How will the Chevrolet Volt be better than a Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid?

Sure, but you miss my point. People think they can just change technologies and that's it. Therefore missing huge savings possible by changing driving habits (behavioral changes - which don't cost anything, BTW) which can also lead to further savings if lower speeds make it possible to reduce car size and weight. Does having everybody continue to race around in hulking SUV's make sense if all that has changed is that the SUV's have become EV-SUV's? Just as people buy hybrids and whiz around in them as before (my niece being an excellent example).

Technology isn't the whole answer. Efficient use of energy and reduction of usage are important pieces of the puzzle.

 

There is conservation and pollution, and I am not opposed to people using less energy, but I am more concerned with people using less scarce resources and of harmful pollutants.

It comes down to a moral argument, which I don't think has much traction in america today. If someone is driving a big honking suv on wind power, at least IMHO that is better than someone driving an econobox on opec oil and causing pollution at the refinery.

I think that we can agree that less gasoline refined and less coal mined and refined are a good thing. IMHO long term I would rather be wasteful of wind and sun than trying to squeeze some more oil efficiently from sands and shale. But I am thinking long run, and others are thinking this year. And there is that old keynsian maxim "in the long run we're all dead". I am sure that those buying those volts, leafs. teslas are more efficient on than average.

 

You're still clinging to the technology viewpoint. Whatever they're driving, they need to be driving (a) less and (b) more economically when they DO drive. No matter WHAT they are driving. Is that clearer?

Changing the fleet will take time (and will cost money). Look how slow the adoption of hybrids has been, and they're just an intermediate step. Behavioral changes cost nothing and can be implemented more quickly. OK, except that people are stubborn and resist change. Which is why they'd rather just buy different technology and not change their behavior.

 

You two are like a couple of religious zealots arguing over how many angles can dance on the head of a pin.

Here is the long and the short of it:

1) Conserving resources is good.

2) Switching to more abundant and less damaging resources is good.

It isn't an either/or situation. Both are good.

Tom

 

+1
My GF says that posting in a forum like this is a waste of time. She's right.

 

I'm not grasping and clinging to technology, I am espousing my point of view, That Malthusian economics are really not what is in play. The solution does not mean we need to give up SUVs, infact someone buying an electric RAV and fueling it with wind might actually help even if it uses more energy than a prius C. THere are a large number of have nots in china and india, and I don't believe we should tell them they can't drive cars because oil is the only fuel source. I am not arguing against efficiency, but efficiency by itself is not a long term solution.

Yes, that last part exactly is my POV. I doubt you avert a huge oil crisis by telling people to drive hybrids. Economically substitution is much more straight forward, but for it to work the technology must be ready.

I hope you don't ignore the subleties or think that shooting down the argument that ev's just run on coal is bad practice. There are more important things than efficiency and CO2. Texas has a lot of oil, but more hot air. The oil we can sell and their is plenty of hot air to power all the plug ins, we only need the grid improvements which are being made and to build the turbines and modernize the natural gas plants. Similar stories are in California and the Pacific Northwest and between them these areas will get the bulk of phevs and bevs. Now the story is not as good in places like Indiana, so its not universal, but even indiana could pay more for reusable energy.

Now that we have settled that, volt will be better for some a prius phv for others. I don't think its an either or, and I think its great to have choices ;-)

 

Going to guess you have a scan gauge (which I do not). It sure sounds to me like the engine is running faster than those speeds. We drove between 65-75 the whole way to Virginia and I could just hear the engine working away. Maybe I am just over sensitive because of how quiet the Prius is. I found the drive back with just the Prius to be much more pleasant as far as sound/interior vibrations. Is even more noticeable when rolling up to stop lights or in very slow traffic. I suppose I just do not spend enough time in CS mode, or with the engine running ever. Winter will most likely change that as the engine should kick on in the lower temps to help the battery.

 

Quite right, but it takes a national effort and a LOT of money for either to solve our biggest enviro problems, so the argument here is about allocation of resources. Needless I hope to point out, conservation is a lot cheaper than 'clean' coal. And a lot cheaper than PV. So while gmwort is happy to tout his personal economic argument of low cost to him, he ignores the subsidies that allow it.

I am well aware that the lion's share of petroleum costs are swept under the rug too but two wrongs do not make a right. Transparency is the only way to go.

 

No, there are not.

Efficiency and conservation will allow us to live within obtainable green budgets. CO2 is the driver of AGW, a monumental problem you are still in denial about.

