So, electric vehicles (EVs) were looking pretty good in part 2. They’re much more energy efficient than regular cars, at least on a “tank-to-wheels” basis. Today, I’ll talk about their greenhouse gas emissions, starting with a quote from my thesis:
Advanced vehicles could make a sizeable contribution to emissions reduction in New Zealand. BEVs generate zero tank-to-wheels greenhouse gas emissions, and PHEVs only produce emissions when using their internal combustion engines. However, the well-to-wheels emissions for advanced vehicles depend on the source of electricity used to charge the vehicle. These sources, of course, vary substantially between countries, with many countries generating the bulk of their electricity from coal or oil. In fact, for countries such as the US, UK, China and Australia, Matthew-Wilson (2010) estimates that the Tesla Roadster BEV would actually produce higher well-to-wheels CO2 emissions than the conventional Lotus Elise on which it is based. Doucette and McCulloch (2011) and de Sisternes (2010) reach similar conclusions.
As such, the potential for PHEVs and BEVs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions depends on low-emissions sources of electricity. For much of the world, a shift towards these electricity sources will be needed if advanced vehicles are to play any part in reducing emissions. The difficulties in doing so would be one reason for The Boston Consulting Group’s (2009, p. 2) argument that conventional vehicle “technologies will be the most cost-effective way to reduce CO2 emissions on a broad scale”.
I want to highlight the end of that first paragraph. For many of the world’s largest economies, EVs wouldn’t actually reduce emissions at all, based on the current mix of power generation. Indeed, they could even increase emissions – in which case, what’s the point? True, they could help with energy security and wean countries off expensive oil imports (things I’ll look at in future posts), but there’s a lot of cost involved in buying into the technology, installing infrastructure and so on.
In order for EVs to reduce emissions, there will have to be a major shift in the way the world generates power. And, while renewable generation is growing, it still makes up a tiny fraction of the world’s electricity supply.
The New Zealand Situation
Back to New Zealand, where things look a bit better:
Of course, New Zealand is in a much more favourable position, with a large renewable electricity base. The New Zealand Government (2007, p. 22) points out that our “energy resources are plentiful and cheap by world standards… it is easier for New Zealand to commit to a low emissions electricity system than almost any other country”. As shown below, we can reduce our emissions significantly by transitioning to advanced vehicles. Matthew-Wilson (2010) estimates that in New Zealand, a Tesla Roadster would create less than one-third the CO2-equivalent emissions of a Lotus Elise.
I made my own calculations as well, and found that:
“A BEV using 20 kWh of electricity per 100 km of travel would produce emissions of 3.9 kg of CO2-equivalent emissions over this distance, a well-to-wheels measure. This is around 17% of the level of emissions produced by a typical petrol car, illustrating the potential for major emissions savings”.
Indeed, if New Zealand transitions to having more renewable electricity (we’re currently a little over 70% renewable, with aspirational targets of 90% by 2025), those emissions will drop even further. Emissions could become essentially negligible for electric cars, or trains or buses for that matter.
EV emissions – great for NZ, not for most other countries
Yes, electric cars could make a big difference to New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions. However, that’s not the case for most countries. We’ve got plenty of renewable electricity, but most countries don’t, and that means their power plants have much higher emissions. This means that most countries have a lot less to gain from implementing EVs.
This is a major issue, because New Zealand is a tiny market in the scheme of things. The availability and price-competitiveness of electric cars will be determined by much larger markets – where the case for switching to advanced vehicles is much weaker. As such, prices will not fall as quickly as they would if all countries had low-emissions electricity systems, and there might not be as many different models and variants available. This will slow the uptake of PHEVs and BEVs in New Zealand as well.
So, it’s been clearly established that EVs can reduce emissions in New Zealand at least. There are still some questions around whether they are the most cost-effective way of reducing emissions, and whether our power grid can handle them – and those things will need to wait for another day.
Processing...
Yup an electric car that runs on coal is only going to move pollution. I read somewhere that every Chevy Volt had cost $250,000 in US subsidies. Presumably that will come down as they sell more.
