Misinformation at Seattle Electric Vehicle Booth

I swung by the Seattle EVA (Electric Vehicle Association) booth to chat with some of the folks over there. The conversation went something like this:

Me: So, does it really make sense to get an electric vehicle that runs from a coal-fired grid?

Old Man: Absolutely. Anything to get off foreign oil.

Me: But, what about the emissions? Are the emissions better through the grid than using oil?

Old Man: [rolls eyes] Of course they are. Electric vehicles are 5x more efficient than a gas vehicle, so the emissions are 5x better.

Me: Are you sure about that?

Old Man: [looks annoyed] Read this pamphlet. [Throws me a flyer and runs off to greet some other people].

Truth is, he is absolutely correct in saying that electric cars are 5x more efficient at using energy than gas cars. Problem is, the grid that gets the energy to us isn't very efficient, so much of the efficiency gains are lost in the transport of the energy.

Take a look at the graph above. That represents the lifetime CO2 emissions for different types of automobiles. Partly because the manufacturing emissions are higher for electric cars, an electric car run off of today's grid has a much worse emissions story than a hybrid. But if you can transform the grid to run from a renewable source, then you have something exciting to talk about. We're not there yet.

And this doesn't even begin to get into the water requirements to generate the power behind electric vehicles. Needless to say, I'm disappointed that Seattle EVA doesn't have their facts straight.

Comments

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[Justin]

You bring up a great point with your post. People need to look at the full energy cycle. I would be very interested to see how bio-diesel stacks up... I am going to be moving my business away from Gas powered vehicles and I starting to research the most cost effect / environmentally effective balance for me. Thank you for bringing great content, your feed is a part of my daily stream.

[Skip Montanaro]

Do you have a source for the data displayed in your graph? It's not clear to me how the hybrid can be cleaner than the full electric, given that all its input energy comes from gasoline. It is, at best, an incremental improvement over today's full gas car. I suspect that's mostly because the cars with hybrid drivetrains tend to be smaller on average than those with traditional gas engines.

Your "Electric (coal)" figure is misleading. On average nationwide, I believe about 50% of our electricity is generated using coal. You imply that if Joe Q. Public were to buy an electric car today that all the energy used to power it would come from coal-fired power plants.

It's also not clear why the amount of carbon dioxide used to manufacture an electric car should be higher than for a gasoline engine car. Electric motors are much less complex than internal combustion engines (and therefore much simpler to produce) and batteries, while expensive to produce from first use raw materials, can be recycled, substantially reducing the cost to produce new ones.

[Steven Lough]

Our booth was inundated all two days. Turns out the Green Festival should have had LOTS more info on Transportation Issues. I think I may have been the "old man" that the blogger refers to. ( That hurts a little) What I do not remember is being short or rude to any one.
It may have been yet another person commenting on " But where does the Electricity come from" but I remember mentioning several studies by the EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute) which showed that even if generated from Coal Fired Plants that pollution from a given number of EV's would be less than the same number of Gas fired cars. But what I did not mention, is to look at total pollution from the Oil Fields, Oil Pipe lines, Oil Tankers, Oil Refinery energy input, Oil Prices, and ...Oil wars...

[Gene]

You bring up good points although some info on where you get your data from is always good. In line with the same thinking what if the power to process oil to gasoline is supplied by coal? Take a look at how much power is used to produce and transport gasoline.

I personaly belive that if your buying an EV than looking into solar or wind generation to completely offset your power usage would be a natural path.

[Tyler Marshall]

I have an electric vehicle, and I am also concerned about where my electricity comes from. I live in Kirkland WA, and my electricity would normally come from hydro (with some natural gas and coal mixed in). However, Puget Sound Energy has a Green Power program, and I have been buying 100% green power for several years now.

http://www.pse.com/solutions/foryourhome/Pages/home_greenPower.aspx#

It only costs $0.0125 extra per kW, and the energy comes from renewable resources like wind, biomass, and solar. You don’t even need an electric vehicle to join and reduce your carbon footprint and greenhouse emissions. I hope that someday all of our electricity will be from renewable resources, and nobody will be discussing coal.

I think the question "does it really make sense to get an electric vehicle that runs from a coal-fired grid?" is a bit loaded.

I live in the Seattle area and our electricity does not come from a completely coal-fired grid. Puget Sound Energy maintains a balanced and diverse mix of cost-effective power resources. The mix is 72% renewable. 70% comes from hydro, 1% wind, 1% solar. The rest comes from two? gas plants, one nuclear plant on the Columbia River, and a coal plant with scrubbers in Centralia. So if I've done my math right, about 83% is already CO2 free if you are a regular PSE customer.

Thermal plants are at best 40% efficient due to the Carnot cycle (see thermodynamics). The plants lose 60% of their energy into heat, straight up the cooling tower. Given 1000 MW(th) Coal-fired (or Nuclear or gas), 400 MW(e) are are produced. The transmission lines losses account for 10% or 100 mW. Other losses such as poor grounding etc. account for another 100 MW(e) lost, leaving 200 MW(e) delivered to homes (or electric vehicles and scooters). As you can see, it's not transmission line losses, but the thermal plant.

