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Electric Cars, Nuclear Power, and Being Green
A bill to extend tax credits for the purchase of electric cars is before the Congress. It has bipartisan support, and supporters specifically cite the threat of global warming as a reason for this measure. It is estimated that this extension will cost $16 billion in lost revenues.
The idea that electric cars are so “green” that tax credits to encourage their sales are warranted lacks foundation. Although they are frequently termed “zero emission”, electric cars are not emissions-free. It’s just that the electric power plants do their emitting for them. Given that the National Energy Institute says that on average 0.95 kg of carbon dioxide is emitted to produce one kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electrical energy, of which the Tesla needs 75 kWh to go about 210 miles (real world estimate), as much carbon dioxide is emitted to power a Tesla Model S as is emitted by a similar sized conventional car given recent improvements in gas mileage.
There are clear advantages of electric cars. Teslas, for example, are just cool and fun to drive. Energy purchased as electricity is a lot cheaper than energy purchased as gasoline. There is a lot to be said for not emitting carbon dioxide and other gases in the cities. The disadvantages include long refueling times and the impracticality of taking long road trips. Also, they are still just a lot more expensive than conventional cars.
Regardless, let’s get out of our heads this idea that electric cars are somehow reducing overall carbon dioxide emissions because they are not, not with our current mix of electric power supplying the electric grid. Some people subscribe to renewable energy power companies, but those customers get their juice off of the same grid as everyone else, 85% of which is powered by carbon fuels on the average. Where you send your check for the power is only a matter of bookkeeping. In fact, there is a limit to the amount of renewable energy the grid can take without becoming too unreliable. If your grid is supplied by less carbon fuel, then electric cars make more sense, but my impression is that there are as many electric cars buzzing around in cities supplied by a lot of carbon fuels as in those that are not.
There is only one way to make electric cars truly emissions-free, and it’s not with renewable energy, which is not ready to take over supplying the power grid and probably never will be. The only way is to go with nuclear power, the only power source cheap enough and reliable enough to power our civilization emissions free. If we are serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions then we should be transitioning to nuclear power, which is much safer now with new reactor designs.
What can we do that is actually green, what really will reduce carbon dioxide emissions?
For one thing, do you really need that vehicle? Does it need to be so enormous? A small car with a small engine that sips gasoline or diesel is the most kind to the environment given that such vehicles are simpler, take fewer resources to make, and are easier to dispose of. Second place for green-ness goes to hybrid vehicles which are better emissions-wise than electric vehicles.
- Was that trip to Hawaii for the conference really necessary?
- How about the insulation in the house?
- Consider going over all the appliances and gadgets at home to make sure there aren’t a lot of energy vampires hanging around.
- Own a smart thermostat yet?
- CFL or LED lights throughout?
- Carpool? Bus? Bicycle? Train? Scooter?
And so on. It’s really pretty simple to cut back on one’s carbon footprint. The purchase of expensive electric vehicles doesn’t figure into it for the time being.
And the policy implication here is: No, we should not subsidize the purchase of electric vehicles with tax credits.
Full Disclosure: I own stock in petroleum energy and related companies.
Published in Environment
Yes. This also.
Good one!
More wealthy people (at least around here) are the only ones with solar panels too, although I think actor Edward Norton had some small program to support putting solar panels in low-income areas.
Make them at least limit the tax breaks to those making less than average or certain amount — unless you want Teslas and electric cars to cost even more.
Streetview was created because Google was mapping out all the WiFi spots in the world. Imagine that meeting.
Person 1: We need to figure out location without relying on GPS.
Person 2: We could look for nearby WiFi spots and if we knew their position, we could then calculate the position of the phone.
Person 1: What are going to do, drive every street in the county and measure all the hotspots?
Person 2: Why not?
You are thinking like an American. In India and many developing countries, the lines are just a suggestion on direction of flow. People drive by observing all the cars around them and communicating with little beeps on the horn. All the self driving cars have sonar sensors and can just split the difference between cars on both sides. That will work fine, as long as most cars are smart enough (have drivers) to figure out the lanes. After all, the goal of the autopilot is not to stay between the lines, but to stay between the other cars.
My main concern with the electric car is that when they take over the market – what will be done with spent batteries? They will wear out at some point. Is disposal/recycling going to become a major problem? Is lithium an environmental hazard?
Not much of an issue. They are 100% recycled already. For the near future, Chinese and Japanese chemists are competing to improve the process.
This comment may have already been made, but with regard to the use of new nuclear power plant designs we are still only in the design stage in the USA. Of the 4 new gigawatt class plants started here in the early 2010s only 2 are still in construction and they may yet never be finished. There are no new small nuclear power plant designs fully approved for construction in the USA and they would take maybe 5 to 10 years to build when approved and someone decided to build one.
Given that, nuclear generated electrical power here comes from a mix of 60 or so sites with plants that came online anywhere between 1969 (Nine Mile Point 1) and 2016 (Watts Bar 2, which had its completion stalled in the mid 1990s after being under construction for a decade).
I don’t intend to suggest we can’t get to the stage where we have mostly new nuclear power plants, but that will be several decades in the making most likely.
The long lead times for development and construction of nuclear plants is a result of government regulation, and regulations can be reformed. If climate change is the emergency that many people are saying it is, then this should be a top priority.
