Myths about electric cars
Chris Paine is pretty sanguine about the future of electric cars. In this WaPo article he lists 5 myths about them and explains why using them is easier and the outlook is better than people think.
I don’t have the tech knowledge to say whether he’s right or wrong (I’ll leave that up to those of you who do, because I’m curious to know). But I do think he’s left out a sixth myth. I am convinced that a certain not-insignificant percentage of people believe that electric cars don’t have any environmental effects at all—that they run on magic or they run on air, and that electricity comes out of the wall socket in some mystical process that doesn’t need to be considered in the equation.
Thank you Neo, for exactly what you said here about that “magic, no pollution” electricity.
Try telling someone that electric cars really use coal instead of gasoline (at least for a good part of the Northeast US) and you get blank stares.
Perhaps, it is related to the NIMBY (not in my back yard) effect; since they cannot see the pollution in their immediate area they assume that it doesn’t happen.
Your point about the “magic, plug in and no pollution” belief being widespread is well taken. I suspect that if one were to question Democrat Congrescritters on this issue, you would find out that a substantial proportion of them are among the “magic, plug in and no pollution” believers.
After all, San Fran Nan believes that natural gas “is cheap, abundant and clean compared to fossil fuels.” As if natural gas is NOT a fossil fuel!
The entire “sustainable” and “green” movement is such a joke. People have no idea where their food comes from.
In my yuppy neighborhood, it just arrives beautifully packaged on the shelves at certain approved places like Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods.
One of my friends fought hard against the coming of a Walmart grocery because it wasn’t unionized. Of course, this grocery is wildly successful because the prices are so much cheaper.
Doesn’t that help the poor people and the other people who shop there?
This friend isn’t a “locavore” because we have winter here in our neighborhood, and she doesn’t want to live for six months on potatoes and kimchee. But my California family members are big “sustainable” “locavores.” Of course, they all drive everywhere without shame.
As the old joke goes, electric cars have been the car of the future for a century. They will continue to be the car of the future untill batteries are developed that have the energy density of gasoline. See here on the energy density of various energy sources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
While not an expert, I do have the tech knowledge to evaluate Paine’s article. He’s correct about the future of electric cars but…premature. That is, electric cars are premature. It’s the energy storage medium, i.e. the batteries wherein commercial viability of electric cars is lacking.
Materials research has revealed that the potential for far more energy storage in batteries is viable but perhaps decades away from commercial viability. Nanotechnology will undoubtedly play a large part in developing these materials for future batteries.
And Paine minimizes the pollution aspect that Charles mentions.
The pollution aspect is however temporary, at least from an historical perspective.
Thorium, a cheap, clean and safe alternative to uranium powered nuclear reactors shows great promise and could potentially be developed in 5-10 years with sufficient financial backing.
Nuclear energy, fusion not our current dirty fission is the most ideal way to provide electric cars with clean energy and we are making real progress in developing nuclear fusion. But we are 20-50 years away from commercial viability of that resource as well.
The International nuclear fusion project — known as Iter, meaning “the way” in Latin — is designed to demonstrate a new kind of nuclear reactor capable of producing unlimited supplies of cheap, clean, safe and sustainable electricity from atomic fusion.
Interestingly, the moon’s surface is full of the energy source helium-3 which could be used as a power source for nuclear fusion reactors.
“If we could land the space shuttle on the moon, fill the cargo with canisters of helium-3 mined from the surface and bring the shuttle back to Earth, that cargo would supply the entire electrical power needs of the United States for an entire year,” Gerald Kulcinski, a nuclear engineering professor and director of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Once we have nuclear fusion plants, practical and robust car batteries, we will have the means for a clean transportation, manufacturing and energy sectors, which of course is the main source of the majority of our pollution.
The transition to these technologies is just a half century away but today, as a matter of national and economic security we need to “drill baby, drill”.
As I’ve been saying to my daughter for decades, it’s not the technological problems we face wherein the real difficulties lie but in man’s inhumanity to man. Mankind’s lust and greed for power over their fellow man is a far more intransigent problem than the state of our environment.
1–Not dead, but on federal life support (Expensive Life Support).
2–Range: Check the Consumer Reports report on their Fisker test drive. If I need to go to the nearest large city, that’s 100 miles, + running around, so roughly 225 miles all up = not an EV trip.
