What's the real environmental cost of electric cars? | Hacker News Reader

What's the real environmental cost of electric cars?

bbc.co.uk

33 pointspetenixey58 comments

It's always seemed crazy to me that just because electric cars are non-polluting, people forget that dangling on the other end of that charging cable is probably a coal-fired power station.

I've never seen figures on this before but it's nice to finally see something quantifying that. This study found: "For a European average power generation mix, and if you use your car for 150,000km, you could hope for a 25% improvement [in global warming impact] relative to a gasoline car"

and also points out that: "some cars make almost double the impact on global warming as conventional cars. This is mostly because of the raw materials and energy needed to build the lithium-ion batteries."

I'd love to see more data around this. I'm not anti-electric but it does seem we could apply our efforts, natural resources and budgets more effectively to other places, like loft insulation.

...or even better, just not travel as much. Most current travel is either unnecessary or inefficient.

Citation: I live on a fairly busy road in London, UK. I just watched 45 cars go past my living room window with only one person in, followed by a double decker bus with about 5 people in it. Hardly efficient!

Mass transit really isn't that effective unless you live near both ends of a system. Need to transfer, it gets worse.

You can try and make people feel guilty so they use mass transit or you can actually help it make their lives better. Which way do you think will be the most effective?

Bottom line: solve for time.

Or, you can shift their workplaces to areas with no parking.

I work in a downtown business district. A recent office move and resident parking, constraints in parking facilities, and heavy enforcement of once-loose parking rules vaporized office worker parking. This affects 20-30k people.

Result: The telecommuting program participation rate is up, and people are taking public transit options, several of which are free to them.

The car problem in society is all about who bears the costs for things.

Sorry, but that is not a solution. The traffic is the natural consequence of people's need to move around, not of available parking. A real solution consists in removing the need (a.k.a: letting people telecommute), not the tools (parkings).

I didn't say it wasn't available. I said it wasn't free.

By making parking "free" to the end user, you make it easy for them to make choices around a car. Usually, public transit is cheaper than driving, but adds time. In my case, I can drive 15 minutes and pay $250/mo to park, take a bus for 25-30 minutes for $25/mo, or walk for 45-60 minutes for $0/mo.

Think about NYC and it's famous mass transit system. Why does that exist, where just 200 miles away, Boston is a sprawled out driving disaster? The root answer is that Manhattan is an island, and there is no parking. You cannot just bulldoze a hill to put a 50 acre Wal-Mart parking lot there.

> Bottom line: solve for time.

Absolutely! People don't like to spend hours in a traffic jam, but if they do it every day it's just because they don't have a faster way to get to their destination. Yes, public transportation may be cheaper, but it is slower unless you live and work next to two stops of the same train/bus line. What is more important: time or money? Given the ever increasing road traffic, people clearly prefer time.

So I guess the most pernicious evil is the sprawling suburbia all around America that for no good reason necessitates car travel all around.

We've got videoconferencing, but imagine if the R&D hours and experience we've got in building cars to ferry people around had been invested in 'remote cars'. i.e. Remote workstations that were like modern office cubicles, except they existed in your home.

Even better, instead of cubicles, we could use an array of cameras and monitors to simulate shared working spaces. And instead of spending money on road/rail/air transport infrastructure, we spent it on high-speed data transfer links.

So I could have an office on a beach, that when I entered it, I was actually inside a shared, real-time space with my work colleagues.

Totally possible with current technology, but not with mindset or infrastructure constraints.

That's no evil. It is baffling, however, that people who spend so much time in cars are happy with cars that have such poor fuel efficiency.

Yes, I understand that some people need big cars with poor fuel efficiency. (You need a 4x4 to get over the hills in winter; or for all the sports gear you're using; or because it's your business.) But people in the suburbs tootling around doing 40 mile commutes every day just need a comfortable car with good efficiency.

Cheap gas and complacency really hurt the US.

