Why do we even bother with electric cars?
By Cars & Motorcycles on Apr 07, 2009 with Comments 8
…. asked: I’m just curious, why do we even attempt to make electric cars like the Chevy Volt. Almost all of our power grid is ran by gasoline powered turbines i don’t really see the plus to even inventing them we’re just using gas indirectly. And don’t tell me solar and wind power can solve our problems, because it can’t.
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It was a good start that didn’t follow threw because of oil rig companies losing money. They wont to bleed us dry first.
The electric car has no ecological advantage. It’s a pure “social” marketing strategy. Most people who will buy an electric car will not think that far enough to realise their that their electricity comes from burning oil or nuclear plants. It’s an easy way for automobile manufacturers to bail out of the environmental impacts of their products in the sense of “oh we’re not polluters, the electric companies are for producing un-green electricity”.
Solar or wind power are not YET viable alternatives but solar power technology has evolved a lot in terms of efficiency. In the mean time, hybrid cars and public transit are a good alternatives for lessening our ecological footprint.
I’m not quite as pessimistic as you are Jeff. I live in the Southwest and solar here is viable. Additionally, there is nuclear and eventually we will begin building more safe nuclear plants, using new technology like a pebble bed reactor.
Additionally, hydrogen will become viable at some point. A lot of advancements are being made now in hydrogen generation and at that point, hydrogen full cells become very viable and with a car like the Volt, taking the small engine out and replacing it with a fuel cell becomes pretty easy to do.
Here’s the thing: an internal combustion engine burning gasoline is 20% efficient, but a gasoline power plant is 60% efficient and an electric car can use that electricity with about 70% efficiency. 60% times 70% is about 40%. That means that an electric car is twice efficient (40%) as a gasoline powered car, meaning a powerstation would burn half as much gas to power all of the cars in America.
This is mostly because large powerplants which burn gas are 3 times as efficient as the gas burning engines in your car. Car engines operate at a variety of speeds, overheat, and in general have poor performance compared with large, stationary, efficient generators. Power stations can also transmit that energy with little to no loss through powerlines into your car battery (if only a cars transmission was that efficient).
It’s not as simple as you like to put it: studies have been conducted that show that even if an electric car receives its electricity from a coal powerplant, it produces less pollution than an internal combustion engine running off gasoline.
That’s why we bother.
In fact it will cause the CO2 to increase much ad 50%. There is power lost in every part of it. There is power lost just charging the battery. Then there is power lost in just hauling the batteries around. Then there is more power lost in discharging of the batteries.
Almost no electricity is actually generating from oil burning, it’s mostly coal with some natural gas, nuclear and hydro thrown in there (of course that differs for each country, there are quite a few that get most of their power from carbon-neutral sources like nuclear or hydro).
Although even then coal power plants are more efficient than the average car engine and can also afford to have much better pollution control equipment than what can be fitted on a car along with being able to disperse the pollution up high (and hopefully not downwind of any population centres).
In the long term we’re going to have to switch our source of electricity away from fossil fuels, probably mostly towards nuclear so we’re going to have to solve the problem of CO2 emissions form our power plants anyway (and the alternatives to electric cars would require a lot of energy be used to manufacture fuel which would probably be made using heat from power plants). Electricity from fossil fuels is the biggest source of excess CO2 emissions and so is the thing that we should be directing most of our attention towards replacing with cleaner technology.
I don’t know much about the Chevy Volt, but won’t it recharge itself, anyway? If so, then I see it being a far better alternative than any type of fossil fuel burning car. Hybrids included.
What country do you live in?
In the USA, almost none of our electricity comes from oil. About 50% comes from coal, a bunch from natural gas and nuclear, and then a smaller fraction from hydroelectric and other renewables. I think you’re confusing gasoline with natural gas, which is much cleaner.
Even when most of our electricity comes from fossil fuels, electric cars still produce lower emissions than gas cars because they’re so much more efficient. See the link below for details.