3–There are 2 that i know of in my town.
4–Not convincing me.
5–So I’d need a gas/diesel regardless.
6–Not mentioned, but riddle me this: EVs would impinge on the sale of gas/diesel, and the taxes therefrom, so governments would then tax them at some rate for use of the roads, and to pay for bike lanes, buses, light rail…
That link to the Iter project is a masterpiece of misdirection. The headline reads, “£13bn Iter project makes breakthrough in the quest for nuclear fusion.” Reading the article, we discover that the “breakthrough” is that the project has received design approval and that the concrete foundation is mostly finished.
This may be a bureaucratic breakthrough and a construction milestone, but nothing has changed on the fusion front. There are no working designs. This is an experimental machine. There is no reason to expect that it will work. There has never been a working design. The strategy being pursued internationally is to spend exponentially larger amounts of money on designing and building ever-bigger machines. The apparent strategy is to spend so much money, so many decades and so much effort on such an incredibly complex machine that for it to fail would be unthinkable. Note that the timetable calls for this device to be built over the next 10 years, then another 10 years must be spent in research before it will ever be even tried out. Iter has accomplished nothing except create lifetime employment for the researchers involved. Even if it works, it will only be a proof-of-concept machine. It is not designed to produce any energy whatsoever. If it does work, the process will start all over again in designing a new generation of reactors that actually produce electricity. If the machines need to be this big and complex, this will take another 20-30 years before electricity starts to flow from fusion plants. If ever.
Alternately, some scientific breakthrough may come out of the blue that makes fusion possible nearly immediately. There is no evidence of any such impending breakthrough now.
Fusion may be the energy source of the future, but for that to happen will require the sort of scientific breakthroughs and solution of problems that cannot be solved by throwing money at them. Fusion has nothing to do with current energy policy. We must proceed under the assumption that no one alive today will live see the advent of fusion energy production and get on with the business of creating energy needed in the next days, months and years, and fusion plays absolutely no role in this process.
Well this technology I am pretty familiar with – high power inverters, induction motors and permanent magnet motors. I design power electronics and controls for these motors – in my case for the drilling industry, but they are the same things used in electric cars, windmills, and a lot of other industries. Power electronics (inverters) in cars are relatively small by comparison.
Where to start with this guys article? There is almost nothing in it that’s based on reality. As Geoffrey points out, the storage technology is still a long way from being state of the art. While the author doesn’t worry about the capacity, battery technology has still not improved enough to extend the distance a car can go unless you are willing to spend 100k or more. Tesla isn’t expensive because of its luxury classification, it’s expensive because the battery bank is huge and expensive, as are the motor and inverter. A non-luxury model with similar performance wouldn’t be much cheaper.
Lead Acid and Lithium Ion batteries can’t be reused after they are worn out. Some of the materials can be recycled, but they are not suitable for utility energy storage – I am familiar with this also because it’s a big dream of drilling contractors to be green, and save energy with storage systems using batteries and ultracapacitors. I hold a patent for such a system, and I don’t know what this guy was smoking when he wrote the article, but it’s laughable. Also, you need to replace the batteries after about 5 years. A very expensive proposition – which is why he leased the car, I’m sure. And all batteries suffer from the cold and heat – lead acid lose 1% capacity per degree below 20C. At 0F, you’re down to 50% capacity. For hot climates, every 10 degrees above 20C, they lose half their lifetime. This is generally the case for Li batteries too – charging and discharging at 40C can reduce their capacity and lifetime to 45%; at -4F they stop working completely. There are some special designs that go lower, but they are VERY expensive.
The US power grid cannot be upgraded in 15 years to charge that many cars. Genius that he is said to be, Obama is an ignoramus when it comes to energy. First of all, coal plants are being shut down all over the US because the world’s smartest man is using EPA regulations to put them out of business. That leaves natural gas plants as the only viable substitute in the near term. Nuclear plants are nearly impossible to get built in this country because there are nothing but idiots making energy policy. Unfortunately, Obama (the genius) is also using the EPA to shut down hydraulic fracturing, which is what fueled the natural gas boom in this country. He may be a political genius, but he’s a virtual idiot in this area. Parts of the the US are going to face electrical energy shortages because of this preening fool. Adding millions of electric cars to the grid is hardly going to help.
