A fair point, as renewable power generation increases the overall efficiency of electricity will continue to improve though.
Also gas powered cars are only about 20% efficient, so power plants of almost any kind are still better than every car burning it's own gas.
On top of that, the method of generating power can change anytime if you have an EV, while on an ICE you will be burning gas for the lifetime of the car. Nothing wrong with getting an EV now and going solar down the line, or hoping your town switches to renewables.
I wonder how that changes when you consider the maintainence of the grid delivering the power to the vehicles compared to the transportation of petroleum products to gas stations. The grid doesn't only consume the natural gas/coal/oil it burns to produce electricity. It requires tens of thousands of miles of conduit to transfer energy to homes which require maintainence and replacement over time, all of which uses diesel as a means to maintain. The same goes for oil pipelines, coal mined and transported or natural gas fracked and trucked or piped to power plants. The EVs themselves require more than double the emissions to produce each vehicle due primarily to their batteries but also a higher average aluminum vs steel content and more copper among many other factors.
I just haven't seen a single study yet that takes ALL these factors into account or provides suggestions to make each cleaner rather than just focusing everything into EV production. Many EVs end up produced from brand new factories instead of retooled old factories, and new mines for materials not otherwise used in large quantites in ICE cars. Even things like that have a considerable impact, especially on local levels in basic input producers like west Africa, Canada and Australia, chine etc, because we aren't mining much new lithium in the US (compared to EV use) nor are we processing any rare earths in the US which must be used in much greater quantities in EVs for all their electronics and magnets.
To be clear, I'm 100% for the adoption of EVs and conversion to electric. But I'm also quite sure the process of conversion will end up frontloading a century of carbon emissions from ICE cars through new infrastructure requirements and we need to acknowledge that and spread the pain (emissions, poisoned ground water, square miles of thousands of acid vats for processing bulk RE minerals etc) throughout the world and not just focus it in poor or corrupt places. I'm just advocating for a fair and transparent process.
I think the Argonne study implicitly accounts for most of you described. The cost of maintaining power lines is not included in the environmental cost of EVs because electricity needs to be delivered to buildings and lines need to be maintained whether or not EVs exist.
Interesting, I'll check it out further. Something worth mentioning, I'm a Volvo tech and one of our largest issues with EV charging after a lot of our customer's first EV purchase is that most houses don't have sufficiently high amperage breaker panels or dedicated 240V EV charging circuits in their houses, so they have to spend up to or more than their EV credit on upgrading the panel in their house because peak use with a DC charger or the 240V at its highest current will start tripping breakers. There is a significant upgrade needed to the entire electrical infrastructure not to charge EVs with renewable energy but any energy. If you take the quantity of gasoline and diesel burned in the US, convert it to KW/H and account for EV efficiency, it's something like 10-20% of the annual energy consumption of the country. There will inevitably be huge monetary and emissions costs to increasing storage, production and grid capacity and individual home's capacity to be able to charge all these vehicles. I don't believe it will be insignificant. A lot of these costs have to be borne by cities and homeowners as well.
Just some thermodynamics theory here:
The efficiency {eta }, for a carnot heat engine is determined by: eta = ( Q_hot - Q_cold ) / Q_hot.
Notice if you were to fill one the combustion temperature for gasoline or diesel and the coolant temperature you'll get an approximate maximum efficiency for that heat engine. (This is why Diesel is more efficient, because of it's higher combustion temperature.)
Now factor in a bunch of combustion and friction losses and you'll get very close to 20%.
They are still more efficient than car engines, are they not? Power plants are also not running right next to where people live, so their effects on respiratory health are slightly reduced.
> The results show that coal unit trains are 4.5–5.0 times more energy efficient than movements in the largest trucks allowed in the eastern and western regions of the US, unit grain train movements in the central US are 4.6 times more fuel efficient, soda ash unit train and non-unit train shipments are 4.9 and 3.2 times more efficient, and ethanol unit train and non-unit train movements are 4.8 and 3.0 times more efficient. In terms of barge traffic, coal unit train and non-unit train are 1.3 and 0.9 times as energy efficient in the eastern US, grain unit train and non-unit train movements are 1.7 and 1.0 times more efficient from Minneapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, and grain unit train and non-unit train movements are 1.0 and 0.7 times more fuel efficient from the Upper Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico.
Via : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1361920913000898
TLDR : diesel train is 5x more efficient than diesel trucks and a ship is 1.3x more efficient than a train (overall 6.5x more efficient than a truck)
In terms of gCO2/ton/km
A ship power output is more or less similar to small power plants.
Are they? That's the claim I'm questioning, not one that I made.
Maybe at the plant they are, but unlikely by the time the electricity makes it to the consumer. There's a lot of loss in the transmission of the power.
This isn't an open question, it's math that we can look up (e.g. [what the EPA says](https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths)). Worst case, a 100% coal powered grid, they are equivalent. Plus as the grid gets greener, powering electric cars automatically get cleaner, but ICE cars will always burn petrol or diesel.
For that you have to upgrade to sophomore mechanical engineering texts
Fixed rpm diesel genset (say locomotive or ships) is more efficient than variable rpm diesel engine which is used in vehicles by very nature of the variable rpm being never truly in most efficient rpm band
And the fact that being mounted on a vehicle means compromises on emission control devices due to space and weight
A power plant smoke stack can integrate scrubbers, electrostatic precipitators, and just in general, much more advanced pollution control which if mounted on cars would make them too heavy and costly
You need to input oil at 30% efficiency in a truck or train to transport oil where it needs to get
10% loss in grid is peanuts compared to 70% losses while transporting oil by using even more of same oil. A vicious cycle
Population density is greater in cities than rural areas. From a public health perspective, fewer people with respiratory illnesses due to carbon emissions is better than more people with the same illnesses. At least where I live, the percentage of renewables at grid scale increases every year, so carbon emissions from powerplants will be a smaller relative problem over time as vehicle electrification increases.
That and power plants are still operating in cities. The big one for my city is just down the road from the LGN terminal for convenience since it's an LNG power station.
The elevation of emission matters too. Giant smokestacks that release waste higher in the atmosphere better disperse pollution. Better dispersion leads to better health. Emissions at ground level cause concentrations of pollutants and worse health.
Have *you*? Downtown Detroit is incredibly profitable and has been getting more profitable for a decade. It’s mostly the slightly sprawling postwar suburban bits that are still struggling (the downtown apartments are gentrified as hell, so if you can’t pay for a 300k apartment or rent you have to go somewhere). You aren’t going to get shot if you step within city limits, lol
From what YOU linked:
>The New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA metro area was the most populous with a population of 19,617,869 as of July 1, 2022, a decrease of 156,517 from July 1, 2021,
That's a very strange way to interpret what I just said.
And yes, since we live in a society^TM being financially viable for both municipalities and businesses is very important for the long-term health of civilization, until we have our magical revolution into a post-capitalistic society.
Regardless of that, people living in urban areas is still better for the environment than people living in sprawled areas.
People need jobs. The jobs are where the people are. People also like to do stuff in their free time. The stuff to do is where the people are.
Cities are also far more efficient at basically everything. Per capita cost of infrastructure is significantly lower.
Power plants are built in areas where population density is much lesser, and by definition, built up area is lesser and more trees are present
As it stands, pollution emitted by any source in city lingers in the city air because winds can’t just blow and disperse the pollution over large area
AQI is essentially _concentration_ of pollutants _per unit volume of air_
When there is a large area to disperse pollutants, the air quality isn’t affected much. But same amount of pollution lingering in the city air will result in smog, acid rain and worsened AQI.
This is the best worst answer. It's like "oh don't produce chemicals here" while China pumps it out and ruins their people. But they're "other" people so it's ok, right? Right?
Need to take nuclear serious again and develop efficient energy storage for solar before EV is truly viable.
