One more thing, which is relevant in this early adopter period. You can
buy RECs to effectively make your EV power green, no matter where you
live.
Peri
------ Original Message ------
From: "EVDL Administrator via EV" <[email protected]>
To: "Electric Vehicle Discussion List" <[email protected]>
Sent: 24-Mar-15 9:26:00 PM
Subject: Re: [EVDL] Article: Electric cars could boost CO2 emissions in
some provinces
This "Ha-ha, surprise, EVs are worse" game has been around for years.
Bruce, Lee, and some of the other old-timers here may remember the
mid-90s
report attributed to a once-respectable university (Carnegie-Mellon
maybe?).
It was a great hue and cry about how the GM Impact / EV1 batteries
would
destroy the world with lead emissions worse than leaded gasoline's.
They
sort of "forgot" to account for recycling of lead batteries. Oops!
That's an anti-EV salvo that stands out in my mind, but I'm sure it
wasn't
the first.
Hint : check the researchers' funding, folks. We think of universities
as
dedicated to unbiased research and scientific method, but those days
are
pretty much gone. Today many are nonprofit in legal terms only. They're
now businesses, and proud of it, run by well-paid presidents recruited
from
business and by boards of wealthy business people. Not many of them
would
have an aversion to accepting money with greasy petro-fingerprints on
it.
The real picture of transportation energy use is complex. Because there
are
so many numbers involved, it's almost trivial to pick only the data
which
lead to your pre-selected conclusion.
Energy gets used in all kinds of places delivering fuel to an ICEV.
These
include locating, drilling, and preparing the well; pumping the crude;
getting it to the refinery; refining it; transporting the refined
product to
filling stations; operating the filling stations, and on and on. You
could
even reasonably count the energy use in the petroleum company's
offices, the
vehicles the wellhead workers drive. I'm sure you can think of others.
And of course energy to run EVs comes from all kinds of places, not
just
coal. In fact, you can run an EV entirely on zero-carbon energy
harvested
from PV modules on your roof. Try that with an ICEV.
Chip Gribben wrote a response to this argument many years ago. It's a
well
researched and unbiased picture showing that because of the US's energy
mixture that emphasizes coal power plants, EVs actually can be (in a
worst
case analysis) blamed for increased output of SO2 and particulates vs
ICEVs.
However, their related HC, CO, and NoX output is dramatically lower.
Where the power comes from matters. For example, in France, where most
electrcity is nuclear, EVs blitz ICEVs for emissions - 99% less HC, 99%
less
CO, 91% less NoX, 58% less SO2, and 59% less particulates.
http://www.evdl.org/docs/powerplant.pdf
Better yet, as powerplants are upgraded, and as more renewable energy
comes
online from PV and wind, the entire EV fleet gets cleaner. Meanwhile,
as
more tar sands oil gets used for ICEVs, the entire ICEV fleet gets
dirtier.
These bogus poison-pen-PR analyses do enormous damage partly because
the
media are so quick to latch onto them. They LOVE to "prove" that the
status
quo is the very best of all worlds, and that new ideas are all bunk.
That's
not just because media owners are stolid, top-one-percent establishment
types (though they are, by and large). It's also because reporters are
balloon-poppers by nature. They pounce on something like this and come
up
gleefully waving it in the air. By the time it's debunked by more sober
sources 3 weeks later, they've moved on to the next big conflagration.
David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA
EVDL Administrator
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