Plug-in cars could actually increase air pollution

oh Marlin. that's funny. oh, wait, yer serious! Hasn't that gone the way the Prius is worse than a Hummer article? Why, oh why do these things continue to thwart the best solution out there, electric cars.

Anyone ever read darrelldd's website and links? evnut.com. give it a try. Gasoline will NEVER be clean to produce and burn. Electricity can and will be...unless articles like this continue.

 

Headline should read "recycled crap information". Problem is the coal plant not the car. I hope the state agency didn't spend too much money on the report. good lord

 

I swear those types of reports are what keep us from progressing. And they say us environmentalists want everyone to live in the stone age..... Get with the program people.

 

One more reason why we need to replace fossil fuel power plants with safe, clean nuclear power.

 

Amen to that brother. Another thing these "surveys" don't take into consideration is that all those plants are still running during the night. You cannot start and stop a generating plant in a 12 hour cycle. It is just not realistic. (I worked at power plants for 20 years). The electricity is just going to waste. At least if we plugged a lot of cars in, the electricity generated by those running plants would be put to good use.

 

Often this recycled story goes more like this:
Because PHEV's don't warm up very well (because they're running on electric) when the ICE finally DOES kick on, it's not warmed up, so it's way more polluting the air, than if the PHEV had been running for a WAY long time on gas. So the logic is, run your car a LONG time, then it's hotter, and eventually after it runs a long time (never mind that it had to run cold, then get hot by the way) it will make less smog ... you know, eventually.

 

That's it. For the sake of the environment, we should level all coal plants and install individually gas/coal powered electricity generators per house. That would DEFINITELY BE CLEANER RIGHT?

 

I'm a big believer in PHEVs, and I think both the sources cited in that story are old news and both are plausible.

Both say, in effect, that if you use the least efficient and dirtiest coal plants to charge your battery, and compare that to a Prius, then you can get more pollution (of some types) from an EV than from a Prius. The MN study, in addition, assumes about 0.3 KWH/mile for a Prius-like PHEV.

Darelldd's documents, by contrast, use (what I interpret as) a fairly efficient coal-fired plant to charge the battery, and compares that to an inefficient car (getting 20 or 25 MPG). In addition, those documents assume 0.2 KWH/mile, or about a third less than the MN study.

So those are contrasts of:
inefficient coal plant + inefficient EV + efficient car (MN study),
efficient coal plant + efficient EV + inefficient car (Darelldd's docs).

At least, that's how I see it. The 1.4 lbs C02 from 1 coal-fired KWH seems to assume a fairly efficient plant. I just calculated 1.2 lbs C02/KWH for US electrical generation as a whole (all fuel types), using 2006 DOE statistics.

The Tesla document assumed the most efficient generating equipment available, roughly 60% efficient conversion of fossil fuel to electricity. That's a bit aggressive in terms of assumptions.

I'll split the difference with my own calculation: Average electrical generation and average EV efficiency against an efficient hybrid.

Assume 1.2 lbs CO2/KWH (US average), 0.25 KWH/mile for electric propulsion (split the difference), compare to a Prius getting 46 MPG.

In that scenario the EV produces 2/3rds as much C02 as the Prius. Which means that it's plausible that charging from an inefficient coal plant would produce more, and because coal can produce a lot of S02, more S02 as well. And, of course, charging as Darrelldd does produces none.

So, I'd say this is old news, probably true facts, but mostly spin, ie, show me the outlier and make it seem like that's typical. And it does not consider the potential that the marginal pollution from increased nighttime KWHs may be well below the average. I'm still a little troubled by the engine cold-start issue you'd get with a converted Prius, but there's nothing here to deter me from getting a PHEV.

 

you mean dangerous and human evolution ending power?

i hope solar power plants and wind generators + c02 friendly power-plants burning plants oil and stuff wins over the stupid nuclear power.

never liked it and never will like it

and NO i am not a environmentalist

btw
are you related to schumacher germany F1? because then i can Imagen wy you want more nuclear power

 

richard, what does it cost to "store" nuclear waste? How long? What does safe mean? Compared to the carbon from coal or the radioctivity from spent uranium? Too many questions for me.

Same questions for true renewable wind and sun, with more postive results: no waste to "store", no cost for the non-existent waste, no radioctivity, no pollution. Seems win, win, win. Let's get more of these systems online.

 

Hi All,

Nobody said Coal Fired Power Plants would be left off the emissions improvement hook.

