Electric Cars Have Twice the ‘Global Warming Potential’ of Traditional Vehicles

[Locutus]

TheBlaze has reported on the not so green side of electric cars before — those being charged with electricity from coal-fired power plants contribute more pollution than their gasoline-fueled counterparts. Now, a report of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology takes a look at the manufacturing of electric vehicles and found that’s not so great for the environment either.

“Although EVs are an important technological breakthrough with substantial potential environmental benefits, these cannot be harnessed everywhere and in every condition,” the study authors write. “Our results clearly indicate that it is counterproductive to promote EVs in areas where electricity is primarily produced from lignite, coal, or even heavy oil combustion.”

Published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, the researchers found the production of electric vehicles is “more environmentally intensive” than those with an internal combustion engine. Producing the electric powertrains and traction batteries are among the factors that “add significantly to the environmental impacts” of production.

The study also took a look at the environmental impact of electric vehicles compared to traditional cars when it comes to actually taking them on the road. Like the study we reported on earlier this year, EVs with electricity supplied by coal were found to have more of a “global warming potential” — increasing it by a factor of 17 to 27 percent — compared to traditional cars. EVs using electricity supplied by the “average” European source reduced global warming potential by 20 to 24 percent though.


more


Study Finds Electric Vehicles May Not Provide the Environmental Benefits Which They Claim | TheBlaze.com


research - Energy and Environment - NTNU



Comparative Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Conventional and Electric Vehicles - Hawkins - 2012 - Journal of Industrial Ecology - Wiley Online Library

 

[DaSleeper]

When has government ever subsidized a winner???

Electric Car Verdict: Another Government-Subsidized Bust — MasterResource

 

[Nuggler]

8OTheBlaze has reported on the not so green side of electric cars before — those being charged with electricity from coal-fired power plants contribute more pollution than their gasoline-fueled counterparts


No shyte!!

Excuse me while I go remove the top from a mountain and fire up a few cars.

Holy frig, Sherlock.

 

[taxslave]

Something Petros has been pointing out to the greenies for quite some time.

 

[Redmonton_Rebel]

Welcome to the moron zone...

The whole idea is to use other, non-carbon intensive sources of electricity to provide all power in the future, and electric cars charged with power produce no emissions. So electric cars charged from getothermal(of which millions of Americans now use), hydroelectric, solar(which is rapidly growing with techology like roll-to-print nanosolar and others), wind and nuclear have very low carbon intensity.

In the case of nuclear the most promising development is a return to molten salt reactors that are meltdown resistant( the fuel is already contained in MOLTEN salt that expands as it cools naturally limiting the fission process), have almost complete burn up, can burn LWR waste of which there's hundreds of thousands of tins worldwide, run at near normal pressure(meaning no explosive release of gases in case of a reactor accident and produce much less waste that' has a much shorter half-life.

Oh, and would you look at this, radiation at low levels isn't the risk factor it's been claimed all those years, amazing:

Evidence for formation of DNA repair centers and dose-response nonlinearity in human cells

Single time or single dose measurements are snapshots and might not capture the complexity of the IR response of DNA damage-sensing proteins. Here, we present a methodology and a mathematical kinetic model that can characterize the DNA damage response simultaneously across both time and dose levels. Our results provide a more accurate model of RIF dose response, and underscore fundamental concerns about static image data ****ysis in the dynamic environment of the living cell. We observe that as the number of DSB increases in a cell, the number of RIF does not increase proportionally and the kinetics of RIF formation/disappearance is altered; RIF appear faster but remain longer in the cells as dose levels increase. These nonlinear processes cast considerable doubts on the general assumption that risk to IR is proportional to dose and could be interpreted as the consequence of DNA repair centers in human cells.

Impact of Results for Regulating Risk of IR on Human Populations. The current literature has assumed the linear-no-threshold hypothesis (LNT), which implies that any amounts of IR are harmful. LNT is used to set dose limits for radiation occupational workers or the general public. The LNT is based mainly on data from the Japanese atomic bomb survivors and secondarily on arguments involving the dose-response of surrogate endpoints. Gene mutations are thought to be the initiating events of cancer and they can occur via misrejoining of two DNA DSBs or via point mutation. Physical laws lead us to believe DSB frequencies are proportional to dose. Therefore, it is well accepted that point mutations are linear with dose because it requires only one DSB, whereas DSB misrejoinings are dependent to the dose squared (39). In the dose range of radiation cancer epidemiology, the quadratic term is almost always negligible, especially at low dose rates, as the first lesion is probably repaired before the second mutation occurs (40). However, the amount of DSB clustering at 1 Gy suggests a much higher quadratic term for DSB misrejoining than expected. Therefore, extrapolating risk linearly from high dose as done with the LNT could lead to overestimation of cancer risk at low doses.

