Key words :
future energies,
climate change
,global warming
,wind power
,electric cars
,sealevel rise
,coal
Author
Author
Biography: Chris Rhodes. www.fresh-lands.com Professor
Chris Rhodes is a writer, speaker and researcher who became involved with
environmental issues while working in Russia during the aftermath...
"Electric Cars Should be Called Coal Cars": The Heretic.
13 Apr, 2011 10:24 am
Even if we could make enough electric cars fast enough to curb our oil consumption significantly, the provision of green electricity for them remains a probably insurmountable obstacle. If governments are serious about electrifying transportation, a move from personal to mass electric transport, e.g. trains and trams might be the better way to go.
I saw a wonderful play at
the Royal Court Theatre in London recently: "The Heretic" by Richard
Bean. In a nutshell, the plot centres on a female academic, Dr Diane
Cassell, who is researching sea-level rise. She finds none at some
measurement point in the Maldives, but realises that both land and sea
are rising together. Thus, while sea-levels are indeed rising, the
islanders are unlikely to be forced from their lands by them. If she
publishes her results, the department stands to lose a very lucrative
contract from an insurance company and so her Head of Department
forbids her to go public which she does, and on national television at
that, so getting fired from her job. The Human Resources person is
grimly hilarious.
It's a great play, insightfully written and skilfully performed, and raises many themes woven around the veracity of climate change, and the dubious politics of academia. The latter seem to fall increasingly in line with the plot of my novel, University Shambles, intended originally as a black comedy rather than some prescient vision of the future. http://universityshambles.com
In the play, one of her students with utterly green credentials including eating lots of garlic to apparently curb his own bodily greenhouse-gas emissions, refuses to go on a field trip in the university minibus on the grounds that it runs on fossil fuels, preferring instead to cycle forty miles there and forty miles back.
Diane asks him: "In your green future, how would we get fourteen students fifty miles to the North Yorkshire Weather Station?"
He replies: "There should be like an electric car/minibus. Electric cars don't have any emissions."
Diane responds: "Electric cars should be called coal cars. 30% of our energy comes from coal. Electricity is not naturally occurring in nature."
Now this does raise an issue about the "cleanliness" of electricity, which is all the more salient in view of the U.K. government's aim to install thousands of electric charging points around the country for electric cars with the aim to "wean us off imported oil". However, the majority of electricity in the U.K. is generated using power stations fired by coal (28%) and gas (45%), and hence even if a substantial substitution of the present 30 million British oil-fuelled cars by electric vehicles could be made, it would entail the consumption of vast quantities of these other fossil fuels instead to provide the additional electricity for them.
It is claimed in a Royal Academy of Engineering (RAE) report on electric cars that they are in any case cleaner because 80 - 90% of the energy put into them in terms of electricity is recovered in terms of useful power at the wheels, to be compared with 20 - 30% in a conventional oil-powered car. Well, that sounds good, but the reality is that only about one third of the energy in the coal or gas actually ends-up as electricity because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Carnot Cycle limit - the other two thirds being thrown away as heat. Thus the electric car is harvesting in terms of well-to-wheel miles only about 27% of the original fossil fuel energy, so not that much better than the standard car running on petrol or diesel. The difference is merely whether about the same quantity of waste heat energy is thrown away at source or in the vehicle.
The green energy company, Ecotricity refers to electric cars as "wind-cars", to stress that they could run on electricity made from green sources such as wind. Indeed, the U.K. has made the decision to focus on wind-energy to meet its carbon-emissions targets, and plans to build offshore wind-farms on an impressive scale to do the job. It is advised by the Committee on Climate Change that by 2020, 1.7 million electric cars should be on Britain's roads, or just over 5%, which I don't honestly see would make a serious hole in our demand for imported crude oil.
To decarbonize the national grid would require another 30 - 40 GW of green generating power, or "the equivalent of a hundred large offshore wind-farms," according to the chief economist of the CCC. These would need to be large indeed. Assuming a rated capacity per turbine of 5 MW, and a capacity factor (actual output) of 30%, we have 1.5 MW for each. Thus we need around 20,000 - 27,000 turbines to produce 30 - 40 GW of power. So that means 100 wind-farms with 200 - 270 turbines each. If one turbine per day were manufactured, no mean feat given present manufacturing capacity, the process would take 55 - 74 years to complete, with the installation of them as a separate effort. As noted in previous posts, there is the further question of whether there will be sufficient quantities of rare earth elements (REEs) available on the world markets to make the turbine magnets which need about one tonne of neodymium per 4 MW of rated capacity.
Clearly, we have a serious problem in switching from dirty oil cars to green electric cars, which will need to be built themselves. There are many issues of the materials needed per se, and a hybrid car e.g. a Prius needs 1 kg of praseodymium for its motor plus 15 kg of Lanthanum for its battery, while a fully electric vehicle will require much more of each. Personal electric cars are still a far better option than personal hydrogen cars for all kinds of reasons, but if governments are serious about introducing electric transportation in place of oil, the creation of electrified mass passenger transport, e.g. trains and trams would be the better way to go.
Related Reading.
"Carbon Confusion," by Sylvia Rowley. http://www.guardian.co.uk/electric-vision/electricity-supply-fossil-fuels
Key words :
future energies,
climate change
,global warming
,wind power
,electric cars
,sealevel rise
,coal
-
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Current Commentary: Energy from Nuclear Fusion – Realities, Prospects and Fantasies?
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14/02/12
Shaky Foundations for Offshore Wind Farms
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By the same author
- “Peak Oil” is Nonsense… Because There’s Enough Gas to Last 250 Years.
- Threat of Population Surge to "10 Billion" Espoused in London Theatre.
- Current Commentary: Energy from Nuclear Fusion – Realities, Prospects and Fantasies?
- Shaky Foundations for Offshore Wind Farms
- Global Warming is No Threat?
- Transition Town, Reading,
The wind industry has been grossly overestimating its capacities and reliability by presenting us data as 'averages'. This masks the fact that they are often quite unable to contribute to the grid at all and also seemingly that their load factors are quite pitiful and far below the 30% the industry claims to be their bench mark.
A succession of politicians have only been engaging with the wind industry's powerful lobbyists and have not examined the whole science. Wind is by its very nature unreliable so a spinning reserve (Coal Gas and Nuclear) always has to be available.
It was the Dutch who, in the 17th century, first counteracted the vagaries of wind by creating the very first bond market to help spread the risks of their important East India sea trade which relied on wind to deliver their goods to market.
Millers were famously known to have to turn out at all times of the day and night, and often for brief periods, and climb up the hill to the windmill in order to get some of their grain ground up.
Wind may have a small contribution to make but certainly not on the scale envisaged by our politicians who have mostly spent all their lives only closeted in Oxbridge and Westminster. Industrial turbines are largely green totem poles whose only reliability is receiving our subsidies. The tragedy is that the onshore turbines are dwarfing the subtle natural architecture of the English landscape and destroying a very human renewable resource that is appreciated by visitors from all over the world. Maybe all this for very little sound reasons at all. The idea that an electric car could eventually be run from wind energy with confidence is absurd. Better buy insurance for being trapped in your home.
The first generation of electric cars will mostly be charged from gas-fired power, this being the most rapidly advancing power generation source in most countries. The dream of powering them from solar and wind is a nice thought but, as much as I like to promote renewables, the maths don't stack up. Private transport is a luxury and its anything but green.