I commend Toyota. I don't know to what degree this is greenwashing, but I suspect it's... less than average. I may be biased, but I think they're responsible stewards of their market share. They seem to be huge for the right reasons: concentration on quality and doing right by customers, and investment in technology that raises the bar for what to expect from cars and automakers, going back decades. HFC vehicles might not be the [near] future but I can't complain that they've tried.
The goal of matching 45% of its purchased power with renewable electricity (in 2035) seems fairly average of what the typical grid user will likely get in 10 years.
The word "matching" is what carries the implications. They could be saying that during optimal weather conditions when solar/wind is flooding the grid and the prices are at the lowest, they will pay an additional to 45% of their purchased power, in order to "compensate" during periods of suboptimal weather when gas, goal and oil is the primary energy (which also mean when the power supply is low and prices are high).
Yep, I got the year qualifier for that part wrong.
To give some more context, Texas has already started to curtail around 10% of solar production because of overproduction. That brings an other aspects to the question if we are getting net zero if a company match solar energy production to their fossil fuel consumption. Do we get fossil fuel displacement by producing energy that no one is willing to buy at even zero cost? To be fair it is likely a non-zero number, but it seems logical that as overproduction increases that numbers get closer to zero.
I will add this study (https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1451) as a additional data point with this quote: "Here, I show that the average pattern across most nations of the world over the past fifty years is one where each unit of total national energy use from non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-quarter of a unit of fossil-fuel energy use and, focusing specifically on electricity, each unit of electricity generated by non-fossil-fuel sources displaced less than one-tenth of a unit of fossil-fuel-generated electricity"
Some of their HFC vehicles are net zero emission. Same cannot be said about EVs. But like you mentioned, the main reason why they try to do right by customers more than the others.
I sort expected a reply like this or something about their faulty ECU code and unexpected accelerations. I can't really argue these points effectively, so I'll just say: maybe I'm wrong.
Manufacturing a coal power plant also takes energy. Clearing the site for a coal power plant also takes energy. Same for the infrastructure.
Did you ever ask those questions for coal or gas or oil? Or is it only for solar panels that they seem suddenly relevant?
Seems like any small step towards cleaner power is a material improvement, if small. There's likely no single thing that can be done that will solve the issue in one fell swoop. Asking or hoping for that is ridiculous.
It's even sillier than that because "energy costs to produce energy" is a cycle.
Suppose it emits 80 tons of CO2 to produce a given amount of solar when 80% of the power to build the solar farm comes from coal. Okay, but now you have solar farms generating 15% of your energy, so the next one only takes 65 tons of CO2 for the same amount of solar. Pretty obvious what happens when you stop burning fossil fuels entirely.
The lifecycle emission of an electric car is on average a total of 10T of C02-equivalent. Contrast that the ~40T with a fuel-powered gas or electricity generated from a coal plant. It's still a reduction-factor of 3 to 4.
Source : https://www.carbone4.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcarbo...
(accounting for electricity from a Nuclear Power plant in France, VH = hybrid, VE = electric, Thermique = Combustion Engine)
Granted, it would be better to have no car at all but on this front, the US is doomed.
> My comment is that the lifespan of a car in the US is short (5 years, 10?) so ICE vs EV more or less evens out?
The average car in the US is 12.6 years old, implying that the average car has a total lifespan of something like 25 years (because the average car will be average, i.e. currently at around half of its total lifespan).
> Considering old cars are exported to poor countries, that is another reason in favor of ICE since EV are a no go here.
I don't think anybody chooses a new car based on what kind of charging infrastructure might be available to third hand purchasers in other countries in 20 years.
What could possibly make you think cars only last 5 years in the US??? You’re just pulling numbers out of your ass to rationalize the conclusion you already made, that they even out. Neither of them are true.
How about you go look up the answers to all those heavily studied questions, published in freely available reports by numerous organisations if you're so concerned?
Apparently your concern doesn't rise to any desire to seek out data which is readily available.
None of that information you mention was in the cited article; the rest was my own musing on the topic.
