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Comment by ralusek | Hacker News Reader

Isn't running an internal combustion engine in a car still substantially less efficient than the power plant necessary to charge it, regardless of the fuel?

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Not just that, ICE cars emit their shitty exhaust right where lots of people live. Things are generally more complex than breaking it down to a single CO2 number make it appear, and I'm a bit uneasy that recent trend.

It's the ICE vehicle industry that's spreading this narrative. It's only a result of lobbying.

Gasoline burns very cleanly in modern (that is, <10 years) vehicles, with little to no emissions other than CO2, and most importantly, no particulate pollution. Particulate pollution is much worse for diesel vehicles, though.

Compared to those two, though, coal power plants are dirty as hell, and I’d take equivalent amount of car emissions to generate the same power over coal any day.

I code at a hospital, which is in a poor neighborhood. The garbage exhaust on my walk in to work from cheap old cars is unbelievable, to say nothing of 18 wheelers and huge trucks rolling through this poor neighboring neighborhood all day. Kids living there are straight up taking lung and brain damage from that exhaust. So it does grind my gears when people talk about coal EVs being dirtier, they just dont think of poor minority kids who bear the brunt of local city emissions of dirty ICE and diesel.

Trucks running dirty diesel aren’t really the same thing as a modern gasoline car.

Particulate pollution from highways and major roads is definitely a real issue and there have been studies done showing a lot of health problems result from living 250-500m or closer to such a road.

But if we’re talking about a modern emissions-compliant gas/petrol ICE vs a coal power plant I’m not sure how that shakes out. Coal power emissions are estimated to have massive health effects that affect millions as well.

(Of course, best solution is electric car powered by nat gas, nuclear, or renewables which don’t emit particulates at all...)

Also when it's cold outside the "clean" engines are really dirty as the catalytic converter do almost nothing at low temperatures.

"One of its biggest shortcomings is that it only works at a fairly high temperature. When you start your car cold, the catalytic converter does almost nothing to reduce the pollution in your exhaust." [1]

And when it's cold the car usually starts at someone home around where other people live and that's where the pollution ends up.

For diesel engines that operate at lower temperatures this is even worse.

[1] https://auto.howstuffworks.com/catalytic-converter3.htm

Why can I smell those clean cars then?

No, the same is true of coal plants. There are modern coal plants that burn much more cleanly than old coal plants.

Not that I want to argue in favour of coal plants; we still need to get rid of them just for the CO2. Same goes for ICEs.

Also very dangerous particles go airborne from the use of brake pads. EVs (and hybrids) use mostly regenerative braking, and release almost no such pollution.

You make a good point about brake pads but EVs still release particles from tyre wear, although there is active research on tyres that reduce that source of pollution too.

It would be a bit much to expect them to not pollute at all, but if they pollute significantly less, that's still a major win.

CO2 emissions are of particular concern right now (and honestly should have been for the past 40 years), so it makes sense that they get a lot of attention. But you're absolutely right that it's not the only kind of pollution, and the others shouldn't be ignored either.

Despite there being 7 billion of us, we seem to struggle with paying attention to more than one problem at a time.

ICE engines are around 20% efficiency I think, while e.g. a gas turbine in a power plant is around 60%. Very little efficiency is lost in transmission cables and in the electric motor, so it is definitely a lot more efficient to use electric cars as a way of burning fossil fuels.

Not to mention that coal plants and gas power plants can be changed to burn biomass or do gasification of biomass. That allows us to avoid fossil fuels entirely. You cannot easily run an internal combustion engine on biomass.

Sure you can produce ethanol or biodiesel from plants, but that is not as attractive as gasifying wood pellet. In particular because the latter does not compete with agricultural land.

You also have to consider the efficiency of the battery of an electric vehicle, though it may well still turn out to be more efficient as you claim.

”Very little efficiency is lost in transmission cables and in the electric motor”

It’s not that clear-cut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_energy_efficiency:

”Taking the conversion factor of 2.58 in France into account (see Embodied energy#Electricity), we would find an efficiency of about 0.5/2.58 or 19 %, which corresponds to the order of magnitude of the balance of the combustion vehicles, according to the diagram of the Department of energy (where the efficiency of combustion vehicles is less than 20%). By the way, according to the French energy agency (ADEME), the primary energy consumption of electric vehicles and combustion-powered ones would be approximately equivalent”

I think that even ignores the higher weight of electric cars. Because of that, I think it’s better for the world to buy a small ICE than to buy a Tesla (for the local environment, things are different)

The French electric grid is predominantly nuclear, so whatever the transmission losses, the EV will be near zero CO2 output.

Nuclear is how you spell winning in French. Clean green limitless power.

Until it fails and the surrounding environment and people are destroyed for generations.

That's why they're building ITER.

About 30% less efficient

I believe in terms of mass by mass yes, it might even be true for hybrids.

But (I suspect) it's still better to burn gasoline than coal.

That may well be so, but my conviction is that we need to substantially reduce carbon emissions across the board, and if that's true I don't think replacing gasoline cars with coal powered electricity plants makes a lot of sense, unless maybe the CO2 is captured and stored, but at that point you might as well go nuclear (which I am a proponent of, as the only realistic alternative at this point).

