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Comment by lowii | Hacker News Reader

Building millions of electric cars and shipping them around the world is extremely energy intensive. Many countries where those cars are shipped to use fossil fuels as their main source of electricity too. Nothing about it is green or will "stop climate change", but it gives them good marketing.

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The CO2 output to build and ship the cars is amortised over the first few years of the car's use so unless the car is destroyed in a crash before that time, there is a significant net CO2 benefit.

My supplier (United Kingdom based) provides 100% renewable electricity. I'm sure there are plenty of other countries (where Tesla is on sale) that can provide energy generated in a more efficient way than internal combustion.

It isn't perfect but it's the lesser evil when compared to combustion engines.

http://www.carboncounter.com lets you play with various options. ICE vehicles only look better if you compare the smallest petrol vehicle to the largest EV.

I like how that graph limited the price per gallon to $6.5. A few years ago the price per gallon in Germany was higher than that. Today it is around $6.3.

Yes, it would be nice to have a European version.

Not to mention that a big-ass power plant burning gas (or coal or some other fuel) is going to be wildly more efficient than the relatively tiny engine in your car. Economies of scale apply to CO2 output too, so running an electric car on not-green energy is still better than running an ICE car.

'wildly more efficient' is probably an overestimate. The worst coal plants have about the same efficiency as a car engine, and the best natural gas plants have ~double the efficiency.

Electricity is rapidly switching over to renewable sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics

Having an electric car fleet means that transportation will get greener "automatically", as the power grid switches over to wind and solar. Having a fossil fuel car fleet means you're screwed no matter what happens in the electricity sector. Having a smaller fossil fuel car fleet just means that you're screwed a little more slowly.

I would also expect that it’s easier to address the co2 output of a single coal plant than a million cars due to economies of scale. The solution space for internal combustion engines is constrained by size, weight, and serviceability which is less an issue for power plants. Note that this is not to say that we shouldn’t prefer green energy, only that it shouldn’t deter us from investing in electric cars.

coal production is growing for the last three years

Is it indeed? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining#Production needs an update then.

Makes sense, though... Assuming that a coal plant's going to be hopelessly unprofitable the next time it needs maintenance, it does make a certain sense to use it harshly now and wear out every moving part.

> Is it indeed?

Sure, https://yearbook.enerdata.net/coal-lignite/coal-production-d...

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining#Production needs an update then.

And I know of a brave man who could do it

> Assuming that a coal plant's going to be hopelessly unprofitable the next time it needs maintenance

How come? See no reason for that

That link says two years, actually. 2016 dropped from 2015, 2017 and 2018 increased, nothing is specified for 2019. Are you saying there was another increase in 2019?

I assume that coal plants become unprofitable once they need considerable maintenance because they're not being built any more, which I assume means that no investors consider them a worthwhile investment. Further, because the price of solar and wind power is dropping. If the price curves continue as in the past decade, then in a few years, building a new solar plant becomes cheaper than operating an existing power plant in the first parts of the world. At that point, what coal plant owner will spend money on signfificant maintenance?

> Are you saying there was another increase in 2019?

Data not yet out, but yes, I believe so. There is a prediction it would rise till 2022 though not yet reaching the peak of 2013.

https://www.greencarcongress.com/2019/03/20190306-coal.html

> I assume that coal plants become unprofitable once they need considerable maintenance because they're not being built any more

mmm... not sure this is true about coal plants not being build. China and India I believe still building them.

> Further, because the price of solar and wind power is dropping.

well, while they are dropping, coal production is gorwing three years in a row (and potentially another three years in making).

> hen in a few years, building a new solar plant becomes cheaper

and what people supposed to do by night?

You recognize, that even if you saturate your grid by solar electricity from, say, 11 to 5, there are still 18 hours left...

Renewable energy storage is a solved problem, with a number of techniques already in use. It is a recognised part of the scaling-up of renewables generation by the grid operators, along with the knowledge that grids themselves need to be updated. But the idea that somehow energy experts are slapping their foreheads thinking 'OMG how did we miss this' is slightly insulting.

> Renewable energy storage is a solved problem, with a number of techniques already in use.

mmm... could you name a most significant one?

> But the idea that somehow energy experts are slapping their foreheads thinking 'OMG how did we miss this' is slightly insulting.

well, let me remind you how this conversation started - coal production is GROWING. Not because someone is just evil, but this is what customers demand - reliable supply of cheap electricity

Where I come from, the hydroelectric plants are run partly according to the price. There are rules, the rivers can't be dry, but as far as permitted, the operators let the water flow when the price is high. Much of the weather forecasting is paid for by that; the power generating companies model electricity demand for the coming hours and days.

Where I live right now, the farmers are building things like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fa/20... The green things are more or less balloons, because it pays to store the gas until peak time and burn most of it then.

