This article is about petroleum-derived products, and cutting your carbon footprint by choosing alternatives.
One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution" is that it's going to require a massive expansion of our renewable energy capacity, like solar and wind, but we also need that renewable energy for other things, like household energy usage. If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency so the green electricity we generate can go to less wasteful means. It seems incredibly wasteful to massively build out green energy to continue to prop up a system where we all drive several-ton hunks of metal one mile to grab a coffee at a drive-thru.
I see stock pictures of traffic jams [0] and just think that EVs are a green "band-aid" to cover up a wasteful lifestyle.
> One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution" is that it's going to require a massive expansion of our renewable energy capacity, like solar and wind, but we also need that renewable energy for other things, like household energy usage.
The big problem we have with renewables right now is matching generation with demand. Solar is really cheap for daytime generation, but what are you going to do at night?
Electric cars don't have that problem. They're parked for most of the day, they need to be charged once a day or less, so they can be charged whenever renewable generation is available. Which makes deployment of renewables more economical, which means we get more of it.
> If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency so the green electricity we generate can go to less wasteful means.
We can do two things at once.
The biggest thing we can do to reduce vehicle miles traveled is to relax zoning near urban areas to allow higher density housing to be built closer to jobs. That works, it makes housing more affordable (which is independently good) and people waste less time commuting.
It also takes years before the new housing is actually built and even then doesn't solve the entire problem. You can't replace last mile truck deliveries with higher density housing or mass transit; you need electric trucks. Nobody is going to build low ridership mass transit to the low density suburbs that already exist, and they're not all going to cease to exist.
100% of cars are not going away anytime in the next century, but making the large majority of new cars electric is feasible within the next few years.
This is not a problem with a single solution. It's a problem with 100 solutions that each have a niche and you solve the problem best by deploying them all, each in the place where it makes the most sense.
The whole "what about at night?!" line has been trotted incessantly out here, slashdot, hackaday, reddit, etc like people in the utility industry aren't aware. A huge amount of electrical load happens during the day that doesn't happen in the dead of the night, which is why many utilities offer nighttime cheaper rates.
That hasn't stopped utilities from deploying wind and solar for 40% of their new generation over the last year or two, while shutting down coal plants left and right. For half a decade it's been considered settled fact that solar and wind are cheapest and the way forward. So, maybe this isn't as big a deal as you think it is.
Attention long ago shifted toward planning the grid to accommodate that, and also on grid-scale storage projects. Pumped hydro has been used extensively in the UK for decades because every time the BBC finished a program, everyone watching TV would fire up their electric kettle at the same time. There are several pumped hydro installations in Canada and the US as well.
Most EVs can schedule charging cycles and numerous utilities provide special rates for customers who agree to some level of utility control on their charging similar to how utilities provide discounts to people who let them tweak their AC thermostat; you can still override it, in most cases. In Australia, going back several decades, there was a grid load reduction signal system that worked by generating a harmonic that load reduction switches would look for.
An increasing number of EVs are set up to be able to backfeed power into the grid, and the idea is that they could do so on request from the utility.
Lots of utilities offer off-peak billing incentives. Imagine a world where your fridge does most of its cooling during the day, and "rides" through the night, etc.
EV charging stations are starting to come with their own local battery systems because DC fast charging, particularly at 800V, is enough power that it can be difficult to get enough electrical service and in some locations the station sits unused for a fair period of time.
Add in the fact that lithium ion battery prices continue to plunge following expected rules about production costs, as well as other technologies maturing; there's an iron salt based flow battery that looks really promising, made of very cheap and extremely prevalent materials (salt, iron, and water mostly) and scales fairly well.
>That hasn't stopped utilities from deploying wind and solar for 40% of their new generation over the last year or two, while shutting down coal plants left and right. For half a decade it's been considered settled fact that solar and wind are cheapest and the way forward. So, maybe this isn't as big a deal as you think it is.
Conspicuously absent in this incomplete story is the fact that so much of the coal has been replaced by natural gas, which doesn't have the giant unreliability downside of solar and wind. You can get away with >=~40% of your energy generated by solar/wind on every single day of the year with no interruption. Bump that up to 80% and it'll take a long time and a lot of money to accomplish that without sacrificing reliability.
