by mos6507 » Tue 13 Jan 2009, 18:23:42
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')I'm not convinced that EVs pollute less. The great portion of electricity comes from FFs, and that isn't likely to change a whole lot.
This is a stale argument. They do pollute less even when fed coal fired electricity. However, once a car is on the road, the world is stuck with it for a very long time (kind of like a human being). An EV especially is likely to have a long lifespan (battery pack exempted). So it will become progressively cleaner as its electricity source changes. A gas car will always only be as efficient as its engine design permits across its entire lifecycle. So I think it's an important stepping stone to start the achingly slow process of moving the fleet to EVs and to follow that up in parallel with the achingly slow process of cleaning up electricity generation so they can later converge.
To illustrate, let's say the goal is to transition a town powered by a single coal fired power plant over to EVs in 10 years. By the end of those 10 years the plant will be replaced by a nuclear plant (I'm using a nuke to diffuse all of you who say renewables won't scale). So let's say when the turn the power off on the coal plant and they power up the nuke plant, 50-60% of the fleet has switched over to EVs. From that instant onward, all the EVs have now gone totally zero carbon at once.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Heineken', '
')I'd rather see a trend toward smaller, fewer, more efficient IC cars, with a view to phasing them out completely down the line and reorganizing how we live (localism, public transport, railroads).
You'll never phase them out completely because people will still want the freedom of personal transportation.
Now, if battery prices never come down, then gas cars may ride off into the sunset of irrelevance post-peak before EVs attain any sort of foothold. EVs need to compete on a cost basis with gas cars otherwise they will only ever be a niche. They barely did when gas was $4/gallon and they certainly do not today. Batteries either have to get a lot cheaper or last virtually forever (EESTOR).