Even if you only ever burned coal to create the electricity to power EVs, that's still less CO2 than is released by burning gasoline.... ICE ['internal combustion engine'] vehicles only send between 16 to 25 percent of the energy created from burning gasoline to the wheels. The other 75 to 84 percent is lost due to inherent inefficiencies. Most of the loss is heat and noise, although about 10 percent is sacrificed to stuff like drivetrain losses, essentially the difference between crank horsepower and wheel horsepower....
Electric vehicles (eventually) send 87 to 91 percent of the energy in the battery to the wheels. I say "eventually" because 22 percent of that energy needs to be "recaptured" through regenerative braking. Put another way, 31 to 35 percent of the energy stored in the battery is lost for various reasons, but 22 percent can be regenerated by the "brakes."... To summarize, replacing gasoline with coal (which, for the record, is an abysmal idea) would reduce energy usage by 31 percent. Another way to think about it: Right now, Americans use about 9 million barrels of oil a day for our automotive transportation needs. Magically switching to EVs charged via burning coal would result in only needing the equivalent of about 6 million barrels. That's a big reduction.
That seems like a significant rebuttal on the one point, at least.
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There's another advantage, too: the relative efficiency of all of that energy being centrally generated at power plants and then distributed vs all of that energy being generated by several hundred million individual power plants--those ICE engines.
However, it's illustrative that he a) chose the worst case comparison rather than comparing with oil- or natural gas-fired (centrally located) power plants, which would be far cleaner than coal, and b) he chose to ignore the lack of pollution resulting from burning coal with modern burning and scrubbing facilities, which while still putting out more atmospheric CO2, is still pretty much non-polluting.
He's also...optimistic...on his brake-regeneration per centage. Even taking that number as reasonably accurate, it only applies to big city stop-and-go (i.e., lots of braking) driving. There's not a lot of braking in the less urbanized 'burbs, myriad of towns and villages, and out on the open road. And in my major suburb of Plano, TX, there's still not a lot of stop-and-go traffic, even on the most heavily traveled streets: the city's engineers, decades ago, figured out how to time the traffic lights to the speed limits and, as computers got better, how to let that timing adjust according to time of day and more-or-less real time traffic volume. And even us poor, dumb Texans figured out how to adjust our driving speeds to the traffic light timings.
Nor does he suggest when "eventually" might occur. Sounds to me like all the green jobs that will be created...sometime...and all that fusion power that's just around the corner.
Eric Hines
Final exam question: who gives a damn about CO2, unless you're in a closed room filled with it?
AlGore will be chortling to his grave at you!
Conversion of fuel to electricity loses a LOT of efficiency in the process...coal-fired power plants are around 30% efficient. I didn't see any mention of this rather important fact in the Motortrend article, although it is mentioned in the linked piece by Karin Kirk. She also puts the efficiency of combined cycle gas plants at 44%. While this may be true of older plants, if you build a new CCGT plant you can get more like 60% efficiency with the turbines available from GE or Siemens.
There are also losses in electrical transmission and distribution and in charging the battery and in pulling power out of it. Maybe another 10%.
He says "the energy required to produce an average EV's battery is equivalent to about 74 gallons of gas." That sounded low to me, so I did a little research. This paper:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2515-7620/ab5e1e
says battery cell manufacturing uses about 180 megajoules of energy per kwh of battery capacity. For a 100kwh battery, that would be 18000 MJ. Conversion to gallons of gasoline with that amount of energy yields a number of 136 gallons. BUT....if the energy used to produce the battery is in the form of electricity, then you also have to consider that energy losses required for the conversion of fuel to electricity. So, in practice, around 270 gallons of gasoline equivalent to make the battery.
This number does not include the energy used for the mining and processing of the materials and for transportation. There is an interesting analysis from a natural resources investment firm which says that the decline in costs for 'renewable' technologies, including batteries...which has generally been credited to technology improvements and manufacturing quantity increases...is really largely due to the reductions in energy prices over the period.
Sound like an argument lurking in there somewhere in favor of hybrid vehicles -- where the regenerative brakes capture just as from slowing an Internal Combustion Engine vehicle as they would from a fully electric vehicle.
Full disclosure: I'm a happy owner of a '22 Ford Maverick Hybrid. Just (barely) enough truck for the Texas suburban micro-ranch.
