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A new study from North Carolina State University indicates that even a sharp increase in the use of electric drive passenger vehicles by 2050 would not significantly reduce emissions of high-profile air pollutants carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides.
For Immediate Release
Release Date: 01.21.14
A new study from North Carolina State University indicates that even a sharp increase in the use of electric drive passenger vehicles (EDVs) by 2050 would not significantly reduce emissions of high-profile air pollutants carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides.
“EDVs” is a catch-all term that includes hybrid, plug-in hybrid and battery electric vehicles.
“We wanted to see how important EDVs may be over the next 40 years in terms of their ability to reduce emissions,” says Dr. Joseph DeCarolis, an assistant professor of civil, construction and environmental engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper on the new model. “We found that increasing the use of EDVs is not an effective way to produce large emissions reductions.”
The researchers ran 108 different scenarios in a powerful energy systems model to determine the impact of EDV use on emissions between now and 2050. They found that, even if EDVs made up 42 percent of passenger vehicles in the U.S., there would be little or no reduction in the emission of key air pollutants.
“There are a number of reasons for this,” DeCarolis says. “In part, it’s because some of the benefits of EDVs are wiped out by higher emissions from power plants. Another factor is that passenger vehicles make up a relatively small share of total emissions, limiting the potential impact of EDVs in the first place. For example, passenger vehicles make up only 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions.
“From a policy standpoint, this study tells us that it makes more sense to set emissions reductions goals, rather than promoting specific vehicle technologies with the idea that they’ll solve the problem on their own.”
The energy systems model also showed that key factors in encouraging use of EDVs are oil price and battery cost. If batteries are cheap and oil is expensive, EDVs become more attractive to consumers. “That’s consistent with results from other studies,” DeCarolis says.
The paper, “How Much Do Electric Drive Vehicles Matter to Future U.S. Emissions?,” is published online in Environmental Science & Technology. Lead author of the paper is Samaneh Babaee, a Ph.D. student at NC State. The paper was co-authored by Dr. Ajay Nagpure, a former postdoctoral researcher at NC State who is now at the University of Minnesota. The research was supported by National Science Foundation grant CBET-0853766.
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The study abstract follows.
“How Much Do Electric Drive Vehicles Matter to Future U.S. Emissions?”
Authors: Samaneh Babaee and Joseph F. DeCarolis, North Carolina State University; Ajay S. Nagpure, University of Minnesota
Published: online January 2014 in Environmental Science & Technology
DOI: 10.1021/es4045677
Abstract: Hybrid, plug-in hybrid, and battery electric vehicles—known collectively as electric drive vehicles (EDVs)—may represent a clean and affordable option to meet growing U.S. light duty vehicle (LDV) demand. The goal of this study is twofold: identify the conditions under which EDVs achieve high LDV market penetration in the U.S. and quantify the associated change in CO2, SO2, and NOX emissions through mid-century. We employ the Integrated MARKAL-EFOM System (TIMES), a bottom-up energy system model, along with a U.S. dataset developed for this analysis. To characterize EDV deployment through 2050, varying assumptions related to crude oil and natural gas prices, a CO2 policy, a federal renewable portfolio standard, and vehicle battery cost were combined to form 108 different scenarios. Across these scenarios, oil prices and battery cost have the biggest effect on EDV deployment. The model results do not demonstrate a clear and consistent trend towards lower system-wide emissions as EDV deployment increases. In addition to the tradeoff between lower tailpipe and higher electric sector emissions associated with plug-in vehicles, the scenarios produce system-wide emissions effects that often mask the effect of EDV deployment.
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Was there really the need for a STUDY to tell us that use of electric cars, which are powered almost exclusively BY those damn dirty FOSSIL FUELED power plants, would not decrease emissions?
The problem is the tree hugger fringe simply isn’t very smart. They have a very hard time thinking about complex issues – perhaps the result of being medicinally ‘treated’ all the time … why thayt electricity- it just comes out of the wall socket. Do dirty emissions there, we just plug into that nice clean electric outlet …
Yeah, that’s it, that’s the ticket – clean outlet – clean power.
Same reason they all think solar and wind are great ideas. WHile ignoring that solar and wind required inefficient on demand power from dirty fossil fueled plants – for the 70+% of time no wind or sun available.
Despite overall emissions in the EU down appx 1.5% due to decreased demand due to recession … Germany’s emissions, despite a strong shift to renewables, are UP 1.3%.
There ARE places for wind and solar … guys like Anthony and residential point of use based solar a good example. But even Anthony’s solar, while great for Anthony, likely (a) places a burden on the existing grid and infrastructure, (b) requires dirty and more inefficient Peaking” (on instant demand) plant power (as opposed to efficient base load plants that run near 100% capacity all the time), to cover the 70+% avg period there is no sun, and (c) likely receives a subsidized at or near “retail” payment for excess power sent to the grid and not the wholesale price paid for most ‘bought’ power.