 

This is not part of the definition of fungible. The difficulty of storing electricity is precisely why peak shaving is so important, and why electric utilities do everything they can to encourage people to shave the peaks, and why the strategy of charging at night from the grid, and feeding back during the day, is so beneficial.

The fact that electricity is fungible is why the above strategy works.

Really? I get exactly the opposite sense. I sense that people with PV arrays generally employ a wide range of conservation and efficiency measures. Zythryn has described how he has made his home more efficient.

Perhaps you got the 90-mph reference from a post on which I said that I once took my Tesla up to 90 mph for about 5 seconds, just to show a VW Bug on the freeway who was the king of acceleration. But I don't have a PV array. It's not permitted where I live since the homeowners' association is responsible for all the house roofs (actually, all exteriors except the porches). I do accelerate hard. I also note that even driven hard, the Tesla (like EVs generally) uses about 1/3 as much energy as the most efficient gasoline cars.

All the PV owners that I've met are very spare in their use of electricity. And of course, they have an incentive to be, since in most cases they can sell their unused electricity back to the grid.

 

Reducing waste is always good. Conservation in terms of reducing waste is good, but from that we cannot extrapolate that conservation is always the best policy. For example, if your house is on fire, the fire department can conserve water by not spraying it on your house. This is not a good place for conservation.

I mention this to make a point about the "logic" being expressed on this thread. Outside of religious name-calling threads, this one has the largest concentration of willful misapplication of logic. I can't believe the lengths to which some arguments are being carried in the name of supporting some notion of who gets the biggest bragging rights for being green. It's all silly. There is a need for conservation, and there is a need for better efficiency. The two are part of a general solution, not mortal enemies.

Tom

 

It had to be done to create a baseline to answer the question OP posted.

Volt has halo around it's green bragging rights. My goal was to point out that it has no such green cred if you consider well-to-tank-to-wheel from the average grid electricity. That has been established by this discussion and the DOE report. However, there is more to it.

The regular Prius thrive on synergy between gasoline and electricity (from waste). Plugin cars by nature also create synergy with the power plants and PV systems. By introducing energy from the outside source, we also need to consider the synergy between the on board powertrain and the external grid.

As you put it, the synergy effect would come from reducing waste from the coal power plants. I do not have a way to measure how much waste (power plant inefficiency) would be reduced.

Does anyone have such study/report to quantify it?

 

I will admit that in the arguments over peak shaving and limited-case scenarios (such as the rare person who burns very little gas in the Volt) I lost sight of the question in the title of the thread.

I consider that for the average driver, the Volt is not better than a PiP or even a regular Prius. But needs and styles differ, and ways of providing electricity differ, and there are exceptions to the general rule.

Throughout this thread I have tried to argue that attempting to trace the journey of a given electron, or to identify the source of a given electron, is the wrong way to look at it. In fact, no single electron travels from source to destination. Electrons in a wire move back and forth at 60 Hz (in North America) and what travels along the wire is a voltage wave. Voltages add and subtract within the grid and there is literally NO SUCH THING as a given kWh between the generator and the load. What I consider the correct way to analyze the problem is to look at the effect of a given action. Putting up solar panels and feeding the electric power into the grid, taken alone, reduces the amount of coal burned, if the local grid is powered by coal. It does not matter who uses that electricity, and in fact, the electricity all gets jumbled together on the grid. The action of feeding PV electricity onto the grid, in the case of coal-fired generation, reduces the amount of coal burned.

Feeding PV electricity onto the grid, and then drawing the same amount out, has no net effect on the amount of coal burned, except as timing may (and does) affect the practical operation of the grid.

I've tried to argue that from this action-effect point of view, what matters is not whose electricity anybody uses, since that concept is actually meaningless, but the effect that use or generation has on the grid.

Thus it does not matter, in my view, whether Zythryn uses a grid-tied or an isolated system. It is the effect of his total system that matters. And his system has no net effect on the amount of coal burned, except insofar as peak shaving actually reduces the strain on the grid, and therefore probably reduces the amount of coal slightly. The real effect of Zythryn's overall system is that he burns less gasoline than he would in a Prius, but only because his driving habits involve very little gasoline use in his Volt.

I remain unchanged in my opinion that for most people, the lesser efficiency of the Volt, combined with its higher level of emissions, make it worse than the Prius, especially if it is ever used for road trips. And after all, the whole idea of the Volt is that it is capable of long trips. Because if you were just concerned with being able to go the extra 10 or 15 miles occasionally, a Leaf would be the better choice. The Volt's only advantage over the Leaf is that the Volt can go farther than 100 miles, but if it is to be driven that far on anything like a regular basis, then the Prius becomes the better car.

