Coal power Volt vs. Gas power Prius

Oh, I do not doubt for a moment that international oil is costing the US oil wars and astronomical amounts of money every day, I just do not know if astronomical amounts of local pollution and an unbridled path to runaway climate change is a smart price to pay as an alternative.

To be honest, and if I was king, I would force the US to rely on domestic wind and solar today, or whatever zero carbon non-nuke fission option might appear in the future. Costs would likely soar to 30 cents a kwh today, and people with limited means would be forced to either conserve or suffer. My justification for the tyranny is that I am not asking others to do which I do not already do myself. I sometimes find it hard to believe that so many americans prefer to beggar the country, pollute their nest, and live in fear of violence rather than give up SUVs and wear sweaters. But then I remember where they get their 'news.'

 

I'm 100% in agreement with the government being wrong organization to pick technologies. I do need to point out that they were supporting fuel cell vehicles far more than EVs till it became obvious that Fuel Cell cars have no future. It's the consumer supporting EVs more that the government.

Unfortunately, a whole lot of fracking is necessary to get all the NG needed. That certainly is not a zero-impact situation. I'm also skeptical that sequestration would ever occur at that large of a scale. I honestly think that wind and solar become more economical today if full sequestration were to be a refining/power plant requirement.

Hopefully, I would wish to avoid a confrontation discussion since there are points on both sides that are worth presenting and reading. My viewpoint is that in the tradeoff between short term gain for me and long term gain for the future generations, the best course for me is to seriously evaluate getting an EV. Undoubtably I will have some short term addition to the Crystal River Coal Plant load, but only until I figure out other less/non-polluting answers. I'm working on that now. I'm also not alone. In the case of the EV, most owners would be well aware of their impact via dirty power and would be taking big and small steps to minimize or eliminate.

 

I'll have to disagree. We can start with the $7500/car tax credit, and then add on tens of *billions* of dollars handed out or "loaned" to Detroit. Did it reach 100 Billion ? Admittedly not all of the hand-out was specifically for EV, but a lot of it was, and the government lip service was to promote the next generation of car industry in the US.

 

Well, to be fair, EV's support a lot of other goals that Hybrid can't match. Namely nation security issues. This whole discussion is a bit of a straw man, it seems to me. Sagebrush, why are you so intent on bashing EVs? We all know they're not perfect, but do you honestly think that they don't have a much better upside than straight hybrids?

 

Did you see my earlier response to you ?

To recap: perfect is not the question, a discussion of best alternative is.
I do not think a $7500 taxpayer subsidized EV is better than a Prius. It is more harmful to the environment, and cannot begin to match Prius' potential to decrease oil use at current costs.

EV will never take off while petrol is subsidized and cheap. If petrol ever becomes expensive, hybrids will be the best value in the market. Remove government meddling and EVs are an interesting orphan for years to come if we exclude hobbyists. I can see myself buying an EV easily, so I am not your usual 'basher.' I do think they are an idiotic public policy adventure.

 

The GOAL is not to 'reduce' petroleum use.

The GOAL is to ELIMINATE it.

Yes, in fact, the cars DO need the subsidies, because BIG OIL already destroyed a generation of EVs by buying up the battery patents and suing all involved.

Do we need to spend the TRILLIONS UPON TRILLIONS of taxpayer dollars to keep petroleum based fuels 'affordable'? Not to mention the blood on our hands.

For the two trillion dollars we blew in Iraq+Afghanistan, we could've bought 50,000,000 $40,000 EVs and just GIVEN THEM TO PEOPLE.

So ANYONE who complains about 'subsidies' for BEVs must have their heads jammed exceptionally far up an oil company's stinking arse.

Because we subsidized BIG OIL's RECORD PROFITS in 2008. We are going into debt subsidizing them. So you can pay $30,000 in taxes to have 'affordable' $3 gas.

 

I'm not as big a fan of tax credits as much as I am a fan of eliminating subsidies (direct and hidden) on conventional vehicles and their fuel chain. I realize that there is a short term penalty, but the advantage is that the competitive market usually can find a way to amortize the cost much better than the government. When I say I'm for EV's that means I'm for them in a fair market. I bought all my Prius's without the tax credits being a factor for me, and the same applies to any EV.

