The Case Against More Ethanol (2016)
e360.yale.edu
e360.yale.edu
I’m kidding about the Illuminati part, but it is one hell of a scheme that ensures there is always excess agricultural production.
I do not envy the people who have to research, analyze, plan, and execute these policies in complex economies in hard times like that.
> “One of my responsibilities is to see that we have a continuing adequate food supply, and the best way to assure that is to let farmers make a little money in the process.”
https://www.nytimes.com/1972/04/16/archives/up-up-up-butz-ma...
That was him.
Someone should probably tell the Illuminati.
In the same way street lights are pretty much everywhere today.
You could imagine a special type of paving stone that has a magsafe socket in, and you just pull a wire from your parked car to the kerb.
People can't get lousy fiber pulled to their houses and you're talking about multimegawatt electricity supply.
Fast DC chargers will always cost more due to the need for expensive power electronics.
1 MW would be enough for just ~150 chargers. And where would you get that megawatt at night? More base load, which means nuclear or fossil which means less niche for solar because no one would shut down such amount of base load generation each day.
Besides 60 amps isn't exactly cheap in electronics. It might not require active cooling for the cable and the battery, that's true.
Only if every car in your neighbourhood is plugged in and pulling 7 kW at the same time.
Smart charging solves this, by reducing charging during demand peaks (ie: 6pm when everyone is arriving home from work and plugging in at the same time), and increasing it later in the night when more capacity is available.
That's about 37 miles per day, so about 12.5 kWh per night on average at ~3 miles per kWh. And remember, those who are driving long distance are probably going to be using fast chargers on-route, so their domestic charging demand will be lower.
Secondly, even if they did need 40 kWh every night, that only equates to 4 kW over a 10 hour charging cycle. Easily manageable by avoiding the typical late afternoon / early evening peaks. Most grids have a lot of spare capacity between, say, 9PM and 7AM.
So no. Switch most commute to electric - then at first grid goes down, then power plants struggle.
"Most grids have a lot of spare capacity between, say, 9PM and 7AM" - that's not the grids we're talking about. HV circuits might not feel it, but something laid down for a suburb was scrupulously designed to carry only just enough, because it's basically burying refined metal, be it copper or aluminium.
There is no spare even 4KW for every house and never has been because that would have cost more in about everything - meters, cables, multiple stages of step-down transformers, transmission lines, generation.
Electicity is not free, never has been, and distibution costs are surprisingly a very important consideration.
Yes, there is. It's just the timing that matters. Domestic electricity demand during off-peak overnight hours is as little as 1/3 as it is at peak time. If all those houses can run 4 kW of air conditioning, or heating, or electric ovens at 6PM, then there is 4 kW to spare at 2AM.
This issue has actually been studied in some detail by the UK's National Grid. The conclusion was that additional demand from millions of electric vehicles would cause issues if they all were charged at peak times. But, provided demand can be managed, existing grid infrastructure can cope with an entirely electric vehicle fleet with modest investments in the coming years/decades.
Fun fact: UK grid demand used to be significantly higher than it is today. It peaked at 62 GW in 2002, but it now rarely gets above 45 GW, despite significant population growth! Much of this reduction in demand is due to improved energy efficiency.
If we could handle 62 GW in 2002, then there's no reason that we can't handle 62 GW again in, say, 2042.
There is - supply and grid maintenance was scaled down with demand.
The grid certainly can be rebuilt to 2002 state in UK, but this will not be cheap.
The other point that I was making is that any deviation from current patterns, like night demand significantly growing will require significant changes in generation.
It doesn't need "rebuilding". The grid, broadly speaking, hasn't changed since 2002. Generation has changed dramatically, but generally the transmission lines that served old power plants do not get removed when the plants close. They're still there, still active, and are often reused (for example, off-shore wind farm built off the coast from closed coal plant).
> "The other point that I was making is that any deviation from current patterns, like night demand significantly growing will require significant changes in generation."
