Gore also admitted supporting ethanol in the U.S. was a mistake, like half a decade ago

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/787776

There is no way refineries use 6kwh "electricity" for one gallon of gas. They'd be bleeding billions of dollars if they were.

What they do use is 6kwh of "energy", almost all of which in the refinery process comes directly from burning the "primary" sources (aka oil). There is some electricity involved but it's small portion.

How does that compare to Tesla?

Okay, let's just say Tesla gets 3.5 miles per kwh. Current fuel efficiency standard is 27.5 mpg. But let's say real world cars don't do that well and to make math easier, let's just say gasoline cars really only get 21mpg.

Tesla needs 6kwh to get 21mpg.
6kwh in the batteries. We start off tied.
20~30% is lost from plug to battery (you can tell there is energy lost because the entire power chain from plug to batteries get hot during charging). Let's go with low end 20%
6/(1-0.2)=7.5kwh. At this point we are already over the 6kwh for a gallon of gas. Tied at best if you want to throw in the energy used to transport the gas.
Some tiny amount ~1% is lost from power plant to you. Let's just ignore that.
But let's look at where your power comes from... yeap, fossil fuels. Your typical thermal plant (of any kind really) converts 30~40% to electricity. Newest natural gas plants under ideal conditions can get ~60%

Let's just use that 60%
7.5/0.6=12.5kwh primary energy to get a Tesla moving for 21 miles, more than double the primary energy to get a gasoline powered car moving for 21 miles.

The real numbers are worse. But I can live with a 60% as something we can aspire to.

I know.

I didn't even set off to attack environmentalists. You guys just assumed it.

UN thankfully finally reversed position on ethanol last year.

But that's not really stopping PEMEX (state owned by Mexico) and Sinopec (state owned by China) from using ethanol.

Well, this is too much to get to on the phone. I won't have a real keyboArd until tonigHt.

Thanks. This is what I was getting at, I just didn't know the numbers off the top of my head. The point is that electric cars right now are not competitive, from an environmental point of view, with gasoline powered cars.

That analysis is not correct. I will show that, in depth, when I get the chance.

sierra club got ya covered

https://content.sierraclub.org/EVguide/myths-vs-reality

I love that Sierra Club document. It manages to not lie but somehow misses the point.

Read their answer to first question carefully and think about their caveat really carefully.

So, aside from disproving you, you're still hanging by a thread to the caveat all while not knowing how often it applies?

Cool story

If you pass a law requiring all new homes to have 50 kw systems installed so PV could possibly end all forms of other energy use.

There are about 70 million homes, assume 50 million have systems on them. million X kw is a gw, gigawatt.

50 million homes X 50 kw systems x 5 sun hours a day x 365 days year =
4,437,000 GWh

the country uses:

4,686,000 GWh

and it is not that expensive many companies can make solar panels profitable for $.50 a watt, and many probably could go to $0.25 especially if you use China rather than tariff them. With scale you probably could have that system on your roof for $20K and you would never need a roof so you would save money on roofing from day 1. Furthermore, from the money you receive you can hire a leasing firm to repair and maintain the system, install new panels as needed, insure it, inspect it, ...

Put a few systems on apartments maybe some vacant land. The cost of electricity would drop to about $0.02 for those without systems. Plus you still got hydroelectric. You probably could desalinate all water for California/Arizona farming and allow the Colorado go free to the Gulf of Mexico, and the Sacramento to San Francisco Bay.

Thus as old houses need to be rebuilt, the new modern homes would replace them. By keeping panels flat you would not even know they are there. A house with a clay or asphalt roof would be seen as old fashioned like a 1990s cell phone.

Steelhouse,

Well, 50kw is a huge system and you'd need either a very big house or ground mount/carport.

The panel pricing is ok, but installation and balance of system. The only way I can see residential ever getting to $1/w is on new construction with building integrated products where the solar is embedded in the roofing. At this point that is more expensive, but the right roofing product could end up changing that I think.

The project of rebuilding every home in America is, well, big. I'd like the new homes to come with it, but otherwise there are a lot of existing roofs to use.

