Hacker News Reader

Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

> I still feel like electric is just pushing the pollution somewhere else

In a way it is, but that's the point. Even with fossil fuels, centralized energy production is much more efficient than every car having its own combustion engine, and then electricity is also flexible enough to enable you to switch to green/renewable sources without change for the car and its supporting infrastructure. In a way, electricity is energy abstracted away from the means of its production.

View on HN

In addition just pushing the pollution somewhere else isn't necessarily a bad thing, there are a lot of cities that would be a lot healthier if emissions were all about 80 miles that-a-way

This. I recently switched to an all-renewable tariff[1]; if I had an electric car then that would have been all that was required for me to be running emissions-free.

[1] https://octopus.energy/where-does-octopus-energy-get-their-e...

And there are a lot of people getting SolarCity roofs...I'm starting to see them all over...combine that with a PowerWall, which you can charge during the day, and you have a really compelling argument to go all-in.

That's a really good perspective that I hadn't really considered before.

I used to think that way, too. And then I remembered that the cheapest form of power generation is using coal, which is extremely abundant. I also remembered that power plants have an expected life span of 50+ years and people are against closing down things which are have already sunk their original cost and now are cheap, effective and provide lots of jobs.

It's really hard to say which is the lesser of two evils.

Getting rid of the coal plants is mostly a separate battle, though.

I admit I'm not sure how centralized coal burning compares in emission efficiency to internal combustion engines in cars.

   And then I remembered that the cheapest form of power generation is using coal, which is extremely abundant.

That's not so clear cut when you try and factor in externalized costs (which any proper analysis must)

> I also remembered that power plants have an expected life span of 50+ years

How much of that infrastructure was built in the post WW2 period so is nearing replacement anyway?

That's the scary part. Didn't your president just declare he wants to invest in new coal? 2067, here we come!

That makes the problem regional, but not unsolvable. Consider states like Washington and California, where electricity is highly renewable. Every electric car in those states is a big difference in 'power cleanliness'. True, in other states the gain isn't as big, but I still suspect a coal plant might be cleaner than N small gas engines (and the refineries that support making that gasoline.)

At the very least, it allows for the possibility of changing the power generation under the cars, which current engines don't allow.

Coal has now been overtaken by natural gas in total power production. As it stands now, 1/3rd of US power production is natural gas, 1/3rd is clean, emissions-free power (i.e. mostly nuclear, then hydro, wind, geothermal, and solar), and 1/3rd is coal.

Natural gas is incredibly cheap. And it's also fairly common to convert coal power plants to natural gas, so you don't need to shut down the plant. And a lot of coal plants are already plenty old enough to shut down.

To summarize here: Just 30.5% of US utility scale electricity for the last 12 months (rolling) have come from coal. This is down from over 50% in the early 2000s. 33.5% is natural gas. 34.9% is emissions-free (nuclear or renewables... but it increases to about 35.3% if you include non-utility-scale solar). So now the plurality of power is emissions free, with most of the rest being (relatively) clean-burning natural gas.

This is a HUGE difference in a short amount of time, and the story keeps changing. The old story that most electricity is coal (about 51% of electricity was coal in 2003) is now definitely obsolete. But people keep recycling the same talking points.

I like to occasionally check up on this table, which is where most of my data comes from: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cf...

I hear that coal is no longer cheaper than natural gas. And renewables are catching up fast. Coal is dying, and EVs are unlikely to add much additional coal use.

Coal isn't the cheapest [1]. Natural gas is cheaper because of fracking. Renewables have been reported to be cheaper than fossil fuels for the first time in 2016 [2]. Electric vehicles are cleaner than gasoline cars almost regardless of where the electricity comes from [3]. I think in Missouri EV are on-par with gas because Missouri has the dirtiest power plants.

[1] http://wolfstreet.com/2016/06/13/why-us-coal-production-coll...

[2] https://qz.com/871907/2016-was-the-year-solar-panels-finally...

[3] http://midwestenergynews.com/2016/04/20/minnesota-study-chal...

Ok, natural gas is cheaper. Great, we've just moved the goal posts from "hell" to "purgatory", since fracking is still very harmful for the environment.

My main point was that a centralized environment comes with its own downsides, the main one being inertia.

Renewable power generation may already be cost competitive with fossil fuels [1]. It's gaining popularity in developing nations for this reason [6].

Natural gas, which is leaked heavily during fracking [2], is an order of magnitude more harmful than CO2 in the short term [3]. But it breaks down far faster in the atmosphere [4] and is comparatively better than coal when it's burned [5]. Thankfully, fossil fuels are losing to cleaner technologies [6].

Cheap renewables, like solar, allow EV owners to opt-out of centralized power generation and charge their cars with clean power [7]. One could argue that this is the entire business model of Tesla [8].

[1] http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy/power/re...

[2] https://thinkprogress.org/methane-leaks-erase-climate-benefi...

[3] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...

[4] https://www.quora.com/What-happens-to-methane-once-it-is-rel...

[5] http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/coal-and-other-fossil-fue...

[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/20...

[7] https://www.wired.com/2011/11/evs-go-off-grid/

[8] https://www.wired.com/2016/06/tesla-solar-city-elon-musk/

http://www.afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.php#w...

Electric cars are a little bit cleaner, even in Kentucky which runs on 84% coal power. Everywhere else, they are significantly cleaner.

Oddly, hybrids turn out to be cleaner than BEVs in Kentucky that may point to light trucks skewing the gasoline vehicle numbers.

There's a lot of "thinking with your feelings" going on about this for a topic with so much hard data easily available.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com