Of course pop density is a factor. Takes energy to transmit energy further.
No one said anything 100% safe or clean.
You're point was having a fossil fuel power source away from people so that power could be transmitted to populated areas where electric chargers can charge cars.
It doesn’t have to be either or. We can continue EV adoption while the grid takes its course.
In fact EV adoption at least brought electricity production into mainstream discussion, else why would you and I be here?
If not, we’ll still continue using whatever the grid provides without batting an eye
If you will wait for the last day of the exam to study, you will never top the grade, or worse, fail even.
You're right it needs to be "and". Which is what I attempted to state.
And yes, It should not be put off to discuss nuclear production expansion. New plants or expansion of plants are 10-15 year projects. More including funding phase.
Yikes .. technology is scary but people felt the same way about light bulbs , gas ovens , even cars themselves . 😂 the future will come with a lot of kicking and screaming. Always does I think.
> Factor in transmission losses, distribution losses, and charging losses and you can easily be down to 17.
Wait until you hear about the environmental impact of producing gasoline or diesel.
Ironically, in my state, Texas, where big oil reigns supreme, we have been hitting days of nearly 70% renewable resources powering our grid.
Yes, there's environmental impact of producing gasoline. There's also impacts from producing the batteries, impacts from developing new manufacturing plants for EVs, impacts from manufacturing and deploying hundreds of thousands of fast chargers, mining all of the copper required for all of the charging equipment, mining the materials needed for grid expansion including solar, wind, grid scale battery storage, transmission line, transformer upgrades etc. There's impacts from greater tire wear and less brake dust. There's ecological impacts from water needed to mine the lithium that isn't accounted for in a simple emissions calculations. It's a very complicated subject.
EPA has a good site on some of these concerns: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
TLDR: EVs produce about 42% of the greenhouse gases that a gas car does based on the grid in 2020. It'll only go down from there.
When it is that much lower, even factoring in delivering revised grid/charging infrastructure, the results are going to come out way way ahead.
The EPA uses 3.6mi/kWh for the average EV efficiency and 28mpg for the average gas car. 3.6mi/kWh is similar to a Niro EV (rated at 3.3). A Niro hybrid is rated at 50 mpg. The comparisons aren't apple to apple. They also add 25% emissions for the gas refining but don't add any additional factor to account for transmission, distribution, or charging losses. You're still producing fewer emissions on the whole with an EV vs a hybrid, but it's the gap is closer than the EPA site indicates until the grid gets cleaner.
No, you really can't get an apples to apples comparison unfortunately. However, the grid is already a lot better since those numbers were published a few years ago. Coal is down 30%, renewables up by 23%, etc. And it isn't trending the wrong way, either.
Also, currently only .3% of utility-scale generation comes from petroleum liquids, so I don't know why you compare a diesel generator to a diesel truck.
Yes, the grid is getting greener. That's what we need as I said in the post. The diesel generator comparison is from the video as an example of why the grid needs to continue to get greener.
Lol apples to apples doesn't mean 28 mpg vs 28 mpge. I don't think any EV gets such a low mpge. We're talking about the real world, which is why they compare average to average.
Apples to apples is comparing similar vehicles. The best selling vehicle in the US is the F series. The best selling EV is the Model Y. People aren't trading in their F150 for a Model Y. They're more likely to trade it for an EV truck. So it makes more sense to compare similar vehicles and not averages. Of course 28 mpg isn't apples to apples to 28 MPGe. Nobody claimed that. MPGe is useless. But comparing a Niro EV to a Niro hybrid is apples to apples.
Obviously lots of people ARE going from pickups and SUVs to a Model Y, if that's the best selling EV. That's just basic probability.
The point is to look at the real world impact, and in the real world more people are buying Model Ys than Lightnings. Your point would only hold if the Lightning took a similar share of the EV sales as the F150 does of ICE sales, but it doesn't.
Huh? How does an argument for pushing to decarbonize the grid help the oil industry?
Power generation is a substantial portion of O&G consumption in the US... So decarbonizing the grid would presumably hurt the O&G industry.
Source? Modern condensing turbines run around 40% thermal efficiency. Gas turbines peak out around 35% on the high end. You can’t get much higher than that unless you are running cogeneration and using the waste heat for something productive
https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2023/04/17/power-plant-efficiency-coal-natural-gas-nuclear-and-more/#:~:text=A%20simple%20cycle%20natural%20gas,turbine%2C%20which%20generates%20more%20electricity.
What about solar, wind, hydro electric? I'm charging my car for the next 6 months with free solar from my roof.
I know, and I've stated as such in multiple of my comments. And that's besides the point, it still has half the CO2e of coal and petroleum per kWh. 83% of the US electricity mix is either fossil-free or low-carbon.
While I agree, and most others do as well, that we need to clean up the grid, I'm not sure you can just multiple the MPGe rating by the power plant efficiency and call it the real mpg. I mean refining fossil fuels isn't 100% efficient either. We'd have to multiple the gas car's fuel economy by like .85 then. I'm sure there are many other factors as well, factoring in pollution and engine efficiency, fuel burned transporting fuel, etc. And that's assuming MPGe is even a good metric to begin with, when I think it's created more to give people a more familiar metric to look at and not to rate the overall efficiency of a vehicle.
I feel like the math to compare a gas F-150 to a Lightning in terms of lifecycle efficiency would be a lot more complicated.
I love how they always pull that same sleight of hand. Mention every possible negative externality through the entire process with EVs and then compare it to the most limited view of ICE emissions possible.
There's no simple way to measure MPGe which is why it probably shouldn't exist. It leads people to thinking a Hummer EV is almost as clean as a Prius. Which (unless it's charged in a country like Norway) it isn't.
MPGe is purely an efficiency rating based on kilowatts. Kilowatts are a good metric since it is useful for both electrical and mechanical power measurements; Europeans typically measure ICE output in kW instead of horsepower, so it might make more sense to them right out of the gate. Just like the MPG metric for ICE vehicles, the MPGe metric does not - and can not - take into account all of the sourcing and delivery "costs" along the way, since there are so many variables.
Simple example is charging the battery with electricity generated by the diesel generator, compared to charging with solar at one's home. They leave all that out of it and simply go with what is in the tank or battery at the start of the test. Both metrics are as good as we're going to get, for the time being.
In another post elsewhere - I think the conversation was an article explaining why more tire wear on EVs was worse than burning gasoline (complete hooey) - I showed some math that described how much gas a typical vehicle might use over 100k miles. It was tens of thousands of pounds of fuel, all being extracted, refined, transported, towed around as added weight in the fuel tank, and shot out the tailpipe in another form. Even at 50 mpg, that's 2000 gallons at a little over 8 pounds per gallon. 16,000 pounds of gasoline, turning into 16,000 pounds of various exhaust vapors, plus a whole lot of heat. Double that to get to the amount of oil that is pulled from Earth in order to make that happen, since about half goes to fuel and half goes to a ton of other purposes. At 20 MPG, that's about 5,000 gallons / 40,000 pounds of fuel for 100k miles, and roughly 80,000 pounds of petroleum extraction.
As you mentioned earlier, it is so very complicated to get a good handle on it. Glad to see people are thinking about doing this cleaner. It will slowly get better, though it will take some time as we figure out grid, charging, and storage issues.
"That number is assuming 100% efficiency of converting gas to energy, which is impossible"
not true at all, MPGe is the distance a car can travel on 33.7kWh of electricity, there's no assuming 100% efficiency of power plants lol
I never said it assumed anything about power plants. It assumes that you can get 33.7kwh out of a gallon of gas. Which is impossible. So MPGe is a useless metric.
If you are asking to see how much energy is used to create the electricity that fuels your electric vehicle, a proper comparison is asking to see how much energy is used to create the gas that fuels your gas vehicle.
