Electric Cars, Please!

[fisherman]

Here in the freeway/sprawl heartlands of America where mass transit is virtually nonexistent, a car is almost a necessity. I'm lucky enough to have inherited a car from my family: a 1998 Buick Century. But with 106,000 miles, it's getting to that point in its life where things are going to start breaking, and eventually the cost of repairs will be

Comments

[divo326]

More than anything else, it's batteries that are holding back electric vehicles. Today's batteries are large, heavy, inefficient, and expensive. Routinely fully charging and discharging them also significantly decreases their lifetime, so you would probably have to replace yours several times during the life of your car. Hybrids get around this by not letting their batteries vary outside of 40%-60% of their total charge. Long term, I agree that electric is the way to go, but we aren't there yet.

Short-to-mid-term, biofuels are more reasonable than you've probably been hearing recently. Corn-based ethanol is probably not the answer; corn is linked to our food supply and is also not the most efficient plant to convert the sun's energy to a usable form. People are also beginning to pay attention to cellulosic biofuels. To my knowledge, no one has the mechanics down yet for converting cellulose to fuel, but finding the right process could allow us to more efficiently extract energy from plant matter, and separate it from our food supply. It would probably still require extra land (although I've heard proposals that wouldn't), but currently farmers in the U.S. are payed to let some of their land lie fallow. While it may not be the most productive land, there is space out there to produce crops for biofuels.

The internal combustion engine has stayed essentially the same over the past 80-100 years. It is an extremely inefficient piece of equipment, but in an era of low gas prices, the economic forces weren't there to push for change. Now they are. Full sized vehicles that get 80 mpg have been demonstrated (I'm not sure what the cost was), and there is no reason why we couldn't have that be the norm within the next 10 years, other than political will. More improvements could push that higher; one limit I heard for a "realistically perfect" car was over 200 mpg (a "perfect" car could get over 400 in that analysis).

Overall, I would love to see a change towards electric cars, but I believe/have heard that there are problems that are pushing a feasible, low cost version well off into the future. In the meantime, changes in engine efficiency and a switch to biofuels (if done right) can begin making a difference in the next couple of years.

Wow, this ended up being longer than I expected.

Mmm, substantiated arguments.

[fisherman]

I was surprised to read that the Chevy Volt is only a couple years away from being put on the market, since the configuration seems ideal: all-electric drivetrain that can be recharged through the grid, with an onboard non-electric recharging system for extended trips that will be gasoline in that car but could easily be switched out for some other source. Only a couple years away! Even though the initial purchase price of vehicles like that might be more expensive now, it's a no-brainer to me: with gas quickly approaching $4/gal. even in Michigan, and the state of the environment rapidly deteriorating (I forget sometimes that most people still don't understand how severe an ecological impact traditional industrialization has been having), the investment would be worthwhile, economically and ecologically.

There are different kinds of batteries, and the EV1--the focus of the documentary I mentioned--used NiMH ones, while the current generation of cars seems to be switching to Li-ion batteries, which should improve performance. Plus, once the market for electric cars gets established, costs will drop and the technology will improve more quickly.

And indeed, I was too short with biofuels. Even though internal combustion doesn't make sense (anymore) as a primary power source for the traditional car, electric solutions aren't ideal for every application, so it would be good to develop (relatively?) carbon-neutral alternatives to fossil fuels. As much as Dubya has been lampooned for his talk of "switchgrass," crops like that would probably be excellent substitutes--once we get a good cellulose conversion method--since they can be grown on land not suitable for food crops. I've heard of researchers working on genetically engineered bacteria to convert the cellulose, so it might not be too far off.

Re: Mmm, substantiated arguments.

[thecrazedhermit]

Biofuels are really not the answer. The investment we'd have to make as a society to produce them (cultivation, harvest, transportation, refinement) are almost prohibitive and the results, lower emissions at the tailpipe and less land dedicated to food production, don't offset those costs; ask all those suffering from this food crisis what ethanol's done for them. For me, ultimately, the answer is much more along the lines of the Chevy Volt and, eventually, straight-electric cars, which will only really take off once the battery technology gets to a point where you can take your car on a 700 mile/day road trip and charge it overnight. I have to think that day is coming.

Re: Mmm, substantiated arguments.

[divo326]

I've been going to a lot of energy seminars sponsered by the MSU physics department this semester, which is where this all comes from. Of course everyone presenting had their own agenda; people who work on biofuels or internal combustion engines had a vested interest in that route, solar guys want everything run electrically, etc.

Trying to synthesize and summerize what I've heard, though:

There is proven technology to more than double the fuel efficieny of internal combustion engines.

The current blend of biofuels are not terribly good, but there are prototypes for better fuels and more effiecient processes to create them. These also put the infrastructure in place in case anyone figures out a better (probably cellusosic) method. I am particularly intregued by the cultivation of algae, which could be done completely independently of our cropland, but at the moment the cultivation and harvest are proving to be difficult.

Fuel cells aren't on track to provide enough power for cars. They may have other, smaller scale applications that could be very cool (e.g. powering medical devices in the body).

Silicon solar cells are a proven, relatively efficient technology but far too expensive to compete at the moment. Other kinds are a wildcard: if someone figures out the right design to produce cheap, fairly efficient cells, it could change the playing field entirely.

Today's batteries suck.

And slightly separate from the transporation debate, oil is going to become increasingly pricey and difficult to extract, but it won't run out anytime soon. Coal will be far more available, so "clean coal" power plants will probably be part of the mix.

And finally: the proposed cap on carbon emissions is crap. Carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere with a lifetime of around 1000 years, so on the timescale of the next century anything we put up there essentially just keeps adding up. In order to reach fairly stable atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by the end of the century, we will have to halve our current emissions.

So really, I would love to see a complete shift away from internal combustion as soon as possible, but it doesn't really look like anything else is ready to take up the slack yet. I could be wrong, I haven't done extensive research on this, I just have the diverging viewpoints of 10-15 people who work in various energy-related fields. We'll see how the Volt holds up when it first comes on the market. Hopefully it and its successors will work well enough to significantly reduce the amount of liquid fuel we need, but everything I've heard so far says that that day is still a ways off.