But why? Just use nuclear for the other half. The goal is not "renewable energy ASAP". The goal is "minimize fossil fuel usage ASAP".
Smaller series-built plants will solve the long lead time problem. Once installed these are to be run at max capacity all the time, providing the base load - actually running a nuclear power plant is cheap compared to all other energy sources, the costs are mostly made in the beginning - planning and construction - and end - dismantlement and conservation - of the plant. Those costs - both head and tail - will go down radically with series-built plants. Once a reliable and cheap nuclear or hydro base load is in place the rest can be filled in with a mixture of renewables with storage (which is not available for now except for regions with a large established hydro-power infrastructure), renewables with fossil-based backup or more nuclear capacity. Renewables can not be used on their own as long as the storage problem is not solved, insisting that they can will and does lead to extreme price hikes and brown/blackouts.
I'd be wary of using Wikipedia as a source on this politically contentious issue since it has a known and fairly extreme slant to the "left" on most of these issues, in part due to the Wikipedia "reliable/perennial sources" policy [1] which promotes the use of left-biased sources while demoting centre- or right-biased sources.
That mostly depends on the will of the regulator, technically these systems are mostly ready. The NuScale 50MW modular reactor has now gotten its safety approval [1,2 - interesting to see how Popular Mechanics claims to "like nuclear technology" while the Scientific American article shows the more negative attitude "green" proponents usually espouse ] so it is a step closer to reality, what remains is mostly more rounds of approval and certification. In the UK Rolls Royce is working on a larger (440MW) [3] type of modular reactor with a stated goal of having them up and running in 10 years, building at a pace of 2 per year. Russia and China are also working on this type of reactor, so is Argentina. The IAEA has a technology roadmap for the deployment of small modular reactors [4] for those who want to read more on the subject.
To answer your "less than 15" question succinctly: certainly, as long as the activists are kept at bay. Possibly, if they are allowed to roam free to wreak havoc. Probably not if they are put in control.
It's doubtful the utilities are going to leave money on the table if there is a significant uptick in nighttime electricity usage due to to charging.
I'm not sure I'd want the lifetime of the most expensive component in my car being used to supplement the grid. But not only that, the incentives for feeding power back into the grid are under attack from the utilities:
“I'm not sure I'd want the lifetime of the most expensive component in my car being used to supplement the grid.”
I’d imagine that a service like that would be paid for, indeed. Tesla has talked about setting up a system to orchestrate grid support from car batteries and powerwalls.
As I understand it there is more money to be earnt to maintain grid frequency, than to shift load. I guess with more battery storage on the grid the variability in price at higher frequency will calls being made for seconds and minutes will dip.
There’s storage over the day night cycle but earning once a day will take longer to generate income.
But seasonal variability will be generating income a lot more slowly unless the price goes very high, but there would probably be other problems at that point.
If the workplace has chargers then a large number of cars can also be charged in the 9-5 time span when there is usually plenty of sun. Cars are idle most of the time, so we just have to make sure that they are plugged into the grid whenever they are not being driven, and then have intelligent charging systems that use EVs as sinks when there is a surplus.
It's a nice idea, but for it to work, it's going to need to be cheaper for the end user to charge their car at work than at home overnight (this is unlikely to be true in the near future, although could be made true with the right incentives), and workplaces are going to have to have some incentive to install them.
Something like, the employer provides free low speed electric car charging to the public because this is good PR and shows that they're green and encourages customers or clients to hang out on their premises.
But then since it's available to any "members of the public" yet using it involves parking your car at that company's building for eight hours, there is high uptake of the service by employees, and the company is sure to mention their green initiative when recruiting new workers.
That’s expensive, especially on top of a new EV purchase and charger install. How do you avoid a tragedy of the commons without mandating batteries on every new charger installation?
An EV driving 15k miles per year only averages ~500w of electricity 24/7. The infrastructure is therefore relatively cheap.
So at scale a 1GWh battery pack can charge ~100,000 cars at any time of the day. But, assuming PV adoption continues electricity prices will be lower in the day so most people will end up charging at the office.
They average 500W but that's a lot of 0W mixed in with a little bit of 10,000W. If everyone decides they want their 10,000W at the same time it's not going to work out.
