How is this "an unambiguous positive?"

Every dollar spent on private autos and highways is a dollar not spent on rail, transit, making bicycling work, and on redesigning urban centers to replace mobility with accessibility.

Electric vehicles are just another way to use the enemy of the human race -- coal -- to power cars.  Making those cars requires a ginormous amount of energy before they've even moved a mile, and they ride on petroleum-based tires (about a barrel in every tire, if I recall correctly).  The roads are made of concrete (7% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions) and asphalt (more petroleum).

By 2050 we need to be making about 15% of the greenhouse gases we make today, not increasing them.  So a "7 or 8" percent increase represents about 600% too much emissions.

The reduction from reduced transportation emissions is nice -- but it's only about half of the needed reduction, and it means that we're still committed to dangerous climate destabilization.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

David cites studies showing electricity for cars saves pollution regardless of the fuel or generation method and concludes by describing plug in hybrid cars as, "one of the few climate change solutions that's an unambiguous positive." We agree this is one unambiguous positive, but would make three points:

First, there are other unambiguously positive solutions that are not being deployed in a remotely optimal fashion, and they do not require any new technology.

Second, all of us should expend more brain cells demanding "unambiguously positive solutions" to climate mitigation.  The "lazy" environmentalist that pushes for all possible renewable energy deployment with no regard for cost needs to think harder to find sources of clean power that are also cost effective, and not assume the world optimally produces energy services, beacuse it does not.  The "lazy" business person or economist that objects to all government programs to reduce GHG emissions because "these actions will damage the economy", needs to think harder to learn about clean energy sources that benefit the economy, and learn why those sources are not being optimally deployed.  All citizens should join in non-partisan efforts to deploy double bottom line solutions to climate change.

Finally, the largest opportunity for "unambiguously positive solutions" is to recycle currently wasted energy.  US industry vents energy streams that could generate nearly 10% of US power with no fuel and no incremental pollution.  Contrast this with the 2.6% of US power generated in 2005 from renewables, exclusing hydroelectricity.  Why not chase industrial waste energy recycling with the same vigor we are chasing renewable energy.  Bill McKibben wonders if the problem is that there aren't any folk songs about heat recovery.

The energy waste in U.S. electricity generation and delivery is even greater.  The US monopoly-dominated grid delivers only 33% of input energy as electricity and wastes the other 2/3's. This dismal efficiency has not improved in nearly 50 years.  Ouch!  By building all new power plants next to thermal users and recycling this presently wasted heat, the US could eliminate burning 13 quads of fuel per year -- 13% of the current 100 quads used by the entire economy.

We wrote in a new book* that recycling the current industrial and electric energy waste would save 17 quads of fuel and would, "reduce energy costs by $70 billion per year and cut U.S. fossil fuel use from 85.7 quads (in 2004) to 68.7 quads, roughly a 20% drop in fossil fuel and in associated CO2 greenhouse gas emissions."

Recycling waste energy, by halving the net fossil fuel used to generate electrity, would double the emissions impact of plug-in electric hybrid automobiles, and would reduce the cost of electricity for recharging -- a double double win.

David, happily there are other "unambiguously positive solutions;" society will benefit from rapid deployment of all double bottom line sollutions.

*"Energy and American Society -- Thirteen Myths", Springer, ed Marilyn Brown and Benjamin Sovocool

Tom Casten
Chairman, Recycled Energy Development LLC

Tom Casten, Chair, Recycled Energy Development LLC

According to the report, the study period is 2010-2050 (rather than starting in 2000, as the capsule summary states).  So it's not actually a case of revisionist history...

Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicles will rule in those fractions of possible futures where battery makers fulfill their promises.

Remember solar power cheaper than grid?  That was another one that would "rule" if only it would come true ...

This is really a key distinction, because while we can hope for "inventions to be named later," we should really base our fail-safe plan on things proven already.

...while it would be nice to reduce oil imports by 3 to 4 million, we currently consume about 20 million barrels of oil per day in the U.S., about 70% being used for transportation.  Saudi Arabia is not one of our biggest exporters.

Jon,

Remember that real-world populations (Japan, California) have reduced net gasoline usage.

Theory is good, but when practice does better, I'll take it!

All: when I say "unambiguous positive," I mean, "makes some (not all) things better; doesn't make anything worse." I do not mean, "leaps directly to the world we greens envision."

