Energy Outlook Comments
How would electric cars or plug-in hybrids be counted? Zero CO2? Or some formula based on the electric generation? If the latter, does that mean a Frenchman or Swede gets full credit for an EV, while a German or Briton does not?
Good question, and one that the EU bureaucracy might not flinch at tackling. Doing it right would have to take into account not only where but when the cars were recharged, since the CO2 output of the grid varies daily and seasonally.
I'm trying to find the details, but the EU's Europa website isn't the most user-friendly.
I hope they would get ZEV credit, since, ah, they're not emitting anything. It's not the car owners' fault that their electricity is coming from a coal plant built in the 1950s, and they've reduced their own emissions. Now it's time for the generators' owners to do the same.
I don't see why people should be blamed for things that they don't do.
Perhaps it's a question of the practical effect on the EU's goal. If EV's in Sweden reduce CO2 more than EV's in Germany, than the EU would probably want to encourage sales in Sweden. That logic would argue for calculating the CO2 impact of the generation.
Another question is the impact on renewables. If the EV charging could be automated in such a way that it took advantage of peaks in wind generation, it might be reasonable to give the EV's credit for using the wind, even in a grid dominated by coal. That would also encourage wind generation by reducing wind's variable impact on the grid.
There's a real synergy between wind, solar and EV's and plug-ins.
"I don't see why people should be blamed for things that they don't do."
Stewart, my thinking is that even with an EV, you are still using energy. You can choose to live close to work, or far away. You can choose a huge, heavy EV, or a small one. If the reality of energy production is fossil-based, then these personal decisions still matter. Only if you believe it's reasonable for the generators to go completely carbon-free can you put the issue solely on them.
>>Stewart, my thinking is that even with an EV, you are still using energy.
What's wrong with that, as long as it's clean energy?
>>You can choose to live close to work, or far away.
Not necessarily.
>>If the reality of energy production is fossil-based, then these personal decisions still matter.
They only matter to the extent that they affect the environment. Using electricity in and of itself has next to zero environmental impact, and the owners of EVs usually have no control over the generation methods used. Punish the people who are actually polluting, not their customers.
Stewart,
"the owners of EVs usually have no control over the generation methods used"
With all due respect, that's a copout and part of the reason we're in the pickle we're in. None of the pollution you blame on manufacturers would exist if there were no demand for their products, including electricity. Anyone buying an EV or a plug-hybrid is still responsible for thinking about where the power to run it comes from, rather than assuming it's Someone Else's Problem. Worse, if we rely on this approach, consumers will have little incentive to reduce their energy use, because they are likely to assume that renewables make up a bigger portion of the supply than they are likely to for many years.
Last week I thought Stewart's opinion was silly, but after thinking it over, I agree with him. It makes more sense to regulate CO2 at the point it is generated. If there is a CO2 penalty to be assessed on electric power generation, it should be assessed at the power plant. To do otherwise would be to say that energy used by cars should be treated differently than energy used by televisions.
That will happen, anyway, but the reality is that anyone buying an EV or plug-hybrid today will be running on electrons generated principally from gas and coal, or taking up renewable power that could otherwise be used to back out gas or coal. Net-net, transportation might still be the best use for it, but that's not obvious without running the numbers.
Geoff, what do you think of the idea that EV's could provide demand management services for renewables, and therefore support their growth?
I get that renewable energy can't invest in adding energy storage without making itself much less competitive, and must thus find a way to rent storage on the fly from someone else who has it and is under-utilizing it. It's a clever idea, and intellectually appealing, because it solves the great Intermittency Problem.
But when do we reach the point at which all the necessary pieces can be tied together? We're clearly not there now. It would require a big investment in real-time grid management and widespread net-metering-based re/de-charging infrastructure and billing/crediting IT and back office, and you'd have to build enough of it in advance of the existence of the cars that would use it to make it a viable part of the selling pitch for those cars. Otherwise you fall into a similar chicken/egg trap to the one that helped kill the EV-1. Who pays for that? Surely not the car manufacturers, given their parlous finances. Taxpayers? Perhaps, but this isn't just R&D money we're talking about, and it could turn out to be a very expensive dead end, either technically or from a consumer perspective.