Oh, and hey, it's starting to look like too little radiation can be a health risk:

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/pr/2011/Low Background Radiation Experiment News Release.pdf

“Initial results from June 2010 show … the growth of ‘radiation starved’ cells are (sic) inhibited
compared to cells grown in the presence of background radiation levels,” the researchers
reported.

One ton of thorium will provide 1 Gw/y of electricity and the worldwide supply is enough to last centuries. A LFTR(Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor) can be much smaller and safer than traditional nuclear power plants and provide far more energy, while producing much less waste and fission by-products like Xenon(which is used as an advanced rocket fuel), Iodine-131 and Bismuth-213 which are used in nuclear medicine.

So in combination there's no need to use coal anymore, meaning that it comes down to the efficiency of the vehicles themselves.

Electric cars may require more resources to produce the large battery packs that power the vehicle, but there's almost no loss of energy in the running of the vehicle.

Enhanced nickel-iron batteries: Stanford scientists develop ultrafast nickel-iron battery

Graduate student Hailiang Wang, lead author of the study, said the team managed to increase the charging and discharging rate by nearly 1,000 times.

And EDLCs(Electric Double Layer Capacitors): Electric double-layer capacitor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ultracapacitors are used in some concept prototype vehicles, in order to keep batteries within resistive heating limits and extend battery life.[51][52] The ultrabattery combines a supercapacitor and a battery in one unit, creating an electric vehicle battery that lasts longer, costs less and is more powerful than current plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs).[53][54]

There are now effective ways to quickly charge and use regenerative braking, meaning very little loss of power from friction.

On the other hand you have "traditional" internal combustion vehicles that have many power robbing moving part, like valves, pistons, cam and drive shafts, most of the energy content of the fuel is simply blown out the tail pipe.

And if you look at the main source of Canadian crude oil that powers many vehicles it's hard to conceive of a less efficient source of energy.

- Large amounts of power are used to mine the millions of tons of tar sands daily to send to the primary processing plants.

- Massive amounts of water and natural gas are used to separate the bitumen from the waste.

- Upgrading uses further power to remove many of the impurities and create sythetic crude, some of the electricity used coming from COAL power generation.

- The sythetic crude is then sent to refineries where even more energy and more greenhouse gases are produced to turn it into consumer products.

- The fuel is then burned in IC vehicles.

Now here's a tough one for yah, if you charged your electric car with electricity created by hydro, nuclear, solar, wind, or natural gas power production would it be more of a "Global Warming Potential" than a car burning gasoline produced from tar sands "oil".

It's a rhetorical question...

We now return you to THE MORON ZONE...

 

[L Gilbert]

Study Finds Electric Vehicles May Not Provide the Environmental Benefits Which They Claim | TheBlaze.com


research - Energy and Environment - NTNU



Comparative Environmental Life Cycle Assessment of Conventional and Electric Vehicles - Hawkins - 2012 - Journal of Industrial Ecology - Wiley Online Library

Typical. Science sometimes comes out with support for the obvious long after it's been accepted by everyone. Times are changing, though.
Now how about the studies showing the differences between say electric cars being made and juiced up using other forms of energy sources than coal and infernal combustion cars?

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/04/18/electric-vehicles-greenhouse-gas-emissions-save-money/

 

[darkbeaver]

What global warming?

 

[captain morgan]

What global warming?

Oh, c'mon... Ofcourse you've heard about the new global tax that the UN has been pushing.

 

[taxslave]

Welcome to the moron zone...

The whole idea is to use other, non-carbon intensive sources of electricity to provide all power in the future, and electric cars charged with power produce no emissions. So electric cars charged from getothermal(of which millions of Americans now use), hydroelectric, solar(which is rapidly growing with techology like roll-to-print nanosolar and others), wind and nuclear have very low carbon intensity.

In the case of nuclear the most promising development is a return to molten salt reactors that are meltdown resistant( the fuel is already contained in MOLTEN salt that expands as it cools naturally limiting the fission process), have almost complete burn up, can burn LWR waste of which there's hundreds of thousands of tins worldwide, run at near normal pressure(meaning no explosive release of gases in case of a reactor accident and produce much less waste that' has a much shorter half-life.