The reasons for the culture of urban sprawl in the USA substantially boil down to white flight. Urban planning was a disaster in most US cities, the governments and services were dysfunctional, and there were too many people in the cities that middle class folks didn't want themselves or their children around. Arguably the death knell of urban family living was forced busing. Suburbia was a way to get away from people who couldn't afford two cars, and to live around only people who could afford that.

You will not curb the suburban sprawl problem in the US until ways develop for communities to control who lives in them. Right now the only mechanism is price. The rich can sustain unsprawled urban enclaves because they price undesirables out of their neighborhoods.

Or in molten salt nuclear power plants.

> It's always seemed crazy to me that just because electric cars are non-polluting, people forget that dangling on the other end of that charging cable is probably a coal-fired power station.

I don't think that's crazy at all. Think of it as "refactoring" the environmental burden. First you move the energy generation from individual cars to a central energy source. If the energy source (coal in this case) is terrible you won't immediately get a big benefit. However, you have separated the environmental impact of energy generation from combustion motors to a central power plant. So now when you build an infrastructure of clean sources of power: nuclear, geothermal, wind, solar all your cars get the benefit automatically. This is good design. Separation of concerns!

The fact that we're burning coal in this day and age is crazy, of course. Especially given that nuclear power plants are being shut down in favor of coal. Environmental policy isn't exactly rational, but highly politicized issues never are.

> This is good design. Separation of concerns!

I'm not convinced that this is necessarily true for environmental policy. Imagine, for example, how much people would care about their waste footprint if they had to keep all the trash that would otherwise go into an ocean.

Once we have no idea anymore where the power in our cars comes from, and no visible pollution in the street that we know is caused by cars, won't the search for a better power source slow down a lot?

"Not in my neighbourhood" etc... :)

We also have to consider how we move our "concerns" from one place to another. Tanker ships and trucks for petrol, metal wire for electricity. Neither is super efficient.

Developing electric cars is vital. As is providing charging stations and other infrastructure.

Just because today we generate a lot of power from coal, gas, oil does not mean that in the future we will be 100% clean with renewables (!), nuclear or some other innovation.

The two things should be developed independently, and transportation should be developed on the assumption that the supply of energy will eventually come from a clean and sustainable source.

Two big advantages that this study dismisses are local vs remote pollution, and an easier ability to take advantage of generation mix changes. Even if EVs have the same life life cycle cost, their pollution is always at a remote source further from population centers. That matters for the tailpipe emissions. Secondly, it's much easier to replace a few power plants, or improve their pollution output, than millions of internal combustion engines. If all cars were EVs fed from coal plants, it would be easier to make that clean than millions of traditional vehicles.

Quite, it sounds like a bit of a dick move at first blush but the air quality of say LA or Mexico City would be drastically improved at little to no additional environmental cost if the emissions were being emitted in less of a geographic hole.

The major benefit of electric cars will come when a proper smart grid environment exists. The biggest problem with many renewables is their inconstant nature - windfarms will produce electricity when the wind is blowing, which might not be when the power is actually needed.

EVs provide a mechanism to store that excess power generated; cars can know to recharge their batteries faster when more power is available to the grid.

While it's true that a smart grid environment could provide additional benefits, the major benefit of electric cars is, and will continue to be, the increased energy efficiency on a personal level.

The biggest problem with renewables is that they're less convenient. Gas is an extremely convenient energy storage mechanism. You put it in a tank, and it stays in a more or less usable state for decades. We don't have usable batteries that do that yet (Edison NiFe batteries notwithstanding).

These assessments don't mean much because we are only getting one side of the story. Let's measure electricity from the power plant to the car and compare it to gas from the gas station to the car. How did gas magically appear at the gas station? Do oil pumps, oil tankers, refineries, delivery vehicles, and gas stations themselves now produce no pollution and waste?

In the article they said the study included 'well to wheels' in their calculations, so it's not just one side of the story, they factored in all you're talking about.

The problem is the true answer to light environmental impact does not fit very well in either side's political ideology.

Pick whatever mode of transportation that costs the least, and the chance is very good that it's environmental impact is also the least of the available options. This provides a good rule of thumb. A small gasoline car (there are no small electrical cars) will easily win out over all alternatives, in some cases even over public transport.

