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:
Quick, somebody stop Nissan before they sell more EV’s in cold Canada. Recall?
Nissan Leaf goes to first Canadian customer, Sept 26.
http://www.autos.ca/general-news/nissan-leaf-goes-to-first-canadian-customer
Johny -(Falstaff)-come-Lately may think he has plowed ‘new ground’, but we covered this stuff 2 1/2 years ago (April 2009) here on Anthony’s website! At the time I was the proxy ‘advocate’ for elec vehicles but my main thrust was the efficiencies in the electric generating, transmission and distribution network over (mainly) hydrocarbon fueled vehicles. See the link above and begin to learn …
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“Today’s ICE is a marvel of collective innovation, but it is also no wonder it took a century to get here given its fundamental problems.”
It’s no wonder that the ICE took over from the electric car a century ago because of the electric car’s fundamental problems.
We’ve already tried these things and abandoned them as soon as the ICE came along. A further century of EV development and we still can’t make them viable for more than a few specialised uses.
Just FYI, the Tesla Motors EVs hold their battery temps constant. They perform just fine in cold weather. LiIon batteries are not the same as lead-acid, in any case.
Owners of the little Roadster EV in Norway, north of the Arctic Circle, love them. As do those in Edmonton.
But the proof of the pudding will be in the Model S, which will be widely distributed in the ’12-13 winter. The economics will be particularly interesting.
Anywhere there’s talk about electric cars, it boils down to couple of arguments. One of them over here is usually “how will they work in winter”? Well, I’m not suggesting that we would have similar winters like in Alaska. Thank god no. In worst case the temperature here in southern Finland drops to about -30°C (and that’s rare, typical it’s around -5°C to -15°C). And electric cars have been proven to work better than gasoline engines, which typically have trouble starting. Mostly because of the frozen lead-acid batteries.
About the heating: A 3000W rated petrol heater we use here in Finland uses up about 0,35 litres of petrol in an hour (0,1 gallons). They are often used in electric cars as they’re efficient and do not eat up the range of an electric car. In a typical winter the usage is only 15-20 litres of petrol, assuming about 10000 miles of yearly driving and our winters (not as bad in Alaska, I admit). So it’s so little it won’t change the “green-factor” much. But if you heat an electric car cabin with for example a 3000-5000W electric heater, that’s about 3-5kWh. A typical electric car uses 15-20kWh per 100km. If you could drive, say average of 40mph, that would be about 10kWh in an hour of driving. Add 3-5kWh to that and you could estimate that the range would be about 25-33% less. I wouldn’t dare to say that electric heater would eat up much more juice than that.
But that’s just how it’s here. I can’t say how these same electric cars would work in -40°C or more. To be honest, I wouldn’t risk it myself in Alaska, before throughout testing. But I would possible test it out and see how I could insulate and keep the batteries warm. Maybe add an additional heater, in addition to a proper battery box insulation (3cm or more of insulation with no heat bridges). It might work, or it might not. But so far all of this is just speculation, before someone driving an EV comes to tell about his/her experiences here. The truth is that you just can’t throw a typical electric car like Leaf into Alaska during winter and hope it will just work fine. Most likely it won’t, or it’ll have drastically reduced range. I also have no idea how long ranges are expected of a car in Alaska. But with an electric car with a properly insulated battery box (with some electric heating blanket) and a petrol heater to heat the cabin, I would definitely try it out, if about 60 miles of range would be enough (to be on the safe side). Just for the environmental point of view, I’d rather concentrate on switching to electric in much warmer climates… It’s does not make much sense to electrify Alaska, where lives only 0,23% of the population of USA. But let the people decide what they want to drive with.
There’s no doubt that electric car would be practical vehicle, even in moderately cold environments (like in Finland), if it meets the drivers daily needs in range. For me, it will be the perfect choice. Here even the electric grid is so clean it will have only 1/3 emissions of a new Prius, if not powered by renewables. But typically the upfront price has been ridiculously high. There’s no technical reason for the high price, as it’s only because of economies of scale. An electric motor and it’s controlling electrics are much cheaper to manufacture and easier to install and maintain than any internal combustion engine and exhaust systems with catalytic converters. So far the batteries are the most expensive part. And I would compare batteries to gasoline prices.