> a 1 GWh battery pack
Some day soon. For now though that's about the total installed capacity for the entire USA [0].
Trains are amazing for cutting out carbon from the delivery chain. You can even run double stack containers with overhead electrical traction (both China and India do it). Honestly using trucks to ship from a California port to Utah makes no sense - use trains and then transfer to trucks only for the absolute last mile
It's a false dichotomy. We can BOTH build more green energy, and use some of it to displace fossil fuels from transportation.
If you predicate the future on reducing car dependency, good luck. I mean it's a noble goal, but you're gonna be holding your breath a while. Cars are popular for a lot of reasons.
Likewise trying to build enough solar panels for all the car-miles currently driven ends up being a mountain of solar indeed. So reducing the miles driven would ALSO be nice.
But we have to start on both and push hard on both, because meeting in the middle will happen a lot sooner.
Cars can be popular and not be a necessity for the majority of the population, and that will still drastically cut emission, pollution and traffic congestion.
And so is jetting off somewhere for holidays.. realistically we need to cut down so much to survive, but so far everyone is working on "it's future society's problem".
Only when the threat of death was within weeks did humans actually react with lockdowns, etc...
It's going to be interesting when we go back to the normal human behavior of dying within 50 miles of where we were born.
I can see a lot of people posting on this forum telling their grandkids, "I actually saw the Eiffel Tower in person, once. Yes, really! There was this thing called 'tourism'."
Well, governments quickness to full shutdowns, lockdowns, and travel bans across the world has made international travel much more less likely for myself, which sucks because I would've liked to see the world.
EVs are going to drive out gasoline for very comparable reasons to digital cameras driving out film cameras. That's a win for CO2, a win for air pollution in cities (that may be shaving points off people's IQ and definitely is shaving years off their lives), and a win for fungibility of energy generation. As gasoline infrastructure withers, it will be a win for retaining progress; it will no longer be possible to go back.
None of these things end car culture, but switching away from gasoline may help to de-fang it by reducing the macho attraction. If cars become just about getting from A to B, then alternatives may start to look more viable.
It's also a win for reducing oil dependency for many nations. Many of the oil producing countries are not always the most savory characters, and energy independence is an important national security goal in itself
And perhaps more importantly, there isn’t miles of red tape and NIMBYism to overcome to be able to roll out EVs.
I’m strongly in favor of nationwide electric rail, but I also know that accomplishing that will be nearly impossible short of the federal government steamrolling it through, which itself is unlikely due to oil and auto lobbying.
So I see it as a sort of, “take what you can get” situation.
I agree, the much better solution would be to reduce the cultural reliance on cars in general. Incentives for more work from home, more walkable and bikeable cities, more amenities locally, better public transport... Unfortunately at least in the US such changes are basically impossible due to the culture, at least currently. A generational die off or two might radically change that.
> EVs are a green "band-aid" to cover up a wasteful lifestyle.
Bad urban planning in the US is arguably a bigger problem. Most people aren't rich enough to live within walkable distance of their nearest coffee shop, grocery store, and train station. Trains make you wait an hour outside in the cold wet rain without bathrooms while a mentally ill person harrasses you for half of the hour. Buses don't show up. Curb ramps don't have drainage, so you have wet socks. And the nearest actual bathroom is for "customers only" (at least for males).
Right. Oddly this is where our climate problems can meet our affordable housing problems: start building clusters of neighborhoods that are designed to be walkable and bikeable. These are in stupidly high demand, we just need more of them. Default to installing heat pumps, solar panels, and EV hookups.
There's no silver bullets, but if the average person winds up driving X% fewer miles because they have the option to walk, that's a meaningful win.
Retrofitting the massive suburbs in both Europe and the United States is an almost impossible undertaking though. Likely the market will speak at some point and oil / electricity will become too expensive for people to own houses in the suburbs, but it’ll be painful when so much of the suburbanites identity is tied around this false idea of being “left alone”.
That, and the majority of Americans don’t even walk anymore, you can spend hours of driving without seeing someone walking to somewhere (as opposed to walking their dog), it’s insane.
