Not content to upset the recyclers in the community (See: Is Recycling Bullshit), I’m moving on to electric cars today. Rob at Say Anything Blog had an interesting post the other day citing a report from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville that talks about how electric cars might be worse for the environment than their gas guzzling counterparts.
To summarize the report, electric cars seem to be more hazardous to the environment because a majority of the electricity that they consume is created in fossil fuel burning electric plants. Rob points out that the study was done in China where a very large proportion of electricity is produced by coal powered plants, and that a smaller proportion is produced that way in the Unites States, but that the proportion still isn’t small enough to negate the negative effects of the increased pollution from production.
I think this is another case where the technology just isn’t advanced enough to support the new initiatives. Cleaner electricity production would, obviously, help the situation, but many of the clean energy production methods just aren’t mature enough to support themselves, let alone a growing fleet of electric cars.
Combine that information with the added expenses in maintenance of an electric car, and they begin to look downright unattractive. Not to mention that they have yet to create an electric car that is capable of reproducing the power that is needed for them to become mainstream in smaller cities and rural areas.
What do you think? Are electric cars an already dying breed? Should we continue to support them in hopes that electricity production technology catches up eventually?
photo credit: kevin dooley
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The underlying problem is that the U.S. power grid is still powered by many unsustainable sources like coal. If we can power the grid by cleaner sources like wind and solar and even nuclear that in turn powers electric cars then there’s almost no question that electric cars are better than gasoline.
Another consideration is that the coal plants in the U.S. have cleaner emissions than those in China. Plus power plants are often more efficient than a single car is.
In my opinion, I think we’re looking at it the wrong way. We shouldn’t just be asking how or if we should use electric cars. We should really be figuring out how to power the U.S. in a more renewable fashion which would make electric cars an easy choice when it comes to pollution and the environment.
I guess I kind of look at it as whether an electric generating plant has to work that much harder and put out that much more pollution as a direct result of a car being plugged in. Or is the majority of the pollution being generated with production that’s going to take place regardless of electric car usage? I’m guessing that as output increases the levels of pollution and such decrease until maximum capacity is acheieved at that plant. If new plants are being forced online then yes, this could be problematic, but if a majority of extra electricity required to power these cars can be done within current capacity, then I believe electric cars do provide an overall benefit.
I often wonder why we do not use natural gas. It is plentiful, relatively inexpensive, clean and domestic. I know the Honda civic is one that uses it. There is already an infrastructive of gas stations who have it.
@Jeffrey I think you’re right. The power infrastructure just isn’t ready for it. As cleaner energy becomes easier to produce, the whole point of the study/report goes away. But, until then, we’ll still be using coal fired plants to produce electricity, and the result is that electric cars might be worse for the environment than a gas guzzler is.
@money beagle I think the report only looked at the estimated increase in production based on ecar usage. It only stands to reason that as ecar usage rises, the production needs will go up, and new plants will have to come online, and the resulting pollution increases even further.
@krant I’ve been wondering that myself. They actively flare (burn off) the natural gas in the oil fields here simply because the cost of building the infrastructure to get it somewhere has been too expensive to build and it’s more cost efficient to burn. Supposedly, they’re putting in a plant that will be able to capture and make use of it, so that might end soon.
For me, I think that the novelty of it all is starting to wear off. My wife is about to give up her beloved Prius and go back to a gas guzzler.
Thanks for writing about energy Shane. It’s an important topic that doesn’t get enough attention from consumers because there is plentiful supply at reasonable cost. Watch out for the gas crunch, then people will be scrambling to get into alternates.
I’m a fan of the electric car. Yes, it’s new to mainstream America and they need to be developed but I still think it’s important to get as many on the road as possible (see gas crunch above). Consumers simply are not fussy enough about how their electricity is produced. As long as cola is cheap and plentiful and people keep their head in the sand about the connection to climate change, coal will dominate. There really needs to be some breakthroughs in clean energy to satisfy more of us, like Rob at Say Anything Blog.
