Electric Transportation and Solar Energy
A reader asked that I comment on this fairly euphoric piece, suggesting that the world economy can and will be revived with the aggressive adoption of electric transportation and photovoltaics. Here are a few bits and pieces of my reaction.
• There are quite a number of industry observers who share optimism associated with the economic impact of a huge investment in cleantech. As I wrote here, probably the most visible are Amory Lovins and Jeremy Rifkin, but there are plenty of others.
• For my money, the low-hanging fruit here is not actually renewable energy at all, but energy efficiency. Obviously, I believe in clean energy in many of its forms, but for the next decade or so, the greatest contribution to slowing the damage that we’re doing to our home planet will come through simply using less energy, and using it more wisely.
• Electric transportation is not the panacea that most people think it to be. In the U.S., where burning coal is the lowest-cost baseload power, more EVs mean burning more coal. Of course, we (many of us anyway) are working hard to change this, but such change will be a long time coming.
• What will happen in the world is only partially based on rationality and a sincere concern for the good of mankind. To a far larger degree, it’s driven by the unlovely confluence of big money and big government. This opens up all kinds of crazy things:
a) Ongoing subsidies for the oil companies, and elimination of things like the production tax credit for wind
b) Continuing wars in the regions of the world that were geologically blessed (cursed?) with oil
c) Oil pipelines, fracking, a nuclear renaissance (God help us), etc.
d) Nonsensical policies made in back rooms promoting the next corn ethanol
e) Continued refusal to consider the externalities of fossil fuels in the cost equation, i.e., passing along the cost of long-term ecological and human health damage to our children and grandchildren
• Over the many decades, I’ve proven that my crystal ball is no better than anyone else’s. But even in the absence of all the evil and stupidity described above, I have to think that renewable energy technologies are going to become cost-competitive with fossil fuels. Keep in mind that PV is only one of these; I certainly wouldn’t discount wind and the others.
• The main objection I have with the article per se is its oversimplification of an extremely complex set of moving parts, one of which is energy storage. For example, the sun happens to shine when our cars aren’t at home in their garages. The presence of wind energy, on the other hand, has a better congruence to the times at which we’d like to charge our vehicles. The whole set of situations with storage, smart-grid, V2G (vehicle to grid), etc. makes this far more complicated than the author seems to understand.
• The adoption curve of electric vehicles is very much a function of the consumer value proposition, which for the moment is not at all attractive. We’re asking consumers to pay huge amounts of money for unappealing and inconvenient cars.
• A related point: obviously, the oil companies are prepared to fight the EV movement to the death. But anyone who thinks that the auto OEMs are anxious to make this happen is severely misguided.
Well, I hope I’ve been able to shed a bit of light on this. Sorry I can’t join in the euphoria, but I don’t believe the answer is that simple. Having said that, it’s Saturday night. Might be time for that cold martini pictured above.
Thanks for writing.
Sorry, Craig, but on a global basis we are not going to use less energy. Rather, we are greatly going to increase energy consumption.
Although it is conceivable that the U.S., Australia, and perhaps a few other prosperous countries may somewhat reduce energy usage, many of the world’s people live in poverty and cannot be lifted out of poverty without greatly increasing energy consumption. Also, in many places of the world, water consumption must be greatly increased for sanitation and to increase crop yields. Therefore, even if we were able to reduce dramatically energy usage here in the U.S. and in a few other prosperous countries, global energy consumption would still greatly increase. The alternative would be to condemn billions of people to perpetual poverty and that would be unacceptable.
Considering the above, we must develop clean energy systems to permit global energy usage to increase greatly without negative effects on the environment. Probably only nuclear energy is capable of doing the job, but our current nuclear technology is unacceptable, except perhaps as only a stop-gap measure to be phased out when a better nuclear technology becomes ready to implement on a large scale.
We all wake up in the morning with choices, most of them are put in an easy pill for us by some happy to do so corporation, Media, or otherwise. We are free to chose as we will, we use logic that is perfect as logic is. We ruin this logic with information from those happy corporations thru the media they pay, own and control. Our choices are far more than the quick glance we are tuned to. This is like the magician and the upside down cups moving around by fast hands. Which cup has the “Prize” under it? Hypnosis, distraction, and Wa-La we are puppets. I am not resigned to this, I am suggesting you not be either. Mass Media is not your friend. ” We are the droids they are looking for” . What ever the options on the table are, none are wise is most likely. We must look past the box we are in.
“Obey” the options is the message, greed & control is the motor we are being steered to an unsustainable place. All for the profit of others. Greg Chick
Comparison, one year’s motoring (~10-12K miles) in:
a) Diesel car – running on 2nd generation biodiesel needs about 2,000 sq-m of agricultural land for biofuel crop.
b) Petrol car – running on bioethanol from sugarbeet (UK) needs about 7,000 sq-m of agricultural land for biofuel crop.
c)BEV – running on electricity generated by CPV (Concentrating PV) located in non-agricultural land/deserts requires about 3sq-m of panels or 12 to 15 sq-m of land.
In UK, if all road transport converted to electric it could reduce the UK’s end use energy budget buy about 20%, about 60Mtoe of fossil fuels would be replaced by about 20Mtoe of renewable electricity.
OK this isn’t going to happen in the next couple of years but current advances in battery technologies I believe indicates that this is a realistic target to aim for, where as propping up the existing transport infrastructure with fossil fuel substitutes, even hydrogen, is not viable in the long term.