> Retrofitting the massive suburbs in both Europe and the United States is an almost impossible undertaking though
Europe where? Suburbs are mostly an American thing, and the closest equivalents in most European cities are dense-ish, and usually have some form of public transit connection. Many cases can be improved a lot, but it isn't even close to being comparable to the thoroughly unsustainable very low density American sprawl.
Reduce the need for cars which will reduce the load on the grid if they're driven less.
But move people to buy EV cars instead of ICE where they can't do away with having a car.
Even if that still uses dirty energy sources, it's still cleaner than having ICE cars driving everywhere with their little inefficient engines, when a big power plant can do much more to be efficient. It also decouples energy sources in such a way that green energy can be built up to replace it without consumer disruption.
It's a win win to move people to EVs, but it's not the only end goal for better climate policy
>If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency
I've spoken to a subset of EV proponents who would strongly disagree with this. They say that it's not feasible or even possible, or maybe even acceptable, to convince enough people to change their lifestyle this radically. Therefore, we need to just all buy EVs.
Personally I agree with you, although the huge boost that continuing new development gives to my field as an engineer is undeniable.
If HN had a vote option that represented "I mostly agree with what you've written, but worry you're only saying it as half-garbled talking point designed to oppose something else that I support" it would get a lot of use from me.
I applaud your support of walkable cities with robust public transportation infrastructure.
I'm sad that it seems to mostly just be an echo of a decades long misinformation campaign against EVs rather than a positive and sincere suggestion to improve society.
The phrase "if we were rational and serious" is a red flag. Rarely has that come up in climate change discussions without a whole bunch of (ironically) irrational assumptions attached to it.
Oh if only those silly greens had been more rational! What amazing progress we could have made on this problem. Are we all supposed to pretend that lots of serious (acting) figures on the, let's say, non-green side didn't openly and blatantly lie about it not being a problem and all the solutions being cons long after everyone knew this was what they were doing?
If I was to come up with a list of things that were not rational or serious "pretend climate change is not happening" would come way before "let's stop using internal combustion engines in crowded cities because we have cheaper, better, quieter, healthier alternatives readily available".
This is the only solution I accept these days in any serious discussion about cutting carbon emissions. And yea I know about Chernobyl and Fuckushima, but we’re still better off dealing with focused problems like that instead of vague extinction level crisis.
Yeah, I know about Chernobyl too - I grew up there and my parents still work there (since 1987). Yes, it was a huge tragedy but it’s effects are hugely exaggerated by oil and gas lobbyists in US.
The bigger problem with EV revolution is carbon footprint of its side effects, e.g., extra emissions from producing and utilizing batteries, or extra particulates from tire wear due to weight of electric vehicles.
Explain why it's heavier? Because electric vehicles carry all the chemistry, while gasoline powered vehicles only carry carbon and hydrogen and take oxygen from the air.
Or explain why the difference in weight is negligible? But it's not, electric vehicles are noticeably heavier, and vehicle weight is the primary driver of tire wear and road wear.
80 mph vs 70 mph [1] is a 10/70 increase in speed or 1.14
1.14 ^ 3 = 1.5 or 50% more power required to drive 80 mph vs 70 mph.
There are some nuances. ICE efficiency goes up a lot with load. Perhaps you’re not exactly in a v^3 regime. There are fixed power costs.
All these and others lessen the impact of doing 80. But the point remains. Slow down.
[1] if you dont like my numbers do (vhigh/vlow)^3. The formula doesn't work for very low speeds though (driving 20 in our cars is much more efficient that 10 mph).
Hmm. But over a fixed distance, the overall energy expenditure scales as v^2 (for v^3 power regime). Double the speed implies octuple (?) the power but only for half the time implies quadruple the energy spend.
Not invalidating your point, but just a minor adjustment. :)
Subjectively it feels like highway speeds have been going up steadily over the last 10 years. Maybe not. But I don't like that "cruising" speed on US interstates is 70-75. Seems dangerous and wasteful, just to save a few minutes travel time. But then again people also drive on the highways with huge empty pickup trucks all the time, so they probably just don't care about waste.
> Subjectively it feels like highway speeds have been going up steadily over the last 10 years. Maybe not. But I don't like that "cruising" speed on US interstates is 70-75
Secretly, I hope that range anxiety in EV sticks around a little longer so that people lower their average speeds on the freeway to max out their range.
