Autoblog

Does not apply for me, I have installed solar panels on my garage roof. I have plenty of power now to charge my future plug in car.

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Powerplants are much more efficient than gasoline engines. Powerplants like efficiency cause it makes them more money.

And like Ive said a thousand times if your that eco friendly leave cars alone and go after construction equipment. Construction equipment accounts for the majority of pollution and are not required to go through any emissions requirements.

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sk - that is pretty cool but solar panels are really expensive. How long is the buyback - Just wondering? Also, I live in Western Pa. I think we get like 52 days of sunshine a year (no joke), is it even possible to use Solar Panels here? I would add them up there in a second if the cost ratio makes any sense. I know BP actually makes solar panels as a roofing poduct so the panels are actually flush with the roof and hardly noticable. Hopefully the tech gets developed to a level that the panels will work even areas like mine and the price point drops.

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Power plants are not inefficient. They are far more efficient than a small gas engine, because they can be, because they run 24/7. There's no concerns of weight, little of size and they are well maintained. They have scrubbers on their smokestacks to reduce their trace emissions (like NOxes) even further.

Additionally, we can replace them with other plants that don't use oil if we want. And we can do so without having to change any of the devices that use electricity. So one day you can be using coal to turn your house and car and the next day you can be using sunshine and rainbows, without having to replace the stuff in your house.

Electricity makes a lot of sense, if we can find a good way to store enough of it to get a decent range.

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I would still rather use natural gas from North America and Coal from West Virginia to power my car with electricity than Oil from OPEC. In the future we can switch to more Nukes and renewables to produce the electricity. The nice thing is nothing changes on my end...I still just plug it in.

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Adam:
CARB regulates construction equipment emissions.

http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/ordiesel/ordiesel.htm

CARB doesn't say offroad vehicles account for 70% of emissions, but they say they account for about half of particulate matter in the air in California.

http://www.arb.ca.gov/msprog/ordiesel/presentations/nov16-04_6slides_per_page.pdf

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Like hell they are more efficient!

On a per-watt basis it produces 2x more CO2 to burn coal to run a steam generator than oil, diesel, or gas.

Thats PRIOR to the ungodly resistance that hundreds of miles of high-tension wires it has to travel. Scrubbing systems regardless, when your electricity is made in a power plant, you essentially have to produce each Watt twice just to get it to you.

And all these fancy sunshine and rainbows ideas have been on the table for 30 years and borne 0 fruit.

Likely outcome? Strip-mine more coal in the short-run.

And even if they built a windmill on every acre, that costs men, money, resources. Then all the wiring, control centers, sub-stations.

Expect the price of electricity to increase along with food and fuel over the next decade.
And that affects businesses and people that don't own cars.

Effect on the economy by switching to plug-ins? Negligable. Welcome to recession. Grab a snickers because you'll be here a while.

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Saving gas and sending less of my money to countries that hate the USA are my primary concerns. If that means charging up my electric car from a coal power plant then so be it. National security is my priority, that does not mean I don't car about the enviroment, it's a matter of priorities.

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Then you are misinformed. Most of our unrefined oil comes from Canada. By a huge margin.

The reason oil prices increase is because speculators use scare tactics, like crap going on in the middle east to drive up the price of a barrel of oil on Walstreet.

Its a sound investment. The more people think the world is low on oil or that today's bombing in Iraq actually affects US oil supply (please), the more the price goes up, the more their oil futures (essentially stock) goes up.

Now they are just riding the wave of fear, and it increases by the day.

Has nothing to do with actual supplies from the Middle East. Thats very patriotic of you, but unfounded.

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Yes, we'll burn more coal in the short run. Yes, the price of electricity will go up, but note that will happen whether we use electric cars or not. The price of virtually all energy is going up.

Why do you mention CO2 and scrubbers in the same argument? Scrubbers only reduce trace emissions, they don't affect primary emissions (CO2 and H2O vapor). You'd need carbon capture and storage for that.

Yes, coal produces a lot of CO2. But even when run on all-coal electricity, electric cars are competitive on CO2 to gas cars and also afford us the ability to switch to other power sources without huge impacts to our way of life. You don't have to buy a new car if OPEC turns the taps off, you just have to reduce your usage until plants that use other fuels come on line to replace the electricity made from oil and gas and then you are off and running again.

http://ohmexcited.googlepages.com/CO2.htm

'The good news is that in most "real world" conditions in the US, electric vehicles could reduce CO2 emissions significantly. However, coal remains a very dirty polluter. EV's with modern batteries compete against internal combustion engines even assuming coal as the fuel source. But coal can reduce the electric vehicle's environmental return on investment significantly. It's the single biggest emitter of CO2 in the US. If the government is ever to get a handle on American CO2 emissions, in a world of EV's or not, something serious needs to be done about coal plants. Either by carbon sequestration aka "clean coal" or phasing out with replacement of nuclear, wind, solar, or other renewables. In fact, if all American cars and light trucks were eliminated from US roads, it would only reduce American CO2 output by 20-25%.'

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I get 'could be cleaner' from this.

All I see here is the government admitting that coal is dirty and that 'something needs to be done'.

I mentioned scrubber systems because you said they were so clean of particulate emissions, and I said 'regardless of that, they are still dirty as far as CO2 goes. It made sense.

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BigMcLargeHuge, transmission/distribution efficiency is greater than 92% for electric power in the U.S.

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I mentioned NOx. NOx isn't particulates, NOx is a gas.

That paper is from some dude who posted it to googlepages, it isn't a government study.

It says electric cars are already better on CO2, except perhaps in a few areas of the country. And it can easily be made better if we want, unlike having when the fuel is burned directly in the vehicle, which means trying to get old cars off the road to improve the situation.