I’m with the majority of you guys above:
THUMBS UP — for pointing out that electric cars are a waste of time and money.
THUMBS DOWN — for promoting the AGWers’ unfounded speculation about CO2.
To be clear I still think systems like Anthony’s are a net positive. They are often/usually good for owners. But I believe they need to pay a fair share of the costs incurred by the grid and that they should be paid a fair wholesale rate for power supplied to the grid.
And while battery storage technology is not remotely available on a large commercial scale basis – it would take a commercial building full of current battery technology to supply even a few hundred homes with enough power to get thru just a single night between solar powered days – battery tech could supply much of the needs for a residential property. Couple with onsite nat gas powered backup generator and a single family home could be sustainable without a grid connection.
All those batteries are expensive though, highly toxic and of limited lifetime, and present a significant safety concern – to occupants and firefighters as well.
“My question is this: Has Elon Musk managed to create a Lithium Ion battery with power density several hundred percent more efficient than the Chevy Volt?”
No, just much bigger. From what I remember, the Volt’s battery is pretty small, because it can switch to the gas engine for long trips.
Besides which, Teslas are probably mostly sold in locations where people aren’t using them in non-ideal conditions for electric cars, like forty below zero winters.
I am just a layman here, but I managed to determine that the big battery Tesla S CLAIMS a capacity of 85kwh. I also found the efficiency of an internal combustion engine. 1 gallon of gas
= 36.6kwh.
Good luck trying to find the HP, voltage or the efficiency of the Tesla electric motors! They are
a more closely guarded secret than the nuclear launch codes.
I do not even know if the 85kwh figures are for real.
If Tesla refuses to publish these figures, I can only conclude that Elon Musk is a bigger con
artist than The Music Man, Elmer Gantry and the Rain Maker!
It seems to me he has been seduced by government subsidies and carbon credits. Tesla Motors
has never seen a dime in profits in the 10+ years it has been in existence! Piss a half a billion
taxpayer dollars away and then add $7,500.00 for each vehicle sold. Then add tens of millions
of dollars in “Carbon credits,” the only reason Tesla is currently showing a profit.
It gets better: The buyers of these cars are also eligible for subsidies for the charging
hardware and their monthly electric bills!
Unless someone can convince me otherwise, I smell a fraud on the order of Piltdown Man.
i found the bog, (http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/18/electric-vehicle-manufacturers-will-chase-money-new-ways-2014/) that says electric vehicle are becoming very popular among the people due to the efficiency. However here you are explaining “emissions of high-profile air pollutants carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide or nitrogen oxides” . Please explain bit detail.
Sure, emissions of nitrous oxides and sulfur dioxide from power plants will increase to provide electricity to electric drive vehicles (EDV), but those plants are generally located away from congested urban areas. Net emissions may not decrease significantly, but they will certainly decrease significantly–and specifically–in dense urban areas, especially ones geographically restricted by surrounding hills or mountains like Los Angeles where smog is a big deal during inversions. Electric vehicles will significantly decrease smog in those areas. However electric vehicles are not cost competitive yet and it’s hard to imagine they will become so anytime soon.
Lauren R. says:
January 22, 2014 at 2:57 am
“However electric vehicles are not cost competitive yet and it’s hard to imagine they will become so anytime soon.”
It’s just battery technology that has to fall in price, it’s happening and will continue at an accelerated rate now that electric cars have caught on a bit…
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/19/ev-battery-prices-disruptive-drop-prices-will-continue/
So that’s the main disadvantage however the cost advantage is that they are so much simpler, than car cars, just one moving part effectively, easier to build and service, dirt cheap to run and due to the low centre of gravity the driving performance is actually better. Batteries need to half in price and/or double in density and that’s not far away from here.
I see electric cars winning, easily… over hydrogen or ethanol or bio-diesel… and of course gas cars… gas cars will eventually go like gas lamps were replaced by electric bulbs, the batteries just need to get a little cheap
I live in a part of the country where you’re either running the heater or the air conditioner 10 months out of the year. Where do you get heat with an electric car? With an ICE, the heat for the passenger cabin or defroster is simply waste heat from combustion. The only extra power used is for the blower. In an electric car, you don’t have this natural heat source.
How is the range on an electric car affected by running the heater or defroster? The high yesterday was in the teens, we expect an overnight low below zero tomorrow. BTW: Does that cold alone reduce the effective battery charge?
Here’s a great business opportunity, and I’m willing to sell franchises to let everyone in on the ground floor. It’s call Charge Mobile. The business plan is to provided road-side charging services to EV owners who find themselves out of juice along the roadside. Maybe we’ll build the charging capabilities into the tow trucks, so we can charge the EVs while relocating them somewhere safe.