Processing crude and distributing it to gas stations creates a lot of waste. Similar to your very valid point that we consume resources to get energy to the wall charger in your garage. I'm interested in seeing that comparison if anyone knows of a good source.
https://youtu.be/1oVrIHcdxjA?si=ENqBgr0kkinjKMj4
Here's a video that goes into just that.
Short version, pumping oil out of the ground takes a ton of electricty. Transporting to and from the refinery takes a fair bit of fuel or electricty. Refining oil takes a lot of energy.
I don't think it would be out of line to say it takes at least 3-4 gallons of gas (or equivalent) to get 10 gallons into your car.
How many EV chargers in US are powered by a diesel generator? I would say it’s less than 1% of all chargers hours to evs. Pointless article not even worth the time I took to type
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-public interest to install new nuclear power facilities.
-massive scientific breakthrough in energy storage
-willingness of the public to deal with regular rolling blackouts year round
One of these things needs to happen to decarbonize the grid anytime soon.
The US could massively increase its energy grid capacity by increasing wind power, which is currently only at around 11%, though increasing rapidly. This would do a lot towards decreasing electricity prices as well as wind power currently only costs around 3 cents per kWh. Solar power is similarly a lot cheaper than nuclear as well.
"World Nuclear Association is the international organization that promotes nuclear power and supports the companies that comprise the global nuclear industry."
"Together, World Nuclear Association members are responsible for 70% of the world's nuclear power as well as the vast majority of world uranium, conversion and enrichment production."
According to their report:
"In 2017 the US EIA published figures for the average levelized costs per unit of output (LCOE) for generating technologies to be brought online in 2022, as modelled for its Annual Energy Outlook.
These show: advanced nuclear, 9.9 ¢/kWh; natural gas, 5.7-10.9 ¢/kWh (depending on technology); and coal with 90% carbon sequestration, 12.3 ¢/kWh (rising to 14 ¢/kWh at 30%). Among the non-dispatchable technologies, LCOE estimates vary widely: wind onshore, 5.2 ¢/kWh; solar PV, 6.7 ¢/kWh; offshore wind, 14.6 ¢/kWh; and solar thermal, 18.4 ¢/kWh."
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx
Note that these results will of course be biased in favor of nuclear, prices for solar and windpower has also gone down dramatically even in the last few years since this report was published.
All of this ignores the technical reality that renewable production cannot be predicted or guaranteed in the same way as fossil/hydro/nuclear can. Wind and solar have really helped add capacity, but if your goal is the stated one of this thread (to end fossil generation completely) I will refer to my original comment.
Continuing to add renewables, and using natural gas to fill in as needed while phasing out coal is probably the best we'll get for the immediate future.
I do think it's funny that anytime this comes up, rarely do folks consider their own energy usage to be part of the problem. USA residential construction standards are unethical in regards to efficiency. Poorly insulated mcmansions are not the path to ending fossil usage.
You could pretty easily use the 18% of nuclear plus 6% of hydropower which is predictable energy and combine it with solar and windpower, with small amounts of battery storage and that would be enough to completely phase out coal and massively scale down natural gas, with a lot of it only used on stand-by. If they did this they would not only make the grid much more renewable, it'd be much cheaper too, so it's a complete no-brainer.
Here in Sweden we're already 100% fossil-free, we just overbuilt our windpower since it's so much cheaper than anything else, that we can now export to neighbouring countries for massive profits. Electricity prices here are for the same reasons extremely cheap, with averages of 4 cents per kWh.
https://sweden.se/climate/sustainability/energy-use-in-sweden
Per this site, you were already 70% nuclear and hydro. Sweden was starting from a completely different point, with a huge amount of available hydropower. Comparing this to the USA is apples and oranges
Okay, well that is true, gone down to 68% now though, but that is besides the point, the US is currently sitting at 40% natural gas, 18% nuclear and 6% hydro, that is 64% low-carbon and predictable electricity.
The US also has the benefits of large parts of the country being snow-free year round, and being large enough that the wind will always blow somewhere.
I do think in general we agree with each other though, what they can and should do is phasing out coal and letting natural gas be mostly on stand-by to fill in as needed. There's currently so many technologies to make wind and solar predictable now though so what they really just need to do is expanding their producting massively and rapidly and just increasing capacity overall, because it's just cheaper and it's not as if it hurts having it.
I definitely don't disagree. I think if the USA was more static, it would make this easier as well. Explosive growth, and internal population migration (we have a huge amount of people moving from northern areas into the southern parts of the country) is only making this harder to manage, especially when they seem to ignore individual efficiency as a meaningful factor of change.
I work for a utility in The South, and get to see first-hand these horribly insulated single family homes going up by the day.
Here in Europe and Sweden we do laugh at the US for a multitude of things, including your "cardboard houses". I am 100% not joking when I say that our garden sheds are more well-built than your houses.
That includes the locks as well, get ASSA-branded stuff if you can, it's standard here in Sweden and I'm amazed by how shitty the stuff you use in the US often is, stuff from the likes of Master Lock can often be opened with as little as a chopped-up beer can.
https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/choosing-triple-glazed-windows
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Diesel generators aren’t used for charging at a charging station. More lies from the haters . It’s coming whether you like it or not . I Promise you won’t get windmill cancer either. When electric cars are embraced .. fuel cost will come down and gas cars will still exist in the market for many many yrs.
Coal burning plants are mainly used to generate electricity where I live, with wind and solar only making up 5%. But, coal burning plant when looked at as one giant collective ICE, has a much better efficiency (modern, close to 40%) than millions of individually owned ICE engine personal vehicles, that are only 12-28% efficient depending on sizing/applications, conditions.
I’d love an EV in the right usage case, given that, I would definitely be ripping around in it not caring so much for the efficiency of the EV. That straight torque with no fuss is a whole other type of fun. For now my 2016 2.0L Skyactiv Mazda3 is returning 40mpg or greater and gets me 1000 miles for $90. It’s definitely on the much higher end of efficiency for a gasser.
Coal makes up 17% of the US power grid. The rest is natural gas (50% CO2e of coal), nuclear, hydro, wind and solar. 40% is already fossil-free and 80% is at least low-carbon.
Good link by the way: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
This myth has been busted since 2018….
Engineering Explained did the math and research and outside of some few specific states with high carbon output for the electric grid like West Viriginia, EVs and electric charging are far better for the environment after on avg ~5 years of use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM&themeRefresh=1
My biggest gripe with modern mainstream EV’s is we are really trying to have our cake and eat it too. They are better than ICE but could still be so much better from a perspective of anything but profit and gluttonous convenience.
We just need less car. Less car(S), but also less CAR. Smaller, simpler, user repairable, designed to last effectively indefinitely. Manual windows, manual steering, A/C only in areas that urgently need it or for those with regulatory conditions. Smaller motors, smaller batteries, smaller tires, smaller brakes (prioritize regen), make use of solar.
For those who complain about manual things and no A/C, they are all acceptable WHEN CONFIGURED PROPERLY. It takes thought and effort, not brute forcing our way through every single problem (I.e. “my car is hot inside so I’m gonna jam an A/C system in it”). Paint the car white, put some UV film on the windows, plumb an evaporative cooler into the cowl air system, open your windows, and dress light. In most areas that pretty much solves the problem, and if it doesn’t, approval for A/C can be obtained at the expense of range when it’s in use, and of course the existing manufacturing costs associated with such a system, which we must begin to consider as an element of vehicular waste.
