Jun 11 2008
The 100 MPG Car
OK, I’m ready. I want my electric car. I would rather not pay $4.00 a gallon for gasoline (I know, I’m a spoiled American), I would rather not continue to pour carbon dioxide from my tailpipe into the atmosphere, and I am a hopeless technophile and electric cars are just cool.
So I was interested to read that NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, has created a prototype plug-in solar hybrid that gets 100 mpg. That is exactly what I want my next car to be because it seems that it where the technology is (or at least will be soon). I have been following this technology for a while, and while the tech media generally is heavy on the hype, it seems to me that we are genuinely getting close and this is a viable technology.
What NREL did was take a Prius – Toyota’s hybrid sedan – add a $40,000 lithium ion battery, add a $2,500 solar panel, and voila – 100 mpg. The resultant car costs $70,000, which is prohibitive to widespread adoption (and certainly to my personal adoption).
NREL makes the point that this is a single prototype. A mass-produced version would certainly be cheaper. But, the batteries and solar panels are somewhat fixed costs that will significantly raise the price of any similarly equipped car.
I also think the article skimmed over another point – the car isn’t really getting 100 miles per gallon – it’s getting 100 miles per gallon + the electricity charged from the grid to the battery. The solar panels likely contribute little to the overall charge in the battery (and this will vary wildly based upon geographic location, weather, time of day, and where you park). Most of the energy to drive the car comes from the grid. If you drive less than about 60 miles per day commuting, virtually all of the power will come from this source.
Don’t get me wrong – this is a good thing. This is what I want. At $4.00 per gallon, a 30 MPG car would cost 13.3 cents per mile to drive. A similar electric car would cost about 3 cents per mile – if charged from the grid off -peak. Add a solar panel and that decreases the cost a bit further. Also, electric cars have efficiency options, like regenerative breaking, that pure combustion engine cars do not.
The question remains, though, is the technology ready? The new lithium-ion batteries are able to store enough energy and provide enough power, but they are still very expensive. Also, there lifespan is as yet unknown. Will they survive the lifetime of the car, or will you have to spend thousands of dollars in 2-3 years to replace it?
What about the solar panels (which are admittedly an optional addition)? Will they pay for themselves over the lifetime of the car?
Better batteries and better options (like ultra-capacitors), at least we are told by the tech magazines, are on the horizon – but when will they manifest?
Charging off the grid off peak is a great idea in many ways. Power plants usually have untapped energy production capacity that go unused off-peak. They would love to better balance their production by increasing off-peak demand. Imagine millions of people recharging their cars overnight during off-peak hours. Therefore much of the increased use of electricity would not even require additional power plants – they would use the currently untapped production of existing power plants.
But eventually the increased use of electricity will require expanding our electrical power production. The energy has to come from somewhere, and if we build more coal-burning plants (or simply increase the output of existing coal-burning plants) to charge our electric cars any imagined environmental benefit will be erased. Electric cars may shift our energy dependence partly from foreign oil to domestic coal, but I don’t think the environment cares about that.
As an aside – I am not necessarily talking about global warming. Pollution from coal-burning plants is a significant health hazard resulting in numerous excess deaths from asthma and related lung disorders.
Therefore any discussion of electric cars must be linked to thinking about our electricity infrastructure. I personally think solar and nuclear will be the best options, with other clean energy sources (like wind, hydroelectric, geothermal) playing lesser but important roles. We’ll see.
Meanwhile – I do want my plug-in solar electric car.
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12 Responses to “The 100 MPG Car”
You might want to take a look at the Aptera (www.aptera.com), which is supposed to be available later this year (but only in California). There will be hybrid and electric only versions, both for under $30,000.
Steve,
I’ll have to go find a specific reference, but you’re wrong about the use of electricity in cars just shifting the source of pollutants around–power plants, coal-burning power plants, are *way* less polluting than cars. It’s not even close. I’m not saying it’s zero, or that we shouldn’t consider that a shift to electricity is free, pollution-wise, but it would be a major shift to a cleaner world. Cars represent an enormous percentage of our air-borne pollutants.
I’m off to go find a reference.
msd
Matt, you may be right. I could not find a primary reference, only secondary sources. But it seems from my reading that coal plants that have modern methods of limiting pollution are better, but older plants or ones that are not required to recapture carbon, etc. are as bad or worse. You also have to consider the environmental effects of coal mining in your total assessment.
My primary point, though, is that you have to consider the entire chain of energy production and transport, not just the end user. My problem with this article is that it focussed entirely on the use of gasoline and didn’t discuss the fact that you would be charging the batter off the grid and what are the implications of that.
