Electric Transportation and Coal-Fired Power Plants

Here’s an article suggesting that electric transportation saves lives insofar as its environmental benefits reduce global warming, and heat causes more deaths each year.  Sadly, this is an oversimplification.  As long as coal is our lowest-cost base-load energy source, EVs will remain of dubious benefit vis-à-vis climate change (and the dozens of other environmental/health issues).  We really have to turn off coal.

Yet I remain a fan of EVs, even in the near-term, since they will enable us to integrate more renewable energy — wind in particular — which, ironically is what will eventually enable us to decommission the last coal plant.  I also point out that the falling prices of batteries has been much more dramatic than anyone could have predicted just a few short years ago; we’re very close to a point at which they’ll be selling like hotcakes.

I believe we’re on a course to making fossil fuel consumption wane away, through a confluence of a number of macro forces:

• Rising public awareness of and disgust in our systemic involvement in ongoing wars, support of evil petrostates, and apathy to environmental damage

• Energy efficiency and smart grid causing significant reduction in energy consumption per capita

• Falling prices of renewable energy and achieving grid-parity with fossil fuels

• As mentioned above, the advent of electric transportation, enabling the implementation of more clean energy.

The bad guys have lost the war; we will not be burning coal and oil in 50 years.  The only real question is how much damage will have been done along the way.