First you were talking about lines, now you are talking about generation. But it's the same story. Power plants get turned off and curtailed at night because there is less demand. If demand increases at night? Plenty of spare capacity available, they just need to run for longer.
I do not account for transmission inefficiencies, as this is highly variable depending on your location and grid infrastructure. But it would be extremely unusual for transmission losses to be as high as 66% like you suggest!
As for charging losses, that's something like 10%. About 90% of the energy as measured at your domestic electricity meter will make it into the battery. I did account for this, by giving a deliberately low miles per kWh figure. In reality, most EVs will get significantly better efficiency than the 3 miles per kWh that I quoted.
But that doesn't mean everybody in your neighborhood can draw 24KW all night long. Those are maximal currents for intermittent loads like heaters, clothes driers etc. You might have a single 100KVA polemount transformer suppling a whole street and a single 15KV / 300Amp line servicing a whole neighborhood.
When everybody attempts to draw even 5-10KW in the air-conditioning season, you get circuit breaks because the main feed is incapable of supplying sufficient power. The upgrading will be done but it will take a decade or more, especially considering the push from local municipalities towards buried power feeds which are very expensive.
The average commute in the US is 50 Km per day and if that is the average it is reasonable to assume some communities will be highly correlated above average, for example if they are 40-50 Km away from a large economic hub, a large proportion of residents will drive the 100Km roundtrip per working day. The lower price of electric comute will prompt many residences to have two electric cars driving the average every working day, for a total, again, of 100Km = 20KWh. So double digit is not exceptional, it will be the average, an extra 3KW of power for each household for the entire night, assuming an outstandingly smart grid that can perfectly level off demand.
Combine that with rare events like hot nights and large movements, psychological reactions like panic, and you have an unreliable local supply that might trip every few months without expensive upgrades.
There is plenty of capacity available, provided charging is spread out over the night and not concentrated at peak demand periods. You just need chargers that are smart enough to ensure this happens.
These are quite widely deployed in a few London boroughs.
(I totally agree about fewer cars, but remaining ones must be electric. And electric cars need charging infrastructure.)
- Heviz to Saint Tropez 1200km
- Empuriabrava to Malaga 1100km
- Porto to Andorra 1100km
- Krakow to Bucharest 1200km
- other shorter trips (700km-800km)
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- business trip Bucharest to Leipzig 1600km (I go much farther without passengers)
- Leizig to London 1200km (slow ferry)
- etc
I drive a diesel and it's just excellent for my family's holidaying, we would be wasting considerable time charging, reducing the overall time to enjoy the tour's destinations.
That being said, it'll only be a couple more generations of tech before we're getting fast charge in the 15-20 minute ranges. By the time you've done a full-tank fill, used the toilets, picked up a few Rom bars in the shop and paid - you probably wont lose much time.
(I'm still a car lover, but change is coming, and it'd be hard to argue with it in a few more years).
It may not be viable to maintain a large fleet of family-vacation-type vehicles just to satisfy the demand for summer holidays in August and ski trips in February.
This is merely an interstitial time until you can run from Bucharest to Leipzig with fast charge stations in every town and village along the route.
Aren’t you “wasting considerable time” by having to sleep as soon as you arrive at your tour destinations?
Perhaps "each night" isn't the right choice of words, "every 3 nights or so" would be more accurate.
The vast majority of car users do not refuel a full tank daily, which is a good indicator of their driving habits being perfectly compatible with overnight slow-charging with plenty of capacity to spare. (If the user normally refueled a full tank daily, and got an electric car with a small battery, work-place slow-charging might be needed.)
The vast majority, should they go on a long car trip (note that this universally popular), will not be doing completely uninterrupted driving for 12 hours. They will need at least a few sizable breaks for food, toilet and leg stretching. If breaks are taken around a fast charger, a 20 minute break can give you 50% charge, 40 minutes giving 80% charge. If the drive is for vacationing, the stops will likely all be long enough for full charges as people see the sights.