I don’t know if you factored this into your calculations but the energy demand of transporting, refining, and then transporting petrol to tens of thousands of petrol stations is enormous. Then there are the huge administrative costs in managing the distribution system (oil companies have really big headquarters buildings). Being able to plug a car into a wall eliminates quite a few middlemen.
Hi Steve, no, those things aren’t really factored into my calculations. They should be, ideally, but I didn’t have any good stats to hand on them. A big part of those emissions/ energy use would occur overseas rather than NZ, but that is irrelevant from a climate change perspective of course…
There another part to having a BEV fleet even for countries with higher well-to-wheel efficiencies and that when combined with smart-grid technologies the BEV allows use as a way to smooth peak power spikes in your electrical grid by using the BEV as a mobile (but parked up) battery.
With Electrical Generation the system has to be designed for the peak load not the base/average load – so you have to over-commit generation resources (and have peak power plants idling most of the time) to cater for the peaks.
If everyone with a BEV was plugged in to grid most of the day and it was smart-grid aware, when the Electrical Grid needed power it could draw energy out of the BEVs battery to “top up” the grid.
While each BEV would only supply a few tens of kWh – with enough BEVs in the smartgrid you could obtain Megawatt hours easily, and avoid the need for expensive over capacity in generation.
Think of it as like a kind of crowd-sourced electrical grid.
Of course, a country full of BEVs with flat batteries isn’t much help so the idea would be that the BEV would not allow all its power to be used so you always ensured your BEV could “Get you home”.
And of course, once home, the BEV would charge – but after the peak load had passed.
The pay off for BEV users: cheaper/low cost power to recharge their cars – on the understanding that the power could be drawn down if needed during the day.
The pay off for NZ Inc, could be a massive saving in peak power generation.
Another way of putting this is that enough BEVs in garages all over the country plugged in at night and it’s a significant amount of distributed storage, especially for nocturnal wind sourced electricity.
Hell of a way to buy that storage though, the other use for this power is water heating, which is essentially what they do in Australia to use surplus coal fired electrons as coal plants are as about as easy to turn round as the Titanic. Or at least it greatly reduces their efficiency to ramp them up and down with demand.
Between solar during the day and cheap night rates hot water can be very cheaply produced.
Anyway intermittency of renewable production can be managed by time shifting the demand through these two uses.
Yeah sure, you wouldn’t buy BEVs for that purpose, but if they are in your transport fleet its a side benefit you can consider.
And yep you can make cheaper hot water from solar using cheap night rates, and I suppose that since hot water stays hot for a while it is a good store of energy for washing stuff.
Can’t run your transport system on hot water though.
And while it may seem a lot of infrastructure to put in place – 90% of it is already at your home. And it won’t happen overnight.
30 years ago the thought that everyone would have a mobile phone with GPS in it enabling the spooks to track the location where every mobile phone call in the US was placed from would have seemed fantastic with the level of distributed compute power needed to run the system – and yet here we all are in 2013, the most surveiled population of humans that ever walked the globe.
Of course, but people can be incentivised to charge overnight with off peak night rates. Still there is the problem of the high capital cost of the vehicles in the first place which means that they are much more likely to stack up for people driving a great deal, eg taxi drivers, but then they’ll probably need to charge more frequently [I have no idea how many kms the average taxi does in a day- anyone?].
Greg
I think the spooks have changed the date on your phone. It’s 2014
Ahh!, so they have, I need to change my phone carrier away from the “NSA” network my phone keeps prompt me to use 🙂
Must be under surveillance still for my radical ideas like roads are for all and believing that “PT is not dirty word”.
What is BEV?
Battery Electric Vehicle
Also note PHEV, Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle
They don’t pay RUC’s either
They actually do. Hybrid vehicles pay tax on petrol only. Electric cars pay RUC just like diesels.
Believe the RUCs are suspended in some sort of tiny nod to greenishness.
