Bloomberg: Electric Cars Said to `Plunder' Governments, Stifle Carbon Cuts

In my opinion as an atmospheric scientist, IF overnight charging of BEVs results in greater load on coal-fired electric generation at night, significantly higher exposures to conventional pollutants are possible for residents who live near power plants.

There is a plume dispersion scenario known as "fumigation" which occurs when surface-based nocturnal inversions grow to well above the stack height of the emission source (power plant stack in this case), not an unusual occurrence. Inversions are very stable and inhibit vertical dispersion of stack emissions. This allows pollutants to become relatively concentrated over a small area. The following morning as the inversion breaks from the surface up, the high concentration of emissions that have built up aloft, along with the stack plume itself, can mix down to the surface. However, upward vertical dispersion is still inhibited by the inversion aloft until it completely breaks, thus "fumigating" surface receptors for a significant distance downwind.

Since coal-produced electricity has relatively high conventional emissions per unit power (especially NOx and PM2.5, which the regulators have been obsessing about ironically), I'm not convinced we will see a significant net emissions benefit, even at substantially higher efficiency of BEVs, at least not unless/until we move substantially away from coal to renewables for electric generation.

 

Symbiotics LLC | A New Generation of Hydropower
It would seem likely that "off-peak" prices would rise over time as more EVs come online. On the other hand, pumped-storage schemes may be more useful as "backup" capacity for wind and solar power plants.

 

http://www.pluginamerica.org/images/EmissionsSummary.pdf

Although obviously not unbiased, this report seems to indicate that PHEVs may be the best option for people whose electricity is presently coal-generated, but EVs are still better than ICEs. We Prius owners need to think EV versus Escalade or Expedition, not Prius or Nissan Altima Hybrid.

 

In other late breaking news from the Sarah Palin news hour:

• President Obama is a MUSLIM
• Iraqi WMD are on display at the Smithsonian
• The so-called "recession" in 2008 - 2009 was a fantasy of the liberal press
• Aliens abducted her last night. It really HURT. Faith saved her

 

Other late breaking news from the Church of AlGore:

1. Anthropogenic Global warming is real.
2. The hockey stick graph is real.
3. Luddite lunatics at East Anglia only publish the truth (pravda).
4. AGW "Peer Review" journals include Spelunking Today, Climbing with Abandon, and The National Enquirer.
5. AlGore's film "Inconvenient Truth" was found truthful by courts in the UK.
6. The world Luddite isn't in the dictionary, doesn't exist, and is a conspiracy unto itself

However, what is real is that there are globalists and environmentalists don't want:

1. exploitation of America's natural resources including oil, gas and coal.
2. development of clean nuclear energy which has been proven for 40+ years to be clean, safe, cheap and reliable
3. individual citizens to maintain their liberty to chose to drive what they want when they want to drive it.

Here's what they want:
1. Fat, lazy, wasteful Americans to be "put in their place."
2. European gasoline prices thereby placing the most regressive of all regressive taxes on poor people.
3. Americans to be forced into high density urban dwellings where they are reliant on public transportation that doesn't go where they want to go when they want to go in a timely fashion.
4. Limits on procreation. China type one child policies.

It's fake that John Holdren, Barack Obama's science czar beleives:

• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation's drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who "contribute to social deterioration" (i.e. undesirables) "can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility" -- in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational "Planetary Regime" should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans' lives -- using an armed international police force.

None of that is true. It's just a conspiracy theory, right SageBrush? It's a conspiracy that John Holdren coauthored a book in 1997 entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. That's not real. Sarah Palin made it up.

What is true is that the government loves us and cares for us. Right, there buddy?

 

:focus:

... or we could just let it-

:rip:

 

Yea, because he is the first president in recent history to incur a huge government debt!

 

And of course, the massive debt had absolutely nothing to do with the worse recession since 1920 that the previous administration engineered.

<whistling>

 

Wow. I'm amazed at what some people believe - and wish I could find ways to exploit them economically (like Palin/Fox have). I could retire tomorrow.

 

The last time I checked, wind farms, solar panels, and nuclear power plants do not involve the risk of massive oil spills that DESTROY entire ecological habitats and cover beaches and coastlines with thick black tar oil that makes the breathing air in entire states smell like diesel fuel.

 

Those whacky German experts also don't address the amount of carbon/government$$$/energy it takes to MAKE fossil fuel energy (not even counting the trillion dollar subsidizeing of the war machine, kept running by still more fossil fuel). From EV nut's web pages:
Gasoline and Oil
I never realized how much electricity / natural gas it takes, just to refine our fossil fuels. The cost of that energy seems to be heavily subsidized ... yet a blid eye seems to be turned toward those costs.

Scruteny of EV costs in the 'hybrid-news' catagory. Surprised our mods haven't relocated all of this to the proper thread/forum.

 

Efficiency by itself is not a good figure of merit. What matters are (1) lifetime CO2 emissions and (2) cost of operation.

A back-of-envelope calculation shows that EVs are nearly a wash for overall CO2 emissions when the electric source is about 50% coal, which is the average situation in the US. Details and exact figures could make that 40% or 60% but it's not off by much. If the electric source is all coal, which is certainly the case for many electric utilities, then an EV creates more CO2 per mile than does a Prius or several other cars. Subsidizing an EV in such a case is worse than useless, it's actually harmful.

EV buyers are doing the world no favors unless they ensure that at least half of their electricity comes from a non-fossil source. Where the option is available the easiest and cheapest thing most households can do to reduce CO2 emissions is to contract with a utility for 100% renewable electricity.

 

According to a 2004 report from Toyota Motor Corporation...

http://www.mizuho-ir.co.jp/english/knowledge/report/pdf/wtwghg041130.pdf

...the "well-to-tank" efficiency of "future gasoline" (defined as "ultra-low sulfur") is 83% (Table 2.1.4 on page 19).