There is, in certain quarters, a tendency to reject unambiguous positives because they are not other, better unambiguous positives. I don't favor that approach.

grist.org

"off with odograph's head!"  

Well, actually, more like, the same page on the statistical abstract shows fuel consumption, and fuel consumption went from 70 billion gallons for cars in 1990 to 76 billion in 2004, but for SUVs/light trucks went from 36 billion to 63 billion!  So the total went from 106 billion to 139 billion, a 24% increase.  Perhaps you know better why California and Japan were different

I agree with JMG, though at the risk of sounding negative about a potentially very positive step in the right direction.

Three Kunstlerisms come to mind:
-We cannot go on pretending we can perpetuate the "happy motoring utopia".
-We simply have to make other arrangements.
-It's time to put down your ipods and get busy.

Oh, and about the Red Queen? She is actually human population growth.

Well this is the reason why I see PHEVs to be the best solution to move forward.

BioFuels on the other hand, in their worst case scenario, they make coal and oil look benign.

The the think to remember is that I will be as happy as anyone, when cheap (what, $2k per vehicle?) PHEV batteries arrive.

I am just careful to distinguish between what I wish and what I have.

I have a Prius, at a $22-23K base versus the average new car price of $27-28K, it is already cheap and effective.

I worry that these articles about what "rules" might put people off the proven solutions we have today.

Gar, how many khw do you need for a 3000 pound PHEV?  And what does that cost (per vehicle?) today?

Feel free to also list promised prices for tomorrow, they are fun, even though I can't count those eggs before they are hatched.

"The the think" really means "I think the thing"

...but I also wonder if policy should target reducing vehicle-miles, or even vehicles; which would mean more rail/buses and maybe some creative way of moving people closer to work.  Relying on higher prices will hit the middle classes more than the rich; and without carbon taxes, the price rise will be very difficult to offest without subsidies -- which I predict politicians will propose -- which would be a ridiculous way to spend money. In other words, the end of cheap gasoline is here.

Well - at one point, back when nickel was cheap it was thought that mass production could bring NiMH prices down to $300 per kWh. Many people think nickel prices have peaked and that much of the price rise was due to one time occurences, but no one expects it to return to 1998 levels. So reasonably NiMH might be mass produced for as little as $600 per kWh as opposed to $300 once expected.

In terms of what a plugin hybrid would run. You would want to make it a plugin hypercar -- ultralight construction with carbon fiber. You can make a carbon fiber body for around $7,000 -- more than a steel car body, but not that much more. This is because the material cost are higher, but you can use less carbon fiber than steel, and you can make the body in once piece, already colored, saving a LOT of labor.   The Solectria sunrises demonstrated a 250 mile range with a 30 kWh battery. So a 65 mile range (which would cover about 90% of miles driven) would require about 8 kWh of storage. So manu cost would be about $15,000 for body and batteries. If this was a true serial hybrid (with engine used only to charge battery) that would be about 85% of the cost of building the car. No gears -- use axle motor, put more less power into them. Run the wheels in reverse for braking. (Add a capacitor for regenerative braking). Since the engine would only be used to drive an alternator to charge the battery, it could run at single speed -- so that engine could be really efficient as well. Make the body aerodynamic to cut wind resistance. (You have lots of choices of shape in aerodynamic bodies.) Basically this would be a plug in hybrid hypercar. When running off our current grid it would have emissions comparable to a 90 mpg gasoline powered car. (Obviously if the grid was renewable the emissions would be close to , but not at zero running off the grid.) Running on gasoline, tt would get about 75 mpg if it was designed as a small but comfortable 4 passenger vehicle, probably about 65 mpg for a midsize or sedan. Because of all the parts you are leaving out the cost would be similar to, perhaps a bit less than, a Prius or a Civic, depending upon size and features.

One caveat here. I'm assuming $10 a pound for carbon fiber, which was the price until recently. It has shot up to $20 per pound due to demand by aerospace industry. But this is pretty universally agreed to be a blip. There is no shortage of the raw materials for carbon fiber. It is a supply and demand issue, and we can expect supply to grow to catch up with the market not being served that was perfectly profitable at $10 per pound.

As I said I don't think NiMH is the future of the PHEV. But it is the only battery you can buy today with the right number cycles and appropriate cost for this price range. If I were designing a PHEV in that price range, I'd make sure my battery management system had programmable paremeters so I could slip in any battery. That way I could use NimH as long as that was the best choice, then switch to LiON or whatever proved to be the breakthrough as soon as it was tested.