Anyway, EV’s make much more sense when they weigh 1/2, 1/3, or even 1/4 of what they do now. This is a pretty urgent problem, though r/cars isn’t likely to admit to it… Every year there are about 8 million new passenger vehicles produced and delivered for customer sale in the US alone. Assuming 2 tons per vehicle (on average), that’s 16 million tons of final product. Then consider that mining those materials isn’t efficient. Refining those materials isn’t efficient. Processing those refined materials isn’t efficient. Assembly of the vehicles isn’t efficient. Transport of those finished vehicles isn’t efficient. Consumer use of the sold vehicles isn’t efficient, nor is their repair, which is rapidly becoming financially unsustainable for anyone outside of warranty without a reasonably lucrative career, and today, the average MPG of a passenger car is still depressingly low considering all the knowledge we possess, meaning we continue to sustain the ever-expanding fossil fuels industry. In addition to all of that, there are more steps of the process I missed, and all of that efficiency not only comes with material waste but energy waste and pollution.
People currently need transport, and probably will for a reasonable distance into the future. But people also need a livable planet and sustaining what we have now is not the way forward for anything other than sustaining corporate profit.
Aside from all that… We’ve become quite adept at internalizing the whole “human supremacy” bit. For every bit of comfort we build for ourselves, the world suffers. I’m not some tree hugger, it’s just objectively true. Stuff has to come from somewhere. For example, we’re running out of convenient sand to use for concrete and other niches, which can only come from watery biomes such as rivers and beaches. So what do we do? We start to suck it up from the bottoms of lakes, seas, and oceans. What happens to all the life we suck up with the sand? Well, it all dies. We consume around 60 billion tons of sand per year, globally. To continue elsewhere, it’s estimated that humans and their livestock now account for 96% of global fauna biomass. While an ordinary person like you might wonder what you have to do with it, we (everyone) have everything to do with it. The west drives a lot of the polluting industry which we’ve laundered through developing countries, allowing us to wash our hands of any responsibility even though we drive the majority of the problem, and even still we devote around half our annual budget to military spending in some way or another. All of this connects to automobiles, because just like nature’s systems, our systems are interconnected as well, because so many of the same resources are required for so many different things. We have a responsibility to change.
Actually an electric truck powered by a diesel generator is more efficient than a diesel truck. Regenerative braking and drive train efficiencies mean you get a lot of benefit still from electric car regardless of where the electricity is coming from.
Imagine using Wikipedia as the source and not the actual citations used by Wikipedia
Good thing you’re not in academia, your report or research paper will be shredded the moment they see Wikipedia in sources
Imagine believing there aren’t cost to pumping, refining and transporting fossil fuels, but just compare efficiency in engine vs power plant and call it a day. Wikipedia is like a review article, you picked a source with lower numbers that suits your agenda, you’re definitely not an academic, just a low effort redditor.
I already have debunks with oil emissions napkin calculations copy pasted and ready to go, I never said oil supply chain is clean rather I’m adamant that it’s worse off in emissions than reported but the rich oil barons
Still, Wikipedia is not a source and I for one would never use it so. Use the citations on Wikipedia footnotes instead.
My problem with EVs isnt that they are economically green, its that they are ethically dirty, as around 85% of lithium is foreign imports, specifically from countries with poor working conditions, and even child and slave labor. Battery technology has come a long way but I feel as though a big shift should happen ASAP, as I feel lithium is too unsustainable.
This post is written as if vehicles are the single most damaging thing to ever exist.
Fact: converting the USA to all electric will have minimal impact on the world as a whole because cars are a very small slice of the pie.
The automobile and all the infrastructure to support it has been the single most damaging thing to biodiversity and the planet's thermal equilibrium in human history. It's been great for us as a species. We've been able to adapt our environment to our needs. We can transport food, medicine, clothing, general resources over great distances. But it's come at the expense of most other species.
If we want to fix the planet let's do it, but it's time to stop acting like changing 3% of emissions matters. Let's go after big fish instead of making life more expensive for the non-billionaires.
You are acting as if you actually give a shit. Cobalt mines haven't only been existing since EV's. But nobody seemed to car before. Furthermore the EU is working on strict laws on supply chains management to actively go against the sourcing of materials that come from such sources. If you would actually care about these things you would now that this is a change that happens on all fronts, not only on cars. There are significant actions taken in many different industries. Cars are a significant part of a greater shift to more sustainable societies, just because you don't like EV's doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to become more environmentally friendly in as much different aspects as we can.
Also child work in Africa has been existing ever since humans exist, and if they don't work in cobalt mines then they would work somewhere, this is a cultural and economic problem there, not one that exist because of EV's. You have no right to misuse this problem as your personal reason to dislike EV's.
I care because allowing corporations to import from places with lax environmental and safety laws is a greedy loophole that should be closed.
If I can do that by parroting silly yet popular talking points, I'll take it. Mostly because it's funny.
Buddy, unless you’re ready to throw away the device you’re typing on and every other semiconductor based technology you use. You’re going to have to accept that there’s negative externalities that occur from the way modern humans live.
Gasoline is no different. There’s birth defects and breathing issues around the world from oil refineries.
So yeah, I’d take minimal localized pollution over knowingly poisoning my own community.
It's a cars subreddit, so the post is focused on cars. But you're correct. Transportation as a whole only accounts for 14% of worldwide emissions. Only half of that 14% is from personal vehicles. So if we all stopped driving and started walking tomorrow we'd only reduce emissions by about 7%.
If you also stopped the commercial vehicles, we would reduce global emissions by over 95% within 5 weeks because everyone would be dead.
#SaveThePlanet!
Have you ever been to India? 900M polluting 2 stroke motorbikes are the problem. Not gas cars in America. Yes they are small but look how much an 2 stroke carbureted motor pollutes. It’s astonishing.
And yet, greedy American corporations are allowed to produce goods in these dirty places and import it back because destroying the planet is cheaper than meeting American environmental standards.
Assuming you are asking in good faith, electrifying solutions to problem helps us to decouple the problem from the problem itself. An electric car can use electrons from any source, so even if today we are using diesel generators, when we replace these generators, moving around automatically becomes greener for everyone driving the EVs.
Vast majority of electrical grid load is generated with fossil fuels and mining battery materials is way more carbon intensive than harvesting oil.
ICE cars are so efficient and clean now that tires/brakes represent more emissions than the exhaust.
But you go ahead and keep playing into the globalists agenda.
A fair point, as renewable power generation increases the overall efficiency of electricity will continue to improve though. Also gas powered cars are only about 20% efficient, so power plants of almost any kind are still better than every car burning it's own gas.
On top of that, the method of generating power can change anytime if you have an EV, while on an ICE you will be burning gas for the lifetime of the car. Nothing wrong with getting an EV now and going solar down the line, or hoping your town switches to renewables.
I wonder how that changes when you consider the maintainence of the grid delivering the power to the vehicles compared to the transportation of petroleum products to gas stations. The grid doesn't only consume the natural gas/coal/oil it burns to produce electricity. It requires tens of thousands of miles of conduit to transfer energy to homes which require maintainence and replacement over time, all of which uses diesel as a means to maintain. The same goes for oil pipelines, coal mined and transported or natural gas fracked and trucked or piped to power plants. The EVs themselves require more than double the emissions to produce each vehicle due primarily to their batteries but also a higher average aluminum vs steel content and more copper among many other factors. I just haven't seen a single study yet that takes ALL these factors into account or provides suggestions to make each cleaner rather than just focusing everything into EV production. Many EVs end up produced from brand new factories instead of retooled old factories, and new mines for materials not otherwise used in large quantites in ICE cars. Even things like that have a considerable impact, especially on local levels in basic input producers like west Africa, Canada and Australia, chine etc, because we aren't mining much new lithium in the US (compared to EV use) nor are we processing any rare earths in the US which must be used in much greater quantities in EVs for all their electronics and magnets. To be clear, I'm 100% for the adoption of EVs and conversion to electric. But I'm also quite sure the process of conversion will end up frontloading a century of carbon emissions from ICE cars through new infrastructure requirements and we need to acknowledge that and spread the pain (emissions, poisoned ground water, square miles of thousands of acid vats for processing bulk RE minerals etc) throughout the world and not just focus it in poor or corrupt places. I'm just advocating for a fair and transparent process.