And reasonable too: there's a lot of green washing about, and it is better I think to be sceptical than to take the foaming press-releases of marketing departments (or superficial articles) at face value.
As for researching the minutae and coming up with a definite position on the issue: like many of us who live under capitalism, I don't have time. I've spent the last two weeks intermittantly planting about 200 tree seedlings, a much better use of time I feel.
Time is one thing, energy is quite another. I spent 4 hours watering trees before posting that. And, yeah, I've got burn out. I can post a comment, but deep diving and sorting the greenwash from the actual science and numbers, that's a cognitive blow out for me.
This solar project is right on the average at $1,327, although NREL says it can cost upto 2743.
Some investment group says a 1MW coal plan would cost similar or upto 4x the cost:
>estimates suggest that the construction cost of a coal-fired thermal power plant can range from less than $1,000 to $4,500 per each kilowatt of installed capacity.
https://esfccompany.com/en/articles/thermal-energy/coal-fire...
So, seems just about average and on just the construction cost - cheaper than coal.
My comment was based on 1kW panel on Amazon.com is $500 delivered but there's likely a lot of nuance in quality and lifetime and labor for these projects
Coal runs 24/7 pretty predictably. 1kw of coal means 1kw of power 24/7.
Solar output varies heavily throughout the year, with only limited times where 1kw will be produced by that panel. On average, you’d be lucky to get 2-3 hrs a day at that capacity, and 8 hrs total of any significant output.
Also, the output from that panel needs to be converted/inverted to be used, and those inverters are expensive too.
If you want to produce electricity 24/7 from those panels, you’ll also need batteries.
So figure 5-10x the cost of a single panel to somewhat reliably produce that panels equivalent in energy 24/7 - assuming you have the space.
There are so many problems with simplifying power usage and production, there is no silver bullet. The costs are always based on todays markets. I think coal should be relegated to a baseline emergency power role, there are several problems with that statement depending on where you are in the world and what role coal has there.
Who is paying to build, maintain, and operationally staff a coal plant fired up a few times a year? Or the infrastructure to mine said coal when needed on such an intermittent basis?
This is where the cost calculations of solar fall apart to the point of being outright fraud. You need to add the cost of the natural gas peaker plant you build and keep around for nights and “seasonal” energy troughs before the number makes any sort of sense whatsoever.
I’ve said it before - but solar power has been the easiest ever to predict investment I’ve ever made so far in life. The investment was into natural gas.
Solar is cheap until you reach a saturation point that is already there in some areas - rapidly approaching in others. Battery deployments currently are measured in the hours of duck curve they cover at the moment, not nights or number of days they can cover in totally predictable seasonal energy shortage scenarios. It’s trivial when you can ignore and socialize the actual expensive hard problems to solve.
I love solar and wind - they should be primary generation sources for humanity. I hate the utterly rampant financial fraud going on sold to the public by professional grifters.
Expert bean counters, whose input always weigh heavier for the energy industry than the opinion of environmental scientists, already did the maths on this and concluded that solar is vastly cheaper already in the short run. You should let all of them know they goofed up.
Bwaha. Have you wondered why California and Germany have some of the most expensive energy in the world, while also being on the forefront of renewables - especially solar?
It is because of this. Literally. You’ll need to do your own math though, because it’s too politically embarrassing to acknowledge. After all, California now has ‘too much solar’!
It’s also why California is keeping their Nuke plant alive (doing a strong about face), and building a ton of natural gas peaker plants, and Germany imports massive amounts of electricity during certain times of day and year - and has been keeping coal around a lot longer than they were supposed to.
Because this is a way harder problem than naive back of
the envelope calculations suggest. But that would be awkward to acknowledge. So, we don’t.
Or is it really ‘there is no way they could be lying to us, or doing something stupid! That would be crazy!’?. Because if so, I’ve got some math that shows it literally could be no other way.
Ok, energy costs $0.1 per kWh (h is important) and that's operational cost, while the number above is the infrastructure cost of creating an installation able to supply the wattage above.
