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Comment by petenixey | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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 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?

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.

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.

Or in molten salt nuclear power plants.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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