As an example Thundersky/Winston 25kWh batteries would cost around $7000-8000 for an average size electric car with about 100 mile range, at current prices. If you assume they are at least 10 year / 100 000 miles investment (and they will be useful even after that) and during that time they would prove to be about 2-4 times cheaper than buying petrol during that time, assuming gasoline prices will stay the same (which they won’t). By 2018 battery prices are expected to be halved. Here the price of gasoline is just below $8 per gallon, and it will only go up. So you might understand why I’m so interested of electric cars. It would cost me $27000 just to fill up my tank during this 10 year period (in US it would be about half of this). And after that, they are recycled, with 95-99% of the material back into use.
And mind this, I’m not an “evil greenie”. I support nuclear power and anything else that makes sense either economically or environmentally. Preferebly both. And this is just the reason why I’m also so interested of EV’s. I loathe the German greens because they decided to stop using nuclear power. And now they’re building 10-20GW of new coal power. How green is that??? Bastards.
_Jim says:
October 3, 2011 at 2:49 pm
Battery power – heaters? Where is operation of the ‘heaters’ specified via the batteries?
The Leaf is a 100% electric vehicle so everything runs off the battery
http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/index#/leaf-electric-car/specs-features/index
battery heater
front and rear heated seats
heated 3-spoke steering wheel
Automatic Temperature Control (ATC)
Fairbanks is a town of a little over 30,000 in population. The Leaf has a nominal 100 mile range. With a full charge to start and frequent plugins throughout the day, even allowing for the range loss from the severe cold, it ought to handle your daily errands and commute. I live in a similarly populated berg and on a bad day rarely rack up more than 30 miles if I don’t have to leave town, which was the niche role I specified for the Leaf in my comment.
Anti freeze I suspect is useful. But how do wind turbines work. They don’t do they in freezing weather. Collect ice on their blades, that tends to fall off and hit some unsuspecting cow or person or car. And they break into flames.
George E. Smith; says:
October 2, 2011 at 4:56 pm
Well your 10,000 mpy and one hour per day driving time says an average speed of 10,000/365 = 27 mph average. That seems pretty low to me; unless Fairbanks has a huge number of traffic lights that keep your car stopped most of the time.
The roads are not plowed clear in the wintertime. At least not when I lived there. Winter driving is over packed snow. Starting and stopping distances on packed snow are considerably longer then a dry road.
Falstaff says:
October 3, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Most people, especially here, know that the average power plant has a much higher energy conversion efficiency than an internal combustion engine: almost 50% for the power plant
Are you kidding. The average efficiency of a US power plant is in the low 30% range.
The 50%+ claimed by combined cycle gas is in base-load mode at an optimal set of input codntions. (Ambient temperature,cooling water temperature, elevation etc).
Here is the blurb for a GE state of the art CCGT
http://www.ge-energy.com/products_and_services/products/gas_turbines_heavy_duty/flexefficiency_50_combined_cycle_power_plant.jsp
60% efficiency down to 87 percent load
arcticev says:
October 3, 2011 at 4:10 am
And usually these analysis don’t take into account all the energy needed to extract, refine and ship the gasoline to the pumps. Just as an example, a gallon of gasoline requires 7.5-9kWh of energy, enough to drive Leaf for 30 miles. And this is just the refining.”
Unless I missed it in the commnets, the “well-to-wheel” analysis for the ICE vehicle would have to be a “mine-to-wheel” analysis for the EV. What is the energy required for extracting, refining, and shipping the materials (lithium and what else?) that the batteries use? What is the energy required for disposal or recycling/re-manufacturing of the batteries, when the batteries are beyond useful life? I bring up the disposal/recycling energy since gasoline is replaced by electrical energy in the EV.
Many people like EV and hybrid vehicles due to the non-existent to low tailpipe emissions (which is a good thing, especially in smog prone areas) but are we trading these emissions for another form of pollution?
artw