10 Things You Didn’t Know about Electric Vehicles
Here’s a consumer-oriented piece from the U.S. Department of Energy: 10 Things You Didn’t Know about Electric Vehicles. Nicely done.
There are a couple of issues with EVs, however, that make this a trickier issue than the article implies:
• Even though the fuel savings versus gasoline are significant, the consumer value proposition, i.e., the cost/benefit proposition for the typical driver, while it’s steadily improving, is still not appealing. Sure, it’s good to save $1000 per year on fuel, but how compelling is that if the cost of the vehicle is $10,000 more, and limits one’s range?
This is more than a rhetorical question. Let’s look at sales numbers. More than 7,000 plug-in and all-electric vehicles were sold in October 2012 — making it the highest month of electric car sales to date. Still, that’s less than 1% of the total.
• As long as coal is our least-cost baseload source of electrical energy, the environmental benefit of EVs will remain dubious. This, of course, gets us back to the issue of pricing in the externalities of coal (i.e., damage to the health of our lungs and ecosystems), or making a concerted effort to scale up wind and build out our transmission grid. These, sadly, are tasks for which we appear to lack the political will.
I believe that the migration to electric transportation is in the process of happening, but I see a long-term transition here.
Even more to the point, I see a shift in our transportation paradigm. Instead of merely replacing one big, expensive, wasteful hunk of metal with another, I foresee our cities redesigning themselves in favor of a network of interrelated solutions: car-sharing, ride sharing, walking, bicycling, mass transit, and small vehicles for commuting and urban package delivery.
Obviously better urban planning would reduce commute distances and make public transportation more efficient. However, where I live, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Instead of fill-in, new housing is generally located in out-lying areas thereby adding to transportation problems. Implementing better urban planning will not be easy; there are legal and political barriers to doing so.
New construction of housing will follow lower land cost. The “Fill-in” properties are a higher price per acre than rural land. In the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania there are industrial sites now vacant due to loss of industries 30 years ago. Some are being used for new housing communities, High Rises, Town houses, and other gated communities.
Dennis, you you have posted is quite true; you have illustrated the problem well.
When companies wish to expand, they do not consider the inconvenience and cost that their employees will face in getting to work. Rather, as you say, they consider only their own expenses. In addition to increasing CO2 emissions and fuel use, it creates serious problems for people who cannot afford a car since without a car they cannot get to work. If they buy a car anyway, then they have to cut back on other costs and perhaps live in sub-standard housing or forgo providing a good education for their children.
As recently as the early 1960s, most people could get to work without a car, even if they chose to own a car. That is no longer true.
In earlier times, before almost everyone had a car, when companies expanded, they made sure that they did so on public transportation lines so that their employees (and customers) could get there. Now, unfortunately, that is no longer a consideration, which is an economic distortion which somehow should be corrected.
Craig,
A significant correction. There were indeed nearly 7000 plug-in vehicles sold in the month of October – a number which frankly shocked me… But that only represents ~0.6% of the total. While that technically is less than 10%, stating that it’s less than 10% gives an impression that it’s still far greater of a share than it actually is.
Sorry; that was a typo; I meant <1%. I fixed it.
I know how bearish you folks are on electric transportation, and you have some excellent points that few people understand. Having said that, I see a future, albeit distant, in which we have wind energy coming out our ears at night looking for a home, a transmission grid that can move it around, and batteries with vastly improved characteristics. Simultaneous, we’ll have a population that has gotten really sick of gasoline and its ecological/political horrors.
Craig,
I promise you that the instant that we no longer have any commissioned coal power plants, I will reverse my objection to EV’s.
I still will not support subsidies for EV’s – at least not subsidies that are greater on a per gallon basis than the subsides that are received by WindFuels… But my objections to EV’s will be gone with the decommissioning of the last coal plant.
I presume they don’t all have to be decommissioned per se, as as long as they’re not the lowest cost of baseload power and thus used to meet incremental load on the grid.
Craig,
There would have to be a lower-cost reliable baseload option that has spare baseload capacity, which is logically impossible: if something had a lower-cost and was a reliable baseload power source, then the coal plants would be tamped back and the new source would fill the void – increasing the spare capacity of coal and eliminating the spare capacity of the new source… until the coal plant was fully eliminated and decommissioned.
But even if EVs don’t reduce CO2 emissions with present power generation systems, at least having a limited number of them means that the technology will be well-developed and ready to implement in much larger numbers when cleaner sources of power generation are in operation. That is a good argument for continuing to improve EV technology NOW!
Frank,
The issue is setting up a market that is beneficial or detrimental to your preferred or non-preferred power source. If you are charging EV’s overnight, they not only consume coal-sourced energy, but they create a market which is more favorable to coal – allowing a greater capacity factor on the coal plant and allowing it to remain competitive. If you want the coal plant to go away, you cannot simultaneously give a market incentive for the coal plant and expect it to retire based on goodwill.
There will be DECADES before coal is off the grid – probably half a century. There won’t be any problem using the technology base in 30-40 years to ramp up EV potential, if indeed that is an economic preference at that time.
During that period, the niche market will continue to fuel innovation and improvement. Subsidies end the need for innovation, as there’s no longer a market incentive to improve the product, there’s now just a directive to produce and dump the excess costs on taxpayers.
Perhaps, Craig, we are attracted to EV because that is the only item on your list of topics which are typically an individual effort and other individuals we can talk with are interested in them also while the other items are only Governmental and BIG company interests.
Dennis,
The answer is crowdsourcing.
But we have to start really looking at the cost benefit of our actions before that will work.