Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I recently had the great pleasure of going back for a week to Alaska, where I’ve spent many exhilarating summers. I was reminded of the winter cold by seeing all of the electrical outlets by the parking meters in Fairbanks. Every car that is parked there in the winter plugs in their “block heater”. This is an electrical heating element that keeps the engine block of the car from getting so cold that the engine refuses to start.
Figure 1. Fairbanks monthly temperatures, averaged by decade. You can see the huge change in these sub-Arctic temperature over the last eighty years … or not …
That started me thinking about how much energy it might take to heat a car in Fairbanks, versus the energy to drive it around. Here’s how I would do a back of the envelope calculation for a place like Fairbanks, just below the Arctic Circle.
Block heaters run from about 500 watts to a high of 4,000 watts. Most seem to be in the range of one thousand watts, a kilowatt (kW).
In Fairbanks, the average temperature is below freezing for seven months out of the year. So to calculate total use, we could estimate that heater usage will average out to say four months of the year, fulltime. So the car will be drawing a kilowatt at all times except when it is being driven. Call it 23 hours a day.
So 23 hours / day times 1/3 year times 365.25 days / year times 1 kilowatt = 2,800 kilowatt-hours (kW-h) per year.
The price of residential electrical energy in Fairbanks is about 19 cents per kW-h. So that’s about $500 worth of electricity per year …
Gas (petrol) prices in Fairbanks were about US$3.80 per gallon when I was there. Assume 10,000 miles driven per year, and say 25 miles per gallon fuel efficiency for the car. That’s 400 gallons of gas, worth about $1,500.
My envelope tells me that the Fairbanks car might have a total energy cost of say $2,000 per year.
So car-owners of Fairbanks, when the EPA Police want to arrest you because you haven’t kicked your evil fossil fuel habit, tell them they’re too late — a quarter of the energy to run Fairbanks cars is already electrical, you are already so green it hurts.
(Don’t tell them that due to local conditions and US opposition to nuclear power, Fairbanks electricity all comes from fossil fuels … those kind of folks need their illusions.
w.
PS—Before anyone accuses me of being paranoid about the EPA Police, consider this:
Dan in California says:
October 2, 2011 at 10:43 pm
Just an FYI here… Synthetic oil will pour at -45 or even lower and pretty much eliminates cold start wear. And leaving your glow plugs running is a very bad thing to do. Normally, they will flash on for ~10 – 20 seconds depending on ambient temps, then automatically shut off unless the key is turned to start — that keeps them on during cranking in most German diesels and some others. However, if one bodges up a bypass circuit the glow plugs can be run indefinitely, which always leads to premature failure of the glow plugs themselves, as well as overheating the wiring harness. I often cycle my glow plugs twice on days below -20 to get a better start, but also adding kerosene to the fuel and using 0W40 synthetic engine oil really helps for extreme cold starting. Another good idea is a battery warmer to compliment the block heater.
I’ll see if I can find the equation for battery performance over wide temperatures. It’s a real eye opener, and the main reason those of us north of 49 won’t be going solar any time soon.
Two winters ago, it was so friggin cold in my laundry room inside my house, that I had to use the block heater on the water lines behind the washer. And this was INSIDE the house in NE Oregon, not Alaska.
When my dad was a youngster, he had a job loading/unloading trucks. He remembered building a fire under the motor, and tieing a rope to the crank so several men could haul on it.
A car with a standard transmission, and no “interlock” on the clutch can be moved by running the starter with the car in gear. Useful when you stall on the railroad crossing – used to happen all the time… in the movies. Every car a hybrid! (just not a very good one) Nowadays, most cars have automatic transmissions, and/or an interlock on the clutch…
Sometimes change implies progress, sometimes not. What’s the opposite of “pro”, “con”? That may explain a lot. 🙂
Best,
Frank
Philip Bradley says:
October 2, 2011 at 10:10 pm
Pablo an ex Pat,
“It happens I lived in Canada for 10 years and another year in upstate New York.
I eventually moved to Australia, because I’d had enough of cold, snow and ice.”
In which case you know all about the effect of cold weather on lead acid batteries, the milk float analogy was a bad one. Park your car out without heat @ur momisugly – 20 F or below and you’ll get one or two turns of the crank out of a lead acid battery before it dies and the solenoid starts to go click, click click. At that point the best you can hope for is either a friendly neighbor or a tow truck service to start your vehicle. Did that one time when I was a newbie here, got the T shirt, won’t do it again.