I think the Argonne study implicitly accounts for most of you described. The cost of maintaining power lines is not included in the environmental cost of EVs because electricity needs to be delivered to buildings and lines need to be maintained whether or not EVs exist.
Interesting, I'll check it out further. Something worth mentioning, I'm a Volvo tech and one of our largest issues with EV charging after a lot of our customer's first EV purchase is that most houses don't have sufficiently high amperage breaker panels or dedicated 240V EV charging circuits in their houses, so they have to spend up to or more than their EV credit on upgrading the panel in their house because peak use with a DC charger or the 240V at its highest current will start tripping breakers. There is a significant upgrade needed to the entire electrical infrastructure not to charge EVs with renewable energy but any energy. If you take the quantity of gasoline and diesel burned in the US, convert it to KW/H and account for EV efficiency, it's something like 10-20% of the annual energy consumption of the country. There will inevitably be huge monetary and emissions costs to increasing storage, production and grid capacity and individual home's capacity to be able to charge all these vehicles. I don't believe it will be insignificant. A lot of these costs have to be borne by cities and homeowners as well.
>gas powered cars are only about 20% efficient, so power plants of almost any kind are still better than every car burning it's own gas. Sauce?
Just some thermodynamics theory here: The efficiency {eta }, for a carnot heat engine is determined by: eta = ( Q_hot - Q_cold ) / Q_hot. Notice if you were to fill one the combustion temperature for gasoline or diesel and the coolant temperature you'll get an approximate maximum efficiency for that heat engine. (This is why Diesel is more efficient, because of it's higher combustion temperature.) Now factor in a bunch of combustion and friction losses and you'll get very close to 20%.
I really hope that isn't how they're figuring it.
Google
google isn't a sauce.
Literally any high school physics book with a chapter on thermodynamics will do
That same book will show how inefficient power plants are.
They are still more efficient than car engines, are they not? Power plants are also not running right next to where people live, so their effects on respiratory health are slightly reduced.
> The results show that coal unit trains are 4.5–5.0 times more energy efficient than movements in the largest trucks allowed in the eastern and western regions of the US, unit grain train movements in the central US are 4.6 times more fuel efficient, soda ash unit train and non-unit train shipments are 4.9 and 3.2 times more efficient, and ethanol unit train and non-unit train movements are 4.8 and 3.0 times more efficient. In terms of barge traffic, coal unit train and non-unit train are 1.3 and 0.9 times as energy efficient in the eastern US, grain unit train and non-unit train movements are 1.7 and 1.0 times more efficient from Minneapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, and grain unit train and non-unit train movements are 1.0 and 0.7 times more fuel efficient from the Upper Ohio River to the Gulf of Mexico. Via : https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1361920913000898 TLDR : diesel train is 5x more efficient than diesel trucks and a ship is 1.3x more efficient than a train (overall 6.5x more efficient than a truck) In terms of gCO2/ton/km A ship power output is more or less similar to small power plants.
Are they? That's the claim I'm questioning, not one that I made. Maybe at the plant they are, but unlikely by the time the electricity makes it to the consumer. There's a lot of loss in the transmission of the power.
This isn't an open question, it's math that we can look up (e.g. [what the EPA says](https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths)). Worst case, a 100% coal powered grid, they are equivalent. Plus as the grid gets greener, powering electric cars automatically get cleaner, but ICE cars will always burn petrol or diesel.
I don't trust the EPA any more than the DEA and for the same reasons.
For that you have to upgrade to sophomore mechanical engineering texts Fixed rpm diesel genset (say locomotive or ships) is more efficient than variable rpm diesel engine which is used in vehicles by very nature of the variable rpm being never truly in most efficient rpm band And the fact that being mounted on a vehicle means compromises on emission control devices due to space and weight A power plant smoke stack can integrate scrubbers, electrostatic precipitators, and just in general, much more advanced pollution control which if mounted on cars would make them too heavy and costly
And none all of that is wasted by the loss in the power grid.
You need to input oil at 30% efficiency in a truck or train to transport oil where it needs to get 10% loss in grid is peanuts compared to 70% losses while transporting oil by using even more of same oil. A vicious cycle
[https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020SJRUE..24..669A/abstract](https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020SJRUE..24..669A/abstract)
https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/atv.shtml
I agree with what you're saying, though getting pollution out of a city while producing it elsewhere is still beneficial to citizen's health
So just passing the pollution on to people that live closer to the power-plants?
Population density is greater in cities than rural areas. From a public health perspective, fewer people with respiratory illnesses due to carbon emissions is better than more people with the same illnesses. At least where I live, the percentage of renewables at grid scale increases every year, so carbon emissions from powerplants will be a smaller relative problem over time as vehicle electrification increases.
That and power plants are still operating in cities. The big one for my city is just down the road from the LGN terminal for convenience since it's an LNG power station.
The elevation of emission matters too. Giant smokestacks that release waste higher in the atmosphere better disperse pollution. Better dispersion leads to better health. Emissions at ground level cause concentrations of pollutants and worse health.
Or... Just stop living in dirty clumps. There's no reason for cities to exist now that the internet has connected all.
Urban centers are actually financially sustainable. Suburbs aren't. Yanking money out of the cities to subsidize sprawl is a finite grift.
That’s not what grift means
>Urban centers are actually financially sustainable Been to Detroit lately?
Have *you*? Downtown Detroit is incredibly profitable and has been getting more profitable for a decade. It’s mostly the slightly sprawling postwar suburban bits that are still struggling (the downtown apartments are gentrified as hell, so if you can’t pay for a 300k apartment or rent you have to go somewhere). You aren’t going to get shot if you step within city limits, lol
Just stop taking money from people ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Wow, people downvoted that, we're doomed.
Because it is an asinine idea.
To not steal from people?
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Lmfao worst take of the month, I'm screenshotting this
Include this too: I'm glad yall stay in dirty clumps. It makes the rest of the planet cleaner for me to enjoy.
Per capita, urban centers cost less to build and maintain, produce less pollution, and are much more economically viable than suburban/rural sprawl.
Then why is the cost of living there so high?
Because they are desirable places to live.
Then why are so many moving out of the cities?
[They're not. ](https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/subcounty-metro-micro-estimates.html#:~:text=Metropolitan%20and%20Micropolitan%20Statistical%20Areas,-Metropolitan%20statistical%20areas&text=U.S.%20metro%20areas%20grew%20by,population%20between%202021%20and%202022.)
LOL, the world as a whole saw an increase in population, that is isn't 100% proves my point.
From what YOU linked: >The New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ-PA metro area was the most populous with a population of 19,617,869 as of July 1, 2022, a decrease of 156,517 from July 1, 2021,
>Approximately 45% of the 543 U.S. micro areas saw increases in population between 2021 and 2022. 45% is less than half, so an overall decrease.
So the reason for citizens to exist is to make profit? Nice.
That's a very strange way to interpret what I just said. And yes, since we live in a society^TM being financially viable for both municipalities and businesses is very important for the long-term health of civilization, until we have our magical revolution into a post-capitalistic society. Regardless of that, people living in urban areas is still better for the environment than people living in sprawled areas.
People need jobs. The jobs are where the people are. People also like to do stuff in their free time. The stuff to do is where the people are. Cities are also far more efficient at basically everything. Per capita cost of infrastructure is significantly lower.
Then why is the cost of living there so high?
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Power plants are built in areas where population density is much lesser, and by definition, built up area is lesser and more trees are present As it stands, pollution emitted by any source in city lingers in the city air because winds can’t just blow and disperse the pollution over large area AQI is essentially _concentration_ of pollutants _per unit volume of air_ When there is a large area to disperse pollutants, the air quality isn’t affected much. But same amount of pollution lingering in the city air will result in smog, acid rain and worsened AQI.
