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> there is enough excess nighttime generating capacity nationwide to charge 84 percent ...

This only means no new power plants. The current ones would have to step up production at night.

> it would still emit only two-thirds of the greenhouse gases released by a conventional car

2/3 isn't significantly different than 1 as far as I'm concerned. Especially when were talking about what goes into making the batteries.

Without clean grid electricity, electric cars are merely a feel-good way of outsourcing the problem.




"This only means no new power plants. The current ones would have to step up production at night."

I realize that. However, also realize that wind power is running at peak production during the night, which is when people would be charging their cars. Also realize the 2/3 number was for if 100% of the power was coming from coal, which it obviously wouldn't be.


also realize that wind power is running at peak production during the night

How much power in the US is generated by wind?


According to Wikipedia, it will be 1.5% by the end of 2008:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States

However, it accounts for about a third of all new electricity production. You have to remember that a cap-and-trade bill is going to be what makes both V2G and renewable energy profitable, so if it becomes profitable to build V2G cars then it will also be profitable to increase wind capacity. I forgot that solar thermal is also an excellent candidate for creating electricity at night, since you can store excess hot water very efficiently during the day and then use a small amount of natural gas to make sure it's at the optimally efficient temperature to spin the turbines.


[Windpower] accounts for about a third of all new electricity production.

No. Here is the Wikipedia quote: "Wind power accounted for 35% of all new U.S. electric generating capacity in 2007." (Emphasis mine.) Capacity is not production. Capacity-factor helps us understand how much production we can expect from a given capacity. Here are the capacity-factors of two recently-installed wind turbines:

http://www.hullwind.org

  Sept 25, 2008              Hull 1       Hull 2
                             660 KW       1.8 MW       

  Total Generation - kWhs  10,262,150    8,127,391 

  Days Commissioned          2464           877 
  Hours generating          39,050        14,050 
  Capacity Factor            26.3%         21.5%

Hull 1 is a turbine that was built to replace an older one that -- as frequently happens to wind turbines, but has never happened to a nuclear power reactor -- had been destroyed in a storm. (http://www.hullwind.org/history.php) Being destroyed in a storm further hurts lifetime capacity-factor.


My bad, thanks for the explanation.


As Al Gore put it in his movie, all those things add up... 1/3 here, 25% there, 15% over there, another 1/3 of what's left from here, etc...

1/3 is quite a lot in that respect.


Only if these percentages are in series. Since we're talking about the same power plants, it seems that 1/3 is all we get.

Checking the study in question (first hit for 'study "Electric Power Research Institute" "Natural Resources Defense Council"'), it seems they did _not_ take into account the production and maintenance costs of each type of vehicle.

I'm skeptical of technologies that promise incremental conservation through massive consumption of other resources (battery material).


"Only if these percentages are in series. Since we're talking about the same power plants, it seems that 1/3 is all we get."

To quote E:TS again:

"Without any major breakthroughs, vehicles that are little different from today's could use one-third the energy per mile, says John DeCicco, Environmental Defense Fund's specialist in automotive strategies. That alone would radically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. If those cars ran on a biofuel made from renewable feedstocks with one-fourth the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of today's gasoline (Amyris's biogasoline, for instance, or Verenium's cellulosic ethanol), then the emissions per mile would be one-twelfth what they are today, a reduction of 92 percent. It was the feasibility of such options that, in September 2007, caused Vermont U.S. District Judge William K. Sessions to reject manufacturers' challenges and rule that they could meet California's new standards, requiring carbon dioxide emissions in new cars to be cut about 22 percent in the first phase (2009 through 2012) and 30 percent in the mid-term phase (2013 to 2016). Given the expected doubling by midcentury of vehicle miles traveled in the United States, however, California and the rest of the country will have to go much further--reducing automobile emissions about 80 percent." (p. 229)

The book lists a whole boatload of other ways to save massive amounts of energy with today's technology, many of which are listed in my notes of chapter 9: http://alexkrupp.com/earth.html

The sections on weather prediction, clean cement, carpeting, and fans are insanely cool.


Yeah, exactly. I was picking on electric cars because they only address a subproblem; other technologies are certainly more promising.

...

"Another innovation came in the carpet pattern itself. The company's top-selling pattern, called Entropy, mimics the disorder of a forest floor with its strewn leaves, pebbles, and twigs. That randomness means that the pattern needn't match up from tile to tile, but can be laid out in any direction, eliminating the huge amounts of scrap normally generated at installation. It means few tiles are rejected at the factor: imperfections get lost in the wandering variations of color. It also means the carpet lasts a long time, because worn or stained tiles can be swapped out without replacing the rest." (p. 215)

Sounds like a good book.


It's pretty good. (Disclaimer: my dad is the co-author.) It's a little technical in places, especially in the solar photovoltaic chapter, but overall it's far superior to getting your education on renewable energy from articles in Wired or the thinly rewritten press releases that get posted to Reddit and news.yc. It's a current events type book and I don't think it's so insightful that people will be reading it fifty years from now, but it's still definitely worth a read since we're about to see the biggest economic boom in history (as soon as cap-and-trade gets enacted next year) based on the technologies and ideas in the book. I read it twice and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on the issues now, especially after taking notes the second time. I'd still like to read more books in the same topic area, but right now I'm working through a pile of educational theory stuff.


It's 2/3, but it can come from coal. There are very significant political/economic advantages to that. A simultaneous 1/3 environmental advantage is icing on the cake.


Utilities only burn coal when they have to. It's a soot laden nightmare.




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