Even human power (ie. bikes, walking) is not as green as you'd think. Humans eat expensive multiple times reprocessed food. Especially meat is expensive. And moving does actually cost energy. I wonder if anyone's ever done a rigorous calculation of that. I did some back of the envelope calculations, and knowing that a trained athlete's body can approach efficiencies of 25% in some cases (normal people, 10% at best), and that food has to be transported > 100km on average, I found walking/biking is only barely more environmentally friendly than an efficient, small car (assuming equivalent distance, of course, and assuming 5liters/100km). Using energy gained from eating meat to walk is very likely to be less efficient than driving (yet that's exactly what athletes do, although they have their increased efficiency).

Of course that's not to say walking/running/biking doesn't have other advantages. But humans burn fuel to produce co2 + work just as cars do, it's just much less visible.

If you're interested in these sorts of calculations then I can recommend this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Bad-Are-Bananas-everything/dp/18...

I found it a really good read and to geek it off it's written by the brother of the inventor of the web.

> ...(there are no small electrical cars)...

Huh?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitsubishi_i-MiEV http://www.caranddriver.com/features/2013-fiat-500-ev-featur...

Heh, so there are. I've never seen those before, outside from special test installations. I didn't think they were even cleared for public roads.

Thanks, interesting links. I can't seem to find a locations where I could buy one of those though.

The briefly mention it in the parent article and found electric vehicles to be more efficient. Then they throw in lithium battery production which is probably the least efficient step of the electric vehicle ecosystem. Why not throw in oil pipeline construction impact vs electric grid construction or waste by-products of a coal plant or wind farm vs a crude oil refinery?

I'm not sure you read the article. They compared both from the source to the wheels.

Even if an electric car has zero reduction in carbon emissions, a switch to electric cars would still result in major improvements in air quality in densely populated cities. The health impacts of local air quality are often very significant in dollar terms relative to climate change.

This. Automobiles are maybe the major source of air and especially noise pollution in cities.

Fortunately, in the US, we have huge amounts of $3 natural gas. I'd be pretty comfortable with natural gas (and hydro and nuclear) for electric cars for now, with a transition to hydro/nuclear/solar/wind over the next 25 years.

Aside from the fact that EV are plugged into dirty power sources, lithium in their batteries is a huge problem as well: [1] [2].

The reality is that we know how to build efficient charging systems, and we can even build some efficient power sources, such as wind turbines, nuclear reactors, and even solar panels. The problem is that we don't have a good way to store all this energy so that we can make a vehicle go. A compressed air vehicle [3] might be a better design than a lithium battery one, but it's certainly more dangerous. Other batteries just don't seem to measure up to lithium in terms of charge/discharge cycles and/or energy density [4].

The best we can hope for is a better energy storage system than what we've had up to now. Ideally, something that's clean to manufacture, recyclable, efficient, and long-lasting, but that's been the battery pipe dream. After all, our current cars still use the lead/acid batteries which have not changed much since they entered production in 1881, aside from the invention of a sealed version in the 1970s.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/05/25/us-lithium-analysi...

[2] http://junkscience.com/2012/08/09/rare-earth-mining-in-china...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_air_car

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechargeable_battery#Table_of_r...

I think there's no doubt in anyone's mind that electric cars themselves are reliant on the grid, and if its a coal burning station then obviously you're burning coal to drive. I hope that as greener energy forms such as solar and wind catch on we'll be able to really reduce our carbon footprints. While we as consumers can make a personal change on our end and go electric/hybrid it's really up to govs to help make the grid cleaner with legislation and regulation. It's kind of sad that individuals can't go all the way but I want to be optimistic about this. Maybe combining your own solar panels + electric car can some day in the near future get us where we'd want to be?

Gasoline cars are reliant on the grid (of petrol stations), unless you can refine and pump oil yourself.

Eletric cars are only reliant on electricity. Availablity of eletricity from the grid is much better than gasoline from petrol stations, and even if power goes out you can charge your car from your solar panels or any other means you can find to generate electricity, of which there are plenty. Gyms could probably generate plenty of miles just from obese people on crosstrainers.

