Plug-in hybrids are the only alternative fuel vehicles that can provide genuine energy independence from steadily rising oil prices and brutal price spikes.
I have agreed to participate as a guest blogger for ScienceBlogs in a three-month project on the next generation of energy ideas. My first post is "Electric Vehicles: The Next Generation." Longtime readers of this blog or my books know that I have been an advocate of plug-ins for a number of years.
The key point of this piece is that "Only one alternative fuel can significantly lower the annual fuel bill of U.S. consumers while at the same time significantly reducing greenhouse-gas emissions -- electricity."
Biofuels -- whether from crops or cellulosic material -- are likely to be sold at the market price for gasoline. That's because it is extremely difficult to see how they could be produced in the kind of nearly unlimited quality you would need for them to dominate the liquid transportation fuels market for the foreseeable future. The same is true for offshore, Alaskan, or unconventional oil.
The price of electricity, however, is not linked to the price of oil.
Gasoline prices have gone up some 200 percent in recent years, whereas electricity prices have only gone up about one-tenth as much. Gasoline prices are likely to rise 50 percent to 100 percent over the next decade. Again, electricity prices might rise another 10 percent or 20 percent. We simply have too many electricity sources for prices to rise much even if we adopt a strong carbon cap. These include rapidly expanding low carbon technologies like wind, solar photovoltaics, and concentrated solar thermal electric, which may actually see price declines as they gain market share.
Thus, only plug-in hybrids (and ultimately pure electric cars) offer permanent, practical, low-polluting freedom from the misery of peak oil.
[Note: Some have criticized the Shell sponsorship of Scienceblogs. But Shell exerts no editorial control, so I'll let others lose sleep over this. Personally, while I once admired Shell, especially their strategic planning about global warming and renewable energy, their pursuit of tar sands and, even worse, oil shale, makes clear they are simply another short-term-profit-maximizing long-term-climate-destroying oil company.]
This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.
Cash for Clunkers brought us ... more clunkers!
Comments
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sindark Posted 7:12 am
11 Jul 2008
Widespread deployment of electric vehicles could also provide a distributed option for electricity storage. Such vehicles could be charged at times when demand is low and could contribute power at times when demand is peaking.
a sibilant intake of breath
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stopgreenpath Posted 12:58 pm
11 Jul 2008
if you are of the "let's just kill off the desert - it's blighted wasteland anyhow" mentality, please come out spend a few weeks in Joshua Tree and other sections of the Mojave, fall in love with the diverse, gorgeous, vibrant but fragile landscape, plants and creatures out there, and you will fight to the death to keep Big Energy profiteers from killing it off to extend their monopolies into an era when Big Centralized Energy should be relegated to history books.
unless and until every roof is covered in PV and every yard has a little windmill and every brownfield and superfund site has been used for temporary, larger baseload generation (such as modest wind farms, with massive storage), and until we have invested heavily in conservation tech and retrofits, we simply cannot just move all the pressure for our gross overconsumption onto our intact ecosystems. we need them to work, as they are intended to...
the greenest energy is that which you needn't ever produce.
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racc Posted 3:04 pm
11 Jul 2008
Then there is the sprawling development that is enabled by the availability of cheap energy to run vehicles. The high price of gas is making such development not viable. Plug-in hybrids will make this type of development viable again thus leading to further loss of green space and farm land.
Then there is the extraction of the resources required to make the batteries and the motors.
To leave on a positive note, the way forward is to stop wasting money on highways and instead invest in rapid transit, high-speed rail and cycling. The age of the automobile is over.
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amazingdrx Posted 9:33 pm
11 Jul 2008
Actually corn ethanol doubles GHG compared to gasoline, cellulosic boosts GHG 50%. That is according to flawed studies that ignore GHG in the form of nitrous oxide from ammonia fertilizer. GHG equivalent to 2/3 of the CO2 uptake of the crop.
"...the incremental cost of plug in technology will decline over time."
Yep, but you forgot another factor. Plugin hybrids have eletric motors and ICE backup generators, and soon maybe solid oxide fuel cell/turbine backup generation with 70% efficiency.
A much simpler system to manufacture than the very complex ICE/transmissions in modern cars, with computer chips controlling each and every process, valves, timing, fuel/air mixture, speed and so forth. It's a technological mess.
Yes, the battery storage in the vehicles can help to smooth the demand/supply dips and peaks of a renewable smart grid.
Using the backup fuel cell generation, which could reach total generation capacity of a few times the total grid generation capacity, plugged into natural gas/biogas as a fuel, could do away with most backup generation for the grid. With a zero carbon footprint if only 5% of the natural gas is derived from biogas from waste.
Furthermore, methane storage nano-technology makes its substitution for liquid fuel in plugin hybrids a practical alternative. Also with a zero carbon footprint.
This distributed backup generation capacity is very important because it can economically do away with the need for baseload grid power generation, now provided by coal and nuclear power, both dangerous, expensive GHG intensive energy sources.
