Plug-in cars could actually increase air pollution

Net net, I don't know what the answer is, but there aint nothing free. If you get the energy for you car from a coal fired plant, you can't say that you are not adding to the load. On the other hand, if you power your car from renewable (hydro, solar, wind etc) you could make that claim.

The biggest advantage of plug in hybrids would be the huge reserve capacity of the grid. What people don't realize is that there is no technical reason why in addition to buying power from the grid to charge your Prius, your Prius could sell power back to the grid at different times. The model would be like this. You could SELL power back to the grid during peak times, reducing the need to fire coal or gas fired plants, and BUY it back at low demand times,,thereby using otherwise idling capacity. (Capacity that has to idle to take up the load of the next surge). With net time of day metering it would be win/win for everyone. A significant number of hybrids plugged into the grid would give the utility a cheap source of reserve it doesn't now have, the car owner would get cheap(er) grid power, and the environment would win due to few net emissions. You could also program your grid connection to make sure your car had enough "juice" to go X-miles the next day, or this afternoon or what ever.

That coupled with smaller scaled residential solar would go a long way to making the grid cleaner. The other advantage is that it would put a huge battery reserve into the grid overnight making solar available 24/7 rather than just when the sun shines. One problem with solar now is that it is only available 4-6 hours a day (peak) without a battery to store the excess capacity.

~16 million cars were bought in the US last year. If 2 million of these were plug ins, in ten years we would have 10 million large capacity batteries on line and ready to go 24/7.

Some thing to think about.

 

You are aware that all coal naturally contains a few parts per million of radium and thorium? Every coal-fired power station in the world releases more radioactivity than is permitted for nuke stations. If coal-fired stations were held to the same standards as nuke stations they would all be closed immediately. And of course they will all have to be closed within 30 years or so anyway if we are to have any hope of avoiding the worst effects of global warming.

We're now using nuclear power rather stupidly in a "once through" system. Using uranium and thorium in breeders would increase the amount of energy recovered *and* reduces the amount of high-level waste by about a factor of eight. After a few hundred years the remaining high-level waste is no more dangerous than the original ore.

There will be nine billion people at the end of this century. Supporting them at a Western standard of living, which almost all of them are now fiercely struggling to attain, would require increasing human energy use by a factor of four, even assuming a European/Japanese level of energy efficiency (about twice as good as that of the US). Solar and wind would do the job, if we can find places for the roughly ten million windmills or the 100,000 square miles of Solar cells that would be required. There isn't enough arable land in the world to harvest that much energy from plants and still feed the world, never mind the number of wild ecosystems that would have to be plowed under to do it. Meanwhile, nuclear power stations are safe and compact.

Economic and environmental justice both require that we build as many non-fossil power sources of all types as quickly as we can, because we need them all.

 

This is what AutoblogGreen has to say about the article:

Today's USA Today has an article that talks about two studies on plug-in hybrids, both published last year, that "have yet to trigger alarms." The studies, one by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the other by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, found plug-in hybrids and electric cars might increase certain types of air pollution in specific areas.

The NRDC study says that in regions heavily dependent on energy from coal, "there is a possibility for significant increases of soot and mercury" given an increase in PHEVs. The NRDC study also says that when charged with electricity produced by a coal plant, PHEVs have "higher global warming pollution compared to a non-pluggable hybrid electric vehicle." The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency study found that "a PHEV has marginally lower emissions for all emittants, except CO2 and SO2." The increase in SO2 emissions is 182 percent "due to the high sulfur content of the coal combusted to generate electricity."

When will the alarms trigger? Are PHEVs headed for the same U-turn of support from the green community that biofuels ran into?

(Source: AutoblogGreen)

 

I agree with this guy...

Pollution boost for plug-in cars

 

B.S., IT'S ALL RELATIVE, AND MUCH MORE COMPLICATED. electricity is gotten from many different sources depending on where in the country you live. the southwest gets alot of its power from Hoover dam, as does most of the northwest (hydroelectric). California is 5% coal, while the appilations are more dependent on coal.

 

I always wonder who paid for a particular study - even though this one was reportedly performed by a Minnesota government agency. As stated in several previous posts, the problem is the coal power plant, not the hybrid technology working to at least partially wean the US from dependence on fossil fuels. Using existing wind and solar technologies to recharge the PHEV would solve the problems listed in the study. Massively deploying wind and solar power, especially with supportive government policies and financial backing, could probably happen more quickly than establishing a distribution system for either hydrogen fuel or ethanol E-85 - the pipe dreams GM and the oil-powered administration have used as a smoke screen to fool the general public into believing they were supporting alternative energy sources. Jay Inslee and Bracken Hendricks have written a book, Apollo's Fire, that postulates that the equivalent of the Apollo space program JFK launched - that put a man on the moon in 8 years - could establish a clean energy economy that would produce prosperity and free the US from depending on fossil fuel.

 

"After a few hundred years the remaining high-level waste is no more dangerous than the original ore."

Well, sure, a few hundred years doesn't affect you and me. Let's go for it! How is that better than ZERO years of radioactivity of renewable energy (wind power, solar, wave energy, etc)?

What about the destructive mining of this fuel, than handling of a dangerous substance? Where's the danger of "mining and handling" in the above listed renewables?

Sure, nuclear seems to get us all the energy we need, but what about long term "costs"? I'm no nuclear engineer, so this is all hearsay and opinion. YMMV.

I question this since, to me, renewables will HAVE to win the energy game. Otherwise, it's a continued "dig it up, burn it, oh crap now we got waste". I really don't see that with renewable energy sources.

 

As a retired Electrical Engineer and a proud Prius owner who has worked in both coal and nuclear plants, I feel there are lots of options that make PHEVs very plausible. It wasn't good practice to throttle down a nuke plant during off peak hours so the fossil plants were the ones used to throttle back at night.

We also had pumped storage facilities and gas fired turbines that were used to provide peak power. If many folks plugged their PHEVs into the grid during off peak hours, we could reverse the pump storage facilities to provide more power at night if the nukes couldn't handle the load.

Another preferred approach for the future might be to encourage large scale deployment of residential and commercial PVs. If these PVs were oversized to back feed power to the grid during the day, this could encourage utilities to use less fossil power during peak hours. I do think we need more nuke plants and we need to follow France's lead with fuel reprocessing although it is very expensive.

 

An interesting study by ORNL was published...
"Potential Impacts of Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles on Regional Power Generation"
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v41_1_08/regional_phev_analysis.pdf

Ken@Japan

 

With a quick skim through the summary it looks like they made a lot of assumptions, haven't priced carbon at $100 or even $50 a tonne, or considered the potential of thin film photovoltaics producing power at $1 a Watt - cheaper than coal.