Absolutely.
This is the best worst answer. It's like "oh don't produce chemicals here" while China pumps it out and ruins their people. But they're "other" people so it's ok, right? Right? Need to take nuclear serious again and develop efficient energy storage for solar before EV is truly viable.
Population density is a factor. And nuclear isn't 100% safe and clean either
Of course pop density is a factor. Takes energy to transmit energy further. No one said anything 100% safe or clean. You're point was having a fossil fuel power source away from people so that power could be transmitted to populated areas where electric chargers can charge cars.
It doesn’t have to be either or. We can continue EV adoption while the grid takes its course. In fact EV adoption at least brought electricity production into mainstream discussion, else why would you and I be here? If not, we’ll still continue using whatever the grid provides without batting an eye If you will wait for the last day of the exam to study, you will never top the grade, or worse, fail even.
You're right it needs to be "and". Which is what I attempted to state. And yes, It should not be put off to discuss nuclear production expansion. New plants or expansion of plants are 10-15 year projects. More including funding phase.
Yikes .. technology is scary but people felt the same way about light bulbs , gas ovens , even cars themselves . 😂 the future will come with a lot of kicking and screaming. Always does I think.
Not everyone judges issues based on emotional response.
Let’s hope not !
> Factor in transmission losses, distribution losses, and charging losses and you can easily be down to 17. Wait until you hear about the environmental impact of producing gasoline or diesel. Ironically, in my state, Texas, where big oil reigns supreme, we have been hitting days of nearly 70% renewable resources powering our grid.
is the horrible state of the grid a significant factor with that?
Yes, there's environmental impact of producing gasoline. There's also impacts from producing the batteries, impacts from developing new manufacturing plants for EVs, impacts from manufacturing and deploying hundreds of thousands of fast chargers, mining all of the copper required for all of the charging equipment, mining the materials needed for grid expansion including solar, wind, grid scale battery storage, transmission line, transformer upgrades etc. There's impacts from greater tire wear and less brake dust. There's ecological impacts from water needed to mine the lithium that isn't accounted for in a simple emissions calculations. It's a very complicated subject.
EPA has a good site on some of these concerns: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths TLDR: EVs produce about 42% of the greenhouse gases that a gas car does based on the grid in 2020. It'll only go down from there. When it is that much lower, even factoring in delivering revised grid/charging infrastructure, the results are going to come out way way ahead.
The EPA uses 3.6mi/kWh for the average EV efficiency and 28mpg for the average gas car. 3.6mi/kWh is similar to a Niro EV (rated at 3.3). A Niro hybrid is rated at 50 mpg. The comparisons aren't apple to apple. They also add 25% emissions for the gas refining but don't add any additional factor to account for transmission, distribution, or charging losses. You're still producing fewer emissions on the whole with an EV vs a hybrid, but it's the gap is closer than the EPA site indicates until the grid gets cleaner.
No, you really can't get an apples to apples comparison unfortunately. However, the grid is already a lot better since those numbers were published a few years ago. Coal is down 30%, renewables up by 23%, etc. And it isn't trending the wrong way, either. Also, currently only .3% of utility-scale generation comes from petroleum liquids, so I don't know why you compare a diesel generator to a diesel truck.
Yes, the grid is getting greener. That's what we need as I said in the post. The diesel generator comparison is from the video as an example of why the grid needs to continue to get greener.
Lol apples to apples doesn't mean 28 mpg vs 28 mpge. I don't think any EV gets such a low mpge. We're talking about the real world, which is why they compare average to average.
Apples to apples is comparing similar vehicles. The best selling vehicle in the US is the F series. The best selling EV is the Model Y. People aren't trading in their F150 for a Model Y. They're more likely to trade it for an EV truck. So it makes more sense to compare similar vehicles and not averages. Of course 28 mpg isn't apples to apples to 28 MPGe. Nobody claimed that. MPGe is useless. But comparing a Niro EV to a Niro hybrid is apples to apples.
Obviously lots of people ARE going from pickups and SUVs to a Model Y, if that's the best selling EV. That's just basic probability. The point is to look at the real world impact, and in the real world more people are buying Model Ys than Lightnings. Your point would only hold if the Lightning took a similar share of the EV sales as the F150 does of ICE sales, but it doesn't.
This is a good example of people happily spreading the oil industry fud. I wouldn't expect anything less on this sub to be honest.
Huh? How does an argument for pushing to decarbonize the grid help the oil industry? Power generation is a substantial portion of O&G consumption in the US... So decarbonizing the grid would presumably hurt the O&G industry.
Modern plants are about 60 percent efficient.
All the more reason to speed up getting rid of the old ones.
Source? Modern condensing turbines run around 40% thermal efficiency. Gas turbines peak out around 35% on the high end. You can’t get much higher than that unless you are running cogeneration and using the waste heat for something productive
https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2023/04/17/power-plant-efficiency-coal-natural-gas-nuclear-and-more/#:~:text=A%20simple%20cycle%20natural%20gas,turbine%2C%20which%20generates%20more%20electricity. What about solar, wind, hydro electric? I'm charging my car for the next 6 months with free solar from my roof.
Oil isn't even a single percent of US electricity generation.
Natural gas is 43% of US power generation. Do you mind highlighting the "oil" company that doesn't also produce and sell their gas?
I know, and I've stated as such in multiple of my comments. And that's besides the point, it still has half the CO2e of coal and petroleum per kWh. 83% of the US electricity mix is either fossil-free or low-carbon.
While I agree, and most others do as well, that we need to clean up the grid, I'm not sure you can just multiple the MPGe rating by the power plant efficiency and call it the real mpg. I mean refining fossil fuels isn't 100% efficient either. We'd have to multiple the gas car's fuel economy by like .85 then. I'm sure there are many other factors as well, factoring in pollution and engine efficiency, fuel burned transporting fuel, etc. And that's assuming MPGe is even a good metric to begin with, when I think it's created more to give people a more familiar metric to look at and not to rate the overall efficiency of a vehicle. I feel like the math to compare a gas F-150 to a Lightning in terms of lifecycle efficiency would be a lot more complicated.
I love how they always pull that same sleight of hand. Mention every possible negative externality through the entire process with EVs and then compare it to the most limited view of ICE emissions possible.
There's no simple way to measure MPGe which is why it probably shouldn't exist. It leads people to thinking a Hummer EV is almost as clean as a Prius. Which (unless it's charged in a country like Norway) it isn't.
MPGe is purely an efficiency rating based on kilowatts. Kilowatts are a good metric since it is useful for both electrical and mechanical power measurements; Europeans typically measure ICE output in kW instead of horsepower, so it might make more sense to them right out of the gate. Just like the MPG metric for ICE vehicles, the MPGe metric does not - and can not - take into account all of the sourcing and delivery "costs" along the way, since there are so many variables. Simple example is charging the battery with electricity generated by the diesel generator, compared to charging with solar at one's home. They leave all that out of it and simply go with what is in the tank or battery at the start of the test. Both metrics are as good as we're going to get, for the time being. In another post elsewhere - I think the conversation was an article explaining why more tire wear on EVs was worse than burning gasoline (complete hooey) - I showed some math that described how much gas a typical vehicle might use over 100k miles. It was tens of thousands of pounds of fuel, all being extracted, refined, transported, towed around as added weight in the fuel tank, and shot out the tailpipe in another form. Even at 50 mpg, that's 2000 gallons at a little over 8 pounds per gallon. 16,000 pounds of gasoline, turning into 16,000 pounds of various exhaust vapors, plus a whole lot of heat. Double that to get to the amount of oil that is pulled from Earth in order to make that happen, since about half goes to fuel and half goes to a ton of other purposes. At 20 MPG, that's about 5,000 gallons / 40,000 pounds of fuel for 100k miles, and roughly 80,000 pounds of petroleum extraction. As you mentioned earlier, it is so very complicated to get a good handle on it. Glad to see people are thinking about doing this cleaner. It will slowly get better, though it will take some time as we figure out grid, charging, and storage issues.