@hank My brother had a hybrid, and the battery went bad. If he had chosen to replace the battery, it would have been well over $3000. As it was, he had the car on a lease, so he was able to just trade it in on a new leased car and not have to worry about it.
@hunter I think the technology needs to improve to make it really beneficial, but I am a supporter of ecars. I don’t think the answer is to get rid of them entirely, but to change our focus from pushing them out more, to focusing on making the clean energy technology easier (and cheaper) to use so that it gets a little more market share in the energy industry.
I think this is a common problem that we have all seen numerous times before. Anytime there is something that is drastically different that what we are accustomed to, there is a big learning curve in terms of how to get the best use from it. Look at the personal computer, and how long it took to get to where it is now from where it started–expensive, huge, slow, user unfriendly. As time goes on and the technology catches up the the theory/vision behind the product, more progress will be made. Of course, I may just be optimistic–after all, look at the Zune and the mini-CD, both products that were supposed to change music lol!
I guess I’m a bit confused, I’m a powertrain engineer for a large OEM and I have come across electric cars at work and I think they are fascinating. we are building a battery plant in the US as we speak and planning production there as well. The electric car obviously has components that a normal gas powered car does not such as the large battery under the floor. I’m trying to understand the meaning of generating electricity? The batteries are produced at the electric plants then installed to the vehicle, obviously these batteries are Lithium batters and not a normal car battery, but I don’t see the harm to the environment, especially anymore than a normal plant would cause.
In my mind only two drawbacks of electric car is the distance they can go until needing to be recharged, and the price of a replacement battery. I really think in 5 years electric cars will be much better than they are today and much more mainstream
@Eric Certainly, as the technology catches up, I expect that the “cost” of the ecars will go down, and this will be a somewhat moot conversation. I think the issue that Rob takes, and, to some degree, that I take is that right now the cars are being marketed as if they are environmental saviors when they really are not.
@Evan The discussion is over the plants that create the electricity to charge the cars, although there’s an argument about whether we’re doing some harm by using more batteries which, if not disposed of properly, do their own amount of harm. I would completely agree that in 5 or 10 years, the cars will be far better than they are today, and will be more mainstream.
I found the idea of a “garbage car” very interesting. We’re still a long way from perfecting a car that is fueled by waste, but it is an ingenius idea that I hope has a future.
Electric cars CAN be powered by hydro electric power. Gas cars will always be powered by a non-renewable resource.
I acknowledge that coal burning plants are used to produce electricity, however, there are technologies that can produce power w/o burning fossil fuels. Ultimately gasoline powered cars will be relics that cannot be supported by the planets resources and as long as folks insist on driving mini-tanks all by their lonesome to and from everywhere they go we will have cars. No fuel = no cars unless you develop alternative ways to power them.
I’m still worried about how to dispose of the toxic contents of those batteries.
I think a lot of comments bring up a good point – that not everything put into the grid is coal, but as of right now, most of it is. Of course this could change in the future but it wont change overnight – this could be a situation where the cart is before the horse, but the horse can catch up. What everyone is negating to mention here though is the amount of “rare earths” that are used in making some of the parts for these cars.
@sustainable PF Absolutely, and they can be powered by wind energy and solar energy, but at the moment there just isn’t enough supply for us to reasonably say that they will be anytime in the near future. As the technology progresses, I think they’ll (ecars) be more and more prolific. It’s just a matter of allowing the technology time to equalize.
@jeff I’m not familiar with the “rare earths” bit of the conversation. Got a good link I can look at?
I don’t believe one bit that electric cars will roadstars anytime soon, we just saw the first generation roll out. The most optimistic figures speak of 10% market share in 2020, if that materializes, it will be a feat!
I think this falls under the rebound effect. As things get more efficient we tend to use them more. We’ve seen it with fuel efficiency improvements bringing about more miles driven. Electric cars will become worthwhile when there is 100% carbon free electricity production.
I think it would be so awesome if we had a garbage car. It would give the wife’s common saying, “Honey, can you take out the trash?” a whole new meaning.
I think some people originally had the idea that their homes would be solar-powered and their cars would run off solar electrical energy. But with the price of solar being so high, that’s not happening.