I'd never say it can't be done, but the fact that in a year when so many people were focused on fuel economy, simple hybrids accounted for less than 2% of US car sales--despite a straightforward value proposition capturing the most valuable increment of fuel savings, and with government tax incentives to boot--says something about the barriers facing this idea.
Geoff:
>>None of the pollution you blame on manufacturers would exist if there were no demand for their products, including electricity.
None of the pollution I blame on manufacturers would exist if the manufacturers didn't pollute. Let's have them take responsibility for it.
You can't lower demand forever; plus, demand for electricity and energy as a whole is a good thing--energy powers technology, and technology makes civilization. If energy is a good thing and pollution is not, why penalize the use of energy instead of the production of pollution?
>>Anyone buying an EV or a plug-hybrid is still responsible for thinking about where the power to run it comes from, rather than assuming it's Someone Else's Problem.
It is someone else's problem--the someone else being the person who is actually doing the polluting.
>>Worse, if we rely on this approach, consumers will have little incentive to reduce their energy use, because they are likely to assume that renewables make up a bigger portion of the supply than they are likely to for many years.
Why should they? Energy isn't the problem; pollution is. The problem is that energy producers pollute--and if that's the problem, focus on the polluter. Furthermore, reducing energy use reduces or eliminates investment in new power plants, locking in the status quo. That's precisely what we don't need.
This all boils down to whether life-cycle analysis is valid; I don't think it is. The basic flaw is that no amount of modification to the object being blamed for the emissions, energy being constant throughout, will affect the emissions; no action by the end-user actually causes emissions. A life-cycle analysis:
1. Ends up counting emissions twice or more and abrogating the responsibility of polluters to control their emissions, allowing them to blame their customers for using their product instead of taking responsibility for their product's deficiencies or for problems in their production process.
2. Discourages people from using energy-storage processes that do not produce emissions, and encourages people to directly produce emissions by removing any incentive not to. On the other hand, it's a lot easier to convert to cleaner processes if the pollution-producing process is as centralized as possible, simply because there are fewer units to replace and fewer people have to be persuaded to replace them. Imagine trying to convert cars to CTL-derived fuels if everybody had their own oil well.
3. Blames people for things they didn't do. Nuclear power plants do not emit carbon dioxide, for example, but they do use the services of construction equipment. But the use of construction equipment does not imply the emission of carbon dioxide; the construction equipment could run off electricity or use some other method and still meet specifications for construction equipment. In NEPA-ese, it's not a "connected action."
4. Employs fuzzy accounting. Counting things two or more times is fundamentally dishonest.
5. Assigns an emissions value to non-emitting processes based on their use of energy derived from emitting processes, when the energy could have come from a number of sources.
6. Implies that there's something wrong with energy use per se.
7. Punishes market entrants by always counting their initial energy use against them, regardless of how many hundreds of times that initial investment is paid back. For example, the nuclear power plant mentioned in #3 uses coal-fired electricity from the grid for initial testing. That electricity could just as easily have come from a nuclear power plant--had it been there. Thus the nuclear power plant gets blamed for there not being enough nuclear power plants--specious reasoning at its wackiest.
8. Analyzes only the demand side. Supply-side economics is voodoo; demand-side economics is equally invalid.
9. Implies that alternatives to the energy supply status quo are inherently a dead-end. Why improve the supply side if only the demand side matters?
10. Attributes pollution to practically anything that the life-cycle analysts choose. This is not a "proper accounting," as it does not account for who is doing the polluting and who is simply benefiting from the products to which pollution is incidental.
(continued)
11. Prevents proper corrective action by distracting the environmental assessment process.
12. Implies that all human activity has a negative environmental impact by automatically associating the energy required to run modern society with the pollution that does not necessarily follow.
