A couple of weeks ago, I attended a seminar hosted by several departments at the University of Texas on the topic of "peak oil." The occasion was the visit of David Sundalow of the Brookings Institution, who is hawking his new book Freedom from Oil. This was mutually convenient for him and the university, which is trying to carve out a position as an optimistic, rolled-up-sleeves, can-do problem-solver in the fields of energy and water.
I have no objection to that approach and am pleased to be somewhat distantly associated with it. That said, I did not leave the event with great enthusiasm for Sundalow's book. It was worthwhile in that it drew for me a sharp distinction between can-do optimism and unrealistic, delusional optimism.
I think a train wreck of development, energy, food, environment, and warfare, all driven by a hugely overpopulated planet, is going to be very hard to avoid. I think we can avoid it, and even when I am pessimistic I whistle a happy tune and act as if we can avoid it -- because without optimism there is no hope. Optimism is a moral imperative. That said, it needs to be reality-based optimism. Sometimes the things we want to work aren't the things that are going to work.
I won't bother describing the peculiar literary device in Sundalow's book. Here's some PR, with some impressive blurbs: Bill Clinton, Richard Lugar, Wesley Clark. Here's a favorable review with an audio link. Alas, they are all badly wrong. The species of wrongness exhibited here is a form of middle-of-the-road lawyers' science, in which physical reality is forced to take a back seat to some convenient, pseudoreasonable political posturing.
Sundalow thinks all of our problems will be magically resolved by plug-in hybrids. Somehow he manages to convince himself that this not only removes the need for oil (of course, with present driving patterns it doesn't) but that somehow it will solve our electricity problems as well.
Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against instrumental solutions. If someone could find a way to cheaply stabilize carbon, I would not try to legislate my aesthetic. I'd just smile tolerantly and let the Republicans have their fun hauling their three-ton vehicles across the state to their NASCAR thing. (I'd still want a decent bike lane in town though.)
The trouble is, Sundalow keeps saying things that aren't true. Like the part about electric cars being so much more "efficient" than gasoline cars that even a coal-powered electric car has less CO2 emissions than a gasoline powered car. He says this in the book and he said it at the podium. He obviously believes it. Clearly, Clinton, Lugar, and Clark are not unwilling to believe it. It sounds completely wrong to me. Consider that the electric car, all else equal, starts a factor of two behind. Then put transmission losses behind that. I just find the claim beyond the bounds of credibility.
Similarly, he has very positive things to say about corn-based ethanol. Well, that isn't my thing, but everyone I respect who has anything to say about it thinks it is completely delusional. This is where matters got interesting in the seminar.
There were a couple of engineers in the audience (in their requisite plaid shirts) who were adamant that even the absurd slightly-better-than-break-even proposition that the corn ethanol people are pushing is completely overoptimistic. They claimed -- in rather angry tones -- that in the analysis they had seen, 92 percent of the energy in the ethanol that was required just for the distillation process is unaccounted for.
Now, I'm no chemist. I'm not exactly sure how to treat that number or that claim. The thing is that I would not do what Sundalow did about it. I would say "please give me your card after this talk, I would love to investigate that claim, I need to understand the implications." What Sundalow did was pretty much shrug and move on.
This sort of optimism is exactly what makes me a pessimist. We need our policy class to have the competence to evaluate competing claims. That doesn't mean everyone needs to be an expert on everything. It does mean that they need to know whom to trust, they need to ask the right questions, and they should not try to divert attention from inconvenient counterarguments as if they were arguing in a courtroom or a political debate. Foolish optimism is about the most dangerous sort of error. As Richard Feynman said, nature cannot be fooled.
I have nothing against plug-in hybrids. It's a promising technology, and it may well help matters quite a bit in combination with new electricity sources and various other strategies. We need to move forward on lots of fronts to limit our problems and avoid the abyss. Declaring something to have magic powers, though, will not make it so. No matter how much ethanol we make, for instance, it appears we won't be better off. Maybe the guys in plaid got it right: we are substantially worse off with every gallon.
So what is carbon anyway?