Matt is correct. There are substantial advantages to displacing power generation for vehicles from mobile sources running on gasoline to large stationary electric power plants. Most of the stationary plants use coal, but they can use anything including nuclear and wind. Large plants do have economies of scale and emissions of NOx and SO2 can be controlled. There is also the issue of location, vehicles emit pollutants in cities at ground level. Power plants emit pollutants in more remote areas from high stacks in thermal plumes that rise as they mix with air. The local effects are much less.
People are working on CO2 sequestration for large power plants (including myself). Right now there are no power plants that sequester CO2. If CO2 is sequestered (properly of course), there are essentially no environmental impacts associated with the combustion. There are still effects associated with mining, transportation, and electricity distribution. CO2 sequestration can only be implemented for large stationary plants; it is not feasible for anything mobile. CO2 from burning biomass can be sequestered and that does have the effect of reducing the net CO2 in the atmosphere.
Something that many people don’t realize about wood is that when wood is harvested about half the carbon associated with the living trees goes up immediately as CO2. That is the twigs, the roots, the leaves, the bark, all the non-usable bits of the tree go up immediately as CO2. When the forest regrows, it takes many decades for that immediate CO2 release to be “paid back”. For old growth forest it takes centuries.
For CO2 regulation to be effective, the regulations have to take into account the “time value” of CO2 emissions. CO2 emitted today is worse than CO2 emitted 50 years from now.
There is no foreseeable alternative to liquid hydrocarbon fuels for powering aircraft and long range trucks. Shipping could be shifted to rail, but that requires a large investment (up front) in the rail system which is useless for anything else (and so has no liquidation value). With energy prices so low (even at $4/gal) and so volatile, rail simply can’t compete for capital because all it takes is a drop in the price and rail become uneconomic again and the stranded investment is lost.
If vehicles could be powered by fuel cells, then the efficiency of the mobile sources becomes very high. At that time, a switch to co-generation with parked vehicles generating electricity for the grid, while charging batteries, while using natural gas from a stationary source (the home connection) and delivering the waste heat to be used for domestic heating and hot water could make sense. That will likely never happen because those who control the transfer pricing will ensure that they get so much of the value added that it isn’t worth it for anyone to do it.
Another consideration is disposal of the vehicle at the end of its life, though I’m having trouble locating info on the environmental effects of disposing of the batteries once the vehicle’s natural life has expired. Recycling is obvious, but that too has its effects on the environment.
A friend recommended Neurologica to me and for the past month or so I have found the entries well-conceived and executed. I understand this entry has been largely dedicated to technological advances, and it, too, has been informative about those fronts. However, I think any discussion about energy and consumption is incomplete if it does not include the simple observations about the contemporary built environment.
I’m speaking primarily of the low-density land developments and zoning policies that make automobile ownership a prerequisite for obtaining such necessities as food and clothing. I hate to bring lyrics into such rigidly logical discussions, but I find this one in particular demonstrates the circular logic of the situation. “Buy this car to drive to work/Drive to work to pay for this car.”
Several weeks ago I was in Rome. I walked across Rome from the far side of the Vatican to the train station Roma Termini. This was the capital of world at one time and it took me an hour to walk by untold numbers of businesses, markets, street vendors, and monuments. While visiting my parents in the suburban Southeast, I walked to the second closest grocery store. It took thirty minutes.
I’ll add more later but I wanted to close with that for now.
I do believe Tesla Motors, who currently makes the $110k roadster (awesome car if you havent seen it), is scheduled to come out with a much more affordable option mid next year that is entirely electric and gets about 210 MPC. I’m holding off on buying anything until that time to see what it looks like both physically and how the Roadster is doing with its consumers.
I’m also waiting for my “Dream Car” to come out. So far this ( http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/08/the_hybrid_mini.phpt ) is the closest I’ve seen. If I could get this kind of technology in a comfortable mini-van form factor I’d be completely satisfied for the next decade!
I especially like the motor-per-wheel approach that gives me variable acceleration and braking as part of the power system instead of in addition to it.
CO2 from a coal fired power plant is being used for a C02 flood in an oil field. I think the oil field is in Saskatchewan or Manitoba and the power plant is in North Dakota or it might be the other way around. Depleted oil and gas reservoirs are a good place to sequester C02 since much of the infastructure is already there.
I have been driving a Plug-in Hybrid for the past year using Clean Domestic Wind Power to reduce my need for Dirty Foreign Oil.
I build kits too if you want to drive one.
Batteries are bulky, heavy, expensive and environmentally unfriendly, solar panels are expensive, fragile, heavy, and don’t produce nearly enough electricity.
Fuel cells on the other hand are not any of these (barring expensive) but the technology isn’t any where near ready nor does it look like it will be any time soon
Instead of using all of this crap how about a car that just burns straight hydrogen? I suppose a problem is it would burn the cylinders but I would think this obstacle is way less daunting than all the others. Carrying it is more dangerous than gas but I guess we shouldn’t bother with fuel cells either than.
