There is a problem with the electric vehicle environmentalist community. Many people don’t consider where the electricity that is used to charge those EVs comes from.
Imagine a community that uses 60MW-hr of night time electricity per night that comes from hydroelectric and nuclear, and 30MW-hr per from coal or natural gas, and 10MW-hr from wind. The community uses 100MW-hr of electricity per night. Now imagine that there is a sudden surge in popularity of electric vehicles in this community. The community now uses 200MW-hr of electricity per night. Now where does that extra electricity come from? Hint: no new nuclear nor hydro electric can be built, and solar doesn’t work at night.
That community gets that extra 100MW-hr of night time electricity from coal, natural gas, and wind. The community now uses 200MW-hr of night time electricity. 60MW-hr still comes from hydro electric and nuclear, but now an additional 140MW-hr is needed instead of 40MW-hr. Now 35MW-hr instead of 10 comes from wind, and 105MW-hr instead of 30 comes from coal and natural gas. By going green with EVs and doubling the electricity consumption of the community, the amount of night time pollution from coal and natural gas burning is now 3.5 TIMES AS MUCH!
Natural gas is much more likely. Weather related sources like solar and wind can only be supplemented by a source that starts up quickly, and that’s natural gas. Coal plants take too long to heat up. They have to be used continuously to produce electrical energy.
Who says they don’t? I suggest you do some research before making that statement.
Why would there be a sudden surge? People aren’t just going to abandon their ICE vehicles overnight. It’s extremely naive to think that would happen. The infrastructure is going to grow as fast as the market. Why do you think otherwise? What proof do you have?
You’re making a lot of unsubstantiated assumptions. I suggest you do more research. I have. It’s not that difficult.
How about a slow increase in EV popularity? It doesn’t really change anything. You disregarded that solar panels don’t work at night even though I specifically mentioned this in my night time EV charging example. I really shouldn’t argue this topic with you anymore since it’s just going to be more verbal gymnastics and out of context quoting to create straw men.
There are solar farms in Nevada that can provide energy after dark, they have 25 to 50 megawatt storage batteries. There are several more solar farms being built with up to 380 megawatt storage batteries.
The Anderson study is pretty bogus, but so are all the others to some extent. They all look at one aspect like it is stand alone and attribute all costs to that attribute.
For example Anderson includes dead head time in home charging and the charging time. I don’t have an EV but I’m pretty sure that if I had one and a home charger, I would not drive around for two hours looking for a charger nor would I stand around and watch it charge the vehicle.
It appears to me that none of the people who are writing these reports actually own an EV. I’d rather hear from someone who actually owns one and is objective about the costs.
Battery technology will improve over time as long as there is a market for the EVs.
Solar power using empty land is not a good use of the land when there are millions of acres of rooftops on commercial buildings available. Wind is viable in some places but the long haul grid is still AC in most places and that causes excessive losses.
A DC grid for wind power would be better, in fact changing the whole transmission (long haul) grid to DC would save a lot of electricity. The local grid would still be AC as that is superior for distribution.
The elephant in the room is that if we were to switch to all EVs, what would we do with all that gasoline that is a hazardous by product from refining oil to make all the other products we use everyday. I suppose it could all go into gas powered generators.
In the end, we will reach a point where we will have to accept nuclear power and build new nuclear power plants, whether water cooled fission like the current ones of metal cooled fission that are proven to work or fusion that produces more power than is consumes is ever achieved.
If we don’t embrace nuclear in the near future, then I’d suggest investing in a good cave cause you will need it.
It all depends on how much charging is done at high priced stations. Also, no study like this is worth anything unless it considers total ownership costs.
Question is, what percentage of crude oil can only be used to make gasoline?
U.S Energy Information Administration says that about 45% of crude oil goes into gasoline; less than 20% of gasoline is directly distilled from crude oil.
Presumably most of that 20% can be chemically altered for other uses.
There’s also molten salt reactors using thorium.
The Chinese are making a serious effort to develop this.
Crude oil was first pumped from the ground to make lubricating oil for machinist as wale oil was getting increasingly hard to obtain. The world was running out of whales. The machinist complained about the distillates because it caused fires on their machines.
The distillates come in many forms including gasoline, kerosine, naptha, bunker oil, diesel fuel and more. The distillates are the hazardous waste, although some are less dangerous (higher ignition temp) and were used in lamps and steam ships. They will still have to be dealt with in the future, no matter in which form.
I saw a PBS show about this and other types of reactors, Bill Gates has started another company doing research on future types of safer and more efficient reactors and hopes to get into the business. Unfortunately the AEC is a big roadblock.
The AEC suffers from the other Rickover days. Adm Rickover went with water cooling because for a ship sitting in an ocean of water, that was and still is the best choice. Maybe not so good for a land based reactor, especially one located in the middle of a desert.
There is a nuclear power plant under construction right now, I believe it is a two unit site in AL or LA. Hopefully that will help for nuclear to resurge.
Coal plants are being decommissioned by nearly every utility, some being converted to gas plants. Any utility worth a darn is seeing the future and adding as much carbon neutral energy sources as they can and making their grids more resilient - because they are embracing the movement toward EVs (obviously it gives them more business).
Besides all this, it is much more cost effective to regulate and limit the emissions from one tailpipe (the one sticking out of the coal or gas plant) than it is from the hundreds of thousands or millions of ICEs that would be used instead of EVs charging from that plant.
The community will get that extra electricity from the same hydro or nuclear source it does during the day.
I’ve seen the Columbia River many, many times. It flows during the day. It flows at night. It flows the same day or night. You’ll have to trust me on that.
The beauty of hydro and nuclear power is that you can very easily decrease or increase the power output. For power generated at a dam you simply decrease the amount of water flowing through the power station to lower output, or increase the water flowing through to raise output.
Hydro or nuclear generating stations are not operating at 100% all the time. Or really any of the time.
They are also still building coal fired power plants at a fast rate and are the worlds biggest importer of coal. Except from Australia, they are angry at the Aussies.
While the US has decreased CO2 output at a rate greater that the countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol as well as those that signed the Paris Accords, China’s output has climbed to now double the US. India’s output is now half the US and climbing quickly. Neither country is doing more than lip service to reduce. If you don’t have them on board, reducing CO2 is impossible.
The US and the EU could be 100% carbon neutral by 2050 and China and India would make up more than the difference at the rate they are increasing.
As to the irrelevance or relevance, that is a matter of opinion. This discussion thread has morphed into the splitting of hairs as to the green-ness of EVs and the power generation method that supplies them. You brought up the efforts of the Chinese in the development of a cleaner nuclear reactor all while being the most gross polluter on the planet both the air and oceans. All the efforts of the rest of the world are being un-done by one country. I linked to that as relevance, not to annoy you.
As for mansxplaining, do you look in the mirror much? Do you know for sure I am a male? Or did you just make an assumption?