I want to repeat what I hid in an earlier paragraph, because it is crucial to understanding a fallacy put forth by some others in this thread:

No single electron travels from source to destination. Electrons in a wire move back and forth at 60 Hz (in North America) and what travels along the wire is a voltage wave. Voltages add and subtract within the grid and there is literally NO SUCH THING as a given kWh between the generator and the load. Power generated, completely and absolutely loses its identity once it is on the grid. The power absorbed by a load cannot be identified with any given source. Not merely that it's too difficult to identify the source because electrons are tiny. But rather that the concept of the identity of a given kWh has no meaning. You can add power to the grid, or draw power from the grid, but you cannot trace power within the grid.

When you pay extra for "green" electricity, what you are actually doing is donating money for the installation of green power generation. And if the utility company is honest, it will install enough green generation to compensate for your usage. Compensation is all there is, and compensation is all there needs to be because the effect is to reduce the amount of dirty generation taking place.

 

This is exactly the definition of fungible. Transportation and time shifting are things that make it not fully follow the fungible definition. Under most local definitions though, trading off day demand for night demand is a net positive. How positive or negative this is depends on the grid and regulations.

I never intended my remarks to claim one person is more green than another. My remarks are to move the conversation away from efficiency to utility, and I am sure I have failed with this group.

 

i think both have a place as a way point towards a gasless solution. for many, EVs dont work. either you drive too far, only have one car or (the biggest hurdle) live in an unsupportive state.

Both Cars, because they have the potential to drive gasless for very significant distances means that it can work simply if the owner wants to put enough effort into it.

i drove a short range EV for 3+ years, so i know what its like to plan a trip based on where i can plug in. ya, spent time at the library reading up on magazines (i dont buy any of them...ever) when i might have wanted to be elsewhere but had to get a charge.

but, fact of the matter; whether its a 15 mile range, 40 mile range or a 100 mile range; if you want it to work, you can make it work. for every mile driven that does not burn gas, that is fuel saved.

we wont get completely off the gas standard for at least another 50 years. and we never get off liquid fuel if we cant figure out this electrical storage thing. now, figure that out and gas will be gone in a heartbeat.

slow charge, fast charge, over night charge; doesnt matter. when we can put 500 miles of range in a 500 lb container, the time it takes to fill it will be a non-issue.

and stated it once and will state it again, we will never run out of free electrons

 

In an ideal world, yes. Practically you are just lining the utility pockets, since they simply buy 'green' energy already on the grid. I found one company in the UK that *appeared* to use customer payments to build more clean capacity although they never responded to my emails so I did not follow up with more homework to convince myself that they actually did what they marketed.

The remainder of your post is spot-on, Daniel. You are dangerously close to the conclusion I reached some time ago, that EVs are just appliances, and until clean energy is available in EXCESS on the grid, they only shift pollution, they do not decrease it (compared to a Prius.)

 

NOTHING that CONSUMES energy decreases pollution. However, EVs can, and sometimes do, run on clean energy. Gasoline cars never run on clean energy. Thus EVs create the potential for a nation to shift to clean energy.

My car is water powered, since I get my electricity from hydro and I charge it at night when there is excess energy. But even using average grid power, base resource to wheels, an EV is cleaner than a gas car.

An efficient car does not decrease pollution. It merely increases (produces) less than a less-efficient car.

 

My home electric is coal based. If I install PV that covers 50% of my home energy consumption, or if I take efficiency and conservation measures that reduce my home consumption by 50%, the net effect is the same.

Since the latter is a lot less expensive than PV, I choose efficiency and conservation. More to the point, since efficiency and conservation are a lot cheaper than PV, they are IMO an obvious national energy policy choice. Few people will install 5-10 kw PV arrays without subsidy to prove the 'green-ness' of their EVs.

And in a world where subsidy and cost externalities have been abolished, still few people will put up PV. They will conserve and seek efficiency. Just look to Europe for a partial example.

 

If, and this is a big IF, the conserved energy is not used by someone else, then surely pollution is reduced. Even if used by me or someone else later, the pollution is spread out over a longer time. The same logic holds for a clean energy contribution to the grid that is not excess.

 

Even a driver with similar driving patterns as Zythryn (say 90% EV miles) living in the same area (grid with CO2 intensity above US average) will do better with Prius+PV than Volt+PV with respect to GHG emissions.

700 g/kWh grid:
Prius HEV: 222 gCO2/mile
Volt: 257 gCO2/mile.