Ask Umbra on paperback writers
Comments
View as Flat
GreenEngineer Posted 9:24 am
12 Nov 2007
electric cars
Like the part about electric cars being so much more "efficient" than gasoline cars that even a coal-powered electric car has less CO2 emissions than a gasoline powered car. ... Consider that the electric car, all else equal, starts a factor of two behind. Then put transmission losses behind that. I just find the claim beyond the bounds of credibility.
I'm also skeptical of the claim that a coal-fired electric is better than an efficient gasburner, but only because it seems to be making an extreme version of an otherwise defensible claim: Electric motors are much more efficient over a wider range of speeds than gas engines, and the power electronics have gotten quite good (Tesla's inverter is ~98% efficient, but even a run-of-the-mill PV inverter is around 95%). So I'm curious about your claim that electrics start a factor of two behind. What do you mean?
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leszekp Posted 9:35 am
12 Nov 2007
Try some research
"It sounds completely wrong to me. Consider that the electric car, all else equal, starts a factor of two behind. Then put transmission losses behind that. I just find the claim beyond the bounds of credibility."
This may come as a shock, but just because you can't believe it doesn't mean it isn't true. You might have tried doing some research on the topic before saying something. Here's what five minutes on the Internet got me:
Efficiency of an internal-combustion engine: about 10-12%. 60% is lost as heat right away, the rest is friction/transmission losses.
Efficiency of coal-generated electricity: about 35% even without secondary power uses (thermal, smokestack generation).
Transmission losses: about 7.5%.
Electric motor efficiency: Around 90-95%.
So even a simple, back-of-the-envelope analysis shows that the idea that plug-ins are substantially better than gas-powered cars in CO2/mile is plausible.
On the flip side, the information I've found on corn-based ethanol suggests that the energy balance falls on the wrong side. But it's interesting that you mentioned that the engineers in the audience argued this point, but didn't argue about the carbon balance on plug-ins versus gas-powered vehicles. Maybe because they realized that he was right on that point?
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GreenEngineer Posted 9:50 am
12 Nov 2007
ethanol energy balance
You know, quibbling about whether corn ethanol has a (slightly) positive or a (slightly) negative energy balance is, well, just quibbling.
We crude oil into gasoline at better than a 10:1 energy return ratio. Pumping the stuff out of the ground in the first place can be 50:1 or higher. That's the sort of energy return that our industrial infrastructure was built around. The most optimistic credible energy balance I've seen for ethanol is about 1.5:1, which makes it a complete waste of time even if the proponents are right.
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David Roberts Posted 9:50 am
12 Nov 2007
Michael,
A recent study from EPRI found that even with today's mix of electricity sources, a massive shift to PHEV's would substantially reduce both oil imports and CO2 emissions.
grist.org
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odograph Posted 10:06 am
12 Nov 2007
today
Right now we still have cheap oil (cheap energy, really). That allows us to try a lot of things around the edges. Some of those things may prove to be smart, and some are already proving to be pretty dumb.
But, with cheap oil, and a wealthy nation, the dumb stuff doesn't cost us too much.
If and when oil (or other forms of energy) becomes expensive we will be forced to be a little more critical. We'll have to choose between all those ideas for the ones that seem to work.
It may seem stupid and wasteful to try all the bad with the good ... but you know, how smart are we? Are we really so good as a species that we'll pick all the best things from the outset?
History does not inspire confidence.
Though, how terrible this process of discovery will be depends on a lot of things that are unknown.
We don't know what will be discovered, and we don't know how those discoveries will match the problems (then) at hand.
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Michael Tobis Posted 10:32 am
12 Nov 2007
EPRI study
That's interesting, and apparently that is where Sundalow got his info, but I don't get it.
To break even on coal vs petroleum, the coal has to be twice as efficient, since a unit of coal energy releases about twice the CO2 as a unit of petroleum.
Essentially you are comparing using a fixed power plant to burn a dirty fuel, transmit the power, store the power, and retrieve the power vs a moving power plant to burn a clean fuel.
True, in one case you have to move the fuel and the combustion engine so that adds weight, but in a hybrid as opposed to pure electric that advantage goes away; you have to carry those as well as a large battery or battery-like device.
I understand that a hybrid is better than a conventional car. I am questioning that a plug in coal powered hybrid is so much better than today's gasoline powered hybrid that it will somehow constitute even an imporvement, never mind a solution, for greenhouse gas emissions.