> Where I come from, the hydroelectric plants are run partly according to the price. There are rules, the rivers can't be dry, but as far as permitted, the operators let the water flow when the price is high. Much of the weather forecasting is paid for by that; the power generating companies model electricity demand for the coming hours and days.

yeah, the only problem is how to apply this model to, say, south of US - California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada etc. Not a lot of hydro around

> The green things are more or less balloons, because it pays to store the gas until peak time and burn most of it then.

not sure how it is applicable to electric storage

Making and distributing anything always requires energy. Making and distributing things that lead to fewer carbon emissions is the only way to slow climate change.

Making and distributing fewer things could also slow climate change.

Mass suicides or nuking half the world's population would probably slow climate change too, but for some reason none of those is considered a reasonable solution.

You really compared reducing production and consumption to mass suicide or nuclear war, ok.

Mass death is not equivalent to the idea of producing fewer products and reusing existing ones. Many approaches can be used at once and reuse is a legitimate one.

Actually from all technologies energy production has been the best predictor of number of people living on Earth, so I believe many people would die if those cars weren't distributed to save energy.

Most cars in the world can be replaced with public transport, which is 3 - 20 times more efficient, depending on mode of use.

The problem with that is that it's extremely political, it can't be done by a private company.

For example when I was living in Switzerland I used public transport because I was lazy to use a car, as it's so much more hassle.

I went to Mountain View, California to a business trip, and wanted to do the same thing (as I was used to public transport), and I couldn't even find a way to go to a supermarket, as the closest one to my corp apartment was 40 minutes walk away :(

I decided to rent a car because the closest car rental was closer than a place to eat at...as a European it sounds crazy, but it's true.

The goal of climate change mitigation is harm reduction. Your solution needlessly increases harm.

Not the only way.

Driving less is much more effective than switching to electric vehicles.

Incremental solutions are much easier to implement.

True, but they run the risk of taking too long when there are targets in force that require more radical change. That said, what often happens is that incremental change reaches a tipping point where either the demand or supply side causes a step change.

Right, but for the remainder of our lifetimes there will be hundreds of millions of cars on the road. Nothing will change that. What we can change is the type of car we use, which requires the energy intensive process of building and distributing these cars.

I really don’t like this take. You should consider the fact that an equivalent volume of fossil fuel vehicles would be shipped around the world if electric cars did not exist. The carbon cost of shipping can thus be cancelled out and it becomes clear that this is a massive step in the right direction.

You seem to be concerned about climate change. Do you have a better idea than electric cars to address the problem?

It's a difficult problem for sure. But I don't think we'll ever come up with a truly "clean" personal vehicle like the cars we know today. I think the solution would have to be something like better, cleaner public transit, encouraging people to live in walking/biking distance from their work, encouraging remote work, and reducing car usage overall as much as possible.

Electric cars are better than regular fossil fuel cars, yes. But the article talks about "stopping" climate change, not just making it slightly less bad.

I think this is a don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good scenario along with being a bit more generous with the hyperbole in articles. I think it's fair to read "stopping" climate change as taking substantial steps to begin addressing it.

I think substantial here is debatable.

Build infrastructure for public transportation and bicycles and such things. Try to eliminate cars.

You can't move food and goods with bicycles and public transportation.

Public services like garbage trucks, police, firefighters. There are also private services that heavily depend on driving. Your electrician/plumber has to carry tools that won't fit on a bicycle.

All of my food and goods are moved with bicycles and public transportation.

There's a big hospital not far from where I sit, too. All of the food and goods for 1100 patients there are moved with bicycles and public transportation.

You might argue that you didn't mean all kinds of public tranportation, you meant only the kind of vehicles whose interior is designed to carry people and a bit of luggage. Not the kind that's meant to carry goods for the general public. But why shouldn't the companies that transport for the general public be free to choose vehicles, routing, perhaps even timing to suit the loads and other needs?

Far less driving.

While it's true that electric cars still use tons of fossil fuels and the marketing can be misleading, I think the big picture goal is to simply have cars that can actually run on electricity.

Generating electricity in an environmentally-friendly way is almost an entirely separate problem from using electricity to run things that used to not run on electricity. Electric cars try to solve the latter problem, and the hope is that the widespread existence of electric cars will make the transition to clean energy easier in the future.

Using fossil fuel generated electricity is still more efficient than drilling oil, cracking it into petrol, along with lubricant oil to stop your ICE seizing, driving it to a petrol station, filling your car and burning it at awful efficiency.

Renewable sources of electricity are a huge improvement to be encouraged, but EVs running off fossil generated electricity are better than petrol or diesel ICE.

A whole lot of emissions in the US are from transportation. Electric cars can be part of a wider solution.

But if these electric vehicles were not built, then people would buy icev's instead that over their lifetime put 10 times as much co2 into the atmosphere.

I am guessing you are someone who wants us to stay on fossil fuels forever, and are only pretending to care about the environment

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