 

We're all of cleaning up the grid and that's something that's already happening. The carbon intensity of the grid is decreasing. Not as quickly as many of us would like, but it is happening. As mentioned earlier, we subsidize the hell out of the petrol that you put in your prius. $50B/yr. I'm all for letting the market decide winners/losers as long as business pays the costs of the externalities (see Doug's latest thread). Unfortunatly, that's not happening. We can't even get rid of the massive subsidies that the fossil fuel industries get (about $72B/yr). Hybrids are great, but they're not a solution to our problems, they're only a band-aid. They're a bridge to something better. Electricity is the best bet given what we know now. If we could make fuel out of atmospheric CO2, we'd still have the NOx and O3 issues to deal with, from the 250M point sources you mentioned in an earlier post.

We need to get EVs to a place where the costs start nose diving, like we've done w/wind and are doing with solar. I suppose you support those technologies. They have gotten some gov't support (though as stated earlier, nothing close to the subsidies that fossil fuels enjoy). Given that we may well need large format batteries for grid demand balancing as more and more variable power sources come into the grid, I can see some synergy in w/EV development.

Does anyone have stats on populations in coal dominated vs other source dominated ares? In CO, wind and NG are making large inroads into the coal base. Xcel is going to deactivate a few small coal plants and they're converting others to NG. We did just build a 750MW coal plant, but at least it's IGCC, which will no doubt change the equation as well. Colorado is just one such example of an improving grid.

 

Tripp,
You do realize that "decreasing carbon intensity" is a bit of spin I hope, since carbon pollution continues to increase from the grid, and every EV built for the forseeable future will run 100% on fossil fuels sourced from the grid.

I agree 1000% that the subsidies surrounding fossil fuel, and the non-payment of externality costs in our national markets are a core problem distorting our economy and environment.

 

We have to be careful so EVs don't turn into the next hydrogen - promise of zero emission in 5 years (every 5 years).

We cannot get to zero carbon electricity or eliminate fossil fuel consumption in 5 years. They may decline gradually so you will see cars evolve/mutate accordingly. Hybrids will get a plug. HV battery will get bigger. Gas engine and gas tank should get smaller and finally replaced with fuel cell stacks.

In the next 5-10 years, I just don't see a plugin car cleaner than Prius, other than the Prius PHV or the iQ EV. Leaf is a great alternative as it is almost as good as Prius in term of emission, size and price. Volt is barely better than a non-hybrid car of the same size.

 

+1

IMHO the sales of prii are not going to shoot up and take over the market. If we are going to reduce energy dependance we need other choices. It is not a 0 sum game. I hate government subsidies, but there are some good ones like this, and some awful ones. Even if you think we don't need R&D into green cars, look at the spectrum. $7.5B one time to spur ev and phev cars versus $5B/year on ethanol subsidies which does not include the costs of the ethanol mandate. The entire 1 million car subsidy is a one time charge of 15% of what we spend for direct oil subsidies each year.

Here is some data on the greening of the grid

EIA - Electricity Data, Analysis, Surveys

There is a slight uptick to 44.8 in the 2010 data, and we will know whether this RTM figure stands next year.

 

I'm sure someone has the stats, but I think in this discussion the important thing is the areas and mix of where plug in cars are likely to go.

The Curious Story Of Electric Cars And Texas

From the graph the top MSAs for EV and PHEV adoption are NY, LA, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia and Houston in order of number of cars. The states and average coal consumption are NY(15%), CA(1%), IL(48%), TX(37%), and PA(56%) from 2005 figures for most states and texas for 2010.

If we look at marginal coal, Texas and California run their coal, nuclear, wind, and solar at full capacity regardless of load, so they will use no marginal coal for BEV or PHEV use. I believe New York City MSA in NY state is the same 0 marginal coal, but I am unsure about New Jersey. I am unsure about Illinois, or Pennsylvania and it would be helpful if someone had information on how these grids are run. As a weighted average of actual electricity used in plug in cars, marginal coal will be much lower than the average grid use. At least in Texas charging at night will mainly come from combined cycle natural gas generation until enough wind comes on line to turn these off.

 

Link ?

 

Taking Austingreen's EIA reference above, putting together a couple of tables, the data show an annual average decline in C02/KWH of 1.1% per year. So, for the past decade or so, that's how fast it's been decarbonizing.

That makes the current data substantially different from the Year 2000 data I had been looking at. (Most recent reliable data I could find showing state-by-state estimates.)