13. Further entrenches the status quo by carefully critiquing every aspect of new technology instead of simply comparing it to existing ones.
14. Stops research and development and encourages a fortress mentality via its implication that cutting back necessary functions instead of developing alternative supplies is the answer to resource supply problems.
I don't see it as anything but statistical fiddling at its finest.
Stewart,
"Energy isn't the problem; pollution is."
The fallacy behind this thinking is that we can have energy without any consequences. Even renewables create an impact on the environment; it's all tradeoffs. One of the reasons we have the current problems is that when we first tackled environmental issues in the 1970s, we focused on the sources: the "polluters." That was easier, because there were far fewer of them than there were consumers, and a big industrial facility must comply or be shut down. But this strategy insulated consumers from the consequences of their choices, so they went on making the same choices, some of them bad.
You don't like lifecyle analysis, but what other consistent way do we have to compare energy systems with greatly different characteristics, e.g. an EV running on coal-generated electricity to an ICE running on gasoline? The issue is consistent comparison, not absolute accuracy.
Somehow I don't think we're going to agree on this one.
We can't have energy without consequences, but we can reduce environmental impact. Life-cycle analysis focuses on reducing energy use, when the problem is pollution, and energy use is not a connected action. Using electricity to power a car does not automatically mean that the electricity is coming from coal; in fact, it shifts emissions from a sector where combustion is the only option to a sector that can be cleaned up. It doesn't automatically reduce emissions, but it gives society an option where there once was none, and for that, it shouldn't be punished. Regulating emissions at the source regulates the emissions--if you don't burn coal, why be punished for burning coal? It's ridiculous.
We have a very consistent way to compare energy use: energy use. But on a policy level, there's no reason to do that. If the specific action being regulated is not harmful, move on to something that is.
I agree with at least part of that, but I can't concur that all energy is equal, regardless of its source, and I think you may be misunderstanding the purpose of lifecyle analysis. The goal isn't performing less useful work, as you imply. Instead, it enables us to choose between energy systems to reduce the amount of input energy required for the same amount of useful work out, and to minimize the environmental consequences produced along the way. It's the only consistent and sensible way to compare the global impact of your EV to that of your gasoline car, because those are very different energy pathways, and the difference between them varies greatly based on how you make your electricity.
"But when do we reach the point at which all the necessary pieces can be tied together? We're clearly not there now. It would require a big investment in real-time grid management and widespread net-metering-based re/de-charging infrastructure and billing/crediting IT and back office, and you'd have to build enough of it in advance of the existence of the cars that would use it to make it a viable part of the selling pitch for those cars."
Well, there are two pieces here, which are pretty different. There's charging, and the reverse, Vehicle to Grid (2G).
I believe that the charging part is relatively easy. It’s not something that has to be built into the vehicle, and it can be built incrementally. Heck, it can start with a $10 electrical timer.
Keep in mind that the most basic problem with wind (and nuclear) is it’s 24 hour output. The 20% market penetration barrier that we hear about? That’s primarily based on the minimum demand point at night. If wind peaks then above that level the excess generation is wasted - you can add storage, but one way or another marginal costs start to rise. Adding vehicle charging at night helps solve that problem.
The next step is adding time-of-day metering, something which I believe was mandated in the 2005 energy act. The next step after that is dynamic metering, which tells consumers if prices have dropped (or risen) due to unexpected changes in generation or demand: that just means slightly more sophisticated communications to the meter, and within the home, something which likely would be addressed with BPL (baseband over powerlines) to the home, and similar powerline communications within it.
V2G will probably come eventually and has great potential, but that’s down the way. Simple demand management with charging can do a great deal much sooner.
Its good to hear some are reaching targets but perhaps they should not just look at vehicle polution but also help cut pollution from Vauxhall parts factories and other parts makers.
Commenting by HaloScan