That, coupled with a growing realization that most of the fun with driving is in the peppy acceleration and good handling which is pretty much table stakes for modern EVs across the price spectrum.
High sustained top speed in a straight line with an overpowered ICE car is boring and should be buried with the Lamborghinis and Ferraris (among other trends from the 80s).
Is there data somewhere on optimal mph for fuel savings for the average sedan or by each car? I'm assuming it's basically the slowest you can maintain a decent rpm in the highest gear, but curious where that falls for different models.
In general your otto-cycle (diesel is different) engine is most efficient at full throttle near its peak torque. However, this is far more power than is needed at cruise.
So the lowest speed your highest gear can go?
Not quite. First, engines are so powerful that you’re probably well in a range dominated by aerodynamic forces. With modern 10 speed transmissions you are probably several speeds too high.
Like I said, it depends on the car, you’d have to test it on an empty flat country road. But I’d guess 50 kph or less.
I’m a pretty staunch Republican, but Jimmy Carter was a great president. And his 55 mph interstate speed limit is the most sensical fuel economy policy of any president.
Modern engines change the fuel air mixture if you go full throttle to give you extra power at the expense of efficiency. You really need to look at the engine spec to find the most efficient operations regime.
People concentrate too much on the last one and not nearly enough on the other two. I presume because they require a change in lifestyle people are not willing to do.
Because it isn't feasible. Many people currently using electricity wouldn't want to limit their use because it would decrease their quality of life, and many people live worse than that and would probably like to be able to use more electricity. Consumer electricity consumption will only go up globally. Industrially optimisations can probably be made, but many countries are yet to industrialise and we can't really refuse them the right to.
No it doesn't. If I heat my home with underfloor heating and a heat pump that provides significantly more quality of life than a coal oven while also using a fraction of the energy. GDP and energy consumption have been decoupled in industrialized nations for decades now.
Reducing energy consumption is a way better way to start, than to incentivize everyone to frontload their carbon consumption by demanding batteries produced only by relatively dirty manufacturing means.
Sustainable, effective storage solutions won't be realized with lithium or any other relatively inaccessible, relatively rare material. The combination of sodium-ion or graphene-based stationary storage plus graphene-based supercapacitors (maybe with some nuclear sprinkled in to smooth out the peaks and valleys) is going to be the sustainable way forward.
Sodium is 7th most abundant on Earth, 11th most abundant in the universe.
Carbon is 15th most abundant on Earth, 4th most abundant in the universe.
Lithium is 25th most abundant on Earth, 44th most abundant in the universe.
There are already quite substantial emissions when turning oil into plastics and other products. Steam crackers are among the biggest industrial carbon sources.
But that's not all: The common end of life processing of most plastics these days is waste incineration (causes CO2) or landfils (may cause methane, which is worse than CO2). Sooner or later most carbon embedded in the oil used for products will end up in the atmosphere.
Why is the list of single-use plastics shown always bags and straws? These items use minuscule amounts of plastic, are potentially more environmentally friendly than the alternatives, and have potential second uses (I re-use plastic bags as waste-basket liners, toiletry bag, etc, etc).
On the other hand, I never see COSMETICS packaging mentioned (although at least this article mentions microbeads). Toothpaste tubes, shampoo and showergel bottles, lipstick caddies, face-cream pots, etc, etc. These must be a far larger source of waste plastic.
The problem is not everyone thinks and acts the same. For many a single-use straw is a matter of connivence. They are minuscule in form but the volume of trash produced outweighs the rest.
One thing I can't shake about the EV "revolution" is that it's going to require a massive expansion of our renewable energy capacity, like solar and wind, but we also need that renewable energy for other things, like household energy usage. If we were rational and serious about making the biggest impact, we would reduce car dependency so the green electricity we generate can go to less wasteful means. It seems incredibly wasteful to massively build out green energy to continue to prop up a system where we all drive several-ton hunks of metal one mile to grab a coffee at a drive-thru.
I see stock pictures of traffic jams [0] and just think that EVs are a green "band-aid" to cover up a wasteful lifestyle.
[0] https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/traffic-jam-in-los-ange...