As an aside I now run FULL synthetic 0 W – 30 in all my cars. Stays liquid to – 40 C. If you have ever heard a car engine start in cold weather with conventional oil in the sump you’ll know why. Sounds like a bucket of bolts because the conventional oil has tuned to jelly or worse.
arcticev says:
October 3, 2011 at 4:10 am
“When the full “well-to-wheel” analysis is taken into account with all the losses in the electric grid, battery charging and electric motor, the electric car is still more than twice as energy efficient as the best hybrid. The internal combustion engine wastes a huge amount of energy and only a portion of the heat generated can be used to heat the interior.”
This brings up an excellent question – for the electric vehicle, how much of the battery is used to heat the interior to keep the driver from freezing? You already need to use some energy to defrost the windows. Let’s see, you need an electrical resistance heater, a heat exchanger, a fan to distribute the heated air…oh, you want to drive the car too? :^)
It isn’t kicked around much in these alternative energy threads, but the reason gasoline is as affordable as it is is because of economies of scale and ubiquity. Gasoline has become the universal mobile energy source and the entire ecosystem needed to support it in that role has been in place for years. Legislate that away, even partially, and the collapse will be sudden and complete, regionally.
What is affected loss of efficiencies of scale by mandated electrically powered cars? Refineries. Fuel delivery to your area. Storage and retail outlets where it is needed. Fuel storage tank manufacturing. Engine oil (seen the price for Mobil 1 lately?). Fuel pump manufacturing. Distributed service locations. Starter motor manufacturing. Spark plugs. Batteries. Tires. Piston rings. You get the idea.
Another problem – and I’m no expert on this but… Gasoline production is a process that is part of creating other products. You get gasoline whether you want it or not somewhere between a barrel of crude and bunker fuel. What becomes of all the billions of gallons of unusable by-product (gasoline)? It’s not like the petroleum industry is going to put it back in the ground. It is going to be burned somewhere by something.
Net result: Alaskan drivers will have the most expensive transportation on earth. Places like Hawaii will find it more and more difficult to find people willing to ship gasoline to the islands. Electric cars will not be an alternative but a requirement from the standpoint of cost. Fueling stations will shut down. More wind power and fossil fuel power will be required to keep the batteries charged. Electric rates will have to go up, or more subsidies will be needed (effectively the same thing).
Small towns that get an important percentage of their revenue from auto travelers will blow away. Long haul fuel deliveries will become un-profitable – remote towns off the four lanes will suffer and wither. Very rural agriculture operations that depend on cost effective diesel fuel deliveries will have to go fetch their own fuel because the loss of economies of scale prevent cost effective delivery to these places. Co-ops may spring up to counter this, but that produces haves and have nots.
Just do some what if’ing and see what comes to mind when the cost effective transport of goods is impacted by loss of this simple taken for granted concept: economies of scale. Then imagine what the cost to the consumer will be when the price of everything goes up.
And then prepare for the mass migration of people away from these rural areas into sprawling, filthy, city centers with all the attendant crime, misery, and limited resources. Your own version of Haiti, or Bolivia. Now that is something to look ahead to.
Get a copy of “Flowers for Algernon” and see what the lesson is in that story.
Thanks Willis, that takes me back. I lived in Fairbanks during the late ’80s early ’90s.
I would point out, too, that you’ve miscalculated. If this has already been mentioned, sorry.
Electric use for cars up there aren’t limited to block heaters. You also have battery warmers (essentially an electric blanket) and radiator circulators. (Many varieties…… the idea is to warm and circulate the liquid in the radiator.)
For the uninitiated, it doesn’t matter if you block is warm if your battery falls victim to the cold, and frozen radiator hoses are tricky to thaw with liquid at -30 degrees or so. Health tip!!!! Don’t keep your bottle in your vehicle! Taking a swig to start or finish your day would have dire consequences in the winter there.
Image source: windsun.com
The vertical axis denotes % of charge, horizontal = temp. Note that at -27 the battery drops below 50%. -40 = ~30%! If you have a typical starting battery (most cars and light trucks a sold with these) you will likely not be able to crank the engine over at all, especially with cold conventional oil acting as a heavy drag. One can get higher concentration acid for batteries used in most northern climes which makes the cells a bit less prone to thermal effects. Marine batteries are also more resilient as they have a greater reserve capacity. Insulating the battery will usually keep it from getting too cold over a 24 hour period due to the battery’s large thermal mass. Just be sure to cover the top of the battery as well as the terminals. Keeping the terminals squeaky clean and free of oil is also a must. I always check all other electrical connections as well before venturing North to make sure everything is clean and dry. The freezing temps will expose even the smallest bit of corrosion or moisture and break the circuit.