Even with your driving, it seems reasonable to pull off with fast charging, assuming you have human physiological needs and assuming you drive safely and responsibly (i.e. break with rest every N hours to not lose attention and fall asleep, where N is usually ~4). Maybe your average speed would drop a bit, but that's not that important.
You have a battery pack that you own and maintain carefully, and you absolutely do not want to rent it out to anyone. So you use it day to day transport and charge slowly overnight, perfect to prolong life.
When time comes to make a long, cross country trip, you visit a swap center and deposit your battery, and switch to rented batteries for the duration of the trip, while paying a charge+rent fee. When you come back from the trip, your own battery is waiting for you at the same station, charged and stored in good conditions. Or, you can make the first leg of the journey on your own battery, then have it shipped back to a station near your home before you return; by necessity the network will have to perform rebalancing anyway for the rental stock.
I know Tesla demoed battery swap, but they were only interested in the associated subsidy and not keen on it because it requires a large stock of batteries that they had no capacity to produce in large quantities at the time. When safe and cheap batteries are available in quantity, they will pretty much be forced to revisit this model or face tough competition from charge networks that can handle swap.
DC fast charging seems like a much more practical solution for the occasional cross country trip
It's either that fast charging attains exceptional safe speeds (i.e less than 5 minutes), or that competitive pressures will force electrics to embrace swap. The current status quo of waiting an hour for a full charge cannot stand on the long term; the lost productivity is so large that it completely dwarfs the costs of implementing the swap networks, so somebody is bound to package it in a consumer friendly product and pocket the profits.
The only real margin is the swap hardware and any structural binding parts designed to pass loads towards the battery frame as if it was built in part of the fixed frame. True, it makes no sense to design and include those parts when swap is not on the market, so it's a tradeoff. But is it a salient tradeoff, does it make the car with the built-in battery significantly better? Only very marginally I would say.
The same for aerodynamics, there is really only one place to put a large battery pack, it's not like you can gain lots of design liberty by putting an unconventional shape battery in the bumper or in the roof. Swappability of the underside of the car has no impact on aerodynamics.
There is only one place to put a large battery pack. However there are lots of places to put a smaller battery back. Or you can have a non-rectangular battery pack in that one place to better fit the room you have. Cars are about compromises, so a standard swapable battery pack will be smaller than the customized for the car one you can make. A tiny economy car doesn't have as much space as a large family car so plan is harmful to families that want to go on vacation as they have to stop more often.
95% of the time you are correct, it would be just fine to charge in my garage and who cares if it takes 12 hours as the car isn't moving anyway. However a couple times a year I - like most people - take a longer trip and depends on the infrastructure that allows me to refill my car in a few minutes and get on my way.
There was a Tesla charging station within walking distance of most of the places we stopped for gas, food or lodging. I don’t think the trip would have taken any additional planning with an EV.
With that said, electrical infrastructure is ubiquitous. You can install EV chargers anywhere there is power.
Of course what I'm lacking is knowing how much this will affect things long term. Right no charging stations are being installed on hope they are worth it, if this turns out to be false owners will start to tear them out.
It's a net positive if we push petroleum refueling stations out of business. They sell a harmful product that we're working to phase out rapidly through electrification of transportation, and there will be a cost to remove and remediate petroleum storage tanks that were used at these stations.
In short, the EV charging infra will be built, but if there's someplace you want to go that doesn't have chargers, make it known to those folks you're looking for that amenity (now, or in the future).
[1] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2020/09/29/210091...
Electric vehicles? The range is an issue even in warm climates. Canada is so spread out that more range is needed and so cold that the range you get is lower.
Self-driving vehicles? The gap between driving in Arizona and driving in a snowy Edmonton road is night and day.
It doesn't matter if the 5% of the population keeps driving non-EV vehicles for many decades to come for performance reasons. Let them! Cumulative emissions are all that matter.
Also, wile a large percentage of the population of Canada lives in Toronto and Montreal regions, where cities are closer together, this does not mean that is 95% of the population. Calgary alone has a population of more than 1.3 million people. It is very common to need to make a short trip to Edmonton [0], which is considered close by Canadian standards. But even then, it is a 600 km round-trip in a road that tends to be snowy quite often. Population distribution in Western Canada is much more spread out than the East. And the cumulative population is way more than 5%.