What is the magic I am missing here?
Admittedly widespread deployment would would put a dent in oil dependence, but it's not the happily ever after scenario that Sundalow paints.
The idea that we can run air conditioners off our cars was another place where the whole business made no sense to me. Sorry but my BS detector is going off. Somehow running our cars will have enough storage to cover peak demand, after we've driven them around for a while?
You know, if storage were that good, we could move to renewables a lot more effectively. Why bother with the car as middleman?
I've been wrong in the past and I am always happy to be embarassed by good news, but I need some stronger medicine than raw assertions of things policy folks wish were true. We get plenty of those; that's how we got into the corn ethanol mess in the first place, not to mention some other messes I can think of.
mt
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Biodiversivist Posted 10:47 am
12 Nov 2007
Great comments
And I am in total agreement with Michael's above statement.
As Dave pointed out, there is no doubt that cars running on grid derived electricity will emit much less CO2 on average. Several studies have been done. I have seen none that conflict with them, which is rare in today's world. There is also no doubt that coal is our biggest problem, not transport. If we can get rid of coal and electrify transport, we will get a multiplier effect with exponential reductions. Two curves have to cross for that to happen. He was probably playing up the idea that plug-in cars can be used to store wind and solar power which is just another idea to be studied, with funding that is being pissed away on a war we initiated on an intelligence error at best, by accident in reality, and somebody should be impeached... excuse me.
His upbeat outlook on corn ethanol suggests he does not know what he is talking about. What a surprise. This is why I'm reading fewer and fewer books these days. They are not peer reviewed. They simply make money for publishers and all you need is to be a celebrity or be able to get a celebrity to put a blurb on your book for it to sell well.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Colin Wright Posted 11:05 am
12 Nov 2007
Toxic Optimists indeed!
Michael, I share your skepticism of "delusional beltway optimism."
Even with a "massive shift" to PHEV's we won't be able to avoid the peak oil trainwreck. Look at what the EPRI report says:
Let's say that a reduction from current levels (and not projected) of 4 million bd over 40 years. Or 100,000 bd per year. Or .1/20= .5% per year. But once we fall off the peak oil plateau, depletion rates will be greater than 4% (using CERA's number).
In other words , once we fall off the peak oil plateau, whether that's 85 mbd today, or 100 mbd in 2015 we'll still be down about 1 mbd each year -- even with this rate of PHEV penetration.
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Biodiversivist Posted 11:45 am
12 Nov 2007
It's for real Michael
Here is a simple explanation from Joseph Romm:
http://home.comcast.net/~russ676/biodiesel/page8.html
And you are right also Colin. But, almost all predictions will turn out wrong one way or the other in timing and magnitude. Plug-in cars may become the hottest thing since the PC, global warming may hit a tipping point and make it all moot.
But like I said. This author is making the common mistake of picking his favorites among hundreds of competing ideas and touting them as a done deal. Hydrogen used to be touted that way. Using the energy stored in batteries at night to handle peak daytime air conditioning loads is just an idea with potential. It may or may not work. Lovin's hydrogen economy sure didn't pan out.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Michael Tobis Posted 12:48 pm
12 Nov 2007
OK, so
I guess the argument relies on 1) deployed rather than protoype plug-in hybrid engines being more efficient than existing hybrids and 2) half the grid power being non-fossil and 3) almost all the new hybrid miles being electric. All of that amounts to a slight win for the plug-in hybrid.
That win goes away if the grid is 100% coal-powered, which is what my BS detector was complaining about. Maybe I misunderstood what he was saying, but what I thought he was saying (possibly what he wanted me to think he was saying) doesn't turn out to be true on Joe's analysis.
Anyway, I'd like an actual phsyical explanation as to why a plug-in hybrid should be so much more energy efficient than a regular hybrid that there is even a case to be made.
So far I've seen it asserted but not explained. I'd like to get some understanding of it.
Regardless, the additional power demand of the cars will need to be met by additional grid power. That partially addresses peak oil but will only promote more demand from the grid.
mt
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amazingdrx Posted 1:53 pm
12 Nov 2007
Zero
It might be best to go back to zero and start over Michael. We have been back and forth all over this plugin hybrid versus hybrid versus fuel farming debate.