I used to use a tiger torch for stubborn machines that had frozen solid. Playing the flame under the engine usually warmed things up enough to get the beast fired up. Worked great for un-sticking tracked vehicles that had frozen to the ground. I have worked on machines in temps as low as -70 C. So cold the sweat on my palms would make them stick to metal.
Here endeth the lesson.
Looks like the image didn’t embed… Oh well.
REPLY: Just put in the URL to the image – Anthony
he certainly couldn’t be importing cars from europe because green enviro europe has stricter emission controls that the usa, right?
David L says:
October 3, 2011 at 3:49 am
What’s more efficient?
The figures I’ve seen say that burning the fuel in the vehicle is better from a CO2 point of view. For every 1 kg of CO2 produced by a modern fossil fuel car, you would get 1.4 kg of CO2 produced at the power plant.
The question of efficiency can be a tricky one. The main issue is that battery efficiency drops off rather quickly, with batteries limited to about 300-1000 cycles. That isn’t very long if you use the car every day. As the battery ages, efficiency goes into the toilet. Contrast this with a modern fossil fuel vehicle which has 100+ years of engineering to get the bugs out.
A similar problem comes up when you look at mass transit. A diesel bus has about the same pollution as 40 passenger cars. A diesel bus seats 40 people. So, unless every car has only 1 person and the bus is full to capacity, cars pollute less than busses for the same number of people carried.
arcticev says:
October 3, 2011 at 4:20 am
Also here in Finland a large portion of the excess heat in our fossil-fueled power plants is used to heat our houses. The losses are minimal compared to internal combustion engines in our cars.
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good luck when there’s 100 km between you and the power plant.
try that over 1000 km of mountain terrain chased by greenies that DON’T EVER UNDERSTAND
what cutlines are for and whine about the power for their hairdryers failing…….
now multiply that by 100 000 000 and you might come close to what these “people” are trying to do.
Battery electric cars don’t work in the cold because chemicals react slower when cold. You could try to keep them charged and warmed 24/7 just like an engine block, but you’d be aiming for something close to 60F. I’d bet that after about 10 minutes of driving, the battery would be too cold to go on.
Also, they rely on electric coil heaters to keep passengers warm. They are barely sufficient for normal climates and generally reduce the vehicle range by about half. Same goes for air-con.
Hydrogen fuel cells will also have big problems. Their emissions are water vapor. In arctic weather, I’d expect the reaction chamber the accumulate frost and self destruct.
I reside in a cold climate and there is no way I would risk the lives of my family by driving an electric car in the winter. Once the low temperatures hit those batteries they could run out of juice right in the middle of a blizzard. This is not funny, this could spell disaster. Thank God almost no one is buying electric cars, except a few people who live in warm climates like Texas and SoCal.
Electric cars in cold climes is bad news.
Any word on when Obama will be converting Air Force One to all electric engines? A bank of those new 130 mpg batteries Chou has on the way should pretty much do the trick. Isn’t NASA switching over to solar power launch vehicles now the shuttle has been scuttled?
Leadership is supposed to lead is it not? Surely folks like Obama, Gore, Hansen they will lead the way in the switch from fossil fuel to electric, and only take electric vehicles. Otherwise, what does it tell the average person, when the rich and powerful aren’t willing to take the same medicine they prescribe for the rest of us?
Why fly at all? Why not simply teleconference using the Internet that Gore invented and stop wasting so much Carbon? Obama, Gore, Hansen they need to show us the way and cut their carbon footprints and help save the carbon for the poor in Africa.
Way back in winter 1947, as a young electrical engineer working for a large electronics manufacturer, I was sent to Point Barrow and the Navy’s Arctic Test Station to study the thicknessof the ice in Alaska.
We mounted the equipment in a “Weasel” tracked vehicle having an enclosed cab and an internal motor-generator to power the electronic equipment that in those days employed vacuum tubes. The exhaust was vented, but the motor kept us warm.
When not in use, we kept the vehicle inside the heated Test Station building so the vehicle and equipment would be operational for the next workday during the 24-hour night. Other vehicles had to be kept outdoors with engines running continuously around the clock.
When the wind blew from the north, across the ice-covered Arctic Ocean, the outdoor temperature would warm up a bit, maybe to around minus 25F, but when the wind came from the south across the frigid Alaska landmass, the temperature would get very cold, dropping maybe to minus 40F at Point Barrow.