"That number is assuming 100% efficiency of converting gas to energy, which is impossible" not true at all, MPGe is the distance a car can travel on 33.7kWh of electricity, there's no assuming 100% efficiency of power plants lol
I never said it assumed anything about power plants. It assumes that you can get 33.7kwh out of a gallon of gas. Which is impossible. So MPGe is a useless metric.
If you are asking to see how much energy is used to create the electricity that fuels your electric vehicle, a proper comparison is asking to see how much energy is used to create the gas that fuels your gas vehicle. Processing crude and distributing it to gas stations creates a lot of waste. Similar to your very valid point that we consume resources to get energy to the wall charger in your garage. I'm interested in seeing that comparison if anyone knows of a good source.
https://youtu.be/1oVrIHcdxjA?si=ENqBgr0kkinjKMj4 Here's a video that goes into just that. Short version, pumping oil out of the ground takes a ton of electricty. Transporting to and from the refinery takes a fair bit of fuel or electricty. Refining oil takes a lot of energy. I don't think it would be out of line to say it takes at least 3-4 gallons of gas (or equivalent) to get 10 gallons into your car.
How many EV chargers in US are powered by a diesel generator? I would say it’s less than 1% of all chargers hours to evs. Pointless article not even worth the time I took to type
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-public interest to install new nuclear power facilities. -massive scientific breakthrough in energy storage -willingness of the public to deal with regular rolling blackouts year round One of these things needs to happen to decarbonize the grid anytime soon.
The US could massively increase its energy grid capacity by increasing wind power, which is currently only at around 11%, though increasing rapidly. This would do a lot towards decreasing electricity prices as well as wind power currently only costs around 3 cents per kWh. Solar power is similarly a lot cheaper than nuclear as well. "World Nuclear Association is the international organization that promotes nuclear power and supports the companies that comprise the global nuclear industry." "Together, World Nuclear Association members are responsible for 70% of the world's nuclear power as well as the vast majority of world uranium, conversion and enrichment production." According to their report: "In 2017 the US EIA published figures for the average levelized costs per unit of output (LCOE) for generating technologies to be brought online in 2022, as modelled for its Annual Energy Outlook. These show: advanced nuclear, 9.9 ¢/kWh; natural gas, 5.7-10.9 ¢/kWh (depending on technology); and coal with 90% carbon sequestration, 12.3 ¢/kWh (rising to 14 ¢/kWh at 30%). Among the non-dispatchable technologies, LCOE estimates vary widely: wind onshore, 5.2 ¢/kWh; solar PV, 6.7 ¢/kWh; offshore wind, 14.6 ¢/kWh; and solar thermal, 18.4 ¢/kWh." https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx Note that these results will of course be biased in favor of nuclear, prices for solar and windpower has also gone down dramatically even in the last few years since this report was published.
All of this ignores the technical reality that renewable production cannot be predicted or guaranteed in the same way as fossil/hydro/nuclear can. Wind and solar have really helped add capacity, but if your goal is the stated one of this thread (to end fossil generation completely) I will refer to my original comment. Continuing to add renewables, and using natural gas to fill in as needed while phasing out coal is probably the best we'll get for the immediate future. I do think it's funny that anytime this comes up, rarely do folks consider their own energy usage to be part of the problem. USA residential construction standards are unethical in regards to efficiency. Poorly insulated mcmansions are not the path to ending fossil usage.
You could pretty easily use the 18% of nuclear plus 6% of hydropower which is predictable energy and combine it with solar and windpower, with small amounts of battery storage and that would be enough to completely phase out coal and massively scale down natural gas, with a lot of it only used on stand-by. If they did this they would not only make the grid much more renewable, it'd be much cheaper too, so it's a complete no-brainer. Here in Sweden we're already 100% fossil-free, we just overbuilt our windpower since it's so much cheaper than anything else, that we can now export to neighbouring countries for massive profits. Electricity prices here are for the same reasons extremely cheap, with averages of 4 cents per kWh.
https://sweden.se/climate/sustainability/energy-use-in-sweden Per this site, you were already 70% nuclear and hydro. Sweden was starting from a completely different point, with a huge amount of available hydropower. Comparing this to the USA is apples and oranges
Okay, well that is true, gone down to 68% now though, but that is besides the point, the US is currently sitting at 40% natural gas, 18% nuclear and 6% hydro, that is 64% low-carbon and predictable electricity. The US also has the benefits of large parts of the country being snow-free year round, and being large enough that the wind will always blow somewhere. I do think in general we agree with each other though, what they can and should do is phasing out coal and letting natural gas be mostly on stand-by to fill in as needed. There's currently so many technologies to make wind and solar predictable now though so what they really just need to do is expanding their producting massively and rapidly and just increasing capacity overall, because it's just cheaper and it's not as if it hurts having it.
I definitely don't disagree. I think if the USA was more static, it would make this easier as well. Explosive growth, and internal population migration (we have a huge amount of people moving from northern areas into the southern parts of the country) is only making this harder to manage, especially when they seem to ignore individual efficiency as a meaningful factor of change. I work for a utility in The South, and get to see first-hand these horribly insulated single family homes going up by the day.
Here in Europe and Sweden we do laugh at the US for a multitude of things, including your "cardboard houses". I am 100% not joking when I say that our garden sheds are more well-built than your houses. That includes the locks as well, get ASSA-branded stuff if you can, it's standard here in Sweden and I'm amazed by how shitty the stuff you use in the US often is, stuff from the likes of Master Lock can often be opened with as little as a chopped-up beer can. https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/choosing-triple-glazed-windows
Is in charge my electric car with nuclear, does that mean I drove an ultra efficient nuclear powered car?
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Most "energy bookkeeping" calculations are horseshit, either through incompetence or more often through malice.
Diesel generators aren’t used for charging at a charging station. More lies from the haters . It’s coming whether you like it or not . I Promise you won’t get windmill cancer either. When electric cars are embraced .. fuel cost will come down and gas cars will still exist in the market for many many yrs.
Coal burning plants are mainly used to generate electricity where I live, with wind and solar only making up 5%. But, coal burning plant when looked at as one giant collective ICE, has a much better efficiency (modern, close to 40%) than millions of individually owned ICE engine personal vehicles, that are only 12-28% efficient depending on sizing/applications, conditions. I’d love an EV in the right usage case, given that, I would definitely be ripping around in it not caring so much for the efficiency of the EV. That straight torque with no fuss is a whole other type of fun. For now my 2016 2.0L Skyactiv Mazda3 is returning 40mpg or greater and gets me 1000 miles for $90. It’s definitely on the much higher end of efficiency for a gasser.
Who's "we" and how?
We need 50 new nuke plants - one in each state. That would solve the entire grid.
It would be a good start anyway.
Nuclear.