[0] For example for concerts. Calgary and Edmonton are big enough to get good musical acts. But they are not big or far away enough for touring musicians to visit both cities. If You live in Calgary and your favourite musician is having their concert in Edmonton, that's a day trip you will most likely take.
The main reason I'd not want to do it in winter is the possibility of getting hit by a blizzard while crossing Northern Ontario which is basically unpopulated, and there are stretches without cell coverage. But that's a risk whether you have a gas or an electric car.
One rule for winter driving is to never let your tank go below 50% so you have enough for heat if you get disabled. Heating the cabin in an electric car is really tough on batteries, but you should be able to survive just on seat heating in an emergency, so half a battery should last a long time. Tesla has enough chargers to let you stay above 50% on a cross-Canada trip, but you're going to be spending a lot of time charging. You'll be charging more often, and that last 20% is really slow.
The normal advice is to take I95 instead of the Trans-Canada in the winter, but with borders closed because of Covid, that's not currently an option.
Canada and Norway share at least a cold climate and a petroleum fuelled economy, although distances often are far greater between towns in Canada. So if one really wants to go the electric route, it should be possible even though the transition rate might not be as fast as in Norway.
https://www.weatherbase.com/compare.php3?first=77817&second=...
Both Tesla & Petro-Canada now have coast-to-coast coverage for fast charging on the Trans-Canada now. That doesn't cover all of Canada, but for us we do have our potential trips covered now.
Anyway, some actual data. Most cars spend the vast majority of their time going exactly nowhere: https://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/mobility#a5
The average trip is 8 miles (same source, both in the UK. You can find data for your country. Might also look at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019126151...)
Plenty of time to charge from a domestic charger, and no range issue with current electric cars (which have >200 mile range).
1. One do-everything car (short and long trips without pre-planning)
2. Living in an apartment so no overnight charging.
Even with 200mi range, you have to ensure there are chargers en route because they are still sparse and it still takes a long time to charge the car. Gas vehicles still win because in most places, you can expect a gas station within 50 miles and the time penalty is 5 mins vs hours.
Sparse city charging infrastructure also mean makes charging much harder.
We're getting better but imo electric cars in the US at least are still limited to wealthier folks with houses that have charging stations and some city dwellers in nice apartment complexes. I hope we see a good sub 30k electric car soon to shake things up.
For a while I did make a tiny car and a SUV work, but I had to drive ~100 miles a day for work and even then it just barely worked out.
Of course we built a road system - without paved roads cars are mostly useless. We have build rail systems in the past as well. The problem isn't unsolvable by the nature of the problem. It is unsolvable because you can't get the right people to make long term investments in it (don't look to government - anyone who tries will be voted out eventually at best the system changes course from one okay system to a different incompatible system, though more likely they just stop investing).
They don't live a good distance from work because they want to they do because they can't afford to do otherwise. If you told one of the multitude of people who commute via car they have to spend 5000 on a clown car and an an hour to their commute which amounts to 500 hours annually or 20 days spent commuting they would be in your front yard with torches.
Instead what you need is enough housing to bring its price low enough for more people to live closer to work and enough transit that people want to use it not a clown car mandate.
When you have successfully convinced most people to commute differently you can start to limit cars not before.
In US public policy we are the kings of the Grandfather Clause. Every model of ICE vehicle known for drivetrain longevity will suddenly become coveted by the road warrior class, and that 0.1% of the population will compete over them for the next 20 years while peak mileage and recharge speed of all-electrics goes up.
My sedan has better handling than the roadster I had as a young man. When I tried to relive that in my 30's, it didn't pan out. In the sedan, I won't die instantly in a t-bone or any accident with a truck. Antilock brakes are life.
Things change and antique vehicles become quainter by the year, and at some point you'll have a brief period of mourning and switch without another fuss. But you have time for it to happen organically.