Renewable energy sources are carbon dioxide emissions free, but there is currently no way to make them cheap and reliable, and it may never be possible to do that. Without cheap and reliable energy we really are doomed — everything from modern agriculture to manufacturing becomes impossible and our civilization will very difficult to sustain.
Several of the newer generation of nuclear reactors, Generation 3, are on line, and they have never had a serious accident. With standardization of design they could be multiplied rapidly. Generation 4 reactors, designed so that a melt-down is impossible, are still in the testing phase, but that testing is being done by China and Russia, not the US.
Tesla made a big deal a few months ago in Texas about completing their interstate network of charging stations, so that now you were never more than about 100 miles from a location traveling across the state. Of course, if you’re getting off I-10 or I-20 and driving down to the Big Bend, finding a charging site is a bit more problematic, and the same holds for other areas around the country that are off the beaten path.
That makes the electric car recharging situation about like the U.S. cellphone network system, circa 1993 — it’s mostly in place in the urban areas and fanning out along the main highways where enough people might go, but not useful at all if you get out into sparsely visited/sparsely populated locations. That’s probably how electric cars are going to develop as well. If you’re in an urban area, by 2040 or so, you might have no need for a gasoline-powered vehicle and might be able to do long-distance trips without one easily, but there would still be a few places where the ability to plug-and-go in a hurry isn’t going to be available.
Long lead times for development and construction of the plant are certainly weighed down in part by regulation, but much of that is actually useful for constraining the safety aspects of the plants, the construction, and the operation of the plants once built. Beyond the design, construction, and regulatory approval aspects are the following significant considerations:
While there are a handful of Generation III or III+ plants currently in operation or construction around the globe, only 2 of those are in the US and they are at least a couple years off from being complete and there are no others in Canada or Mexico such that they might even be able to be tied to a domestic grid. Further, there are about 10 domestic nuclear power plants that will go offline in 2019 or in the next few years that will further reduce the ability to generate “carbon free” electricity. These include Three Mile Island Unit 1 (approx. 850 MWe slated to stop by September, 2019), Davis-Besse (900 MWe), Perry (1275 MWe), Beaver Valley 1 & 2 (2 x 900 MWe each), Indian Point 2 & 3 (1000 MWe each), Diablo Canyon 1 & 2 (1150 MWe each), Palisades (800 MWe) and others that don’t come immediately to mind. Each of these could be run longer with plenty of years left on the clock, but for one reason or another they will be taken off the grid by 2022 at the latest. That’s over 9900 MWe that will have to be replaced by something in the next 3 years that could remain online or even be uprated to provide more power if the situation allowed. Based on what Southern Company is seeing with their Vogtle 3 & 4 nuclear power builds of the Westinghouse AP1000 plant (Generation III), each of their new 1100 MWe plants is running about $15 Billion each, so the replacement price for that power would be on the order of $135 Billion and wouldn’t even likely come online until the late 2020s or early 2030s.
Regarding the Generation IV nuclear power plants, we don’t even have a regulatory structure in place to address putting those online even if they were ready today. Regarding regulatory updates for the existing fleet of plants, that too would likely take years to implement before we’d see any significant fruit. So, nuclear power electrical generation may hold some promise in the future for additional “zero carbon” power, but it won’t be any time soon.
So, in other words, all the resistance to building new nuclear plants that gave rise to the regulations that delay construction and approval has left us in the position of having no choice but to build more carbon fuel drinking power plants. Renewables won’t cut it.
Maybe we should adopt French regulations for nuclear power. They don’t seem to take nearly as long to build the plants, and their safety is good.
The regulations in many ways were necessary to drive the industry to improvements that were observed to be necessary for public safety following the incidents at Three Mile Island Unit 2, Browns Ferry, and various other plants over the years. As we learned more about what could go wrong there then had to be some follow up control to mitigate the associated risks. Unlike the USA, the French undertook a government controlled initiative to build a select few nuclear power plant designs and then also supported it with information campaigns so the citizenry would understand what they were getting.
Regarding the French and their build times, they likely moved at about the same pace as the USA in building once there was a know-how developed like we once had. However, France’s last nuclear power plant came online in 2000 only 5 years Watts Bar Unit 1, which was our last until Watts Bar Unit 2 was completed in 2016. The EPR currently being built at Flamanville was started at the end of 2007 and may be online by the end of 2019 with a total cost of about $12 Billion for a 1650 MWe plant. So following their own industrial know-how decay, they are building at about the same pace as the USA.
Regarding French regulations, they are notably different than the USA’s including different safety goals, different operational methods, and different codes and standards that do not apply in the USA. Attempting to switch the change of framework here would not result in any improvements in efficiency as the approaches are notably different even if the plants themselves are generally similar. ( http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france.aspx )
If we had not had the 2008 financial crisis and the following boom in natural gas production we were set to have another case of domestic nuclear power plant construction know how and capability; but the changes in the economy broadly killed the demand for new electrical power production and the changes in natural gas production in between times provided a greater volume of natural gas available such that it became even cheaper to the point of competing against nuclear power production costs. Now that the nuclear power plants are competing against very cheap natural gas (likely temporary) and against subsidized “natural” production methods, even the old plants are closing down because the utilities see no reason to keep them open in some cases with no outside influence to drive the decision (such as a carbon tax that would drive up prices on the carbon producing side or subsidies for “low carbon” generation capabilities.)