You’re right, they scrapped it a few years back…. temporarily 😉
Timeshifting of intermittent renewable power can also be achieved like this: http://peakenergy.blogspot.com.au/2014/02/american-wind-power-to-be-stored-in.html
Although more likely and more efficiently this is achieved simply by drawing down less hydro power when wind or whatever is delivering more. Helps to have power cos with both hydro and renewable generation so the savings are kept in house. Hydro power plants, unlike big thermal ones are actually relatively nimble, they can be ramped up or down pretty quickly. I remember standing in the MRP control room as they cranked up the turbines on the Waikato hydro stations in anticipation of Auckland’s evening draw down- half an hour early to be safe.
This thread is some sort of Greenpeace porn fantasy. BEV’s are never going to be a mainstream transportation mode in NZ or any other country.
I know most of you will bleed blood over this but the growth transport fuel is going to be diesel.
What thread are you reading Phil? It seems rather downbeat on BEVs to me.
Still you can go home and leave your patio heater on all night if it cheers you up.
Bleed blood? What do you bleed, hydrocarbons?
well I am a petrol head but I’m saving up for a hybrid car now.
Ah, hybrids. The first step on the way along the evolutionary path to BEVs: ICEV, hybrid, PHEV, BEV. Or are you buying a fuel cell hybrid Phil?
DB9 plug-in by chance Phil?
The important point John makes in his post is that NZ has strong renewable power gen but the rest of the world doesn’t. Because of this there is little incentive to produce a proper BEV that could become a mainstream transport vehicle. No one is going to make a car based on potential sales to the NZ market.
Meanwhile in Asia – where there is staggering growth in car sales the cheapest transport fuel is diesel.
Have a look at this link that discusses car sales growth in China http://www.businessinsider.com/china-car-market-up-14-percent-20-million-sales-2014-1
and this link that shows power gen in China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_China
Well Phil regardless of what you believe, the truth is that the planet has 1 billion cars on it already.
But the next billion cars cannot be the same as the 1 billion already existing on the planet.
The planet simply doesn’t have the capacity to sustainably make nor in fact to handle the pollutants from another billion cars that are using ICEs.
It may not stop your petrol head behaviour, but in time, the developing world will (like the developed world) run out of resources and options.
You may not be personally affected tomorrow, but sooner than later it will affect everyone
So diesel may be a fuel used for Asian cars, but I read that China and many other Asian countries have severe smog problems now from the existing Fossil fuels used for power generation and transportation. How will adding a billion more Ice powered cars to Asian roads help solve that issue?
Short answer: It won’t.
It may not be a BEV that Asian countries use to solve their problems, but they (and us) will need a solution that requires different thinking to the kind of thinking that got us here.
When you plug in an EV you have to ask – where is the electricity for this charge coming from? Probably not a renewable source cos those sources are already running flat out. It’s probably a non renewable source.
In other words you can’t look at NZ’s TOTAL renewable generation to make your calculations, you have to look at the MARGINAL generation. Noone is letting extra water through the dam for your car. Instead, someone is turning up the gas or putting more coal in the burner.
So EV’s don’t look that good.
I disagree, Nick – EVs can be easily charged outside of peak demand hours, and are absolutely compatible (indeed, complementary) with a renewable network. They’re likely to help with the marginal emissions issue. Remember, it’s not just hydro; wind is increasingly important too. I’ll look at the issues you raise in future posts.
Nick see above about night charging… anyway there are other ways to look at energy and movement, and of course we know that by far the most efficient conversion of energy into distance for a human is no kind of car at all:
I love that even swimming is at least three times more efficient than an sov
The amazing bicycle, the only machine invented by humans that has improved on the efficiency of walking.
It is true that coal and gas will be used and perhaps even diesil. However, even if we ran power plants directly offoil based fuels and charged our batteries, the economy of scale in producing efficient energy would still make it worthwhile. It is far easier to use tecvhnology to make one pwoer plant more efficient than to try and make a million cars efficient.
Of course BEVs still have the problem of the costs and environmental impact of making batteries. Plus there are a huge amount of resources used to make a car BEV, PHEV, hybrid or ICE. There are 7 gallons of oil in each tyre.