Or, hybrid vehicles will stay legal for a long time, and you will just own one of those and leave the rest of us alone.
The real problem is powering them. Batteries have a terrible energy density compared to hydrocarbon fuels and charge slowly, fuel cells don't seem to take off, and using an internal combustion engine to power an electric engine doesn't really solve anything. In fact, the simple fact that powering an electric engine with an ICE may be a good idea speak volume about both the superiority of electric engines and the difficulty of powering them.
So yes, the electric motor's dominance is inevitable, but we are not there yet. Battery technology is just starting to become viable, but electric cars are still heavy and expensive, have limited range and we don't really have a good, universal charging infrastructure yet. It is not because of "the best efforts of politicians", it is because it is technology that is just starting to become viable.
Increase fuel taxes to the level necessary for carbon neutrality and ICE vehicles look immediately unappealing.
At least CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere.
This doesn't mean anything. Better is always relative.
> At least CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere.
There is no evidence we can scale this up besides planting trees and hoping for the best.
1 gallon burnt emits 20lbs of CO2, and a ton is 2000 lbs, so 100 gallons of gasoline emits a ton of CO2.
With current technology takes $15-75 to pull a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere, or $0.15-0.75 to remediate a gallon of gasoline.
I argue a $1/gallon tax is the minimum viable, since we’ll need a carbon negative economy for the foreseeable future.
It’s not clear to me that $1 more per gallon of gas would kill ICE cars. If I ran a big auto maker, I’d actually lobby for such a tax, since it’s easier than retooling all the lines, and it pushes the cleanup costs onto legacy customers.
I personally think the tax should be paid upfront when you buy a new ICE car (assume it’ll last 100,000-200,000 miles), and not at the pump.
ICE is still the norm in Sweden, with EC standing for 3% of all personal cars. EC have however taken a significant chunk of new sales, with last month being 35%. It also help that all government workplaces over a certain size has free EC charging, and even some shopping centers.
I don't think this is as cut and dried as you think. Generators are ~90% efficient. Gearboxes and differentials aren't 100% efficient either. If you are already carrying enough motor to propel you without an engine then you can size the ICE closer to average load than peak load potentially getting back a bit of efficiency.
Obviously, ICEs that are strictly used to crank generators are common.
If you mean “is there data on whether that works in what is otherwise a battery-electric car”, that's called a series hybrid, and there are several production examples, including the Chevy Volt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_locomotive#Diesel–elect...
Long answer: Before WWII, there were luxury cars built this way. Manual transmissions were much harder to drive, so some luxury cars used a generator/motor pair as an automatic transmission.
WWII needs for copper drove them out of the market; and they never came back because it was simpler to just mate an oversized engine with a horrible automatic.
If we can build batteries that don't source new cobalt from the DRC, (by using none or recycling) that would remove one ugly skeleton from the closet.
UBS Predicts EV Price Parity In 2024: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/22/ubs-predicts-ev-price-p...
In summary: Battery-electric cars will be "worth it" in 2022, and cost the same as a gas car in 2024.
Also: Tesla is very close to making its batteries cost the same as a gas car. What they are going to do is turn the bulk and weight of the battery into a structural member of the frame. (Recently announced on Battery Day.)
Sometime in the future, some of those arguments might be outdated, but they don't strike me that way now.
We still will have EVs with limited range and a lack of universal charging infrastructure. (I say this as the overall happy owner of a LEAF, but it's a bit of a toy rather than a car that I can rely on for all of my travel needs, relying on my wife's car and aircraft for distance travel and using the LEAF only around town.)
https://egopowerplus.com/16-inch-chain-saw/
If you need more than a 16” bar, then, yeah, you’ll end up with a gas chainsaw, but the weight of battery + electric motor is less than ICE + gasoline at this size.
Also, electric is much, quieter, less smelly, less maintenance, avoids trips to the gas station, etc.
Good policy? Probably not. Essential politics? Yes.
