ELECTRIC CARS: THE WRONG FIRST STEP

Bill Kenney, Florham Park, NJ 

The world is gearing up to change billions of people’s lives and throw trillions of dollars at reducing greenhouse gas emissions based on computer projections of disaster. Whether you believe the projections or not,  prudence dictates that we, and the world, need to do something now.

During the 1970s the Persian Gulf oil producing countries embargoed crude oil shipments to the U.S..  We learned important  lessons in those years, many of which are pertinent to the upcoming world-wide struggle to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

We learned: that our national energy system was composed of millions of users and generators and that saving a bit of energy in one part of the system did not necessarily result in a saving in the overall national consumption of oil. We needed to consider the entire national system to be sure that any individual change would result in a net decrease in crude oil use.

We learned: to live with mile-long lines at gas stations and be rewarded with an eight gallon purchase, so we drove less. The lines are gone, but the price is up. Less driving still make sense.

We learned: to set our thermostats for 78 degrees for AC and 68 for heat and saved money without suffering much.

We learned: that on average we needed to burn 10,000 BTUs of fuel to produce 1 kilowatt hour of electricity, so we stopped unproductive uses of power.

We Learned: to combine bits of our energy system into cogeneration networks and even passed laws (Purpa) to encourage that.

We learned: that in addition to our self-serving needs to preserve our economic status, there was a patriotic power in saving energy in everything we did. Perhaps an enlightened leadership can resurrect that patriotic power to address CO2 production.

We learned: That the combustion of any fuel is the most thermodynamically wasteful process we can imagine, so we worked to minimize it. (Ted Kennedy actually talked about the Second Law of Thermodynamics in our Senate.)

One lesson from this history is that the rush to electric vehicles is premature. It does not consider how the incremental electricity to supply the new load will be generated. Only about 20% of the nation's power is currently generated from renewable sources. (and the hydroelectric piece of that is under attack by the salmon fishing industry.) another 20% is still generated by burning coal.

Right now, incremental power loads will likely be produced by burning more coal in the least efficient units in the system. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and Duke Energy each of which  produces millions of megawatts for our national grid, still generate 20% of their  power by burning coal.  Adding the load from electric cars will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions at these sources. It will add to them.

A well thought out plan would force reductions in other electricity uses to compensate for the extra load from the vehicles. Nighttime lighting of the Empire State Building and other non-productive power uses might be a target. When we get serious about eliminating coal burning, requiring all major sporting events to be played in daylight could be a major step. (The Chicago Cubs did that for decades). The complexity of how the power grid would deal with shifting loads as wind and solar are phased in would have to be thoroughly analyzed as well.

In this country, the major consumers of power are far from current, and probably future, generation sites. It will take about four square miles of solar panels to produce the power now generated by a single commercial station. In addition, we will need space for the inverters required to change their direct current output (DC) to the alternating current (AC) in the grid. We will also need transformers to increase their low voltage output to the levels needed for the grid.

In a couple of decades or so, when we have paved the deserts of Arizona and California with solar cells, dotted all our horizons with propellers on 200-foot-tall poles, built those rectifiers for the solar electricity and storage facilities for both these intermittent sources of power, and run thousands of miles of wires, electric vehicles might make sense.    Hopefully, our national plan will include finding and training the mechanics needed to build and maintain the new generating facilities.                                           

In the meantime, subsidies for electric vehicles are counter-productive for the goal.

Some people are beginning to realize that nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases. However, fear about accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima still exists here and in Europe. There is also fear about the disposal of spent fuel rods. Westinghouse developed a design that would eliminate the kind of thing that happened at Fukushima, however, nothing has been done to minimize the disaster fears of the people in our country. 

Increasing nuclear power generation would allow more “green” power with less disruption of our living space than relying solely on wind and solar. A communication program to reduce nuclear power fears should be among the first steps in a rational plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Crude oil and refineries are not going to disappear. We will need to have some fuel burning generation units available to ensure that the new power grid has the flexibility it needs to deal with unforeseen problems.  The refineries also produce the raw materials for our beloved water bottles and a host of other man-made materials.

Some fuels produce less greenhouse gas when burned, but none of them are “Clean”. Natural gas, which is primarily methane (CH4), is the best, but burning it just produces less CO2 than heavier fuels because it contains more hydrogen relative to carbon than other fuels.

Thus, hydrogen alone would seem to be the fuel of choice: burning it produces no CO2. Unfortunately, hydrogen is hard to get. It takes a lot of electricity to split it out from water.  In addition, hydrogen use brings with it logistical and safety problems. It must be transported and stored at very high pressures. At those pressures it can defuse through some steel containers. We found this out when there was an explosion at a university laboratory decades ago.

Bio fuels are getting a lot of attention these days. These fuels are derived from plants grown in our fields (corn, soybeans etc.) plus a tiny amount from processing waste cooking oils. They produce CO2 when burned just as fossil fuels do. A rudimentary search on Google reported  a typical  bio-fuel would produce more greenhouse gas than natural gas when burned. The theory is that because the plants on which they are based absorb CO2 from the atmosphere via photosynthesis while growing,so  some of the greenhouse gas  produced by burning them is offset.  Here we are faced with a land use balance:food versus fuel.     

There are many other questions that will need answers in a “carbon neutral” world, and neutral is not enough. Some nations will need to increase energy use to upgrade their standards of living.   

We need a plan to deal with all these questions  and the others that will surface as we go forward. And we need to get the population on board with that plan. Our politicians jumping in front of the nearest TV camera to spout promises will do nothing to help.

This essay is just a list of some of the problems. Solutions will take a lot of work, and will be critical for developing a sound plan to do our share of saving the planet.

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