All in all, a move to electric cars and renewable power sources will decentralize energy supply and make us less reliant on the grid (and all the failed states that supply oil).

Indeed, I think it's neat to consider that the electric grid could eventually end up being more distributed than the petrol grid.

Petrol has to be drilled from wherever the fossils happened to be compressed, transported to wherever the closest port is, pipelined to wherever it's convenient to have a refinery, trucked to gas stations, pumped into your car. It's a very top-down hierarchy.

Electricity can be obtained from wherever the solar, wind, gas-powered-generator, nuclear-generator, geothermal sources are (hint: just about anywhere), put onto a fault-tolerant grid, and "pumped into cars" anywhere we've run copper.

Gas wins on storage capacity/convenience, but that's about it.

I am no fan of conspiracy theories, but I truly believe that some oil corporation or related investors might have had their influence on this article. Media is an easy source to manipulate people and BBC does it really well (They have a very good history of writing up biased articles in favor of/against certain companies/industries). I wait for the day when some anonymous source like Wikileaks publishes a link on how corrupt these fucking media organizations are from top to bottom. Really.

IMO, the article doesn't appear well-written enough to have been a commissioned piece.

I think the promise is in the future. Right now electric cars might not be as eco-friendly as you'd expect, but once they've become popular, recycling techniques for the batteries will improve, and we can easily switch the generator of the electricity from coal to something like nuclear power to cut back on emissions, the car won't care. When you're driving a gasoline car though, you're basically stuck with gas.

It seems like the electric car will be important in normalizing the grid as solar and wind projects expand. The hard part will be convincing people that their batteries do not need to be full all of the time, and making cars intelligent enough to ensure that the batteries are full when they need to be.

> The hard part will be convincing people that their batteries do not need to be full all of the time...

This is the hard part not because people are stupid, but because their needs and wants, in aggregate, are complex.

My wife is an extremely efficient commuter. She grew up on a farm where they had a "bi-weekly trip-into-town". As a consequence, she doesn't go anywhere without having her route figured out and optimized, traveling salesman style. But she's the exception. The rule is people who spontaneously change their minds about where they want to go in their cars in the next 6 hours.

The reason gasoline wins is not because it's more efficient, but because it augments people's behaviors instead of trying to alter them.

That being said, electric vehicles are certainly able, today, to positively augment the driving habits of people who are near charging infrastructure or who regularly drive less than 50 miles/day.

I wasn't suggesting stupidity, just that people tend to think about the worst possible situations when presented with new technologies.

It is handy that the aforementioned sources of power start to diminish as people are also settling in for the day and are less apt to use their car. You are certainly not going to be driving while you are sleeping, for instance, which is a great time for the car to give back to the grid for a while, as needed, before charging back up for the morning. However, the idea that your car isn't juiced up for that late night emergency that happens, maybe, once in your life is a concern many, including myself, will have.

I don't think a car with appropriate learning systems would need to get in the way of your normal life here, but knowing you have a car available for those rare emergencies is a comfort blanket many will realize they have.

I'd prefer to drive my bicycle on a street with electric cars, rather than on a street with gasoline cars.

I think since 2010 fuel consumption has declined a lot even though weight has increased. So when manufacturers decrease weight, combustion cars will become even more environment friendly.

For example: a big Audi nowadays can do 20-30 km/l. When losing a lot of weight it could even do more. Losing a lot of engine power maybe even more (there is hardly any need to go faster than 160 km/h).

Edit: wow, reading a little into it: in 1899 a electric car was the first to break the 100 km/h barier.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car

And the alternative is to keep using ICE automobiles? Our very existence impacts the "environment". We're either using up a finite amount of oil, or a finite amount of materials to make electronics. This argument against electric cars makes no sense.

http://greenmonk.net/2010/01/07/what-if-we-create-a-better-w...

Yes and no.

No technology is going to be a cut and dried solution to all our environmental problems. None. Period. Not even Mr. Fusion.