Even with the current mix in the electric grid, electric cars produce quite a bit less CO2 than any combustion engined car and get cleaner as more coal power plants are decommissioned. It is happening perhaps to slow, but it is happening. In 2019 electricity generation from coal was quite a bit down compared to 2018 due to CO2 certificates finally having an effect.

> unless

So you’d agree with doing them in parallel?

Do you think car manufacturers should wait to make electric cars until all power plants have a timeline to convert? Or that power plants should wait until all car manufacturers are switching? Or that they should both act without waiting for the other?

Internal combustion engines pollute the air where I'm living. Moving pollution away from residential areas is a worthwhile task in itself. That makes a lot of sense to me.

I live in a densely populated country. Even a relatively minor accident at a nuclear facility would trigger a huge evacuation (I've seen the disaster control plans), causing major economic harm. Also my country does not have any viable means to store nuclear waste responsibly. Nuclear does not look like the sane option here.

An electrical car produces almost as much fine dust particles as an internal combustion engine. Thus in that respect they are as poluting. The CO2 and NOx combustion engines produces are not that dangerous to our health. Soot, mainly produced by heavy diesel engines, is also a dangerous form of polution, but most trucks should have filters for those by now.

> An electrical car produces almost as much fine dust particles as an internal combustion engine.

This is utter nonsense. Electric vehicles have no direct emissions, including no direct emissions of fine dust. You are confusing this with emissions during production. My point is about emissions at the location of a car's use.

> The CO2 and NOx combustion engines produces are not that dangerous to our health.

If this was true, there would have been no diesel scandal at all. However, car exhaust is indeed very dangerous to your health, especially if you live next to heavy traffic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx#Health_and_environment_eff...

> Soot, mainly produced by heavy diesel engines, is also a dangerous form of polution, but most trucks should have filters for those by now.

They should, but reality is different

- https://www.spiegel.de/auto/aktuell/abgasskandal-manipuliert...

- https://www.unece.org/fileadmin/DAM/trans/doc/2017/wp29/WP.2...

> Electric vehicles have no direct emissions, including no direct emissions of fine dust.

QUOTE

Traffic related particles can be distinguished into: exhaust traffic related particles, which are emitted as a result of incomplete fuel combustion and lubricant volatilization during the combustion procedure, and nonexhaust traffic related particles, which are either generated from non-exhaust traffic related sources such as brake, tyre, clutch and road surface wear or already exist in the environment as deposited material and become resuspended due to traffic induced turbulence.

It is estimated that exhaust and non-exhaust sources contribute almost equally to total traffic-related PM10 emissions. However, as exhaust emissions control become stricter, relative contributions of non-exhaust sources to traffic related emissions will increasingly become more significant.

END QUOTE

Source: http://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JR...

> It is estimated that exhaust and non-exhaust sources contribute almost equally to total traffic-related PM10 emissions. However, as exhaust emissions control become stricter, relative contributions of non-exhaust sources to traffic related emissions will increasingly become more significant.

So if this "estimate" (i.e. conjecture) is on point, EV produce less than half of the emissions of an ICE car currently (EV have 0 exhaust emissions) and will continue to produce much less even when ICE are somewhat improved (and manufacturers stop defrauding customers). Let's not forget that EV also brake less than ICE cars.

> This is utter nonsense. Electric vehicles have no direct emissions, including no direct emissions of fine dust.

Have you ever changed a tire on Tesla because it was worn down? Where do you think the rubber in the old tire went when it was worn down? Emitted into the environment, that’s where.

The GP is obviously wrong about EVs emitting no fine dust, see my sibling comment, but we're talking about fine dust, i.e. PM10 dust.

The study my comment links to notes that only 0.1-10% (depending on conditions) of tire wear meets that criteria, the rest are all more coarse particles.

Have you measure the gas you burnt between changing those tires. You burnt and put in the air hundreds of times the weight of those tires in gases.

You’re saying the petrol emissions are worse than other emissions. But the comment I was replying to said there were no other emissions at all.

fjfaase, your statement "An electrical car produces almost as much fine dust particles as an internal combustion engine" is very surprising and not at all what I would expect.

Can you cite any sources for that or explain it a bit more?

Aside from particulate matter in exhaust, regenerative braking doesn't produce dust like friction braking does, thus I'd expect electric cars to produce much less dust than ICE vehicles.

Rubber tyres on asphalt produce a fair bit of very fine particulate matter, and are currently ubiquitous in vehicles - I imagine this is what fjfaase was referring to.

That said, the contribution is tiny - on the order of 2.5% of total roadside PM10.

https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/atmosphere/atmosphere-10-0...

>Also my country does not have any viable means to store nuclear waste responsibly.

I don’t think you realize how little there is to deal with. It could easily be exported to a competent country.

It’s shocking how people are willing to effectively endorse burning fossil fuels for base load to destroy the environment over the next 50 years because of something that might be a problem in a few thousand years.

Germany's grid is not powered solely by coal but a decent mix of sources with various carbon intensities.

A typical EV in Germany has a carbon footprint of a vehicle burning anywhere in the range of 2-5l/100km(including manufacturing).

EVs in Germany are consistently less carbon intensive than ICE cars - especially in the city.

The "average" EV in Germany uses cleaner electricity than the grid, because there are > 0 EV drivers who charge their cars with their own PV setup.

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