While most of a recent Seeking Alpha article titled 'Plug-in Vehicles and Their Dirty Little Secret' with 444 comments and counting is correct, there's a lot more to the electric vehicle story than the author's focus on emissions would lead the reader to believe.
EV Emissions and the Present and Future Grid
From an emissions perspective, running your car on electricity is about 25% cleaner than a standard car that gets about 25 mpg. But compared to a hybrid that gets more like 45-50 mpg, electric cars produce more emissions (e.g., carbon).
It's also true that more charging will likely occur at night, when the power produced is more heavily coal-weighted. However, while charging at night is worse from an emissions perspective it is much better from a grid stability and grid transmission perspective.
It's also worth noting that the mix of generation sources that provide power to the grid is changing - it is getting cleaner. Coal's share of the gird (in the U.S.) has gone from ~55% in the late 1980s to ~45% today. This trend will continue, especially as the U.S. continues to retire many of its older coal plants and replaces them with natural gas power plants, and more wind/solar.
The Environmental Protection Agency continues to tighten emissions regulations on power plants, so even newer coal plants (the few that will get built) are much cleaner and more efficient than the current ones. So using today's grid mix in assessing EVs ignores the improvement in emissions we'll be seeing in the future as the grid becomes cleaner.
How Much Do Electric Cars Really Cost?
There is one misleading remark the author makes on cost: in many cases running your car on electricity is actually cheaper than gasoline. $3.00/gal gasoline for a car that gets 30 mpg = $0.10/mile. If that car ran on electricity, it would get about 3 miles / kWh, and so for an electricity cost of $0.12/kWh (the US average), that works out to only $0.04/mile, or 60% less.
But this is only one example. Californians pay a lot for electricity, so it could be more expensive to run the car on electricity. Note: PG&E is working on rate structures that make it cheaper to charge at night, thus helping improve the economics for electric cars.
However, the cost of battery packs is expensive, so if you amortize the cost of the battery pack over the lifetime mileage of the pack, then that cost/mile obviously goes up for EVs. But is it really fair to do that? Do we similarly amortize the cost of a gasoline engine, fuel system, tank, etc? No. But without question, these battery packs are expensive, so the costs of the cars will be higher.
Why Electric Vehicles Truly Matter
So what's really behind all this fuss about rechargeable cars? If it's not about saving money, and not about reducing emissions, then what's left?
Energy security.
The biggest challenge our worldwide energy system faces is the near complete monopoly that oil has on the transportation sector. We heat our homes using a variety of energy sources. We make electricity using a variety of energy sources. But when it comes to the 3rd category of energy consumption (transportation) it is essentially all oil.
And making things worse is the fact that the U.S. imports about 2/3 of its oil, and 40% of those imports come from OPEC. This is not a very encouraging situation for whole host of reasons and warrants a separate article.
Hybrids help reduce oil consumption, which is obviously good for reducing emissions, fuel costs, and it helps reduce dependence on oil imports. But it does little to break oil's monopoly on the auto and overall transportation sector.
We need to find alternatives to oil, and the longer we wait the more painful it will become.
(Note: for more information on electric vehicles check out MIT's EV team page here and this recent report from the MIT Energy Initiative.)
EV Emissions and the Present and Future Grid
From an emissions perspective, running your car on electricity is about 25% cleaner than a standard car that gets about 25 mpg. But compared to a hybrid that gets more like 45-50 mpg, electric cars produce more emissions (e.g., carbon).
It's also true that more charging will likely occur at night, when the power produced is more heavily coal-weighted. However, while charging at night is worse from an emissions perspective it is much better from a grid stability and grid transmission perspective.
It's also worth noting that the mix of generation sources that provide power to the grid is changing - it is getting cleaner. Coal's share of the gird (in the U.S.) has gone from ~55% in the late 1980s to ~45% today. This trend will continue, especially as the U.S. continues to retire many of its older coal plants and replaces them with natural gas power plants, and more wind/solar.
The Environmental Protection Agency continues to tighten emissions regulations on power plants, so even newer coal plants (the few that will get built) are much cleaner and more efficient than the current ones. So using today's grid mix in assessing EVs ignores the improvement in emissions we'll be seeing in the future as the grid becomes cleaner.