The batteries in plugin hybrids could store solar electricity, plugged in at work, or wind power (night peaking) plugged in at home.
Good point racc: "Then there is the sprawling development that is enabled by the availability of cheap energy to run vehicles."
Will plugin hybrids, with their lower cost fuel, renewable electricity, increase miles driven and sprawl, and reduce the push for mass transit and biking? Probably. But slowly, as their adoption rate will be slow at first.
A tax on electricity used as motor fuel, similar to the tax on liquid fuel will need to be instituted to support road maintenance. It ought to include funding for mass transit and bike lanes and trails too, to offset the lower cost fuel sprawl effect.
Actually high speed commuter rail will also increase sprawl. If it takes 30 minutes for a 100 mile ride to work (at 200 mph) and people can work on their computer and cell phones on the train, a lot of rural communities will be revived with new growth.
If it's done with renewabley powered zero carbon footprint homes, without huge chemlawns, that might be ok in a limited way. Zoning may have to take mass transit/plugin hybrid realities into account.
The real cure for sprawl is reproductive rights for women, the only humane way to keep human over population from eclipsing any efforts to reduce anthropogenic environmental disaster.
No matter how efficient and renewable human support systems become, continued exponential growth in population will overtake those efforts and put us right back in trouble again.
Right arm green. "...we simply cannot just move all the pressure for our gross overconsumption onto our intact ecosystems."
Farmland can host most of the big wind installations. It's already been devestated by chem-dustrial ag. The revenue from wind and farm waste biogas can allow small farms to survive and eventually thrive as they return to organic agriculture.
Why devestate anymore wild land when it is unecessary? Solar cogeneration on roofs and south facing walls make large desert solar installation just another centralized power generation boondoggle. Solar furnace cogeneration ought to go on and around factories.
Some of the energy savings and revenue could be siphoned off for environmental remediation of polluted factory and farm land. Renewable energy can even be used to extract contamination from groundwater and soil.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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racc Posted 1:22 am
12 Jul 2008
To be correct, perhaps state that park and ride lots near rail stations create sprawl.
The problem with hybrids and electric cars is that they create the false impression that we can continue to drive everywhere and so we still build highways and parking lots to support automobiles. If we accept the fact that the automobile is not the future, we would stop wasting money on highways and instead create invest in rail and rapid transit.
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spaceshaper Posted 2:24 am
12 Jul 2008
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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racc Posted 6:16 am
12 Jul 2008
Unfortunately, hybrid plug-ins are exactly the opposite; expensive vehicles with cheap fuel. This means that the early adaptors will be the people that want to commute long distances. They will enable people to continue unsustainable lifestyles instead of doing the smart thing and moving closer to work.
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spaceshaper Posted 7:36 am
12 Jul 2008
Those vehicles might well be relatively inexpensive - not too much so, I hope, the last thing we need is more disposable tech toys - but that condition might pave the way for a different kind of attitude to the automobile, emphasizing its undoubted value and convenience in short-range low-impact use instead of brute power and speed.
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
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Delay And Deny Posted 2:05 am
13 Jul 2008
I've been reading some neat stuff on superconductors. They are actually selling like hotcakes! China and the US are both big customers. They can use thick ribbon like superconductors that take up a few feet of real estate in place of gigantic towers that take up hundreds.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/power-firms-grasp-n ...={3BB486EE-6B51-4B5D-9E91-0099ED4ED291}&dist=msr_1
Power executives, engineers, and the media gathered recently to officially throw the switch at the $60 million Holbrook Superconductor project, the world's first transmission power cable transmitting waves of electricity from the grid to a substation that feeds actual U.S. homes.
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GRLCowan Posted 10:03 am
13 Jul 2008
Only if they don't travel far between in-pluggings.
This means that the early adaptors will be the people that want to commute long distances.
They are just the people for whom a plug-in hybrid's ability to run its first few tens of km on electricity is least helpful.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, H2 energy fan 'til ~1996
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/boron_blast.html
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Millstone Posted 12:11 am
14 Jul 2008
There is some linkage between oil and electricity because natural gas markets and oil markets are linked and natural gas is linked to electricity.
If we move towards an electricity generation like the ones advocated most freuqently by individuals on Grist and similar forums (renewables and natural gas) this linkage will become even more pronounced.
This is not to knock PHEVs; however, efforts to deploy them in markets where electricity prices are increasing and volitale would likely be less succesful than if they were not. That is to say electricity markets not tightly tied to natural gas markets would be more favorable.
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Biodiversivist Posted 12:50 am
14 Jul 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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John former Marine Posted 12:54 am
14 Jul 2008
Of course, we could improve light rail, buses, and bike paths...but I think those have already been suggested and interfere with the American right to freedom to screw the rest of the world.
Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
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amazingdrx Posted 3:02 pm
14 Jul 2008
Now make it a plugin. With a diesel/natural gas flex fuel conversion.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
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