Ok, this is from the journal Energy, which is an international peer reviewed super duper scientific journal.

They published a paper called Well-to-wheel analysis of direct and indirect use of natural gas in passenger vehicles.

Don't let the title throw you. They looked at Gasoline, CNG vehicles and EVs using natural gas generated power, but they also looked at EVs using the current United States mix of electricity sources.

I can't paste everything in here.

Figure 10 in section 4.2 shows the Well-to-wheel (WTW) energy use in various cases. EV with the US mix of energy is (I'm reading a bar graph) a hair over 2000kJ/km. Gas car is a hair over 3500kJ/km.

Figure 11 in section 4.2 shows WTW Greenhouse gas emissions. EV with US mix of energy is a hair over 150 g/CO2eq/km and gas car is about 260 g/CO2eq/km.

Of course the gold standard in clean auto driving is having solar and an electric car and a pretty high percentage of people with electric cars do have solar.

Regarding the issue of scalability and storage for renewables, some scientists starting with some at Stanford have put together individual plans for every state to have the US 100% renewable energy, including transportation by 2030. It was University guys first, but got some press and some hollywood dudes and now it's at:

http://thesolutionsproject.org/

It didn't disprove me at all. My analysis stopped at the amount of energy required to generate the FUEL to move a car 21 miles. For EV, that's electricity. For ICE, that's gasoline. It takes a lot less energy to get enough into an ICE for 21 miles than it takes to get enough electricity into an EV for 21 miles.

It was a response to this:
I am not saying modern cars' are more environmentally friendly than EVs. EVs are superior on at least one front. Electric motors are by far more efficient (80+% vs. about 20%) than ICE at converting fuel to kinetic energy and produces fewer byproducts in the process (EV=no fumes).

My problem with misleading statements like microbet's is they end up hurting the goal of lowering carbon emissions in at least two ways.

1. it underestimates the potential for gains in ICE efficiency. Gasoline consumption per mile travelled can be cut by almost half by pushing ICE far closer to theoretical limits.
2. it vastly underplays the difficulties and costs associated with adopting an electric vehicle. We've seen what happens when costs are not accurately accounted for with crystal.

Long term I am actually strongly pro-EV because I think it's a much more adaptive technology even though in the short term it probably has limited impact. But by moving us to EV, first with hybrids, we develop the infrastructure necessary to replace the energy generation source. It's a lot easier to replace a coal plant with a nuclear plant than to rebuild all the gas stations to supply other forms of fuel.

The question of overall environmental impact is far more difficult to answer. But microbet's statement is grossly misleading at best.

WRT to the Sierra Club document, I meant to point out about 70% (it's over 60% even in Cali I believe still) of US electricity is still fossil fuel generated, 40% on coal alone. The other 30% is mostly oil and natural gas, which is ~20-30% cleaner than coal on average. Their caveat applies to most of Americans and can be extended to say the benefit is small for most of the rest.

I wanted to do more about ethanol in the US than this, but here's what environmental sources like Mother Jones write about ethanol

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-dru...-little-better

Can't find the paper, but it's referenced here where The Sierra Club was against ethanol in 2005 and pointed out that it was policy paid for by Archer Daniels Midland.

https://books.google.com/books?id=Hf...thanol&f=false

grizy,

I have to go to work, so I can't respond to that now.

But, EVs are not going to replace ICE overnight. It's like that with solar. Advocate hard, encouraging policies, and then in a generation or so there will be a transformation. I'm not saying don't raise the CAFE standard right now.

Nuclear is a separate issue. The thing about it, aside from the super long term environmental impact and the large sometimes hidden government subsidies is that, realistically anyway, Nuclear Power plants take almost a generation from proposal to operation. I don't really think more Nuclear is needed mostly because it takes so long to get going.

As far as replacing ICEs, it is generally not a good environmental choice to throw out a working ICE and buy a new EV.

As far as ethanol, the amount of ethanol per acre is also increasing and I won't be surprised if they hit 1000 gallons per acre by 2030. Also, they put ethanol in the gas to help cut smog and air pollution instead of MTBE. The gasoline retailers like 10% ethanol because if they put $1.50 ethanol in $3.00 gasoline the price is lower, while they sell more gasoline as it cuts your mileage by 5%.

