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More anti-ev gibberish

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He's consistently been anti-plug-in (not just anti-ev). He doesn't seem to recognize power sources for plug-ins are moving in consistently cleaner directions, while sources for gasoline vehicles are moving consistently dirtier as it gets scarcer. He also doesn't recognize the benefits of moving the tailpipe (local smog, easier control, etc.) Every article he writes is trying to move people away from plug-ins. And I notice all anti-plug-in people assume people who support it are not aware that powerplants have emissions.
 
An interesting claim indeed about hydro power. But a simplification at best, it has a lot to do with seasonality, location, amount of wind in the system, and market conditions. In the spring, once the reservoirs are full, the hydro runs 24/7. In the Northwest, the hydro runs 24/7 to meet the load. Another fallacy is that EVs will only charge with coal at night. If the EVs start charging en masse at night, then you will see natural gas generators run at night to meet the additional load. Also, wind is inherently more productive at night, and often needs to be curtailed from a lack of load, which wouldn't be a problem with EV night time charging. He also neglects Vehicle-to-Grid. When my recent paper gets accepted I will email it to him showing that EVs can be charged for 0.01$/kWh and produce millions of dollars of revenue in ancillary services markets (hence his claim of "won't save their owners significant amounts of money" is provably false), which can then replace dirtier ways providing such services. I could go on and on, I do study the power industry and EVs.

Something else I just noticed. He only has Hydro at 6% of total power output, which is low for what I have seen quoted before. Also in the "I don't think the missing data is relevant" is the wind capacity factor. The numbers say that the Wind has 50% nameplate rating as hydro and if the capacity factor is 30% (the average also from what I have seen), then this data is actually relevant, since it would be more present at night.
 
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Why would you assume hydro plants run 24/7? Only baseload plants do so - nuclear and large coal. Hydro qualifies, in fact, as a peak load producer.
I see that once again those who have opinions about the grid seldom seem to know very much about it. That includes perhaps the dimmest light in the US Senate, Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who dedicated a new windmill with the statement that "this will show those oil producers something."
Sure it will Max. We make less than 1% of our power using oil, and even that amount is rapidly declining.
 
Why would you assume hydro plants run 24/7? Only baseload plants do so - nuclear and large coal. Hydro qualifies, in fact, as a peak load producer.
I see that once again those who have opinions about the grid seldom seem to know very much about it.

Speak for yourself. There are hydro plants that can generate massive amounts of power (>1GW) over a short timescale (pumped storage) and those which generate less - maybe 100kW - constantly from the river flow.
 
..., Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, who dedicated a new windmill with the statement that "this will show those oil producers something."
Sure it will Max. We make less than 1% of our power using oil, and even that amount is rapidly declining.

Sen Baucus is simply showing the Oil Producers some love. You see, the OPs use massive amounts of electricity to refine oil into gasoline. A little clean juice for them to make dirty burning chemicals is throwing them a bone.

The facts are that it takes 7.5 kWh to refine oil into a gallon of gasoline. The 2nd largest users of electricity in the state of California are the refineries. (the state itself is #1)

An EV can travel 30 miles on that 7.5kw of electricity. And remember, we are just talking about refining. Oil takes even more electricity when you look at searching, test holes, drilling, extracting, pumping to storage, pumping to oil ships, then the shipping (OMG the shipping) pumping to the refinery and then as gasoline, pumping transporting and pumping into a car. Why not just put that clean Wind turbine electricity straight into the car? Gasoline is double dirty. Max helped make a tiny portion of it just plain dirty.
 
I really started to wonder when I read this:

Can that be true? I always assumed that hydroelectric power plants ran 24x7.

Petersen is old anti-ev writer I've had a lot of fights with (when I was active in seekingalpha). He is all for hybrids - that use new lead acid batteries that he promotes.

Anyway, what he says is partly true. If a reagion has nukes & large coal plants that can't be shutdown (baseload) those regions will reduce hybro, NG and other generation to load balance.