They need to improve, and the more they generate the more they should be required too. Economics wise, the PHEV could fund that refubishment.

Mercury and Paticulates really need to be cleaned up. Coal gasification or liquification and pipeline transport I think is the best approach. Gasification or Liquification at the power plant has no synergy. Do it at the mine, and you save money in transport. It also opens up the possibility of use of the coal energy to natural gas markets. This is all more expensive short term, but if allot of cars are converted to electric it will pay society wise.

 

It sucks to be one of the indigenous people whos land the mine is on or adjecent to. Same goes for any organism who lives near one of those pipelines. Unfortunately fossil fuels are dirty business from extraction to consumption and all of these grand ideas only address one small aspect of its use. Better to spend money on new ideas and reduce consumption. Leaving native people out of the energy question is just as unethical as running the plants in low income neihborhoods.

My point is, please take the land and it's people into account when making these decisions because typical dollar and cents economics just doesn't cut it anymore.

 

I'm curious Marlin... Do you believe this is a valid subject line and title of the report? Seems to me that it would be just as valid to have said "Fuel Cell cars could actually increase air pollution." But we don't hear that. All energy to make Hydrogen will come from rose petals and the laughter of children. Every bit of energy for a plug-in vehicle seems mandated to come from coal. If you choose to look at this globally, it is pure crap. Even nationally... but enough from me.

If I may forward a message from a friend:

I wish the headline writer hadn't confused local with national results. And I wonder if the reporter bothered to read the NRDC study, and if he's ever heard of the EPA.

Here are the key problems with the article:

- The story is really about the need to move away from coal (which we've got to do no matter what we drive), but instead it gives an inaccurate interpretation of modeling studies of cars.

- The NRDC/EPRI study concluded that NATIONALLY, all emissions will decrease with PHEVs, even though a few small pockets of the country near old coal plants could see a few increased emissions ASSUMING that we increase our overall use of coal to 60% of electricity (when in reality, we are moving away from coal). See my summary of this and more than 40 other studies of emissions from plug-in vehicles. But the article confuses isolated local results with national implications.

- The article also cites a Minnesota study (which I just read, and is not yet in my summary) reports local emissions, not national ones. It concludes that with heavy coal use (60%), plug-in hybrids reduce all emissions compared with today's cars except for sulfur oxide (SOx) emissions. Lots of other studies have found that same theoretical increase in SOx with plug-in cars, but in the real world (which the reporter ignored), the federal Environmental Protection Agency has laws and regulations that limit power-plant emissions. As a result, as our energy-hungry society produced more and more electricity between 1993 and 2004, SOx emissions fell from 15 million down to 10 million metric tons per year. No matter how much more electricity we produce, SOx emissions will continue to decline if the regulations continue to be enforced.

- The Minnesota study also has a hypothetical scenario in which the only cars out there are hybrids. Compared with them, and using 60% coal electricity, plug-in hybrids theoretically increase SOx (but not really, see above), and could increase carbon dioxide emissions by 0.5% -- or 1/500th more than hybrids. Essentially, the greenhouse gases would be the same, and that's assuming that in the decades it will take for all cars on the road in Minnesota to become either hybrids or plug-in hybrids, we make no other advances in limiting the use of dirty, nasty coal. (If that happens, the planet is toast, no matter what we drive.) The Minnesota study says nothing about the greater reductions in carbon dioxide on a NATIONAL scale if we had plug-in hybrids, nor about the benefits of using far less imported, expensive gasoline with plug-in hybrids compared with conventional hybrids.

 

For some reason I can't edit my posts any longer. This is the URL that the above "40 studies" link was to go to:

http://www.sherryboschert.com/Downloads/Emissions[11].pdf

 

all of this is dependent on where you live. in Ca coal is about 20% of our electric bill. nuclear is about 15-20, hydroelectric is 20, with petroleum 20, and various geothermal, wind and other making up the difference. so the environmental impact changes based on where you are in the country, and what your electric bill goes to.

 

Hey, the most encouraging thing about this is the comments posted on that article on the USA Today website. I scrolled the first couple of pages and I'd say 95% of the readers knew enough to tell the writer that he was full of baloney. There may be hope for us yet.

 

More important than that is that we can make our OWN electricity. You don't have to buy it from the grid and take what is given to you. And that's the beauty of plug-in cars. They can get their power from ANYTHING, really. Electricity is the world's ultimate "flex fuel" in that way. We don't have all those choices for the liquid fuels that we're trying to replace.