Oh, and would you look at this, radiation at low levels isn't the risk factor it's been claimed all those years, amazing:

Evidence for formation of DNA repair centers and dose-response nonlinearity in human cells





Oh, and hey, it's starting to look like too little radiation can be a health risk:

http://www.wipp.energy.gov/pr/2011/Low Background Radiation Experiment News Release.pdf



One ton of thorium will provide 1 Gw/y of electricity and the worldwide supply is enough to last centuries. A LFTR(Liquid-Fluoride Thorium Reactor) can be much smaller and safer than traditional nuclear power plants and provide far more energy, while producing much less waste and fission by-products like Xenon(which is used as an advanced rocket fuel), Iodine-131 and Bismuth-213 which are used in nuclear medicine.

So in combination there's no need to use coal anymore, meaning that it comes down to the efficiency of the vehicles themselves.

Electric cars may require more resources to produce the large battery packs that power the vehicle, but there's almost no loss of energy in the running of the vehicle.

Enhanced nickel-iron batteries: Stanford scientists develop ultrafast nickel-iron battery



And EDLCs(Electric Double Layer Capacitors): Electric double-layer capacitor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia



There are now effective ways to quickly charge and use regenerative braking, meaning very little loss of power from friction.

On the other hand you have "traditional" internal combustion vehicles that have many power robbing moving part, like valves, pistons, cam and drive shafts, most of the energy content of the fuel is simply blown out the tail pipe.

And if you look at the main source of Canadian crude oil that powers many vehicles it's hard to conceive of a less efficient source of energy.

- Large amounts of power are used to mine the millions of tons of tar sands daily to send to the primary processing plants.

- Massive amounts of water and natural gas are used to separate the bitumen from the waste.

- Upgrading uses further power to remove many of the impurities and create sythetic crude, some of the electricity used coming from COAL power generation.

- The sythetic crude is then sent to refineries where even more energy and more greenhouse gases are produced to turn it into consumer products.

- The fuel is then burned in IC vehicles.

Now here's a tough one for yah, if you charged your electric car with electricity created by hydro, nuclear, solar, wind, or natural gas power production would it be more of a "Global Warming Potential" than a car burning gasoline produced from tar sands "oil".

It's a rhetorical question...

We now return you to THE MORON ZONE...

Still shilling for the nuclear pollution industry are you.

Interesting that those pushing electric cars never mention the high cost of producing and recycling of batteries. Also the cost of cleaning up destroyed batteries in accidents and fires.

 

[damngrumpy]

When we the people, think of a scam or a hoax we think of the supper hour phone call
telling you your ship has come in or how you can get out of paying most of your credit
card debt. There are bigger scams out there that you don't even consider and you do
contribute to everyday. Lets look at a few.

1 smart cars and electric cars purely a fad that will show itself to be just that.
2 The new light bulbs that have more dangerous stuff in them than the old ones.
3 The new environmental this and energy saving that.
The last one is the idea that if we replace everything in our society we will eliminate waste.
Bunkum, we will replace everything because the new religion known as the green religion
wants to suck all the money out of your jeans.
Even the organic food industry is part of the new religion, these people have inspectors right?
They do, they inspect the paper work and the organic industry runs on an honor basis.
Ask yourself, how much honor does XL Foods have and they have inspectors on sight.

All these people parting with their money to get a green car, not realizing clean coal is not clean
and the money they just wasted could have been spent making sure the car they had was running
at full performance. PT Barnum said it best there is a sucker born every minute.

 

[Redmonton_Rebel]

Wow, would you look at this, Lithium-ion batteries are about to become much more capable both in terms of how fast they can be charged and how much energy they can hold, making electric cars a suitable replacement for IC vehicles.

http://www.pnl.gov/news/release.aspx?id=807

We also sell off surplus electrical power:

Where Canada's surplus energy goes - Canada - CBC News

Although Canada is one of the biggest power users in the world — due in large part to home heating demands — it is also an energy exporter.

The country generated a whopping 585,000 gigawatt hours of electricity in 2008, which is more than enough for domestic consumption (and, incidentally, more than the total annual electricity use in India).

We also have reserves of 40,000 tons of a nuclear fuel that in a molten salt reactor is meltdown proof, produces low amounts of much less long lived fission products, is much less expensive to build and run and provides 1 Gigawatts/y per ton of Thorium.

It's nuts to keep flooding the atmosphere with the most significant persistant when we already have alternatives that are much less polluting.

 

[EagleSmack]

Global Warming= LOL

 

[The Old Medic]

Let's just go back to a hunter-gatherer society. Most of the European based cultures will die out, and the Africans and poor Asians will inherit the world.

Then in a few centuries, they will mess it up as badly as the rest of us have.