sense unless they plug into the wall, at which point they throw away all their environmental benefits. All-electric vehicles NEVER make sense environmentally, unless small enough (golf cart?) to avoid moving a lot of mass.
WHY DO SOMETHING STUPID NOW IN THE HOPE THAT IT BECOMES SANE LATER? Electricity is not a flex fuel. The car fleet turns over on a 5-7 year average time scale, whereas power plants are an investment for a good fraction of a century. Buying an electric vehicle increases demand for electricity when what you want to do is reduce the supply of electricity so the dirtiest sources can be taken off-line and retired.
JMMX writes, “Let’s face it, the Hudson Institute is paid apologist for the Nuclear industry. So no wonder she writes that Nuclear is the solution. The conservative agenda has hidden the costs of the nuclear industry while subsidizing it heavily. At the same time, Ronald Reagan, in an orgy of short-sightedness, cut the very modest support that the government was providing to the solar industry.” I wouldn’t know, but suppose JMMX’s charges are true: so what? The thermodynamic irresponsibility of all-electric and plug-in vehicles derives from physics, not politics. Deal with it.
SOME PEOPLE ARE IDIOTS: One comment claimed that the Sun is dimming and we should burn fuels to warm ourselves up. A number of people have made equivalently loopy, uninformed comments about electricity being a flex fuel, which would only be the case if you planned to keep your car for more than 50 years.
Seriously, the key point is a simple one: an all-electric vehicle is an environmental disaster, and the plug-in portion of a gas/electric hybrid is too. That’s because coal is filthy, and even if another source were used to generate the power, every conversion into another form of energy (battery, hydrogen, etc.) throws away a huge fraction of the energy content, so should emphatically be avoided.