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Comment by shuntress | Hacker News Reader

>Electric transportation is one of the most moral technologies we can work on to get out of oil's malthusian trap

While I agree with the sentiment and can't wait for good mainstream electric vehicles, I would like to be pedantic and point out the possibility of generation of the electricity to run an electric vehicle being very dirty. As well as the (not current, but theoretical) possibility of using clean energy to synthesize combustion fuels for engines that efficiently clean all outputs.

A transport being electric does not automatically make it better.

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Electricity is fungible in the sense that it can come from many sources. Oil is not-- it really only comes out of the ground. (Biofuels also have the same problem.)

You can think about making cars electric as removing a tight coupling between transportation and fuel. It creates a more generic interface, which will create more flexible implementations. For example: wind, solar, and using charged car battery fleets to balance the electric grid at peak times.

It's hard to see how combustion can ever be better than electric. Even in situations where you completely offset the carbon by synthesizing fuels with clean energy, you still have huge issues around air quality in dense urban cities.

Electric motors are also massively easier to maintain, have fewer moving parts, are quieter, etc etc.

Oil is also fungible, see e.g. biofuels made from sunlight using algae, or whale oil harvested from sperm whales.

We just don't bother with alternate sources because it's cheaper to pump it out of the ground, we wouldn't bother with alternate electricity generation either if we could just dig fully charged batteries out of the ground.

Forget air pollution the difference of noise pollution would make electric cars worth it.

The seemingly constant point of contention is the 'battery technology'.

I'm sure you have heard some form of: "Electric cars will become dominant once battery technology catches up"

I feel like we don't often consider the thought that hydrocarbons may be the best 'battery' technology.

Edit: I don't really think they can be, outside of back-up generators. Power stations supported by The Grid should be far better than gas stations supported by pipelines/trucks.

Burning hydrocarbons is damaging to the ecosystem of Earth, and for that reason it should be used as little as possible.

There have been billions of $ spent on synthetic hydrocarbons research, so I think "we" have considered it.

'We' in this context intended to mean 'people discussing alternative energy' not 'humanity overall'

I don't often see it brought up, even in discussions of energy storage support for inconsistent energy sources.

3 technologies I've seen discussed extensively in the alternative energy context:

* Methanol from food sources * Methanol from non-food sources (switchgrass) * Biofuels for aircraft (military and civilian)

I can totally believe you didn't see these talked about. But you can find articles in the New York Times on all 3 technologies in the past couple of years.

I guess we are pretty much at the peak of synthetic oil and it is a dead end in terms of energy storage.

Then maybe 'you' should look into it since you are very interested in it. Other people already have, and they are not interested in looking into it any more. You can look at NAZI coal gassification efforts, methanol from switchgrass, all the way to efficient Hydrogen generation and storage, but it usually turns out that producing a complex molecule up a large potential gradient is not power efficient (even with the best chemistry and catalysts).

You can run electric vehicles on solar, wind, hydro, natural gas, coal, nuclear, oil, jet fuel, etc. The delivery mechanism of energy for transportation is separated from production and competition in the production space will continue, despite lots of incentives distorting the marketplace.

Gas vehicles run on gas which comes from oil, or recently some combination of food, but mostly oil. I welcome the disruption of this industry.

Nope. Soon you will be able to plug your electric car into a lamp-post on any street that has such things. This is already being rolled out where I live in the UK, you call the utility company and they upgrade your street just for you and a few neighbours. There is no road to dig up, the lamp post gets retro-fitted. There aren't even special electric car parking bays, you just find a parking spot (yes I know...).

Think of it as getting broadband or a sky dish but without the road having to be dug up or holes drilled through your house. And it is already happening!

So that part of the plan is coming together, you won't need to have a garage with some giant refrigerator sized charging thing.

The next bit is how that these cars don't just take power from the grid, they put it back too. So we will not need heaps of coal fired or 'natural' gas power stations to come online for the evening peak demand - the cars plugged into lamp-posts do that.

Therefore, with this giant battery spread out in many millions of cars on every street, we really can go carbon neutral and use wind/solar/geo-whatever to generate electricity.

Some people need to catch up with this, I personally do so by subscribing to 'Fully Charged' on Youtube, as presented by Robert Llewellyn of Red Dwarf fame:

https://www.youtube.com/user/fullychargedshow

I agree with everything you are saying but I think you missed the fundamental point I was trying to make: Hydrocarbon (gas) 'battery' as an alternative to lithium battery.

Because in the situation you describe, the weak point is still the means of storing energy. The big, heavy, hard to produce/recycle, limited lifespan lithium battery.

Don't take this the wrong way, I am completely against dependence on un-sustainable fossil fuels. But hydrocarbon fuel cells seem like an idea that has legs.

> you won't need to have a garage with some giant refrigerator sized charging thing.

Level 1 chargers are about the size of a loaf of bread.

Level 2 fast chargers are about the size of bread boxes.

DC Fast Chargers are about the size of a mid tower PC.

> A transport being electric does not automatically make it better

That is true. Most people don't spare a thought for the long chain of extraction, refinement/production, transportation of our resources/fuels/energy. They see less petrol/gasoline being used in the last step of the chain and assume they have a positive impact.

However, I would argue that electric cars are still "cleaner" than gas engines, precisely because of their reliance on the power grid. Powering an electric vehicle from clean renewable energy (solar, wind, geothermal) requires a big financial investment. This is a tough ask for most individuals (who can spare $10-15k for solar panels?) but a lesser ask for a power utility company.

Essentially, that's the environmental benefit of having everyone use electric vehicles. It shifts the ability to choose where we extract our energy from the individual to the municipalities. Right now we are very dependent on coal/natural gas/petrol for our energy needs. The first two can be replaced with renewable energy sources by our municipalities. If we keep driving petrol powered vehicles, we will still rely on petrol. If we switch to electric vehicles, we have a path away from the big three.

Of course, this little theory doesn't take into account the environmental effects of the lithium battery packs. I have no idea what the effects are there

I completely agree. With our current infrastructure/technology it clearly makes sense to focus on electric motors for transportation.

I just feel it's important to stay grounded in reality. Energy has to come from somewhere. We are clearly much closer to clean generation of electricity than to clean synthesis of gasoline.

I will come back with a link when I'm not mobile, but solar just hit a new low cost at 65 cents/watt in India.

EDIT: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Solar-Costs-Are...

Energy has to come from somewhere, but we are awash in clean enegy.

65 cents/watt is cheap? I'm paying about 216 times less than that for electricity from my electric company.

Install cost, not ongoing per kwh. Cost per kwh generated comes out to be between 1-2 cents.

I stand corrected. I was in fact thinking of the watt/hour price, not the install price.

At a price of 1 to 2 cents per kwh, that comes out to about 177 to 354 times cheaper than what I'm paying for electricity from my electric company.

Are you maybe think about prices per Watt hour you are paying? 65 cents/watt is a measure how much the module costs to buy per rated output power, not for an unit of energy (obviously, from the units).

>Of course, this little theory doesn't take into account the environmental effects of the lithium battery packs. I have no idea what the effects are there

Sweden has done a study on the impact of LI ion battery production on CO2 emissions. There is a discussion about it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14608959

getting the pollution out of the cities with electric vehicles would be a significant step and then reducing the dirty energy percentage more and more over time.

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