So the only missing piece of the puzzle is non-existent technology that people have been trying to create for over a century. Maybe we can pass a law and force someone to invent it? We can just legislate or regulate it into being.
Stoners do create way more jobs than bombers-N-chiefs.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/sep/06/bill-clinton/bill-clinton-says-democratic-presidents-top-republ/
http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/BL-REB-2534
Here’s a look at job creation under each president since the Labor Department started keeping payroll records in 1939. The counts are based on total payrolls between the start of the month the president took office (using the final payroll count for the end of the prior December) and his final December in office.
http://www.factcheck.org/2014/01/obamas-numbers-january-2014-update/
Stoner created more jobs in 4 years than his war is family business predecessor did in eight.
He also had at least nine less Ben-gha-zi’s… Really twelve, but three would be kinda cherrypicking.
http://i289.photobucket.com/albums/ll215/beautifulevenin/76578A29-27D7-406B-91B8-9328E1CA1678-5068-000003F69756AF59_zps9e05edb7.jpg
SideShowBob says:
January 22, 2014 at 4:34 am
You must have gotten your crystal ball from a different source than I did.
To make pure EV’s practical we need not just an evolutionary improvement over current battery technology; we need a radical breakthrough. The following characteristics apply to all known rechargeable battery types:
1) Capacity declines with age. Total failure occurs at some point, necessitating replacement.
2) Output declines with ambient temperature. At temperatures currently experienced by many major US East Coast urban areas, effective output for many battery types is 50% or less of nominal capacity. At winter temperatures routinely experienced in Alaska and much of Canada battery output drops to zero.
3) Output rate declines with remaining charge.
4) Service lifetime is significantly reduced by repeated high discharge rates and repeated deep-cycle discharges.
5) Energy density (KwH/kg) is 10% or less that of liquid fuel.
6) Recharge rate (and therefore elapsed time to full charge) is always less than maximum discharge rate (i.e., it takes longer to recharge a battery than to run it flat).
See here for some graphs showing effect of discharge rate, discharge depth and ambient temperature on capacity and lifetime. The specific curves will vary with battery type, but the relationships hold for them all.
You can consult a table of energy density for various fuel and battery types here .
Compare this with a liquid fuel internal combustion engine:
1) Capacity of a fuel tank remains constant regardless of age; output capacity of an internal combustion engine does decline with wear, but properly maintained there are plenty of 30, 50, and even 100 year old IC engines that can still output 90% or better of their original factory rating.
2) Output does decline in very cold temperatures, but assuming the fuel remains liquid, there is sufficient antifreeze in the coolant, and you can get it started common passenger vehicles can operate at -20°(F). Specialized vehicles will start and run in conditions considerably colder than that.
3) Power output on the last litre of liquid fuel is identical to that for the first litre from a full tank.
4) Engine wear is increased by prolonged high output, but most wear occurs within a minute or less after starting, before the lubrication system is fully functioning. As anyone will attest, engines last longer when used mostly on highways than when used in short urban stop and go conditions. And it makes no difference whether you refuel at three quarters empty or three quarters full.
5) Energy density of liquid fuel much higher than any battery type.
6) Recharge rate (refueling time) is always much less than the consumption rate — for every minute you spend refueling an internal combustion vehicle you can spend 100 or more minutes burning that fuel to propel that same vehicle. People endurance becomes the limiting factor for long trips with an internal combustion vehicle.
So having current batteries become cheaper just pushes the curves a bit; it doesn’t change the fundamental properties, which at present show that batteries are fundamentally inferior to liquid fuel internal combustion engines for vehicle propulsion.
This is not to say that a fundamental technology breakthrough can’t or won’t occur, just that the kind of evolutionary refinement you can reasonably count on isn’t enough to make pure EVs practical to replace internal combustion engines. Keep in mind that while you wait for the impossible to predict battery breakthrough to happen, evolutionary refinement continues to improve internal combustion systems.
“emissions of high-profile air pollutants carbon dioxide”
I think “high-profile” in this context is the same as saying Justin Bieber is “high-profile”. ;->
“Output does decline in very cold temperatures, but assuming the fuel remains liquid, there is sufficient antifreeze in the coolant, and you can get it started common passenger vehicles can operate at -20°(F).”
Our Civic regularly runs at -40, though we plug it in during the day so the engine starts. The LCD gauges on the dash start to move really slowly at low temperatures, though.
@MarkG:
You are correct; I should have said “… common passenger vehicles will operate at -30° to -40° (F)”.
I refuse to live anywhere I might need to operate a vehicle regularly at even -20°, although if this global warming we’ve experienced recently continues to move Canadian winter down to Atlanta, I might have to.
