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A few days ago I questioned the cost effectiveness of vehicle electrification as a means to get petrol cars off the road in favour of their electric counterparts that use electricity generated from, in most cases, a fossil fuelled power plant. My thoughts on that still stand in terms of cost effectiveness since an electric hot water heater and furnace might set you back a thousand dollars and reduce emissions by the same order of magnitude as buying a electric car at > $20,000 a piece (not to mention the infrastructure requirements for “fuelling”).

@monkchips thought the post was skeptical but I like to think that it was pretty grounded in reality and if anything painted a more plausible, cheaper, environmentally friendlier and more society friendly than more [electric] cars.

Tom Raftery also commented on the synergies of electric vehicles and vehicle to grid technologies with the stabilization of the grid as well as demand management, which certainly cannot be argued with and I agree that electric vehicles can help with that. Both Tom and James are emminently knowledgeable in this area.

However, I am thinking why not just include a battery bank for your household electricity needs that could be used as local storage for distributed micro-renewable energy generation and, like the electric vehicle battery, help stabilize the grid by taking energy when there is a surplus and giving back when there is a deficit. That way you still avoid some of the high cost of an electric vehicle as well as the infrastructure required for charging and / or battery replacement stations. Electric home appliances can also take part in smart grid demand management through responding to dynamic pricing from utilities helping to stabilize the network and decrease consumption. They are also always plugged in so you don’t need any additional hardware nor do you ever have to remember to plug the car in when you get home. You also just need regular old lead acid batteries rather than super lightweight, high tech batteries made of carbon nanotubes.

I think in general it is a problem of perception. Electric vehicles are undeniably status symbols, as cars have traditionally been and still are in western society. You can’t show off how green you are to your suburban neighbours by buying electric appliances - unless you invite them in to take a look; and we all know that cars make lots of money for companies like Toyota. Therefore, a large part of the discussion is focusing on things that may be good but are not nearly the most effective. Of course now I am leaning dangerously close to a tirade about not just electrification but instead cutting our consumption by using more efficient means of transportation like buses / coaches and cycling. Years ago GM (and others) did of course buy up and dismantle many a railway to promote cars and we are still feeding into their ideas of city design and transportation networks!

I can appreciate the value in electric vehicles and of course in the smart grid and hope to see them rolling on the street soon but I am also hopeful that the influencers in our society start sexing up the image of lower impact transport solutions and other cost effective solutions - especially in this economic climate. However, efficiency or cost effectiveness does not always live up to the hype either as noted by the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate.

So who wants to start making not owning a car cool?

Photo credit: http://flickr.com/photos/djkubik/2386857433/

Tags: electricity2.0, electricvehicle, Energy, green, v2g.

Over the past few days my wife and I have been living without propane - due to a miscommunication between myself and the company that is supposed to take care of keeping our large propane tank filled with said propane - and subsequently there has been no stove, hot water, or heat. It was pretty tumultuous until I found a few spare 20lb propane tanks that we have since connected to our system. In case you were wondering just cooking one small meal and keeping the house at 15 degrees Celsius drained the one tank in under 24 hours.

Primary Energy Consumption

This interruption in energy flow to my house got me thinking about how much energy from fossil fuels is used in the home and that compares to fuel used for transportation. I found the numbers a little surprising.

A quick Google revealed the following stats for primary energy consumption by sector from 1949 to 2007 (in trillion Btu) in the US care of the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Or in pictures it looks more like this:

Of course the transportation number includes trains, planes and automobiles (including trucks) so what we should really look at is residential automobile usage. Again from the EIA data but approximating 2008 fuel consumption at 133 billion gallons of gasoline we arrive at about 15,000 trillion Btu’s of primary energy for only residential automobile usage. Updating the chart above we can see that the residential + commercial sector and residential transportation sector are much closer in size now:

What is the end use of the primary energy for the residential sector? The lions share of that energy is going towards oil or gas furnaces and water heaters. It is a similar situation for the commercial sector. But of course the industrial sector has a number of different uses for fossil fuels.

Energy Usage

The first thing that I notice about those numbers is that the total primary energy use in residential and commercial sectors commercial is almost 66% of the total primary energy used for residential automobiles. So if instead of buying a fancy new electric or hybrid car for over $30,000 people were to purchase an electric hot water heater, stove, and / or furnace, it would be equivalent to replacing about 66% of the cars on the road with all electrics. That is with no corporate bail outs, no huge incentive programs for companies or tax payers and no huge technological barriers like building new types of batteries. The problem is that people never see your electric furnace and you don’t get that added value of it being a status symbol like a green car.

I imagine the numbers look pretty similar in Canada and maybe in Europe too where gas is much more common in the home and car usage is lower. However, the lifecycle efficiency of generating electricity centrally from fossil fuels is sligtly higher than burning the fossil fuel in the automobile due to the relative low efficiency of the internal combustion engine.

Reality

Of course there are still other considerations to make before converting to electric cars such as shortages of materials used in magnets for motors such as dysprosium and, maybe more importantly, most electric cars will be charged with electricty generated from fossil fuels for the forseable future. The exception there is of course Better Place.

Looking at those numbers from the EIA if the US were to convert all vehicles over to pure electric it would mean increasing the current electricity generation capacity by something like 38%. That is about the increase in electricity generation from 1989 to 2007.

So if you are really thinking of getting an electric car, or even a hybrid first think about getting an electric appliance instead or, even better, get a bicycle and get some exercise

Tags: climate change, electric car, Energy, energy efficiency, fossil fuel, furnace, green, hybrid.