If we could automate cars so they were driven by computers this would save bucket loads of energy, save lives, double the capacity of the current infrastructure, drastically reduce travel times, seems like this technology is the most feasible, we have the computing power and technology, we just need to develop the hardware and software.
Develop an infrastructure where cars could tap into electricity the way the toy slot cars and trains we used as kids do. This would eliminate the need for heavy batteries and the loss of efficiency associated with them.
Transfer from private ownership to public and make all cars basically uniform. Instead of parking the car in a parking lot you simply put a card in it drive it to your location and than do your business while it goes and picks someone else up. When you need a car you just call one with your phone. If for some reason you need to keep a car with you it can be done for a slightly higher cost. Integrate this idea with carpooling!
I’m thinking that dude that discovered he could split water molecules with radio waves hit on something after all. If it could be transmitted over relatively large distances without a measurable loss we could use this technology to beam microwaves generated from solar panels in space and convert water to hydrogen.
Not a chemist but I wonder if it could be possible to take waste carbon from coal fired plants and combine it with hydrogen through some kind of process to make petroleum (hydrocarbons) This might not be cheap energy but it would solve the problem of where to put the stuff.
Hello Stephen (and all others),
Grat post and great discussion – but even among this enlightened crowd, I sense a lack of real information on the topics of energy and transportation. Apparently no one knows that we are MUCH further along than the linked article implies. Even the correct posts (like Matt’s) have not been able to cite sources – so I’m about tact as one
.
Foremost, I really recommend to visit the excellent Tesla Motors Website (http://www.teslamotors.com), which has a couple of white papers dealing with the questions in your Blog Post – and destroys some of the myths that have come up in the discussion here.
As an aside: I am NOT involved with Tesla (a Silicon Valley Start-Up that has the Google founders on board), but am really delighted with their car, which is fully electric (NOT a hybrid), gets 135 mpg (energetic equivalent), does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds (!!!!!) and runs well over 125 mph. It also looks what kids today call “SICK!”. Quite different from the crappy vehicle that NREL built…
1) “Grid Electricity must be ramped up for electic cars”
Not true. Especially at off-peak times (like at night), vast amounts of energy are generated, pumped out in to the grid and never used. This is so because large-scale plants (coal, nuclear) cannot be switched on and off according to load. So, as most people will charge their electic vehicle at night, almost NO new power plants will have to be built until truly vast number of EVs are on the road. Even then, they will act to balance loads more evenly, so existing power plants can be used with higher efficiency.
2) “EVs only transfer pollution from the tail pipe to the smoke stack (from the vehicle to the power plant)”
Not true. EVS are way more efficient “well-to-wheel” than conventional ICU-powered cars (for a handy chart, see http://www.teslamotors.com/efficiency/well_to_wheel.php).
3) “Adoption of EVS is not practical”
Plain wrong. In addition to efficiency gains for the cars and the powerplants (see last two items), there is a very practical reason for starting to use EVS right now: With advances in power generation technology, a society has to be apply the latest tech to only 100s of power plants, instead of to millions of seperate cars. The cars “automatically update”, since they only receive energy and not generate them.
4) “Solar panels on the car don’t make sense (yet)”
.
Exactly right – at max (12 hrs parking time in the full sun), they might generate enough power to drive 3 or 4 miles. Which is why the Tesla Roadster does not have them. One should put the cells on the Garage instead
5) “The NREL-Prius is a good first step.”
Wrong. Nobody buys an “enviro-pimped” $ 75,000 PRIUS. Nobody will even (when costs come down…) buy a Prius that costs $ 40,000. But people WILL buy a $ 100,000 Ferrari-contender that is environmentally conscious. Since Li-Ion batteries are still very expensive, it makes sense to start the EV revolution from the top-end (as other consumer products like Flat-panel-TVs, 3G cell phones etc. have done), build economies of scale and work your way down to the mass market. The other way around is doomed from the start.
6) “How long can Li-Ion batteries last?”
.
Tesla for example gives a warranty for 100,000 miles or 5 years. You can also look at manufacturer like 1-2-3 or AltairNano who predict even better lifetime and are willing to bet money on it.
Eventually (maybe in 10 years?), the new Stanford battery tech (http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/january9/nanowire-010908.html) should be out of the labs, in the manufacturing lines and should be about ready to displace today’s crude stuff
6) Hydrogen
Not a good idea. Awful “well-to-wheel” efficiency. People tend to forget that Hydrogen is NOT a raw material – it needs to be generated with the same electic power we produce by burning fossil fuels. As for clean hydrogen production – why would anyone want to use solar power to create hydrogen, ship said hydrogen around (either using a lot of it for the transport or once again using gasoline), put it in a fuel-cell with less than 60% efficiency, only to get power again which drives the wheels of a car? Instead: Put the power in the grid, charge a battery, drive the car.
Hope this helps,
- Markus (from Germany)