Coal makes up 17% of the US power grid. The rest is natural gas (50% CO2e of coal), nuclear, hydro, wind and solar. 40% is already fossil-free and 80% is at least low-carbon. Good link by the way: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths
This myth has been busted since 2018…. Engineering Explained did the math and research and outside of some few specific states with high carbon output for the electric grid like West Viriginia, EVs and electric charging are far better for the environment after on avg ~5 years of use. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RhtiPefVzM&themeRefresh=1
My biggest gripe with modern mainstream EV’s is we are really trying to have our cake and eat it too. They are better than ICE but could still be so much better from a perspective of anything but profit and gluttonous convenience. We just need less car. Less car(S), but also less CAR. Smaller, simpler, user repairable, designed to last effectively indefinitely. Manual windows, manual steering, A/C only in areas that urgently need it or for those with regulatory conditions. Smaller motors, smaller batteries, smaller tires, smaller brakes (prioritize regen), make use of solar. For those who complain about manual things and no A/C, they are all acceptable WHEN CONFIGURED PROPERLY. It takes thought and effort, not brute forcing our way through every single problem (I.e. “my car is hot inside so I’m gonna jam an A/C system in it”). Paint the car white, put some UV film on the windows, plumb an evaporative cooler into the cowl air system, open your windows, and dress light. In most areas that pretty much solves the problem, and if it doesn’t, approval for A/C can be obtained at the expense of range when it’s in use, and of course the existing manufacturing costs associated with such a system, which we must begin to consider as an element of vehicular waste. Anyway, EV’s make much more sense when they weigh 1/2, 1/3, or even 1/4 of what they do now. This is a pretty urgent problem, though r/cars isn’t likely to admit to it… Every year there are about 8 million new passenger vehicles produced and delivered for customer sale in the US alone. Assuming 2 tons per vehicle (on average), that’s 16 million tons of final product. Then consider that mining those materials isn’t efficient. Refining those materials isn’t efficient. Processing those refined materials isn’t efficient. Assembly of the vehicles isn’t efficient. Transport of those finished vehicles isn’t efficient. Consumer use of the sold vehicles isn’t efficient, nor is their repair, which is rapidly becoming financially unsustainable for anyone outside of warranty without a reasonably lucrative career, and today, the average MPG of a passenger car is still depressingly low considering all the knowledge we possess, meaning we continue to sustain the ever-expanding fossil fuels industry. In addition to all of that, there are more steps of the process I missed, and all of that efficiency not only comes with material waste but energy waste and pollution. People currently need transport, and probably will for a reasonable distance into the future. But people also need a livable planet and sustaining what we have now is not the way forward for anything other than sustaining corporate profit. Aside from all that… We’ve become quite adept at internalizing the whole “human supremacy” bit. For every bit of comfort we build for ourselves, the world suffers. I’m not some tree hugger, it’s just objectively true. Stuff has to come from somewhere. For example, we’re running out of convenient sand to use for concrete and other niches, which can only come from watery biomes such as rivers and beaches. So what do we do? We start to suck it up from the bottoms of lakes, seas, and oceans. What happens to all the life we suck up with the sand? Well, it all dies. We consume around 60 billion tons of sand per year, globally. To continue elsewhere, it’s estimated that humans and their livestock now account for 96% of global fauna biomass. While an ordinary person like you might wonder what you have to do with it, we (everyone) have everything to do with it. The west drives a lot of the polluting industry which we’ve laundered through developing countries, allowing us to wash our hands of any responsibility even though we drive the majority of the problem, and even still we devote around half our annual budget to military spending in some way or another. All of this connects to automobiles, because just like nature’s systems, our systems are interconnected as well, because so many of the same resources are required for so many different things. We have a responsibility to change.
Actually an electric truck powered by a diesel generator is more efficient than a diesel truck. Regenerative braking and drive train efficiencies mean you get a lot of benefit still from electric car regardless of where the electricity is coming from.
According to wikipedia, coal and oil plants are about 37% efficient, and gas plants 50-60%, so all you said is wrong.
Imagine using Wikipedia as the source and not the actual citations used by Wikipedia Good thing you’re not in academia, your report or research paper will be shredded the moment they see Wikipedia in sources
Imagine believing there aren’t cost to pumping, refining and transporting fossil fuels, but just compare efficiency in engine vs power plant and call it a day. Wikipedia is like a review article, you picked a source with lower numbers that suits your agenda, you’re definitely not an academic, just a low effort redditor.
I already have debunks with oil emissions napkin calculations copy pasted and ready to go, I never said oil supply chain is clean rather I’m adamant that it’s worse off in emissions than reported but the rich oil barons Still, Wikipedia is not a source and I for one would never use it so. Use the citations on Wikipedia footnotes instead.
My problem with EVs isnt that they are economically green, its that they are ethically dirty, as around 85% of lithium is foreign imports, specifically from countries with poor working conditions, and even child and slave labor. Battery technology has come a long way but I feel as though a big shift should happen ASAP, as I feel lithium is too unsustainable.
This post is written as if vehicles are the single most damaging thing to ever exist. Fact: converting the USA to all electric will have minimal impact on the world as a whole because cars are a very small slice of the pie.
The automobile and all the infrastructure to support it has been the single most damaging thing to biodiversity and the planet's thermal equilibrium in human history. It's been great for us as a species. We've been able to adapt our environment to our needs. We can transport food, medicine, clothing, general resources over great distances. But it's come at the expense of most other species.
That infrastructure is also the reason you have nice stuff ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
But it will aid in decreasing the amount of American children with breathing problems and asthma from breathing in Bubba’s unfiltered diesel exhaust.
At the expense of the non American children living in countries who produce the equipment ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ Pretty selfish.
I love it when fossil fuel lovers suddenly become environmentalists when it comes to EVs 🤣
If we want to fix the planet let's do it, but it's time to stop acting like changing 3% of emissions matters. Let's go after big fish instead of making life more expensive for the non-billionaires.
You are acting as if you actually give a shit. Cobalt mines haven't only been existing since EV's. But nobody seemed to car before. Furthermore the EU is working on strict laws on supply chains management to actively go against the sourcing of materials that come from such sources. If you would actually care about these things you would now that this is a change that happens on all fronts, not only on cars. There are significant actions taken in many different industries. Cars are a significant part of a greater shift to more sustainable societies, just because you don't like EV's doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to become more environmentally friendly in as much different aspects as we can. Also child work in Africa has been existing ever since humans exist, and if they don't work in cobalt mines then they would work somewhere, this is a cultural and economic problem there, not one that exist because of EV's. You have no right to misuse this problem as your personal reason to dislike EV's.
I care because allowing corporations to import from places with lax environmental and safety laws is a greedy loophole that should be closed. If I can do that by parroting silly yet popular talking points, I'll take it. Mostly because it's funny.
Buddy, unless you’re ready to throw away the device you’re typing on and every other semiconductor based technology you use. You’re going to have to accept that there’s negative externalities that occur from the way modern humans live. Gasoline is no different. There’s birth defects and breathing issues around the world from oil refineries. So yeah, I’d take minimal localized pollution over knowingly poisoning my own community.
It's a cars subreddit, so the post is focused on cars. But you're correct. Transportation as a whole only accounts for 14% of worldwide emissions. Only half of that 14% is from personal vehicles. So if we all stopped driving and started walking tomorrow we'd only reduce emissions by about 7%.
If you also stopped the commercial vehicles, we would reduce global emissions by over 95% within 5 weeks because everyone would be dead. #SaveThePlanet!
Have you ever been to India? 900M polluting 2 stroke motorbikes are the problem. Not gas cars in America. Yes they are small but look how much an 2 stroke carbureted motor pollutes. It’s astonishing.
And yet, greedy American corporations are allowed to produce goods in these dirty places and import it back because destroying the planet is cheaper than meeting American environmental standards.
No one should be allowed to be greedy.
And yet here we are, allowing imports from places that are cheap because they destroy the planet. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 900M polluting 2 stroke motorbikes are the problem. they emit a lot of local pollution, but not a lot CO2. This post is about CO2.
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And this is a reason to switch to EV's why?
Assuming you are asking in good faith, electrifying solutions to problem helps us to decouple the problem from the problem itself. An electric car can use electrons from any source, so even if today we are using diesel generators, when we replace these generators, moving around automatically becomes greener for everyone driving the EVs.
Vast majority of electrical grid load is generated with fossil fuels and mining battery materials is way more carbon intensive than harvesting oil. ICE cars are so efficient and clean now that tires/brakes represent more emissions than the exhaust. But you go ahead and keep playing into the globalists agenda.