You are right though, even plugin hybrids with a 60 mile battery only range all powered by solar and wind will only eliminate maybe 20% of GHG. They are not the one and only majic fix. It would take elimination of another 30% of GHG by going to geo heat exchange for heating/cooling buildings. And a renewable grid, industrial conservation and cogeneration, and sustainable agriculture to get rid of most of the rest of GHG.
Now lets compare plugin hybrids to regular hybrids. Plugin hybrids use battery power for their first say 60 miles of driving, burning no fuel. After 60 miles fuel would be burned.
If your daily commute to work was under 60 miles, you plugin at work and drive home, having burned no fuel that day. Instead you have used 60 cent per gallon of gasoline equivalent electricity.
That electricity maybe from a coal plant today, but given the widespread adoption of plugin hybrids and conversion to a distributed renewable generation and storage internet enabled power grid, that electricity will be obtained with less and less GHG emission.
No matter how you try, either a hybrid or an ethanol powered car will never operate with less GHG emission because of a renewable source of electricity. You need to plug your car in to get that benefit and eventually nearly eliminate that 26% of GHG due to internal combustion vehicles.
The argument about wether coal powered plugins emit less GHG than say a really efficient diesel of the same weight and performance is really beside the point anyway. It's more of a technical rather than policy issue. Plugin hybrids are still the only way to eventually eliminate vehicle related GHG.
Of course bike lanes, light electric rail, electric buses and other mass transit options are also excellent solutions.
Ethanol has not only the problem that it takes the combustion of a gallon of oil and emission of that GHG to produce a gallon of ethanol. Fuel at the E-15 level (only 15%)lowers the mileage of many vehicles 10%. That means for every 10 gallons, not only is that 1.5 gallon of oil burned to produce the ethanol (farm machinery, fertilizer, farm chemicals), but an extra gallon of fuel is burned (and bought) to drive the same mileage as with 10 gallons of gas. Ethanol uses 4.5 gallons of water per gallon as well. And agribizz farming destroys soil, creates methane (23 times worse than CO2 as a GHG)release from fertilizer run off, and releases carbon stored in soil.
Separating the real majic solutions from the fake ones is difficult. It takes a lot of understanding. Fuel farming, clean coal, nukes, geothermal, hydrogen economy,..fake.
We debate these points to try and see if it is possible to widen the understanding that will be necessary. There seems to be some very slow, very small progress being made. Now how to transfer that to a congressman or senator? Or Presidential candidate?
It's a daunting task to say the least. I helped get my congressman to oppose corn ethanol. But he still touts cellulosic ethanol and I doubt he knows the difference between a hybrid and a plugin hybrid.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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Colin Wright Posted 2:01 pm
12 Nov 2007
Don't worry, be happy?
BioD, you write with regards to peak oil:
I assume your attitude is "predictions are almost always wrong, we'll just muddle through like we always have"? Well, that's fine. We will muddle through. But why the cavalier attitude? Aren't you the same person who protested at Imperium Biofuels?
Why even bother having the IPPC or climate scientists when their predictions are certainly almost always wrong (overly optimistic)?
Well, from my standpoint, by making predictions, based on the best available science, we have the possibility to plan for the future, thereby lessening future harm. Surely that's a given.
Take this example of PHEV's. There are limitations to the rate of market penetration (retooling factories, pumping out cars, can people afford them? etc.) as the above example illustrated. Here in the NW where we have mostly hydropower, we don't have the option of running power stations at night to charge electric cars. One estimate put the maximum number of PHEV's here around 10% of the vehicle fleet (PNWL). Of course, we could shift to renewables by building massive wind, solar and wave farms but that will take decades of work. But according to the DOE-sponsored Hersch report it will take two decades to prepare for peak oil to avoid serious economic harm (and that would involve hundreds of billions of dollars in CTL investment.)
Again, I'll all for PHEV's, and encouraging mass transit as much as possible. But real people are going to be suffering very soon. Already, many poor and middle-class people with long car commutes are hurting. But no one is telling them that things are only going to get worse. And that without an outcry from people with the time and energy to do the background research, business as usual will continue.
If people have an idea of what is to come (and a timeframe) they can start to prepare themselves. They could move (or swap houses with people) so they could live closer to work. They could vote for mass transit. They could buy one of your hybrid bikes!