How Much Do Electric Cars Really Cost?
There is one misleading remark the author makes on cost: in many cases running your car on electricity is actually cheaper than gasoline. $3.00/gal gasoline for a car that gets 30 mpg = $0.10/mile. If that car ran on electricity, it would get about 3 miles / kWh, and so for an electricity cost of $0.12/kWh (the US average), that works out to only $0.04/mile, or 60% less.
But this is only one example. Californians pay a lot for electricity, so it could be more expensive to run the car on electricity. Note: PG&E is working on rate structures that make it cheaper to charge at night, thus helping improve the economics for electric cars.
However, the cost of battery packs is expensive, so if you amortize the cost of the battery pack over the lifetime mileage of the pack, then that cost/mile obviously goes up for EVs. But is it really fair to do that? Do we similarly amortize the cost of a gasoline engine, fuel system, tank, etc? No. But without question, these battery packs are expensive, so the costs of the cars will be higher.
Why Electric Vehicles Truly Matter
So what's really behind all this fuss about rechargeable cars? If it's not about saving money, and not about reducing emissions, then what's left?
Energy security.
The biggest challenge our worldwide energy system faces is the near complete monopoly that oil has on the transportation sector. We heat our homes using a variety of energy sources. We make electricity using a variety of energy sources. But when it comes to the 3rd category of energy consumption (transportation) it is essentially all oil.
And making things worse is the fact that the U.S. imports about 2/3 of its oil, and 40% of those imports come from OPEC. This is not a very encouraging situation for whole host of reasons and warrants a separate article.
Hybrids help reduce oil consumption, which is obviously good for reducing emissions, fuel costs, and it helps reduce dependence on oil imports. But it does little to break oil's monopoly on the auto and overall transportation sector.
We need to find alternatives to oil, and the longer we wait the more painful it will become.
(Note: for more information on electric vehicles check out MIT's EV team page here and this recent report from the MIT Energy Initiative.)
John Petersen's response (reposted from SeekingAlpha comments): I'd quibble with you over cost per mile, because the accountant in me goes immediately to total cost of ownership over the life of a vehicle, including depreciation, insurance and maintenance, to make the cost per mile calculation.
ReplyDeleteA more important question goes to whether we're better off making a small number of plug-ins or a much larger number of HEVs. My favorite example is that a Leaf uses a 24 kWh battery pack to save 400 gallons of fuel per year while a Prius uses a 1.5 kWh battery pack to save 160 gallons. It seems to me that a society concerned with energy security would rather have a 16 unit Prius fleet and save 2,400 gallons than a one unit Volt fleet that saves 400.
My (The PolyCapitalist's) response to John's above response:
ReplyDeleteThings to consider when looking at the total cost of ownership accounting picture:
Maintenance costs on a gasoline car are far higher than a pure EV. With an EV you have no lubricating oil, air filters, oil filters, spark plugs, catalytic converter, a much simpler transmission. But you will have to replace the battery in an EV, which could offset these costs depending on how long the pack lasts and what a replacement will cost in the future (probably a lot less than the cost today).
Any total cost of ownership analysis must include the cost of the U.S.'s oil addiction. The MIT report referred to in my previous comment (link at the bottom of this comment) references a DOE study in which 'oil addiction' has cost the US about $5.5 trillion since 1970. Have you factored this into your TCO calculations?
In regards to the point you make about HEVs vs. EVs, I think you're missing the key idea: a Nissan LEAF doesn't simply save 400 gallons per year. More importantly, it runs w/o oil and helps break the monopoly of oil on the auto sector. That's the crucial point.
We aren't trying to simply use less oil per car, which is what an HEV does. As we add more cars and trucks to the road, all those additional cars will offset lower oil use per car, and our total oil consumption could wind up even higher. And there are limits to how far we can push the efficiency of a gasoline engine.
Instead, we want to power the transportation sector w/o oil - not just less oil per car. That will take time. By focusing on HEVs we're delaying solving the real long-term problem.
John, overall I think you're basing your analysis on what you see today rather than a vision of tomorrow.
MIT Energy Initiative report below:
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2011/01/mitei-20110113.html