It seems to show, under seemingly real-world conditions how using electricity to power cars is environmentally sound today and can even be better in the future. We just need to figure out how to make them cost-effective and functional enough to be useful.

It's a great first step and using electricity instead of burning petroleum directly can offer us plenty of options for improving things even more in the future.

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Iran is a major player in the Natural Gas exporting business while US hardly produces enough for itself. Either way, the higher the MPG the better regardless of the engine running in oil or natural gas or electric.

BTW, powerplants in US are far far more efficient than the naysayers would admit. Can't say the same about countries outside of western world.

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@BigMcLargeHuge
Come on man, your most of your argument is on the basis that America is run on or will be run on 100% coal.
"On a per-watt basis it produces 2x more CO2 to burn coal to run a steam generator than oil, diesel, or gas."
That's really misleading, if you are talking only about steam generators that may be true, but we are talking about electricity replacing the ICE (I don't see cars driving around that run on steam generators). And compared to the ICE, electricity is cleaner.

http://www.evworld.com/evguide.cfm
http://www.slate.com/id/2179609/

Analysis shows an EV is cleaner than a normal gasoline powered car even on 100% coal. There was another analysis done by the japanese that factored in the whole life-cycle (including the battery production) and EVs on 100% turned out slightly better than gasoline cars, though not as significantly.
http://www.autobloggreen.com/2006/12/24/lifecycle-analysis-of-gas-hybrid-and-electric-cars/
Fact of the matter is an EV is cleaner than a gasoline car. Just the fact a typical ICE is only around 20% efficient should make that clear.

Remember we are powered 49% on coal, but the rest is not. Depending on how your local area is powered, you will see varying levels of pollution, and don't forget offpeak power. Yes, for some areas which are powered overwhelming by coal (like West Virginia), CO2 emissions will only slightly decrease and other emissions like NOx might actually increase, but for a majority of places in the US that's not going to be the case. You can even assume a EV/PHEV is worst than gasoline cars using coal and there's only a few places in the US where that will be true. It's common sense our grid will have to improve in terms of pollution and expand anyways. And none of this will be happening overnight. It will be a gradual process, so as more PHEVs get introduced, the power companies can get ready for it. The DOE showed the grid is ready for PHEVs to replace 86% of the cars in the US.

By centralizing our energy production and pollution sources, it's not hard to see it would be a lot easier to regulate, and again you don't have to make any changes to your car to benefit from new technology or just cleaner ways to use current technology. And electricity has such a diverse mixture of ways to make energy it's not a bad investment to switch cars into it too.

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That's an important point and well-raised.

A few mitigating points:

1) It is much easier to replace a few sources, like power plants, as technology changes, rather than to replace the power plants in a million individual cars.

2) In software engineering, we would consider electricity an "interface" for power. Whatever the ultimate source of energy (nuclear, oil, coal, solar, etc.), it can all generate electricity fairly efficiently and most all consumers of power can be designed to consume electricity. We have a pre-built distribution system for electricity (unlike, say, hydrogen or ethanol). It is therefore more efficient to build appliances (and a car is an appliance) to use the common interface of electricity if possible because you can then freely substitute the most efficient ultimate fuel on the generation side without changing the design of all existing cars or of the distribution system.

3) As distributed generation (i.e., generation in every home rather than in a central location like a power plant) is made more practical through advances in solar, wind, etc., once again the common interface of electricity will allow existing cars build to that interface to take advantage of a pre-existing infrastructure without costly retrofitting and coversions.

4) Before distributed generation becomes reality, we cn take advantage of time-of-day variances in electricity prices. Charging your car at night, when industrial demand is low, would potentially be quite cheap and eek the last cent out of the our large capital investment in centralized plants, making them even more capital efficient than they are now.

That said, the immediate source of a huge increase in electric demand would be coal and if electric cars were quickly hugely adopted, it would worsen C02 emissions. That's why plug-in cars have to be one aspect of a multi-pronged effort that also attacks generation side of the problem.

I'm deep into this, so sorry if this sounds like techno-babble.

Cheers,
Jon

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Lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries ARE dangerous. Improperly used, or damaged, and they can auto-ignite and BURN at about 1500 degrees F.

Thanks, but I think I'll stick with gasoline that can spill without instantly creating an inferno without an ignition source.

Sorry, but electricity is not a primary source of energy, unless you are Doc Brown, and harnessing natural lightning.

converting something INTO electricity, and transferring it, and storing it, and then expending it is just more inefficiency, if you look at the whole system, not just the automobile itself.

between capacity and discharge rate, a car can't physically hold enough electricity in storage to compete with a standard liquid fuel tank. And petro-based fuels are primary energy sources, that other than a bit of refinement to separate heavier oils from lighter gasoline, kerosene, etc... does not require energy format conversion, nor wasteful transport. (electric transmission lines and transformers waste electrical energy as heat. A pipeline or truck does not usually spill fuel and waste it.)

Sorry, but re-inventing the wheel here, so to speak, is not gaining us much, but is likely going to COST a lot for less result.

A bit of efficiency gain here or there isn't bad, but I have yet to hear of another primary energy source being touted. Even hydrogen is a transitional energy source. Splitting it from water, only to re-combine it again is a shell game, too, which also takes a huge amount of electrical energy for less net kinetic energy where the tires meet the road.

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Aprime - I totally agree. Looks like the GM Volt hype has struck a cord with Toyota. The Volt is obviously more than vapor if Toyota has taken so much notice that they have either changed plans or decided to release information that used to kept closer to the vest. I guess expensive gas has some benificial merit, in a sadistic way

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