As Robert Hirsch put it in his DOE-sponsored study: "the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented". In these circumstances, what's wrong with foresight based on mathematical predictions?
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amazingdrx Posted 2:06 pm
12 Nov 2007
Lovins
BTW, the might Lovins claims that only 6% of the energy in gasoline gets to the wheels. A new low for estimates of infernal combustion inefficiency and a new high for GHG climate destruction.
And only .3% is actually used to move the weight of the driver and passengers, the rest of the 6% moves the weight of the gas guzzler itself. Amazing.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
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WWAGD?! Posted 4:00 pm
12 Nov 2007
What's Your Plan
Neg. Neg. Neg.
Here's a guy who sees a sliver of light at the end of the tunnel, and what do you do? Cement it shut.
"We need a policy that blah..blah...blah".
That what?
Tell us exactly what you're doing?
I like the future.
I like hydrogen.
I like fusion.
I like people.
I think we can pull this thing off and end up on top.
Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Is anybody with me?
Do I have to put on a pirates outfit and cut up a cadillac into a float to get some positive vibes going here?
John Bailo
Sutext:
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Ron Steenblik Posted 5:42 pm
12 Nov 2007
When the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?
When was that, John Bailo?
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odograph Posted 9:43 pm
12 Nov 2007
Tempest in a Teacup
This is the same old argument (mostly without me this time). It is "how will today's world solve tomorrow's problems." Obviously that never happens, ever.
If the world becomes convinced that a problem is looming it will investigate, change and adapt. The research into hydrogen cars and plug-in hybrids is that kind of investigation. That's good news, right?
We aren't out of the woods (maybe) but we're tryin'
I'm with John B. We didn't give up when the Martians landed at Grover's Mill.
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justlou Posted 10:27 pm
12 Nov 2007
When the Future
is designed around no cars then I'll feel more optimistic. Getting as many people as possible out of cars and avoiding getting new drivers into cars is our best hope.
When you build an infrastructure and a transportation system around such flawed power inputs, trying to find alternatives is just perpetuating inherently bad design. These discussions illustrate just how technocratic all of us have become. We are letting a really shitty technological concept become our master and shape our future.
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odograph Posted 10:48 pm
12 Nov 2007
walkable
Haven't "walkable communities" and the "new urbanism" exploded in the last few years?
The nice thing is that people like to live in such things. They sell now, even with (relatively) cheap gas.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 11:21 pm
12 Nov 2007
When the Martians landed at Grover's Mill, NJ
It wasn't exactly our finest hour. According to this article:
On the other hand, according to the Renewable Fuels Association (the ethanol industry lobbying group):
And one in five (20%) believe that they have been abducted by aliens.
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justlou Posted 11:29 pm
12 Nov 2007
Odo
The idea is catching on, but physically the concept seems to be out of reach for the vast majority of people living in the US who are dependent on automobiles. I'd also have to judge that the idea of dense living still does not appeal to a lot of people for many reasons. While there definitely are some good models developing, "exploding" might not be the best descriptor. But, you got the right idea anyway -- designing without cars or at least putting cars on the periphery.
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odograph Posted 11:34 pm
12 Nov 2007
Pfft.
Way to miss the point Ron. It was never about who was frightened. It was about who gave up, surrendered, went out back and off'd themselves.
No one?
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odograph Posted 11:36 pm
12 Nov 2007
walk-score
"The idea is catching on, but physically the concept seems to be out of reach for the vast majority of people living in the US who are dependent on automobiles."
Are you sure? Most suburban homes I've seen (southern California) have a supermarket within a mile. That is technically walkable, but it would probably be easier to send the kids on bikes.
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justlou Posted 11:50 pm
12 Nov 2007
Yeah, Pretty sure Odo.
I would not compare anything happening in SCal with the rest of the country. In the Midwest that I am most familiar with, most people do not live anywhere close to one mile from a supermarket. Even if they do, walking a mile in January, with wind chills in the single digits, in half frozen slosh, and carrying two armloads of groceries sucks even for 20 year old college students. Of course, trying to negotiate all this is made even that much worse by the car infrastructure.
