Ford scientists have recently published a paper in the Scientific Journal Envir. Sci. Tech on the energy savings they imagine would be generated by having plug in cars, not that they manufacture such a thing, any more than Phillip Morris-Altria manufactures "safe" cigarettes.
The paper comes from the ASAP section of the journal - page numbers have not been assigned - and the abstract is here:
Environmental and Energy Implications of Plug-In Hybrid-Electric Vehicles
There is a peculiar agnosticism about the source of electrical energy in the paper:
Plug-in hybrid vehicles (PHEVs)have been advocated recently as a possible means both for reducing CO2 emissions and for diversifying the fuel supply for the nation’s personal transportation fleet beyond its almost exclusive dependence on petroleum (1, 2). PHEVs are similar to conventional hybrids (HEVs), but with a larger battery typically providing an all electric range of some 30–60 km (20–40 miles) and, crucially, the means to charge the battery from an ordinary electric outlet. Thus, unlike HEVs, plug-in hybrids are not simply more efficient petroleum-based vehicles. To the extent that they are driven in electric mode, they shift their ultimate energy source from petroleum to whatever fuel(s) are used to generate the electricity supplied by the grid and magnify their energy demand for those fuels by the inefficiencies involved in generating and distributing the electricity...
Whatever. Electricity comes from um...well...a wall socket. We need some pictures of windmills here - the windmills that have yet to produce a single exajoule of electrical energy in this country - so we can all feel better about our cars.
It comes from the wall socket I tell you, that electricity:
In recent presentations and reports, other investigators have also explored the impact of PHEVs on the environment and the power grid. In a collaboration with the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Electric Power Research Institute estimated that greenhouse gas emissions from a fleet of PHEVs are dependent on the kinds of electrical generating capacity used (nuclear, conventional coal, advanced coal, etc.) but that advanced generating capacity would result in PHEVs having lower CO2 emissions than conventional hybrids (5). A similar study was conducted by Kintner-Meyer et al., who found that PHEVs constituting up to 43% of the U.S. light-duty fleet could be supported by the grid, assuming 12 h of charging per day (6).
The bold is mine. One can never read articles like this one without reading that wonderful conditional word, "could." If we cover Arizona with solar cells, we could meet all the world's energy demands and that of Mars and Venus (with a few asteroids thrown in on the side). If we cover North Dakota with windmills (nobody lives there anyway) we could throw in Mercury and Jupiter as well.
By the way, climate change is not something that could happen. It is something that is happening. Now. Immediately. It began, in fact, a few days before yesterday.
Oh, any by the way, nobody knows what the energy efficiency of these wonderful new cars will be, but over at Ford, we've heard some rumors about some stuff that's happening over at Toyota:
Since no commercial PHEVs exist today, the average fuel economy of a fleet of such vehicles is more difficult to estimate. We rely on a surrogate for which EPA data are available, the Toyota RAV4...
...The Department of Energy estimates that 0–3 year-old vehicles are driven an average of 14 300 miles/year, or 39 miles (63 km) per day (11). Using this value for each of the three vehicle types gives the daily tank- (or battery-) to-wheels energy demand as summarized in Table 1. While a PHEV with a 40-mile range could complete an average day’s driving solely on electricity, it is likely some fraction of its driving will be done in ICE mode or potentially a combination of ICE and battery power. Because of the increased battery weight, a PHEV operating in ICE mode can be expected to have somewhat poorer fuel economy than its HEV counterpart, though part of this difference will be offset by the greater regenerative braking efficiency and capacity offered by the larger battery. However we expect this mode of operation to constitute a relatively small fraction of the total distance driven by a PHEV, especially under the congested conditions discussed above, and thus do not include nonbattery driving in our analysis.
And if you're worried that we might have to build new electricity plants to fuel this wonderful car culture nirvana, don't worry, be happy:
Electric utilities bring on generating capacity throughout the day as needed to meet demand, which tends to peak in the afternoon, especially on hot summer days. During the offpeak hours of night and early morning, this excess capacity could be sold, possibly at a discount to encourage use at these times, and used to charge PHEVs. In this section, we estimate the amount of such energy that might reasonably
be tapped...
This reminds me of the old ethnic joke where the citizens of a prominent eastern European country announce that their space program is going to land on the sun by going there at night. No one would, of course, dream of recharging their car in the daytime.
And, if you're worried about what this might cost, well, that's not a problem for Ford, since they're not a utility company.
Since the marginal cost of higher power output goes up rapidly as peak output is neared, the utilities will not find it economical to sell discounted power above some fraction of peak capacity. For example, Figure 1 illustrates an increase in cost per kilowatt · hour by a factor of over 2.5 as the last 10% of generating capacity is brought online in the mid-Atlantic states region of the U.S (13).
The figure features a graph with arbitrary units, sort of like the graphs that Ronald Reagan used to use in his televised speeches - the ones that always showed how wonderfully supply side economics was balancing the budget, but the last fuel shown in the graph is well, oil. This is, in fact, how it really works. Utilities use their lowest cost generating capacity first as the grid operates. The cheapest capacity is hydro, followed by nuclear, then by coal, then by natural gas, and finally (no surprise here - a classic in circular reasoning) oil.
In this paper, they use the word "nuclear" only 3 times.
Here's one such use:
One approach to making such emission allocations would be to determine the marginal operating costs of the various plants owned by a utility and assume that they are brought into service in order of increasing cost. For example, utilities generally run low-operating-cost nuclear and coal plants to supply base load power and bring on a mix of hydroelectric, natural gas, and oil plants as loads increase.
The other is a "not our problem at Ford" statement:
While these emissions would be important in deciding what type of plant to build (e.g., coal or nuclear), this is not the question being addressed here. Our question is, given that a plant of any type has been built, what is the reduction in emissions if its output is used to displace HEVs or CVs by PHEVs, compared to retiring an existing coal plant.
A bunch of agnostics, those green guys at Ford, I tell you, a bunch of agnostics. We wouldn't want to say anything controversial at Ford, now would we?
One of the funnier bits of data in this (I wish you could see it) is table 1, where all of the dangerous fossil fuels are listed as sources of electricity and the carbon impact of the wonderful "renewables" they want you to think about is reported as "zero."
Somebody's been drinking the ethanol that was supposed to go into our flex fuel vehicles.
Anyway. We were talking about Phillip Morris, weren't we?
My dad used to joke about his "cancer sticks" until, at least, he got cancer, at which point he started looking for someone to cure him. (He wanted to sue "those bastards" at Phillip Morris, but that never went anywhere.) I used to get pissed off at my old man and tell him that I was going to taunt him when he was dying.
I did no such thing.
My dad was an addict. I used to act like it was his fault, but if you must know, I drive every damn day mostly.
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