EV Road Trip

NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly is about as good as it gets in the news radio biz, but she conducted a very weird interview the other day with reporter David Ferris of E&E News, an online news site that covers energy and environmental issues. A few observations:

• The purpose of the trip was to “inform ourselves, not just to what it’s like to be in the car, not just to what it’s like to fuel to charge the car but actually how it’s going to affect the whole economy – manufacturing, cities, jobs.”  Really?  That’s a big expectation for a road-trip.

• Re: eco-friendliness, Ferris says, “We’ve been rigorously calculating the carbon emissions of the charging we’re doing, and that has to do with the power mix in that individual state. If that state uses a lot of coal, the emissions are going to be higher. If it’s a state that uses a lot of hydropower or wind or solar, it’s going to be lower. And in either case, it’s still significantly lower emissions than gas, but it does vary a lot.” Not completely accurate. The cleanliness of electric transportation is a function of what resource is tapped when an incremental load is put on the grid at that particular moment in time, and this fluctuates depending not only on location but the time of day. The average grid-mix in a particular state is a different thing.

• Apparently, in North Dakota there are signs for electric vehicles that say “powered by coal.”  Ferris explains, “As it happens, the Lignite Energy Council, which is the advocacy group for North Dakota coal, has embraced electric vehicles as a way to create a market for itself in the future. The writing is on the wall that it’s going to get tougher for coal. And they’ve realized that electric vehicles need to charge and that they could be a good market for coal power.” That’s pathetic, of course; it’s like seeing a cigarette vending machine in a hospital lobby.

• It also would have been worth adding that we could power every car and truck on the road with electricity and the result would be a mere 14% increase in grid capacity; this is due to the dramatic increase in efficiency that comes with batteries and motors vs. internal combustion engines.

• Charging takes perhaps 30 minutes rather than say 5 for a gas tank fill-up, and the suggestion was made that this will mean that drivers become more calm and deliberate, and less impatient as people generally.  Sorry, that doesn’t seem probable in the least.  It may make drivers stay with gasoline, but I would think that it’s insanely unlikely to change their basic personalities or basic modes of living.

Strange couple of minutes. Wish she had called me.