However, as Sailor Boy says below, EVs/PHEVs will only replace a small proportion of the existing fleet. The fact is as fuel prices inexorably rise, there will just be less and less ICE vehicles until they are only used for transport and by those with more money than sense. In other words transport history will rewind – maybe to the 1950s or maybe to the 1920s – lets hope no further back than that because that is not a rewind that is collapse.
Yes there are possibilities that could change the numbers of BEVs on our roads, especially some radical breakthrough in cost and power to weight characteristics of batteries, but even that would take years and years to make it through the supply chain, and there’s no sign of it in any case. So, the most likely outcome is that the people who can most afford more expensive fuels will also be the ones for whom the switch to BEVs is more possible. Leaving those priced out of their current cars still finding electric ones out of reach too. Therefore I agree Goosoid, the current trend of a slow down in driving looks likely to continue, linked to fuel price rise [but not only caused by that], and not always congruent with it. In other words because driving is not an easy activity to opt out of in our auto-dependent society, there are clear time lags as people change related factors, like where they live, and in AKL in particular, the improvement in the availability of alternatives.
26%of NZ’s power gen is from non renewables
Nice post JP. EV’s make so much sense for NZ, even if just for the city dwellers. I think that it is inevitable that the drop in the cost of solar power, many warm-temperate countries will drive the demand for EV’s. But the big obstacle will be the cost of batteries, which affects the vehicle prices so much.
As lofty an ideal as EV’s are – they are simply never going to replace liquid fuelled vehicles…for a host of reasons.
Who said they need to replace ICEVs to help? Even if they only represent a tiny fraction of the market they will help.
http://www.treehugger.com/cars/worldwide-electric-car-production-predicted-soar-67-2014.html
Why has no-one mentioned steam driven cars. They can run on almost any fuel(peanut oil, alcohol, wood, etc.), modern boilers a very low pollutant output, boil quickly, have better efficiency performance than other types of propulsion, are simpler (e.g. no gearbox), and easy to drive. I would certainly have one if available.
That would be good if you could look into those issues because I don’t have all the facts and I’d like to see them.
Regarding the night charging – if you could provide stats showing that at night ALL electricity comes from renewable sources then I’ll be convinced. But you might want to address the daytime charging issue too – charging while at work, while parked, and even charging while driving (Powerbyproxi) are all means to address the range anxiety issue but all will be using marginal non-renewable power.
I’ll have a couple of posts which relate to grid issues in the next month or two, but on the daytime thing: daytime demand isn’t a major issue, our peak demand is usually in the early morning and evening, when people wake up/ come home from work, and switch on heaters. Those are the times when non-renewables are most likely to be used. Plus, during the day, we get more energy from wind (and it’ll be the same if we ever get big solar penetration).
“charging while at work, while parked, and even charging while driving (Powerbyproxi) are all means to address the range anxiety issue but all will be using marginal non-renewable power”
Whether the marginal generation is by renewable or non-renewable sources is not pre-ordained. Since there is an objective to get to 90% of our electrical generation from renewables and it is below that figure it follows that additional generation will primarily be from renewables. The generation profile of PV, for example, will have a good fit with daytime charging of BEVs and PV costs continue to fall.
Even if 90% of our power is from renewables the charging of electric vehicles can still come from the other 10% – it definitely will if they are charged during peak times.
Another issue for John to sort out is what determines the total annual output of electricity from a dam? If it is rainfall then it doesn’t matter what time you plug in your electric car. All the electricity for that car will come from somewhere else because the dam isn’t producing any extra electricity over what it was going to produce anyway. See it?
Will the government impose a tax on EV cars?
I can’t see why they would: they don’t for conventional cars. Currently, in fact, BEVs are exempt from paying Road User Charges.
But John get them in any number and the pressure to change from fuel tax to road user charges will be strong. Right now, because of the reduction in driving and NZTA’s politically forced road binge they are facing budget problems. If done well, proper road pricing, this could be good though still may affect take up of less oil dependant vehicles…?
You mean, universal RUCs, rather than the current system where petrol vehicles pay excise instead? Yup, that will probably happen at some point.