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Ron Steenblik Posted 12:41 am
13 Nov 2007
Odo
Honestly, I don't know how many committed suicide following Orson Welle's broadcasting of "The War of the Worlds". I grew up with stories from my parents about the panic it provoked, but other articles say those are urban myths.
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mat Posted 1:18 am
13 Nov 2007
beltway commuting - oh joy
well, i live such that i have to commute to work for 40 minutes each way on the Washington DC beltway system. actually, my husband and i now drive in together - for the past 2 years, and we always plan shopping to use as little gas as possible, BUT i have to admit that we moved to where we now live in order to get out of the massive SUBURBAN congestion in and around our nation's capital. the Capital Beltway(et al) sucks, big time, and most of the drivers are all alone in their big cars (a few little cars), and the HOV lanes (where they exist) are REALLY FAST!
we are conserving fuel as much as is possible right now, but the downside for me is that i am now STUCK at work without a car! (my husband has it most of the time) or course, i now shop a lot less.....
i bet this is a similar scenario for most people, and i don't see it changing in my lifetime. how are all these commuters going to live near work??
what a mess we are in.
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Biodiversivist Posted 2:23 am
13 Nov 2007
Colin
"I assume your attitude is "predictions are almost always wrong, we'll just muddle through like we always have"?"
That wasn't what I was trying to say. I didn't do a good job making my point, as usual. I said, "... wrong one way or the other in timing and magnitude." When I said predictions are almost always wrong I meant that they can't be made with great precision.
I was saying that hopefully, predictions about how fast we will adapt will be underestimated in our favor, as the overpopulation/starvation ones were, and hopefully the global warming tipping points won't materialize before we get our shit together. I suppose you could call that optimism. I am rarely accused of being an optimist. I see this whole thing with a touch of gallows humor and as a challenge. There is no guarantee we are going to be successful.
Michael,
I tend to agree with you. These books are like reading a condensed version of popular mechanics which for decades has been buttering its bread by titillating readers with stories about technology that is just around the corner but almost never materializes. I dropped my subscription as a young engineering student because I got sick of reading about what were little more than illustrated hypotheses. Lovin's hydrogen powered hyper car was described in a popular mechanics magazine in great detail back in the mid-seventies, which was probably before he graduated college. There still isn't a hypercar in existence. All Lovins has managed to do is trademark the name of a concept he didn't even invent. Commercial viability is the gold standard.
Global warming is essentially a coal problem. If we don't find a way to clean up our electrical power, nothing else we do will matter. As Dave is prone to say, coal is the enemy of the human race.
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/lib/06mj/images/43.gif
Having said all that, I'll make one last attempt to address the matter of plug-in hybrids.
My family has cut oil for transport use somewhere between 50 and 80% in the last few years by simply replacing one environmentalist status symbol with another (an Outback with a Prius) and by using a plug-in hybrid bike for around town single occupant trips instead of a Cherokee. This was not only easy to do, but it has also enhanced our lives and is saving us money. If we had a plug-in Prius, that number would be even greater because a plug-in using today's grid will produce even less CO2 and save even more oil because,
- Today's grid average is 1.3 pounds of CO2 produced per Kilowatt.
- A Prius consumes about 250 Watt-hours per mile on electric.
- The average car today produces about 12,000 pounds CO2 and moves about 12,000 miles annually
- A Prius produces about 6000 pounds CO2 annually if driven the same miles
1.3 x 0.250 x 12,000 miles = 3,900 pounds CO2 (all miles electric)(1.3 x 0.250 x 6,000 miles) + (6,000 pounds x 1/2) = 4,950 pounds CO2 (1/2 of miles electric)
(1.3 x 0.250 x 3,000 miles) + (6,000 pounds x 3/4) = 5,475 pounds CO2 (1/4 of miles electric)
Now, if we are successful reducing that 1.3 average to say, 0.6, you can see the multiplier effect. Driving 1/4 of your Plug-in hybrid car miles on electric would produce about 2700 pounds instead of today's Prius average of 6000.
How can electric be so efficient? Picture a 777 trying to get off the ground using ninety 100-horsepower reciprocating engines instead of two gas turbines. Giant gas turbine engines generate our electricity. Our transport consists primarily of millions of tiny reciprocating engines, each converting less than 20% of the energy stored in a tank of gas into forward motion. An electric motor converts two to three times more of its input energy into forward motion.