Back to the distribution network — recall the discussion on this site last year with the overhead vs underground lines, and how nobody is willing to pay for upgrades? (except me) The cost of upgrading the residential networks to support charging millions of more cars will be astronomical, and if they plan to get it done by 2035, they should have started 10 years ago. Instead, they are shutting down coal plants, blocking natural gas production, killing the Keystone pipeline, and keeping offshore drilling off limits to the US, but nobody else. There has never been a bigger dimwit in the White House – promoting electric cars, pumping money into their development, all the while killing their source of power. Sheer Genius.
Materials — the materials used now, at least the most valuable ones for PM motors and Li batteries are controlled globally by China. Neodymium mines are almost all controlled by China, as are Lithium mines, and ironically, most are in Afghanistan. Some might argue the reason B.O. wanted to go back to Afghanistan was for the mineral wealth used in green technology. No blood for oil, but Lithium and Neodymium (also used in the windmill generators too by the way) are ok. Afghanistan sold rights to the Chinese. Another Epic fail for our intellectual giant and chief.
Electrolytic and metallized film capacitors — a good many of them for these types of inverters are made in Japan. After the Tsunami, there was a worldwide shortage of them for 9 months, as well as the IGBTs, which are the heart of the inverter — they are the semiconductor power switch which drives the whole thing. There will need to be an enormous increases worldwide in production to meet the demand this journalist claims is a forgone conclusion. Before companies ramp up, there needs to be a demand. High prices of these components will be the order of the day until there is a sudden, sustainable demand on the factories.
Environment — Lithium, lead, cadmium, etc are primary components of the batteries. They aren’t environmentally friendly.
Energy balance — 80% efficient my ass. The drive train yes, but the energy you invest to produce all the components in these vehicles is very high, higher than to produce a gasoline power vehicle. Nobody talks about that. Nor do they talk about the gas turbine efficiency at the power plant, which is maybe 45%. They’ve improved that with waste heat recovery, but it’s expensive to implement.
There’s more you could get into, but I’m wasting energy. If electric cars are that prevalent in 15 years, a lot of things need to change, and I only listed a few.
I’m told by a friend at ABB who is in the energy storage business, that battery technology is advancing at a blistering pace, and I think he knows what he’s talking about; nevertheless, the distribution network and electrical power supply in the US needs hundreds of billions or even trillions to upgrade it before electric cars will dominate the landscape. Good luck with that.
Geoffrey Britain hit on one thing I agree with — Thorium is a promising source for the US. It’s not fissionable, so it can’t be weaponized, the depleted waste isn’t dangerous, and it cannot melt down. There’s even some work done to miniaturize a thorium power source for a car that lasts 5 years. I’m rooting for thorium as one long term solution — we have one of the world’s largest supplies in Idaho, but I’m sure the left will find something wrong with it and kill that too..
Sorry for the long post Neo – Articles like that drive me nuts.
The prime reason people believe in the ‘magic’ of electric cars is it makes them feel superior and altruistic simultaneously.
There are no renewable energy technologies. There are only renewable drivers (e.g. solar, wind, oil). The technology used to convert potential or kinetic energy to a useful form is not renewable and does cause environmental disruption during recovery of the raw resources, processing, manufacturing, and in actual use.
That said, since the concept of “green” energy is a myth, even within the broad range described in marketing terms, it would be advisable to judge each technology by the character of its content and application-specific value, and apportion their use accordingly to its merit.
I wrote this in 2009:
Look at the Chevy Volt.
It will cost you $40,000. Now maybe the government will give you some of my money (taxes) to help you pay for that.
But in 5 years you’ll need new batteries at about $5000.
So say you get 10 years out of this vehicle for $45,000.
A new Taurus should get at least 25mpg. A decent one would cost $25,000.
Now consider the interest you’re going to pay on that extra $15,000 to buy the Volt instead of the Taurus.
12,000 miles a year is considered typical mileage. The Volt has a 40 mile range on battery. 40m x 5 days x 52 weeks = 10,400 miles.
My Taurus is ten years old. It has 120,000 miles. That’s typical. It gets 25MPG highway. 120,000 miles divided by 25mpg equals 480 gallons.