If the price of domestic food goes up countries will just start importing more food from countries without a carbon tax. That would really annoy farmers. So any carbon tax needs to be accompanied by carbon tariffs.
John Deere already manufactures electric tractors and farmers can simply utilise replaceable battery packs, charged on-site using solar power.
For land travel all electric vehicles make a TON of sense. However, for airline and oceanic travel, the energy density of a battery simply isn't high enough.
Biofuels may be the only carbon neutral way to accommodate such forms of transport.
Burning hydrocarbons peeks out at something like 40% efficiency. Yet we are only now getting to the point where EVs have the same range as ICE vehicles, even though the battery->motor conversion is something like 90% efficient.
Why is that? Because the amount of energy that can be stored in batteries is MUCH lower than the amount of energy released from burning fuel.
Transport needs to carry all of it's energy with it (or, have something like a 3rd rail to provide energy).
That's the argument for biofuels in the future. Not that you can't replace 99% of transport with electricity, but rather some forms of transport require a lot of energy.
We are JUST getting to the point where batteries have enough density to power a prop plane for ~ 1hour worth of flight.
We are no where near the energy density where a cargo ship could sail from china to the US or for international flights.
One alternative to biofuels is hydrogen from something like electrolysis.
One thing I think we'll both agree on. Ethanol for cars/trucks is a terrible idea. EVs are the future there.
https://www.power-eng.com/2020/07/08/power-to-gas-examining-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer%E2%80%93Tropsch_proces...
The advantage of synthetic fuels over biofuels is that you can get a lot more fuel out of 100 hectares of solar panels than 100 hectares of crops, because plants are very inefficient at capturing solar energy as useful chemical energy. The advantage of biofuels over synthetic fuels would be lower capital costs. Biofuels have an advantage while non-fossil fuel demand is low, but they can't scale as well.
Since artificially capturing CO2 from the air is expensive and inefficient so far, an attractive hybrid path combines biomass and electrolytic hydrogen to make methane or heavier hydrocarbons. The main role of the plants is to concentrate carbon from the air. A kilogram of dry cellulose has an enthalpy of combustion of 17.5 MJ [1]. It contains enough carbon to make 0.76 kg (47.6 moles) of methane, once fully hydrogenated. That methane has an enthalpy of combustion of 41.9 MJ [2]. The biomass would supply all of the carbon and a minority of the chemical energy while electrolysis would supply the majority of the hydrogen and the final energy content of the methane.
I'm a Deere Employee. I cannot talk about projects other than the above, but I wouldn't hope for practical electric tractors in the near future.
Of course both get subsidised to various extents, and the prices of energy, crops and labour all fluctuate - but you can guess they're equal within a factor of two.
It's basically a subsidy to a couple of large agribusiness companies. Nothing to do directly with people-first politics.
On balance, I would rather emit the CO2, until we can convert transportation fleets to electricity.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/12/02/5-reason...
For starters, as far as lost sequestration goes, even with the grain removed from the equation, a dense field of corn produces a similar amount or more biomass than the same field would laying fallow.
Another point that is constantly brought up is the methane emissions of cows. Cows do not produce methane in a vacuum, they produce it by digesting grain, so the comparison must be made relative to that same amount of grain being digested elsewhere or decomposing on its own.
Their point about the need to adopt things like silvopasture, no-till, or crop rotation sound great, they but fail to acknowledge that in vast portions of the US they are already the norm, not the exception.
Ethanol makes no sense when EVs are quickly going to be cost competitive.
Biofuel with crops irrigated with fossil water is very unsustainable.
Most likely what will happens is that those uses that can be electrified will be (cars, city buses, light trucks etc.). Biobased fuels, synthetic fuels, hydrogen and so on will have a role for transportation sectors where electricity is not an option (long range planes, ships, trucks).
I recall watching an uncle rebuild grandma's carburetor, because her car kept flooding. He shows me part of the original fuel jet and the replacement. The new one has a little synthetic grommet on it, the old one has an empty notch in the same spot. They blamed it on the ethanol.