Note that the price range I gave was with batteries at current price, and carbon fiber returning to the 8-10 dollars a pound range.

If Nickel prices drop, if NiMH are truly mass produced, and if carbon fiber improvements lead to prices in $3.00-$5.00 per pound range many expect, then you would end up with a plug-in hyper-vehicle that was comparable or lower in cost than a conventional car to make.

DR wrote

All: when I say "unambiguous positive," I mean, "makes some (not all) things better; doesn't make anything worse." I do not mean, "leaps directly to the world we greens envision."

There is, in certain quarters, a tendency to reject unambiguous positives because they are not other, better unambiguous positives. I don't favor that approach.

Fair enough, except for one thing -- your "makes some things better while making none worse" ignores the time element.  Half steps that consume a lot of time and only invite MORE resources to be committed to maintenance of the status quo do, in fact, make things worse, because they consume time.

Time is the one irreplaceable resource.

Time spent fooling with faith healers instead of in chemo is lost--you don't get to say "Oh, ok, that didn't work, let's rewind and get back to the initial diagnosis and try a better approach."

Time spent dithering with placebos means that the disease goes unchecked and makes later, successful interventions less likely.

The tobacco industry sold low tar cigarettes in exactly the same way.  It's simply human nature to prefer alternatives that look as much like the present as possible (at least for those of us who enjoy affluent lives in the present).  

But awareness of our natural human desire for "unambiguously positive" steps must not blind us to the twin pincers of limited time and limited other resources.

We need to aggressively pursue solutions that plausibly might BE solutions, not those that even proponents admit cannot be.  Because there's no getting the lost years back that we waste fooling around with biofuel powered plug-in hybrids and other shiny wondertoys.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Your cost figures for a carbon fiber plug-in hybrid sound promising.  I haven't, however, seen anything like these numbers in the mainstream automotive press so was wondering where you got them ... and how solid they are.

Do you have any thoughts on the cost of converting body-making and assembly plants from working with steel bodies to carbon fiber?  Although the actual production may end up being much simpler, the logistics would presumably be very different.  Given the industry's high level of automation, I'd imagine that there would be considerable costs in reconfiguring assembly lines, putting in place new robots, etc.

I'm not all that familiar with carbon fiber production so was also wondering how the material lends itself to high levels of mass  production vis a vis steel bodies.  In the past automakers have shied away from fiberglass bodies because, while they can be cheaper for low-volume cars (think Corvette), they haven't been as well suited to high-volume production.  Any thoughts?

The Tesla was able to pass safety impact tests with no problem. It is very expensive (in 100,000 area) but that is because it is a true electric - with (I believe) 40 kWh of very expensive LioN batteries. (Firesafe LiON with a high cycle life are still much more expensive than NiMH.  There are cheap LiON batteries out there that are suitable for automobiles but they tend to last 500 or fewer deep cycles.)

Also the all Electric Selecria Sunrise was expected to meet safety requirements and sell for other 20K to 30K back in 1997. (Of course at the time nickel was cheap; the 30 kWh battery could have been mass produced much more cheaply than you could today.) One third or one fourth the batteries, even with a four gallon gas tank and charging engine ought to come it at a comparable or lower price today. I don't think there is any doubt you could produce a safe, street legal, PHEV  hypercar for around the cost of a Prius today.

Gar, you punted on my carbon fiber questions.  The implication is that you think the major auto makers can operate from a "clean sheet" approach to vehicle design.  If so, I'd respectfully disagree.  Billions have been sunk into existing production systems, so the costs of conversion to carbon fiber need to be taken into consideration in vehicle costs.  

I'm not suggesting that your proposed vehicle can't be done, particularly by a low-volume niche automaker like Tesla.  But if you expect this technology to go mass market there will need to be a realistic roadmap toward achieving it.

First a lot comparisons are made between LiON cells and NiMH battery packs. But yes there are LiON packs cheaper than NiMH packs. However they are 500 cycle packs vs. 2000 cycle packs. Lastly on TESLA. TESLA is low volume and a sports car.   Also, as an all-electric car it is much more expensive than a plug-in hydrid would be. A Plug-hybrid with a 65 mile battery range would use one third of the number of batteries of a TESLA. Not having sports car speed and power would reduce other costs. The gas tank, of course gives unlimited range when the driver goes outside of battery range.  One of looking at it is that a $100,000 Tesla shows that a limited run PHEV could be sold for 33K -- a mass produced one for about what a Prius costs.