J Melcher...yes, I think there is a pretty good case for hybrids. But in California, IIRC, they'll be banned along with pure-internal-combustion cars. Nothing but pure electrics allowed.
Full disclosure: I'm a happy owner of a '22 Ford Maverick Hybrid.
Yeah, I liked my '16 vintage Fusion Hybrid, too. Ran like a top, got better fuel mileage than the equivalent pure ICE; although not by a lot.
But I didn't like the loss of trunk payload in favor of the volume the battery took up. I also didn't like either the car's price increment to accommodate the battery inclusion, and--since we tend to drive our cars into the ground--I wasn't looking forward to the cost of replacing the battery since its lifetime was significantly shorter than that of the car itself.
In the end, though, what really spoiled me was the CVT transmission, which has nothing to do with batteries.
In the end, I flipped it and went back to ICE cars. Nor will I buy another hybrid.
Eric Hines
Fundamentally, the world these people want can't exist. Yes, you can go from your bughive micro-apartment to the store and back with an EV without running out of charge. No the store doesn't have anything on its shelves, because the only way a city can exist is for a river of thousands of tons of goods per day entering, and thousands of tons of trash and waste per day leaving for the countryside, facilitated by a fleet of diesel semis.
For electric semis to work, there would have to be an infrastructure of stations where entire batteries could be quickly swapped out of the trucks and left to recharge. (Because no one can afford a day at each truck-stop recharging to move goods.) While something like this is physically possible, it doesn't exist, and it isn't politically possible. (It would require trust that a massively expensive battery could be swapped out. It would require the political will to protect low status people (dirty prole truckers) from Marie-Antoinette callousness such that their lives would remain possible.)
There would be nothing on the shelves at the grocery store, because fields are not plowed by electric tractors. That also requires diesel motors. For that matter, when the WEF gets done pressuring all western nations to forgo nitrogenating their soil, they'll exhaust it in a matter of years and turn all the arable land on Earth to desert. Making enough ammonia to farm food at the rate we need to farm it is an energy intensive process. It *could* be driven by nuclear power, but it won't.
The greens are bound and determined to create hell on earth.
toastedposts
Batteries are 1/30 the energy density by mass of hydrocarbon fuels. This isn't going to be solved by clever chemistry (because of the nature of the bonds involved in each). A difference in degree of this magnitude is a difference in kind: It's not something that engineering finesse is going to help you with when it comes to moving or manipulating large amounts of mass. (Plowing, shoveling, drilling, moving earth, moving goods.)
We can manage electric cars by making vehicles that are carbon-fiber soap suds carrying people only. Plunk a 5 ton load in the back, and you can't fake it anymore.
toastedposts
who gives a damn about CO2
Trees and plants do.
So by all means, let's eliminate CO2 so we won't be bothered by overgrowth and undergrowth stuff like apples, corn, pears, wheat.......
Hey, toastedpoasts, back in the eugenics thread I asked if you could recommend some sources for the theory of Roman collapse. Just a book or articles or whatever. Thanks!
Tom,
My apologies about missing your question. I've read a bunch of random stuff over the years whose source I've forgotten. Some of the late Roman stuff came out of skimming around in Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (11+ volumes - I can't claim to have actually read it all!). (Some really chilling stuff about the end-game where Goths and Vandals were besieging the Roman home cities. The aristocrats locked themselves in keeps within one of the cities with the last of the supplies and feasted while the destitute romans defending the walls were dying of starvation and begging the aristocrats for help in the most degrading terms. Bellesarius, sent from Byzantium to try to liberate Italy wondered why no one was cheering his arrival or helping him fight.)
There's also a biographer Plutarch who has some biographical stories about Roman generals in the early and late republic. Brutus and his failed attempt to save the Republic from Antony and Octavian during the civil war (Tragic: He had a very good shot. About half of the Romans outside of the capitol threw in with him.)
A later general of the empire who was trying to be a human being but was being given orders to attack and take various cities as slaves unprovoked for economic reasons.
toastedposts
Hey, thanks! I'm interested in this story, but just haven't made time to read anything on it.
I have (though haven't read) an abridged version of Gibbons, and it's a dictionary-sized doorstop.
How about all the C02 released when the Batteries catch on fire
https://www.foxnews.com/auto/tesla-fire-california-junkyard
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