Electric motors on the other hand are 90% efficient and motor controllers are also 90% efficient. The battery does heat a bit while being charged, but the charging system is also around 90% efficient. Electric vehicles are around 70% efficient electric in, power to the wheels.

The same efficiency losses plagues cars, but more because the engine is not running at an optimum speed. A gasoline engine can produce at most 30% horse power of that gallon of gas. The reason - a car is also a thermal plant. The rest goes to heating the radiator, heating the engine and bearings, and heating the exhaust air. Another 10% of the original gallon of gas is lost transferring that power through the crankshaft to the wheels. At most a gasoline car is 20% efficient.

But we did not count the energy required to bring the oil from the pumpjack to the refinery by pipeline and/or tanker, the losses incurred in refining the oil, then more transport costs to eventually get the gasoline to the store. I don't have access to give you an accurate efficiency of the delivery of gasoline to the gas station.

Here are some interesting conversions for you to consider:

1 gallon of gas contains 33.7 kWh according to the DOE.

A gallon of gas at the pump costs $3.40 per gallon. With a gasoline car, you can deliver 20% of the energy to the wheels, or 6.74 kWh.

I can buy the same amount of energy as a gallon of gas at my home for 7.2 cents per kWh * 33.7 kWh = $2.43 With an electric car, you can deliver 70% of the energy to the wheels, or 23.6 kWh.

With everything the same, the electric vehicle gets 3.5 time better "gas" (electric) mileage, at a much lower cost.

But I have taken the extra step - I transformed the grid to run from a renewable source for me. I'm a member of PSE's green power program. This means that every KiloWatt-hour I buy is made from the 72% renewable sources. So if I plug in my electric scooter, it's nearly emissions free. (CO2 is produced when building dams, wind turbines, solar panels and geothermal plants...) I invite you to do the same. There are months when the renewables have been cheaper than conventional.

So in short, I pay a bit more for my renewable electricity, my "electric mileage" is much better than an equivalent (1000kW ~= 1 1/4 hp) engine, but the downside I have to invest just a tad more in the machine (3,000 vs 2,500). The same applies to electric cars or plug-in hybrids.

PSE has completed two wind projects: Wild Horse and Hopins Ridge. They are now working on a third. PSE's green power program helps those projects underway.

I think electric vehicles plus renewable power make sense end-to-end. I think PSE needs to be encouraged to be the first large-scale CO-2 free utility in the country. I really don't think that SEVA was mis-informing anyone. Research it a bit and I think you will reach the same conclusion.

[Jim Adcock]

I don't know where you got your plot from, but I don't think you can assume that it represents correct data. The best studies I have seen about these comparisons is the "GREET" models from Argonne National Labs, although they have a lot of results where they do not consider many reasonable car designs -- presumably because the administration doesn't want comparisons that show fuel cell vehicles in a bad light. The case for electric vehicles is simple: Our current gas vehicles with their huge oversized gas engines average less than 10% efficiency on the gas-to-engine-output part of the cycle. Whereas the electric cars battery-to-motor-output averages about 90%. IE 9X more efficient. Coal is about 1.5 times dirtier than Petroleum. Thus electric cars are about 4X cleaner -- even if your electricity is created 100% from coal. Even more compelling, most consumers can ask their electrical utility company to deliver to them 100% clean electricity from wind mills for about a one penny per kilowatt-hour upcharge. Wind Mills produce "excess energy" at night when winds are highest which currently goes unused. You change your electric cars at night from that underused Wind Mill energy. Now you have a car that is 0% polluting on a per-mile basis.

[Paul]

Could someone please explain why the "manufacture" cost for an electric auto is so much greater than either gas or hybrid? It makes no sense to me. Think of all the precision machined parts in an ICE.

Also, what "Hybrid" and what "Electric" are you comparing? Some Hybrid vehicles don't get good fuel economy (the V-6 Accord hybrid, hybrid full size Pickups.) This looks like a graph to designed to heap praise onto the Prius and Insight.

I do understand that if you get all your energy from *older* coal fired power plants EVs may not (or may - depending on what you choose to measure) look better. New coal power plants do much better is part because of regulations and in part because efficiency reduces the fuel cost per kWh. My EV is 80% hydro powered and less than 10% coal powered.

I will leave with this...
The peak efficiencies quoted for production automobile engines are 34% (Prius, gasoline) and 42% (VW TDI, diesel.) That is the *peak*. Typical efficiency is much less (roughly 0% when idling.) Electric motors of EV size almost always have a peak efficiency of at least 85%.

Please do everyone a favor and retract this entry until you have properly investigated your opinion. This article is itself spreading its own form of misinformation, and is doing an extreme disservice to the argument for EVs, as well as unnecessarily making SEVA look like a bunch, when it may have just been a simple matter that they were swamped and/or exhausted from talking to people for 2 days. Had you been understanding and arranged a better time and environment to discuss this issue before publishing your own opinion, then perhaps you might have learned more about the well known "long tail-pipe" or "transfer" argument and that EVs are indeed much cleaner than ICE vehicles. Instead, it looks like you went straight to publishing your own vague opinion that continues the circular blame of "mis-information" without actually proving anything other than your own ignorance.