I'm not trying to predict the future. I'm just giving an example of how we might reduce CO2.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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GreenEngineer Posted 3:55 am
13 Nov 2007
efficiency
What is the magic I am missing here?
Another thing to remember is that electric motors are not heat engines, and are not governed by the Carnot maximum efficiency. Larger commodity-grade electric motors (such as are used in building air systems) are typically 90+% efficient. In a car, you probably spend the extra bucks to squeeze out a few more percentage points, just because it's cheaper and easier than buying more batteries.
For many years, the greater efficiency of the electric motor was offset by really bad storage losses with lead-acid batteries and the associated power electronics. Li-batteries and modern inverters have changed that aspect of the picture.
Of course, the electricity is (most likely) being generated by a heat engine, which is governed by Carnot. But a utility generation plant is a large, high-temperature machine tuned for efficiency and operating at a consistent speed, rather than all over its power band like an car's IC engine. So that step, while much less than ideal, is still much more efficient than a car.
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Pangolin Posted 8:11 am
13 Nov 2007
Old Charlie stole the handle....
old Charlie stole the handle and
the train won't stop going --
no way to slow down.-"Locomotive Breath," Jethro Tull-
Is it runaway yet?
The reason that optimism is toxic is that it can be entirely unfounded in objective reality. It appears from the behavior of the arctic ice cap this summer that we may have passed the famed tipping point. As conditions stand now, thawing permafrost in Siberia and Canada will release so much methane that it will make any emissions reductions below 100% moot.
At this point we need to find a way to pull over 100 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere while maintaining a net negative emissions profile. I'm fairly sure that scenario doesn't include everyone driving their plug-in Prius to Ikea for new furniture for the Mcmansion.
In the meantime the Indonesians are burning vast peat bogs to provide palm oil to Pringles and Eurozone Mercedes. Releasing far more CO2 than will ever be negated by cookies or bio-diesel runs on the Autobahn.
Optimism is the faith that at some point the human race will realize the ship is sinking and opt for emergency repairs rather than buying lottery tickets for the lifeboats. Right now we need to send every lifeboat in the world to Bangledesh because it looks like they are about to get pounded by a cyclone.
Climate Change is real and can kill us. Really real and really dead. All of us. We are going to need transport while we fix things but we are having a serious problem grasping the essential math.
Put the Carbon Back
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Biodiversivist Posted 11:07 am
13 Nov 2007
Listen to Greenengineer
He said what I was trying to say only much clearer with about a 90% fewer words /:
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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oakfeld Posted 10:52 am
14 Nov 2007
Good Point GreenEngineer: ROE
An ROE (Return on Energy) of about 1:1 (from ethanol say) could have the effect of slowing down an economy more used to 10-50:1 from fossil fuels (I recall reading that somewhere). So as GreenEngineer says, why even tout 1.5:1 when that's so far below, an order of magnitude even, than what we're used to. Maybe if it's part of an overall reduction in total energy used, that might be a way forward, but such a study would have to be done.
As for hybrids, hopefully the batteries are less polluting and more easily reclaimed/recycled than the traditional lead-acid. The cost and availability of any special metals they may contain could be an issue for mass production of all these batteries too, don't know. Perhaps the answer here is a breakthrough in an organic battery (there was student project at MIT on this to generate electricity for poor villages, but the output is low, enough to run a light bulb or cell phone).
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Michael Tobis Posted 3:36 pm
14 Nov 2007
Thanks GreenEngineer
That's the sort of thing I was looking for to make it ring true for me. I stand corrected.
It still seems rather less earth-shaking than Sundalow makes out. You can see how his enthusiasm for corn ethanol didn't leave me inclined to believe him in any case. I still think there's a tendency for politicians to believe scientists and engineers are like movie wizards, and that eventually we will come up with the right incantation and everything will be back to normal and happily ever after.
Weasel words spoken, though, thanks for setting me straight with a substantive argument.
mt
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Colin Wright Posted 4:04 pm
14 Nov 2007
Revkin's toxic optimism?
Michael, I liked how you put this in your blog, with regards to the Revkin "middle-of-the-road politics" argument:
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