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Comment by joosters | Hacker News Reader

An interesting article. Some of the comparisons are a little odd, though. The author makes the point that households with an EV are wealthier. Why then, compare their electricity use with a typical household if we have established that an EV owner is not a typical household to begin with?

It would be more interesting then to compare EV owners against non-EV owners in a similar income bracket (or household size, or assumed wealth, or somesuch grouping). I wonder how the picture would change?

Likewise, when the article introduces solar comparisons, it runs into the same problems. I'd guess that the households with solar panels are again likely to be wealthier, and so much less likely to be a 'typical household'.

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I hope this doesn't come off as snarky. Perhaps the author is making a point about the owners of electric cars not being particularly "green" because of their huge houses.

I'd expect the wealth-corrected data to make the EV owners look even better, since they'd be comparing them against households that use even more electricity than their baseline typical customer.

To be fair to the author, I think that they actually can't do the more detailed comparisons because they just don't know enough about the households in the study. At the end of the page, it explains that they don't even know whether or not the households actually have EVs, they are just guessing based upon their electricity plan. So despite the earlier talk of stats like "53% more likely to have a swimming pool", I suspect that this is gleaned from elsewhere and their dataset contains very little about the customers, and probably not enough to be able to break them down by income or other factors.

Interesting, I'd expect the opposite - It's easier to be more cost / eco efficient when you have the money to. You can, for example afford a modern and robust car (with a great catalytic converter) and regular maintenance. You can afford proper insulation and home automation systems that shut down unused resources, etc. You can afford to pay for composting and recycling services.

It's easier to be more cost / eco efficient when you have the money to

Of course, but being more efficient isn't the same as having a smaller overall footprint. The point is that wealthy customers probably have bigger houses that require more energy to heat and cool in absolute terms, even if it's done more efficiently relative to poorer folks.

Be careful with that assumption. My previous 2000 sq ft house cost less to heat and cool than the earlier 900 sq. ft. house we moved from. One having been built 30 years more recently than the other meant that the insulation was of far better quality even though the older house was much smaller and had an almost brand new HVAC system.

I suppose but then why not take into account gas usage between households?

EV's aren't just about being super green, they're about being more sociable with the pollution they produce.

Instead of pumping out CO2 in our cities, the CO2 is pumped out at the electricity plants - making our cities cleaner and safer to live in. :)

This does seem to have some truth. Why is it downvoted?

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/08/mpg-for-electric...

"From a carbon-dioxide standpoint, you’d be better off burning the fossil fuel directly in your car."

That conclusion is odd. It mentions that not all electricity comes from fossil fuels, then immediately launches into a calculation that assumes all of your electricity comes from fossil fuels. It also completely ignores the fact that different fuels emit different amounts of CO2 for the same amount of energy. This one actually supports their conclusion; as far as I can see, gasoline produces less CO2 for a given amount of energy than natural gas, and way less than coal. There's also the nontrivial energy and thus CO2 emissions needed to extract, refine, and deliver gasoline, and of course that comes into play (albeit less so) on the electricity side as well. I think that part of the article glosses over these details a little too much.

Sociable pollution? The world is still not cleaner or safer to live in as CO2 is still being produced somewhere. This whole 'out of sight, out of mind' outlook on green issues isn't a solution. Until we move away from burning stuff to make energy, Telsa can create millions of car, it still doesn't help anything.

I would love to see this chart and the projection of how it would be shaped if 50% / 75% / 100% of cars on the road were electric: http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.cfm?id=16511&src=Tot...

What happens when you shift the energy requirements from transportation to residential? What happens when you shift from high yield energy (gasoline) to low yield energy (coal)?

Electric cars (and buses, etc) is not the solution, but it's part of it. Lots of countries are moving to cleaner electricity production, and electric cars allow transportation to benefit from that pollution-wise.

Exactly this. Now we've only got the one problem to solve.

> Until we move away from burning stuff to make energy, Telsa can create millions of car, it still doesn't help anything.

Actually, it still helps a lot, because burning fuel at power plants is much, much more energy efficient than in internal combustion engines (I think I saw a factor of 3 or 4 in some analysis). So by going all electric, you get 3 times less pollution for the same number of cars (actually, you'd get even less, because power plants are better at filtering pollutants).

Also another added benefit is that the moment you go green by e.g. switching to nuclear power, suddenly all your cars get their carbon footprint cut down by two orders of magnitude.

If not in cities, where do your electricity plants exist?

You are right in that electric cars only relocate the pollution and energy consumption, but it still has to happen somewhere.

Of course, but a single power plant will pump out less pollution than the equivalent millions of car engines.

By moving this source of pollution out of the cities to an unpopulated location you're saving the health of millions of people.

In the middle of nowhere: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Callaway+Nuclear+Power+Pla...

CO2 isn't the only pollutant I don't want in my lungs. Hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter are moved from cities and reduced overall.

CO2 is one of the few pollutants I don't care about having in my lungs. There's already a bunch in there, and any additional amount that comes from external sources is going to be trivial compared to what I make on my own. CO2 is dangerous globally but essentially harmless locally.

Good point, I should probably be more worried about CO :)

Does CO cause harm beyond killing you if there's too much of it? It probably does, seems like everything causes cancer or something, but I'm not too familiar with it beyond the part where it displaces all your oxygen and suffocates you.

Well I get asthma, so I need all the O2 I can get!

Or the contrast being bigger, makes for a sexier article. Including non-ev-owning larger households in the comparison would have made it a a better article.

Can't we just let people conserve resources without complaining that they aren't doing enough in other areas?

I own a Prius. I don't care about being "green". (I'm not some "drill, baby, drill" wacko, but I do think that saving the environment is a collective action problem to the extent that "doing my part" won't make any real difference.) I bought it because it's a really nice car, the price was right, and I really enjoy infrequent, cheap visits to the gas station.

Similarly, I'd love to own a Tesla, not to be "green", but because they're really nice cars and I enjoy the thought of never buying a gallon of gasoline again, even though I know it won't save me money over the Prius unless gas goes up to about $500/gallon.

I don't think I'm very wasteful in my life as a whole, either. I believe my house is smaller than average for my area and the size of my family, although I wouldn't call it "small". We use public transportation a lot, and specifically moved near a Metro station for that. We have lots of LED and CFL bulbs. High efficiency equipment keeps my electric and gas usage down. But I do all of this to save money, not to placate my inner Greenpeace. And if you want to bring large-scale change, that's the angle to push on. "Save money," not "save the planet."

I don't think this article is making any value judgements or policy advocations. To me, it reads a lot like OKCupid's blog posts of olde, simply crunching & plotting the data they collect purely out of curiosity. In which case, the usage patterns vs. the typical customer are interesting, IMO.

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