Say gas goes to $4 a gallon.
480 x $4 a gallon = $19,200. Add that to the purchase price ($25,000) and you get $44,200 for ten years of Taurus driving.
The Volt runs almost emission free, but it sucks electricity out of a coal fired plant.
My ten year old Taurus burns cleaner than that.
What is so special about the Volt?
“What is so special about the Volt?”
It sends a tingle up the legs of the messiah and the union thugs.
I ditto Southpaw — and throw in this:
EVs can’t work viably in hot OR cold climates. The ‘free’ heat available to warm the cabin in all internal/ external combustion designs is not there.
You’ll NEVER see these machines tested in truly foul weather for just that reason. Indeed, these puff pieces ALWAYS come out in the mild weather.
Southpaw is being kind: 30 months not 60 months is the best typical battery life for a VIBRATING machine. There’s no work around.
Beyond that, ALL of the EVs will utterly tap out exotic minerals since the global auto fleet is staggering in size — three to four orders of magnitude greater than current battery markets.
Eco-dreamers figure that they can power-up their cars — at night — from sunlight, via solar cell power.
HELLO… That doesn’t compute. ‘Renewable power’ is unstable power (exception: hydropower) so that with scale-up the system breaks down. Germany is finally waking up to that fact. During high winds, Germany has to shut the mills off. It’s impossible to ‘buffer’ the instantaneous swings thousands of big wind machines produce.
No EV can spare power for air conditioning. Further, the very temperatures that we find objectionable are three times as crippling for the battery pack. It tends to ‘let the smoke out’ instead.
The heat rejection problem is critical because it takes juice — from the dying batteries — to cool the dying batteries — to get juice from the dying batteries. Hence, the melt-downs for ALL current Li-ion auto battery systems. (Fisker, Tesla)
At all times, methane powered machines will under-cut them with price and performance — a situation unlikely to change for the next two centuries.
It’s my experience that this “sixth myth” is what they sell the cars on most of the time. It’s certainly what they preach to kids.
Imbeciles.
Wow! We sure have some impressive commenters here. I’ve heard and read about bits and pieces of the electic car downsides, but I’m totally incapable of putting the pieces together as you all did. When I think of electric cars, I think of miles and miles of city rowhouses with cars parked outside and extension cords connecting them to an outlet in the basement. My next thought is of gangs of teens roaming the streets at night and pulling the plugs.
I’ve got a background in physics, math, and computers… most of what southpaw etal are saying is utterly correct.
These idiotic puff pieces are written by people who have no real understanding of physics, of how the electricity grid works, or of how the only actually VALID comparison isn’t MPG — not even the governments “BS electric MPG” rating, but full-cycle-energy-use-comparison.
That is, from start to finish, how much energy us used to MAKE the car, how much to OPERATE the car, and then how much to DISPOSE/RECYCLE the car.
Once you add a buttload of batteries to that mix, the first and last numbers go up in a way that utterly SWAMPS the meager numbers of OPERATING the car, which is what most people Just Don’t Get.
I mean, really, it’s a corollary of Bastiat’s Broken Window Fallacy, originally titled “That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Unseen”.
The modern green liberal is a freaking CHILD playing “peekaboo” with expenses and costs.
I will note, btw, though, that Fusion is to power generation what the electric car is to the automobile industry.
Both have been several decades away for several decades now.
When you hear of some agency breaking the Lawson Criterion that will be a big deal… and it’s not happened in more than 60 years of Fusion research, now.
Simplistically put, the Lawson Criterion is the point at which the energy you put INTO the system is equal to or less than the energy you get OUT of the system.
The lefts fascination with electric cars is the same as their obsession with trains. They love technologies that limit personal freedom. If they were truly environmentally focused, Compressed natural gas would be on their radar. While less practical than diesel/gasoline it is very worthwhile for delivery trucks and buses. EV’s will require extensive networks of subsidized charging stations to be even marginally practical which when they are not used will prompt bigger efforts to make people by EV’s.
Another comment made there —
…like ignoring the cost of replacing the batteries after 6-7 years — at typical total yearly driving, about 72k-84k miles, LONG before an IC car needs any kind of major overhaul of comparable expense.