Ultimately the question is whether or not electric cars are an important stepping stone along the line to a future where more environmental problems are solved or significantly ameliorated compared to today. I think the answer to that question is probably yes, even with the extremely flawed electric vehicles of today (although with enough evidence I might be convinced otherwise). However, we very much do need to keep in mind that this is at best a baby step, and the work remaining outweighs the work that's been done by a huge amount.

Elon musk claims that even if you take the same source fuel and burn it into stationary power plants, you're still better off. If you burn natural gas in a modern general electric gas turbine, you'll get about 60% efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine, you get about 20% efficiency. So electric cars 'make sense' if this logic is valid.

http://youtu.be/IgKWPdJWuBQ?t=59s I summarized at 59 seconds of this youtube clip you can see his exact claim. Is his claim logically/mathematically sound?^

The key number to look at in these "well to wheel" type holistic studies in the assumed lifetime of the car. In this study they used 150,000km, which is about 94,000 miles. That seems low to me. Most cars manufactured in the 1990s could last a lot longer than that, and cars are made even more reliably now.

This matters because the payoff for an EV improves with every mile driven. They are very energy-intensive to manufacture, but more efficient to operate. In addition, the EV's efficiency can be "upgraded" over time as the mix of electricity sources improves.

I have a mind-bending question (at least it makes me wonder)

I think it does not matter which energy storage unit we consume right now. Eventually all of them will be consumed. Renewable energy? nope it is not really renewable, it is just another energy storage unit, just renews faster than oil, because it stores less energy. Ultimately the only energy source we have is the sun. What will happen when our daily consumption rate becomes larger than the amount sun can suppl?

You might find this interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(energy)

Total worldwide energy consumption (2008) 10^19

Total energy from the sun that strikes earth each year 10^24

Total energy output from the sun each year 10^34

Thanks, definitely interesting. Seems like we will have a lot of time to answer my question.

How much of that 10^24 is required to power earth's ecosystem though? Not that this is relevant now, but I could see it becoming relevant when/if we move towards leeching 10^21 of that energy for human needs in a hundred years - which isn't really much in global terms. Mankind might need to move towards a level 2 civilization earlier than some people imagine. That or we figure out large scale fusion energy.

I doubt we get to the point where we start taking too much light for plants to survive any time soon, and the heat will end up here anyway.

The Sun 4e26 Watts of energy. If the human population swelled to ten quadrillion people (ten million billion humans) and human civilization used all of the power of the Sun each human would have the equivalent power of the nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima every half an hour, continuously.

To say that such levels of energy usage are "academic" and "purely hypothetical" is an understatement.

Matter can be converted directly to energy; the farther down that path we go, the greater our potential energy reserves.

I think we should be using each energy source to bootstrap toward this. By using wind, water, and burning trees, we were able to bootstrap technology to access and use fossil fuels. Using fossil fuels, we were able to bootstrap technology for nuclear fission, which converts a tiny amount of matter to energy. Using nuclear fission, we are working toward nuclear fusion, which would convert more matter to more energy. Using fusion we would work toward even more matter-energy conversion--through some yet-to-be-theorized process.

Yes, in the very long run, entropy will get all the energy sources, but that is a very long run to be worried about.

I think the most environmentally friendly option is to just avoid buying a new car.

Electric cars are a form of self-denial. We think we're doing the environment a favor when in reality we're terrified of a future without cars.

Not true. We can still have electric cars almost in perpetuity if the source of energy is the Sun... the current untapped carbon-neutral energy producing byproducts (hydro, wind, waves); we can also use the Moon (tidal hydro); the Earth's molten core (geothermal). et al.

Progress (as someone said upthread) is refactoring away from internal combustion engines that only operate by burning stored fossil fuels, to engines that operate by storing electrical energy... then we can start to spend the next couple of decades innovating on the electrical production problem and find a way to bend physics and the abundant energy in the system to our advantage.

(and I say all this as a bit of a doom and gloom cynic) OK, admittedly, we make batteries from finite, rare-earth batteries. That's ultimately a problem.

You forget that batteries can be recycled.

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