"One of looking at it is that a $100,000 Tesla shows that a limited run PHEV could be sold for 33K -- a mass produced one for about what a Prius costs."

My Prius cost $22.4K.

You are proposing a $10K increase.

FWIW, I think the $10K delta tallies with what the add-on folks are doing ... but I think we are seeing why (combined with battery availability issues) the manufacturers are not leaping for it.

;-),  this is on the verge of turning into a "if you're smart why aren't you rich" situation.  If YOU think $33K will have the market appeal ... go for it.  Others are trying, as we speak.

33K is for a limited run. If you mass produced that would lower the costs.

A similar argument can  made on converting a Prius to PHEV. You are taking a car that already has a battery, either replacing that battery or adding a second -- bought at retail. You are modifying an existing car in  an autoshop instead of designing it and making a PHEV at the factory.  Buy an existing gasoline car and modify it to run on diesel and I'll bet it will cost you a lot more  than buying a mass produced car designed as a diesel. For that matter make diesel cars in limited runs of 100, with your own body design, and I'll bet that will cost you more than a mass produced diesel.

...On July 10, 2007, the NY Times had an article about "Cost surge for power plants", and it's our very own Jason Makansi making the point:

Part of the problem is huge price increases for the raw materials that plants are made from, including copper and nickel, which is what makes steel stainless. But the cost of finishing those commodities into components is also rising.

''There's a lack of production and manufacturing facilities in this country, and that may be partly to blame,'' said Jason Makansi, a consultant with Pearl Street, a consulting firm in St. Louis that specializes in electric utilities. But, he said, ''the bigger culprit is the incredible demand in China and the rest of Asia.''

''Basically everything is being sent over that way.''

A result of demand in China and India, he said, is that ''Duke and others want to build a new power plant based on inexpensive coal, but the capital cost to build that plant is doubling before they even put a shovel in the ground.''

And other kinds of projects that use similar materials, everything from oil refineries to natural gas terminals, are competing for the same materials and labor, experts said

Gar Lipow wrote: The Tesla was able to pass safety impact tests with no problem.

Which tests were those, Gar?

"33K is for a limited run. If you mass produced that would lower the costs."

There is nothing "limited" about this, and that is the crux of the problem.  The plug-in folks are applying mass-produced batteries, in a quick installation.  Where are the costs, in their "custom" work or the mass-produced batteries themselves?

I get that you are meaning to reassure us Gar, that the market "could" just make an inexpensive Plug-In Hybrid ... but I don't think that is where we as environmentalists (or what's Friedman's old word .. geo-greens?) should be looking.

We have a handful of choices in the 40+ mpg range.

We can choose them today.  Did you hear that the Prius is the best selling car in Silicon Valley right now?  I guess I'm part of that same demographic ... a little bit techie, a little bit green ..

And aware that (1) we have what we need now, and (2) we can always move to even better solutions later.

There are reasons that "technically feasible to make at a reasonable price" does not mean "the market will do it". And no PHEV and HEV battery backs are NOT mass produced at the moment - not in the amounts that give them true economy of scale.

My understanding is that the cells for batteries in hybrid vehicles are a standard part, packaged up for application domain.

And why not?  That's the way the electric/electronic industry works.

(their CO2 per kWh assumptions are in figure 5-5 on page 5-9 of volume 1)

In terms of crash tests:

... Not long ago, four hand-built Roadsters were taken to Germany and systematically destroyed. The crash tests were done by Siemens, the company that made the air bags for the Lotus Elise. Siemens had such liability concerns about Tesla's using its air bags, Elon Musk admits, that the only way to allay them was to have Siemens do the crash tests itself. So far, the results are encouraging. "We've already passed the tests we were most afraid of," Musk says. Now his engineers will take what they learned from those crash tests, plus the torture-track tests, tweak the Roadster a bit more, call that design final, and build a few more of those cars to crash.

OK not the U.S. crash test, but a crash test nonetheless. And I really have not heard anyone doubting the Tesla will be able to pass the U.S. crash test. Carbon fiber body, titantium cage -- why wouldn't it?

>"Will"? What makes you think the Tesla Roadster will ever be crash tested?

It's been crash tested in Germany. What makes you think it won't be crashed tested in the U.S.?

As to the titantium -- I could swear I saw something about some titantium reinforcement, but I must have misremembered.