In my original comment I mixed recharge rate and elapsed time comparisons in the same sentence. Since these properties are inversely related, the comparisons I made are ambiguous and confusing. For example:
Let’s try this again:
In my original comment I mixed recharge rate and elapsed time comparisons in the same sentence. Since these properties are inversely related, the comparisons I made are ambiguous and confusing. For example:
Battery recharge rate is much slower than internal combustion liquid refueling, which means elapsed time is much greater. I apologize for sloppy writing, but I assume virtually all readers here would have correctly inferred my intended meaning.
The important benefit of EDVs is their impact on real pollution in cities. Replacing a million local sources with a handful of large point sources reduces ground level pollutants where people live. And point sources are easier to regulate. Forget CO2. SOx, NOx, and PM are all emitted at ground level literally feet from where people live. And noise pollution would be reduced somewhat.
Of course, replacing large deisel engines will be more beneficial (commercial trucks, buses, trains) but the battery technology is unlikely to ever work at that scale. CNG or LNG would be huge improvements that are available today.
Regarding energy density; that of batteries effectively declines within a journey as the weight of batteries is constant as they discharge ( you’re always lugging 500lbs of battery about), liquid fuel weight declines to zero as it is consumed.
An interesting aside — in the early days of aviation, when trying to set new speed records, those airplanes would carry the minimum amount of fuel possible in order to keep weight as low as possible.
As you noted, a dead battery weighs as much as one that’s fully charged.
The problem with have here is a conflict between day dreams and the laws of physics and nature. Energy density? Come on! Don’t you want a better world? Battery capacity declines with age? Old batteries are full of toxic waste? Batteries depend upon rare earth minerals controlled by China and harvested in some of the dirtiest mining operations imaginable?
Don’t you want something better for your children? Why do you want to make people feed badly? Are you a neo-luddite?
~more soylent green!
#there be some deep sarcasm here right at the end
Goodness, hard to know what to say, after all that. Basically, the article itself already states the best conclusion — no matter what you do with car design, you’re not going to see a truly significant reduction of CO_2 production as long as electricity is produced by burning coal, and even if you dropped the CO_2 output of every car to zero it’s still only a small fraction of the total CO_2 being produced. According to the combined Bern model/GCM predictions, human production could go to zero and the climate would STILL warm with increasing CO_2 for decades. Therefore the best thing to do is let economics and light regulation do their thing and not oversubsidize some particular technology as if that technology is going to matter.
Good advice for many things, actually.
rgb
My background is propulsion and energy technology. The best way to put the issue of electric vehicles into its proper perspective is to call them “coal-burners.” I think it is hilarious; they will generate more CO2 than the gas-burners they are supposed to replace. (Not that I give two shakes for that.)
Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 says:
January 22, 2014 at 7:08 am
Answering your points
1) So what, this also happens with a gas car, motors wear out and need replacing. Future batteries will be better than they are today and todays batteries are okay to win 100% sales grow rates for EVs.
2) Not sure you got your facts right but these battery pack are cooled and warmed on board, evidence Tesla sales in California and Norway, can’t get colder than Norway
3) So what, is all about the total charge
4) So what is all about the total service life
5) So what, gas engines are huge and heavy did you consider that? Electric motors are small and have regenerative braking.
6) So what, Tesla cars are working just fine even after all your FUD,
Almost all car manufactures are coming out with EVs and battery technology will only get better from here, I think my crystal ball is working just fine
Lots of interesting comments. Here’s a couple more …
The US govt spends … pick a number …. $50 billion? … $100 billion? a year of the defense budget to ensure a stable international oil market. We maintain 11 carrier groups. We have numerous air force bases around the globe. We are currently beginning to take delivery of 10 new aircraft carriers at $9 billion apiece. The primary driver for all of this is oil. There seem to be a lot of people who object to govt. DOE alternative energy programs that don’t have a problem with the govt military expenditures that go to support fossil fuel based transportation. IMO if the DOE programs in place now had the effect of downsizing one carrier group and a couple of air force bases they would more than pay for themselves.
Most comprehensive environmental impact lifecycle studies conclude that the impact of driving EVs even with coal or NG power is less than ICE vehicles. However, they also conclude that the environmental impact of manufacturing EVs is significantly worse than ICE vehicles. And, contrary to what many seem to think, the environmental impact of disposal of EVs vs ICE is basically the same. For the greenies out there, a net positive environmental impact of EVs vs ICE is only realized with Nuclear, Hydro, Wind, and Solar power source. (And then only if you drive enough miles.) The environmental advantage for EVs vs ICE from Coal and NG power is not enough to significantly offset the initial environmental deficit from manufacturing that EVs have.
I would love to drive an EV. However, here in Alberta, Canada it’s just not feasible. Unless that elusive global warming comes along, … which it isn’t. In the meantime, I’m stuck with my SUV, to get me through snow in my day to day activities.