[Ashay]

Almost all manufacturing plants use energy, not all of it is from renewable sources. It is difficult to be "completely green" today - it is the system we've built.

Others have made a very elaborate case on the efficiencies of the electric vehicle, and the production/distribution efficiencies of electric power (unfortunately, there's no data for gasoline production/distribution costs).

Let me add another data point. All the parts that go into a car are made by different manufacturers of which many are overseas. While US regulations may enforce tougher CO2 emission standards on manufacturing facilities, the same can't be said for other countries. Let us assume that all countries are subject to a single emission standard AND that we isolate cost comparison to "energy conversion" only (i.e. fuel supply, engine and cooling systems, exhaust, sensors, etc is replaced by batteries, charger, controller, motor). The electric alternative costs less (monetary and emission footprint) because there are a lot less parts to begin with. Plus, recurring costs of engine oil and antifreeze (and their disposal) are more because they are not recyclable whereas most of the battery parts are. This is further compounded by the fact that oil changes are required every few thousand miles while the batteries can keep working for a few years. Motors can outlive the rest of the car.

With real driving data collected from my family's driving patterns, I found that 50%-60% of our city driving is "no load" (i.e. either idling or coasting). This means that half the time we don't need the engine running - unfortunately these "no load" states are not long enough duration to turn the car off (and we shouldn't when coasting).

So, even today, I believe electric vehicles are an absolute no brainer for a very large percentage of city driving needs.

So if one were to consider costs of extracting crude oil - refinement - disposal, the higher number of parts, the maintenance over time, the fuel distribution costs, then it is obvious that electricity is a much "greener" alternative.

I'll part with the following: even with all-electric cars powered by renewable energy sources, it is better to use mass transportation in cities. Period.

[HiTekVagabond]

Ashay, I'm not sure that I agree. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency_in_transportation

There is an interesting table that compares the efficiency of a variety of transportation modes. The efficiency per passenger of a bus is 27 MPGeUS, airplane us 29 MPGeUS, train is 42-45 MPGeUS, motorcycle is 51 MPGeUS.

But even if you take an electric car, you can far exceed the per-passenger efficiency of a motorcycle. An electric moped gets a per passenger efficiency of around 130 MPGeUS, but it's not record breaking fast.

Konrad

[Greg]

While I personally believe in the very highly regarded, peer-reviewed studies from some of the most prominent research institutions in the U.S. which have shown that EVs are cleaner even with the current US electrical grid, I'd like to highlight a few reasons why EVs are still a better choice, even if they were to pollute just as much as gasoline:

- Even if they were just "extending the tailpipe" (which they aren't), wouldn't it still be preferable to have emissions coming from a single power plant, removed from dense urban areas?
- Wouldn't it still be preferable to have those emissions coming from a single power plant which could be upgraded to the latest scrubbing technology far easier than we could upgrade every vehicle on the road?
- Also, this fails to take into account that vast amounts of electricity are being generated during the night during off-peak demand and going unused. The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found that 198 million plug-in hybrids could be charged just with this electricity. This would not be causing additional emissions.
- Coal is not our only energy source. I've read of several EV owners who have solar installations large enough to generate the equivalent amount of electricity that their EV is using.
- As the national electricity grid gets cleaner and cleaner, EVs will too. Any other fuel source will likely only see marginal improvements in efficiency of fuel generation, and likely huge decreases in the actual efficiency of the vehicle over its lifetime. Once a non-EV is built, it's always going to emit just about the same CO2 emissions on the lot or at 200,000 miles.

Please post a follow-up. I would very much like to hear your thoughts about this.

This might be true for areas where all electricity comes from coal but in the PNW it mostly comes from hydro power. So emissions are not a concern here.

what a pissy little person
this guy to help with promoting electric vehicles and he gets grief
go home little man

what a pissy little person
this guy to help with promoting electric vehicles and he gets grief
go home little man

[Alex Barclay]

I liked this posting. I think that you should always think about the complete carbon cycle, and be willing to justify your current position with any askers.

I used to joke with a guy at work that my '90 Grand Am was greener than his Prius, and even did all the calculations. The killer is in the manufacturing energy. I was driving an old car where the manufacturing energy was spent long ago.

From my point of view, to move away from fossil fuels you need to find some new way of transporting energy. Currently we transport gasoline/diesel, natural gas, electricity (and I should probably include water because with the electricity you can then get hydrogen off the ground). Why invent new distribution technologies? In my opinion electricity is going to be the universal energy transport. If you need hydrogen, manufacture it locally using electricity. If you have an EV then recharge it. If you need to heat your house then that's easy now.

The real question comes to how to make the electricity cleanly and efficiently and then how to transport it efficiently to where it is needed.

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