Hacker News Reader

Comment by sleavey | Hacker News Reader

I enjoyed hearing electric cars called "external combustion engines" given that in most countries (at least mine) the electricity used to charge the car still mostly comes from fossil fuel. In such cases all we're doing is adding an extra lossy conversion between chemical and kinetic energy, potentially making it worse. Yet people buy such cars and feel great about themselves. I am reminded of the South Park episode where a cloud of smog across the town is replaced by a cloud of smug.

Why are we incentivising electric cars at purchase rather than incentivising the use of green energy to charge them?

(Edited to add "potentially" before "making it worse" given a comment below)

View on HN

I’m not sure what country you live in, so this may not apply to you, but most countries, including mine (USA) do heavily incentivize the use of green energy. Globally, renewable energy growth is accelerating, now that costs have come down so far. It’s both/and, not either/or.

One other thing is that EVs have huge potential for energy storage. Smart energy policy will effectively use EVs as both a source and sink. In the daytime, when solar is dominant, EVs can charge at work. At night, they can discharge and power your home (V2G). There aren’t many EVs that do this currently (there aren’t many EVs at all currently), but many, like the F150 Electric, will.

I actually published a paper on your last point many years ago. To me it's obvious that we need to use electric car batteries as storage for the grid. The infrastructure is already there. The software in the car should allow the user to specify their preference for how full to keep the battery at all times, and when they next plan to drive far, and the car can decide how it gets its battery charge to the required level in the available time. Adding in price incentives to use electricity when it's cheapest (when there's most supply vs demand) makes it even more attractive.

Nice! Would love to read your paper :) I worked on this project, which is why I am all over this comment section :)

https://its.berkeley.edu/news/new-tsrc-report-shows-benefits...

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6609120

We were a bunch of physicists having fun. The impact of using just laptops for demand side response will be negligible but the idea is that all battery equipped, mains connected devices are capable of responding to grid supply/demand changes by adding or removing load only needing simple electronics (we used an Arduino Uno).

> To me it's obvious that we need to use electric car batteries as storage for the grid.

Like a Powerwall for your solar panels but using the car instead of the battery? That'd make good sense for places like the UK where there's currently no Powerwall equivalent (that I know of.)

Yep! Sunrun (largest residential solar company in the US) has partnered with Ford to make their new electric pickups into “power walls” in this way

Don't power plants have higher efficiency than ICEs anyway, even if combined with the efficiency of electric engines? Correct me if I am wrong.

That's a good question, I don't know the answer to that. One thing to include though is transmission loss to get the electricity to the place it's needed. And at the same time of course include the energy used to get petrol to a gas guzzling car. In other words, the comparison needs to be fair, and that doesn't sound like an easy analysis. I'd be interested to hear from anyone that knows more about this.

The car engine has to fit a weight and size limit that means most of the heat is wasted instead of harnessed.

Power plants can capture 60% of the heat energy. http://needtoknow.nas.edu/energy/energy-sources/fossil-fuels...

Conventional cars capture 12-30% of the energy in the fuel. https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/evtech.shtml#:~:text=Energy%....

The difference is big enough that the analysis is easy.

You're absolutelly right, just a small caveat for the 60% figure: most well-maintained plants capture between 35% and 40% of heat energy. Peakers can reach 35% too. Pulsed coal and new gas tech can get to 50-60% in ideal conditions. Also, most of these techs are new and are available on recently-build plants. That 60% could be as low as 45%.

Still at least twice as effective as ICEs.

However, a 2-tons electric car compared to a 800kg ICE? without taking into consideration the wear on infrastructure and on singular parts of the vehicle, i still think you are in comparable zone.

I like this (very pro-EV) video which gets into this exact question https://youtu.be/1oVrIHcdxjA

The most important point, IMO, is that localized emissions do the most harm. Even if the emissions were equal, keeping pollution out of the urban core will literally prevent (or defer) millions of cases of lung cancer etc. This paper quantifies the social cost of atmospheric release: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-015-1343-0

It's really hard to make these comparisons because environmental impacts aren't fungible. The emissions from building and running an electric car might be more CO2 overall but the CO2 is being emitted at a few large factories and could be more easily captured than from individual cars.

ICEs also emit lots of other pollution in the middle of cities, including noise pollution. Electrics would cut down on those or emit them around the factory instead of downtown.

Transmission losses are not significant in most cases. Your assertion that electricity from fossil fuel power plants is somehow worse than inefficient ICE cars is completely wrong.

Depending on transmission losses, yes. Theoretically, power plants could also have better exhaust scrubbing and carbon capture, but most currently don't.

No, EVs are still more efficient:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electr...

> Why are we incentivising electric cars at purchase rather than incentivising the use of green energy to charge them?

Shouldn't we be incentivising both?

(one of the largest incentives I can see at the moment generation-side is that the levelized-cost-of-energy (LCOE) for solar in particular has become cheaper than most alternatives, and continues to reduce. and that's operational cost, excluding the cost of externalities on nations and their populations)

> I enjoyed hearing electric cars called "external combustion engines" given that in most countries (at least mine) the electricity used to charge the car still mostly comes from fossil fuel.

I will point out, as I usually do when this is trotted out, that this line of thinking is formally called the "long tailpipe" fallacy.

You can find more with that search term.

Yes, it is a fallacy.

Green energy has already been incentivized over the last 25-30 years that has resulted in solar and wind already being cheaper than most other forms of electricity production. Now the problem is electricity storage and fossil fuel use incentivizing electric transport is the correct move as it will result in less fossil fuel use as well decrease the price for electricity storage as more investments are made in battery tech. Btw 13000 miles is all it takes to make an electric car cleaner than a fossil fuel car when it come to carbon use https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

> given that in most countries (at least mine) the electricity used to charge the car still mostly comes from fossil fuel.

The green revolution in personal transportation has two components: emissions-free electrical energy generation and the cars that use that energy. The fact that the former is lagging in many countries cannot be blamed on the latter.

> Why are we incentivising electric cars at purchase rather than incentivising the use of green energy to charge them?

Both need to be incentivised. The energy production will be in the form of disincentives to fossils fuel generation in the form of taxes and cap-and-trade.

Both the cars and the grid need to be de-fossilised. You can't just do one or the other. ICE cars can never be clean, EVs have the potential and when grid catches up they will be cleaner and the benefits from cleaner grid will increase.

Good video to watch on topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzZ1_vH30ko

Assuming plants are regulated on pollution, they're way better at reducing emissions than a petrol burner in everyone's garage.

But then there's the battery manufacturing, not sure how dirty it is compared to manufacturing the car parts they replace.

Remote work tech will do more for car CO2 emissions than what electric cars will ever do. My theory is that EVs won't succeed at all as cars, BUT they will be great as backup batteries with wheels for home-solar installations.

Many residential areas of the uk have illegal levels of NO2. Lethal levels. "adding an extra lossy conversion between chemical and kinetic energy" is not 'all' electric cars do.

I would change "potentially" to "doesn't". It's often touted but the numbers really don't support it in basically any country.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com