Looking at the Cod populations, those can be controlled with fishing regulations. There is signs that it is rebounding, and there are other populations.

However, the ultimate goal should be population sustainability. Everybody says how everyone is moving to Texas, yet California still growing and gained 5 million this century. The world trend is to end abortion and then end birth control, the reason is populations are only suppose to be stopped by war, famine, and disease. Even if abortion and birth control are legal, social trends and religion will move towards anti-abortion and anti-birth control. As people with those social trends will have more children. Short-term losses in Japan, Russia, and Germany will be replaced with new social and political trends to cause the population to grow again maybe not this century, but next. New inventions and new wealth may arise from this growing population but in the end the boom will always be followed by a bust, the flour beetles will always eat all the flour.

I'm not even looking this one up because it's so obvious; education and wealth are inversely related to population growth. Unfortunately, they are directly related to environmental impact as wealthier people use more resources.

The developing world needs education and prosperity, and the world needs it to happen sustainably. This can be easier though in the developing world as they are closer to starting from scratch. Solar, for example, has always made the most sense and was used back when it cost literally 100 times as much, when the option was bringing electrical infrastructure to a sufficiently remote area. Now, the option of a more distributed model from the beginning is economical.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Africa

http://ensia.com/features/solar-ener...eloping-world/

Ethanol has never been on parity with gasoline except for brief periods in 2008. E10 and E15 are results of EPA's (and increasingly, rest of the world's governments') mandates to incrase use of "biofuels", which for all intents and purposes means ethanol.

Then why has the population growth rate of Italy increased over the last 5 years. Why has the population of Utah increased. Utah has some of the best education in the country and 14th highest incomes per capita, and that does not consider low tax rates.

"Utah added more than 40,000 people this year, enough to fill a city the size of Bountiful. While the state’s economy is relatively strong, most of that growth didn’t come from new residents moving in, the Census found in new population estimates released this week.

Utah still has the nation’s highest birth rate and its youngest median age. About 90 percent of this year’s increase came from so-called natural growth, or having more births than deaths. Net migration to the state totaled just over 4,000 people."

The education, porn, birth control, prosperity, may lead to short-term reductions in population but in the end we are like flour beetles, we breed or someone else will. The only limit is calories per acre and the bomb.

Utah? That's not normal. Italy? For a while now they have been below replacement. If they are growing, I reckon it is mostly immigration.

I will look when I am at my computer later.

Why make it so complicated and how do you not know some of these "solutions" are not new environmental problems. Solar panels may be found to be largest contributor to global warming as they increase the albedo of the land.

You could tax all electricity from non-solar sources $0.25 a kwh. People could also buy PPAs from solar utilities in any State including individual homes. In 10 years we would be 100% solar. That alone would be a 100x cheaper solution than the Stanford solution. Furthermore it would work. Put a tax on gasoline.

You get a $600 electric bill or a $50 dollar electric bill. Drive an electric car for basically free or pay $15,000 a year to drive a gas car.

steelhouse

lmgtfy

Also logic very easily concludes that black tar roofs transfer said into INTO THE HOUSE THAT IS BEING COOLED, then electricity is used to cool said house. Wish you would think before you type this kinda stuff.

That project is big on vision and short on details.

That so much of his plan depends on reducing the consumption of energy to begin with should be a huge red flag. Assuming energy use actually doesn't drop precipitously, even his ultra aggressive plans would really only get us to about 50% based on existing energy consumption patterns, even if we flatten out.

Now let's look at a few of his "plans."

Given existing technologies and consumption patterns, basically you need 1 wind turbine (a big one) per person. He has New Jersey projected to provide, give or take, 60% of its power via wind. That means 50+ MILLION wind turbines. In all of US, we have maybe 50 THOUSAND. Offshore and new technology can possible double, maybe even triple efficiency... but we are still looking at 15+ million windmills off the coast of New Jersey, alone. That's not counting overbuilding the grid to account for intermittency.