In the northwest they actaully don't use all the wind power because of this . So when I charge at home it would mostly use wind and not baseload. In anycase most utilities have green power programs where they promise to buy additional green power to meet my consumption. That costs me 10 bucks a month.

There is an elaborate argonne national lab study on various regions / timings of charging and how that would affect emissions. They have done modeling using expected generation mix. I'll link it here when I find it. Bottom line, in a lot of states, you would get cleaner (and more expensive) NG power if you charge during day.

Update : http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/559.pdf

Here is an older study that gives exactly what we are talking about.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/v41_1_08/regional_phev_analysis.pdf
 
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Why would you assume hydro plants run 24/7?
Because once your reservoir is full, you either run the water through the turbines and generate, or you spill it over the top and get nothing. In the spring, the runoff often exceeds the reservoir potential so its use it or lose it. Also, due to migratory fish constraints, you often can't spill too much water because of the nitrogen it introduces in the water. This is why BPA will trip fully producing wind plants offline sometimes because they can't reduce hydro output nor can they spill. They were actually fined a lot of money in 2008 I believe when they did spill due to nitrogen levels. In the Pacific Northwest, the hydro on the Columbia River is the base load. Grand Coulee Dam is the largest power plant in the US at over 8 GW.
 
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Most of the "EVs will require coal" scenarios (or pocket-calculator based misinterpretations of scenarios) make projections as if the only thing to happen would be an isolated development of inflexible EV charging. Some of them are successful in pointing out things that need to be avoided. Steven Chu's job is to avoid those things. So I looked on his blog (the DOE website) for an answer. At least I found these two recent items: ( ;-) )

EERE News: DOE Pursues SunShot Initiative to Achieve Cost Competitive Solar Energy by 2020
February 04, 2011 U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced additional details of the Department of Energy's "SunShot" initiative to reduce the total costs of photovoltaic solar energy systems by about 75% so that they are cost competitive at large scale with other forms of energy without subsidies before the end of the decade. By reducing the cost for utility scale installations by about 75% to roughly $1 a watt—which would correspond to roughly 6 cents per kilowatt-hour—solar energy systems could be broadly deployed across the country.

EERE News: Salazar, Chu Announce Major Offshore Wind Initiatives
Deployment of clean, renewable offshore wind energy will help meet the President's goal of generating 80% of the nation's electricity from clean energy sources by 2035.

Just the usual stuff, not that I think it would convince anyone who isn't already convinced. Worst case as I see it: Maybe we'll need intermediate batteries to even out supply and demand, but those can be much cheaper, larger-scale. Not a real problem either.

For me, the point is that an EV will take advantage of any upcoming clean energy even if built today. It's not fixed at time of purchase. Although EVs will probably be, at first, more popular in states that already have cleaner energy, it would probably be good if EVs are already there when energy becomes cleaner.

That's how it makes sense to me. Aside from all the other advantages (such as fresh air in cities), that is. Just wanted to write that down. :)
 
I like how they all complain about EV subsidies but fail to mention the carrier fleet in the straights of Hormuz and all of the rest of the defense expenditures required to keep cheap gasoline. Factor that in, and EV subsidies aren't even on par with gas subsidies.
 
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1360062/Watchdog-says-electric-cars-dirty-diesel.html

I replied with:

I thought from the headline that you were going to say that electric cars were as dirty as diesel...

Seems like in every case there is at least a 20% saving and if my schoolboy maths is correct, the Suzuki is producing 92% more emissions than its electric Mitsubishi rival.

Which analyse the emissions from the source power stations in the case of the electric cars but not the same for the diesels. What about the energy used to transport the crude, refine it and transport it to the filling station. The energy used to refine the oil alone is 9kWh / gallon - enough to drive the EV well over 30 miles (and that's before it's reached your diesel car).

So we have cars that *are* cleaner than disels (as your story admits) but that's not the only benefit. We source our fuel from foreign suppliers and as the current trouble across the Middle East demonstrates, these are unstable and unreliable. Changing our cars to electric gives us the freedom to power them with whatever we like.