The night I spent in Umiat which is on the Colville River and considerably inland from the ocean,it was really cold — maybe around minus 70F. There’s nothing like a nearby frozen ocean to help warm the local climate. With no ocean nearby, at Umiat, Weasel’s engine had to be kept running continuously because there was no garage for it there.
klem says:
October 3, 2011 at 8:00 am
Thank God almost no one is buying electric cars, except a few people who live in warm climates like Texas and SoCal.
They are also buying them in Florida. Mostly open air vehicles with a sun shade on top and golf clubs in the back. Not a lot of passing power on the highways.
Frederick Michael says:
October 2, 2011 at 8:11 pm
I’m surprised no one has mentioned 0W-30 oil. When I lived up north I discovered that 0W-30 in small engines made a huge difference in cold weather.
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Good point. I started paying attention to oil viscosity after I tried to pour 10W30 oil into an engine after the oil had sat overnight at -20F. It looked, and poured, like Vasoline. I ended up warming the container up in hot water.
BTW, I live in a fairly cold climate. Closer to Anchorage weatherwise than Fairbanks. But nonetheless quite nippy at times. No one around here uses block heaters for commuting vehicles any more. Modern cars complain a bit, but start pretty reliably at -30C (-20F). Below that, it’s a bit iffy, but the place more or less shuts down and waits for comparative warmth to return when it gets that cold.
Caleb says:
October 2, 2011 at 7:48 pm
Caleb, I doubt the reliability of CO2 concentration data fro Mauna Loa also. It lies north of Kilauea that has continuously erupted for nearly 40 years. Whenever, the Kona (southerly) wind blows the Kilauea fog envelopes Mauna Loa. and much of the west coast of the Big Island. The vog is visable, has an odor and obviously contains a high concentration of CO2. I am not aware of how the lab on Mauna Loa differentiates between well mixed CO2 and that in the vog. It seems intuitive that their data may not be reliable.
Dave Springer says: ….
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Dave, you do make some points, in that it isn’t always -20 F there. That’s probably closer to 5 months out of the year, but, for 3 months out of the year, it was much colder than -20. Things change, but when I was there, most cars were not garaged. And, unless the garages were heated, it wouldn’t make that much difference. You are correct, the battery is what is most important, in my estimation, but block heaters and antifreeze circulators are important as well.
I’ve always had difficulty communicating how things were up there. It isn’t something that is easily understood by people that haven’t experienced it. It isn’t the temps that momentarily swing down to -20 deg F that is the problem. It is the constant pervasive cold. I remember taking off my heavy coat to go outside when it warmed up to -20 deg F, on a bright and brief sunny day. Those days, the scenery was breath taking. The sun would shine on the ice of the trees and other objects and sparkle a tantalizing, yet, deceptive invitation.
I was a medic at the hospital on Ft. Wainwright. I found a lady crying in the lobby. I inquired as to her problem. She had a flat tire and couldn’t change it. It was about -40 at the time. I was in the middle of my first winter there. Being the good Samaritan that I was, I went to change her tire for her. I twisted the lug off of her wheel in an instant. I cried with her. That car wasn’t going to move anytime soon. We didn’t have outlets in the parking lot. That lady would essentially be home bound for the duration of the winter. That is the cold that attacks that area. It is surreal.
arcticev: I agree. The idea that vehicle grade batteries can not charge below freezing is nonsense. EV Li Ion batteries use a different electrolyte that sacrifices some energy density, prized by laptops perhaps, for the advantage of better temperature and other performance metrics.
Thundersky 288WH battery spec:
http://www.electricmotorsport.com/store/pdf-downloads/TS90Ah.pdf
What do you do about windscreen defrosting – INSIDE? Recall, you exhale WV which immediately freezes on contact with cold glass …
I know some of these off-the-cuff response are _not_ very well thought out … and so it will be back to gas(oline) powered heaters again for the passenger compartment.
.
Electric Cars in Alaska
I’m sorry, but there are no such things as Electric Cars. Y’all must be talking about coal-fired cars and such.
On the other hand this might qualify …
To the *smart* ones, it is a given (I have to ask, we were all born yesterday?) …
Maybe I should mention sometimes-critical consumer electronics and performance at low temperatures, devices like: pocket ‘cellular’ telephones, Tom-Toms (GPS map and navigation devices), and secondarily MP3 players, iPads, pods etc, laptop computers left in the vehicle …
.
Must have been a very weak battery; the few occasions I cranked a car in those temperatures battery capacity was not an issue …
2003 Dodge Ram 3500 diesel cold start at -24F (no block htr)
Equal opportunity – gas vehicle start
The Ultimate Cold Start -21F -30C
.