In ten years, this is going to be an obvious issue, as you have to pay someone 1k or more to take the damned batteries off your hands to be recycled. And, of course, the original owners will have long since pawned them off on some poor schnook, who, not being able to afford to dispose of them properly, will try and scrape off all the serial information off the useless hulk, and then dump the car in the woods somewhere.
Yeah, *wonderful* for the environment!!
Bumped into this “money quote”:
It costs $60,000 to $75,000 to build a Volt, including development, manufacturing and raw materials — (snip) — With a sticker price of $40,000, minus the $10,000 the company pays in incentives, GM gets roughly $30,000 for every Volt. So it could be losing at least $30,000 per car.
Read the whole thing:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/23/chevrolets-volt-selling-but-not-at-sticker-price/?page=all
It is likely that the liberals think that electricity could be a “magic, no pollution” energy source if the government could just spend even more money on wind and solar.
IGotBupkis said, “That is, from start to finish, how much energy us used to MAKE the car, how much to OPERATE the car, and then how much to DISPOSE/RECYCLE the car.
Once you add a buttload of batteries to that mix, the first and last numbers go up in a way that utterly SWAMPS the meager numbers of OPERATING the car, which is what most people Just Don’t Get.”
A very concise explanation of why EVs are not ready for prime time. The hybrids stack up a little better but they still have the issues of battery costs over the life of the car and battery disposal costs.
Some of the popular elements used in rechargeable batteries are the LAST thing you’d want at the scene of an auto accident.
Cadmium (from Cades; Devil of Zinc)
Touched on just a bit: VIBRATION is a battery killer.
About a century ago some attempt was made to take steam turbine technology from ships and power stations to the railroads.
It was discovered — only during real world testing — that the roughness of the national track system was too much for steam turbines — any steam turbines.
They kept being destroyed in the bearings, seals and gears. None of those issues stopped steam turbines from being the low cost, high performance leader at sea — or when stationary.
Likewise auto batteries. They need to be babied. A century ago that meant that electric cars stayed on the nice paved streets in the nicer neighborhoods.
Such conditions still prevail for current enthusiasts.
Any attempt to take EVs seriously on the road will have them breaking down that moment.
Some flavor of this was written into the script of
“The Great Race” (1965)
wherein Maggie Dubois (Natalie Wood) has to abandon her Stanley Steamer early in the race — whence to join the Great Leslie (Tony Curtis) for the rest of the plot.
At that time, everyone knew that it was leaving town that really exposed the weakness of the steamers: they’re water and fuel pigs.
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A technical tip: Thorium can’t release energy. It’s only fertile. It becomes U233 — an extremely dangerous isotope of Uranium — which does all of the work.
It’s dangerous because it can be separated from the Thorium — chemically — and converted into even better atomic bombs than the regular ones that we all know and fear.
Terrific.
U233 is simply the best atomic explosive isotope to be had.
We better hope that nuclear fusion never succeeds. If it does, we’ll be swamped with cheap neutrons. The only economic reason atomic bombs are expensive is because neutrons are brutally expensive. EVERY atomic program is bedeviled by the need to squeeze out the most performance from every neutron.
In sum: practical fusion will open Pandora’s box — for all time.
Every high school student will be able to craft Heath Kit atomics.
(BTW, one high school nerd did, in fact, get atomic reactions to proceed — in his backyard. He thought that transmuting elements would be just so cool. His results were such that a haz-mat team had to swarm his parent’s property. Cute.)
At this point natural gas is the best solution for the grid. However, breeder reactors are a good solution that work NOW and would be a great solution in the future if the government allowed them. One of the reasons nukes cost so much is the excessive government permit process.
Oh, and I agree with most of what I’ve read in this thread on the limits of battery tech. That is the key limiting factor in EVs.
“A technical tip: Thorium can’t release energy. It’s only fertile. It becomes U233 – an extremely dangerous isotope of Uranium – which does all of the work.
It’s dangerous because it can be separated from the Thorium – chemically – and converted into even better atomic bombs than the regular ones that we all know and fear.
Terrific.
U233 is simply the best atomic explosive isotope to be had.”
The Wikipedia article on U233 indicates this is not a “real” problem and that actual bombs built using U-233 have not produced even the predicted yield.