If you do the head-to-head comparison with 2009 data (might be a bit of an outlier due to the large drop in electricity demand that year), at the US average, a 3 mile/KWH car produces just 9% more C02 than a 50 MPG Prius. If your actual Prius mileage is a little lower, if your actual Leaf mileage beats the EPA a bit, or if you want to toss in the roughly 15% additional C02 attributable to the well-to-tank step for petroleum extraction and refining (as opposed to very low comparable costs for coal, and I couldn't even guess for nuclear or natural gas), then ... it's pretty much break even or better for the EV, at the national grid mix.

Thanks, Austingreen, that was good information.

I think the only reasonable way to estimate this is to evaluate it at the average. In the long run, capacity adjusts, and the long-run marginal C02 is the average C02. And unless you've literally got lock-out timers on the cars, it's a stretch to say everyone recharges at night. (I don't - if I don't plug in the car when I put it in the garage, I forget. So the habit is to get the car charging as soon as you park it. But mine's just PHEV, so maybe that's driven by anxiety about the low battery range.)

More fundamentally, a marginal-cost analysis can violate the concept of fully-allocated costs, and that means you just plain end up ignoring costs.

For example, you can do the same average versus marginal analysis about flying. Average seat-miles per gallon at typical loads is in the 50s to 70-seat-miles-per gallon range. But the marginal impact of an individual passenger's additional weight is only 20% of that average.

So each individual passenger's decision to fly, is, on the margin, extremely fuel-efficient, right -- your marginal fuel use per additional filled passenger seat works out to like 300 seat-miles per gallon. And that argument applies to every passenger on the plane. So can we all claim great mileage when we fly? Nah, the cost of flying the base plane full of empty seats has to be carried somewhere, else you're kidding yourself about total cost (in this case, total emissions). Your marginal seat can't fly by itself -- it isn't marginal unless the rest of the plane is flying too.

So I tend to be leery of arguments that my electricity is cleaner/dirtier than yours because I'm on the margin. It seems more conservative simply to pro-rate over total use.

 

Feel free to look at the texas grid information. It shows all the power sources and plans. Page 16 has your answer on coal.
http://www.ercot.com/content/news/presentations/2010/ERCOT_Board_Orientation,_2010.pdf

Texas recently added or is adding 3 coal plants. This represents a net win for environmentalists as the planned number was 11, but 3 is still too many. I was able to give input on the San Antonio addition, and the utility made the concession of 20% renewables by 2020. None of these were added to run BEV or PHEVs they were added to drop rates from natural gas. The San Antonio plant cost $1B. Given the current costs of natural gas, the February 2011, ERCOT newsletter said it is not economical to build more coal power plants in Texas.

 

Running continuously is NOT the same thing as running at capacity 24/7.

There is an awful lot I do not know when it comes to understanding fossil fuel source allocation in a company wide grid setup, but source fuel cost and the time it takes to modify power output are the main ones I think. Power plants would like to ideally run on 100% coal, but in part are prevented from doing so by regulations that demand "clean" fuel, and in part by load patterns. When NatGas was cheap the load spikes were preferentially handled with NG in areas that did not have hydro. I think but am unsure that nuke can also be used to handle load peaks.

The point I want to make here is that the recent drop in carbon intensity of the national grid these past 10 years or so was driven in part by synthetic regulatory demands, but for the most part by the low price of NatGas. That is a reversible improvement, and in fact one we can anticipate. So any wooly headed hope that adding more demand to the grid from EV will magically be absorbed by the ever-greening grid is IMO heading for disappointment unless national energy policy taxes carbon.

As for Texas, I expect them to spend the lion's share of infrastructure funds to bring NatGas to market rather than wind. Short term it might even be a bit cheaper.

Addendum: Wikipedia says that nuke in France can follow load, but not in the US.
It is not coincidence that as NatGas increases in price the utilities are pushing "smart" charging -- they are load leveling in order to use more coal.

 

I am. Unfortunately, at my present rate, I'll be about 210 years old when I get there, give or take a couple of centuries.

 

Here in CO a measure was recently passed to deactivate a coal plant and convert a few others to burn NG instead of coal. Naturally, the coal industry called foul and talked about all the jobs that would be lost. The NG and environmental groups that pushed for it naturally applauded the measure. Not sure if it will stand, but clearly that's going to be a hit. Of course, Apache 3 will burn a lot of coal, but being IGCC, the carbon intensity will be lower per kWh produced. There were plans to build a 212MW CSP plant in the SW part of the state, but I don't know what the story is on that. Hopefully it hasn't been scrubbed.