US - 8 states want 3.3 million zero emission vehicles by 2025.

jack_christie

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In an effort to spur lackluster sales of electric cars, California, New York and six other states said on Thursday that they would work jointly to adopt a range of measures, including encouraging more charging stations and changing building codes, to make it easier to own an electric car.

The goal, they said, was to achieve sales of at least 3.3 million vehicles that did not have any emissions by 2025.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/25/b...seeks-to-spur-use-of-electric-cars.html?_r=1&

http://green.autoblog.com/2013/10/25/california-leads-8-state-coalition-shooting-for-3m-evs-by-2025/
 
3.3 million zero emission vehicles...fine, I'll buy a bicycle and out it in the trunk. They can't tell me I don't own a zero emission vehicle then ;)
 
This seems to be one of those arbitrary, dubiously effective goals. Instead, why not shoot for an actual performative-based goal? Even if 3.3 million zero-e cars were produced, how many emissions (and other environmental factors) would be produced just by building them? The goal should be directly what they want to achieve instead of something tangentially associated. Something like "we want a 33% reduction in overall emissions by 2025." That is a useful goal.
 
This seems to be one of those arbitrary, dubiously effective goals. Instead, why not shoot for an actual performative-based goal? Even if 3.3 million zero-e cars were produced, how many emissions (and other environmental factors) would be produced just by building them? The goal should be directly what they want to achieve instead of something tangentially associated. Something like "we want a 33% reduction in overall emissions by 2025." That is a useful goal.

They probably do have a broader "reduce emissions by X%" goal, and one of their ways to meet that goal is to help get more electric cars on the road. A lot of the steps seem to just be standardizing stuff related to charging stations, which is common sense, and is analogous to the regulations for fuel filling stations.
 
So where does the CO2 generated in making the car and especially the batteries go? And electricity is still mostly generated using fossil fuels. Even when it is not it may well be being generated using nuclear - So Mr Greenie now rebut that. Oh, and electric cars are still shit and have their own particular problems. Now clear those 'electric cars are going to save the world' blinkers off and start thinking about other ways to cut greenhouse gasses.
 
They probably do have a broader "reduce emissions by X%" goal, and one of their ways to meet that goal is to help get more electric cars on the road. A lot of the steps seem to just be standardizing stuff related to charging stations, which is common sense, and is analogous to the regulations for fuel filling stations.

We don't need more electric cars, we need a paradigm shift in our entire way of life to have any effect at all.

This is a good read:
Why Green Architecture Hardly Ever Deserves the Name

It's approached from the initial vantage point of architecture (think of 'green buildings' as electric cars, and you have a decent analogue), but it more deeply discusses the failing of modernism, which is still the cultural paradigm we are in, some 100 something years on.
 
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So where does the CO2 generated in making the car and especially the batteries go? And electricity is still mostly generated using fossil fuels. Even when it is not it may well be being generated using nuclear - So Mr Greenie now rebut that. Oh, and electric cars are still shit and have their own particular problems. Now clear those 'electric cars are going to save the world' blinkers off and start thinking about other ways to cut greenhouse gasses.

Exactly this. And considering the CO2 issue is a global one, what's the point of doing anything unless China, India and Russia etc make some effort to cut their industrial CO2 outputs too?

This is all bollocks. I'm off to buy a V8.
 
It's fine, they'll never hit the goal. When the time is up they'll push it back another 10 years.
 
So where does the CO2 generated in making the car and especially the batteries go? And electricity is still mostly generated using fossil fuels. Even when it is not it may well be being generated using nuclear - So Mr Greenie now rebut that. Oh, and electric cars are still shit and have their own particular problems. Now clear those 'electric cars are going to save the world' blinkers off and start thinking about other ways to cut greenhouse gasses.

We're not the UK. :)

Out here on the west coast, a large amount of the power comes from hydro and wind. Infact we're shutting down the single coal powered plant here in Oregon because it's not needed. We already sell tons of excess to other states.

Not to mention which is more efficient and easier to control the pollution of -- one large powerplant or lots of little power plants under each hood?

Telsas and Leafs are selling like hotcakes here.

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Exactly this. And considering the CO2 issue is a global one, what's the point of doing anything unless China, India and Russia etc make some effort to cut their industrial CO2 outputs too?

This is all bollocks. I'm off to buy a V8.

This is a horrible argument. So because they're polluting, we should too? Is this some race to see who can pollute the most?
 
Unfortunately for the rest of the US, hydro power is not a practical option and wind has turned out to be a joke for main power supply. The largest wind farm on the planet is in Texas and it has *never* generated nameplate power levels. Worse, despite being 'where the wind blows all the time' it has not been a consistent power producer. The UK has found similar results with their windfarms.

So, for the rest of us, this is what the reality of those 'clean cars' is:
I_a33f01_349970.jpg


It should also be noted that electric cars will produce more pollution in their lifetime (thanks in large part to how their batteries are made and have to be disposed of) than things like an H2 do. So, yeah, less tailpipe emissions but way more more overall pollution.

Finally - Leafs are selling so well that, wait a sec, no, they're not. They've sold just 16,076 this year with some pretty huge incentives and cash on the hood. To put that in perspective, the US C-Max, which is the car just about nobody will admit to wanting let alone owning, has sold 28,254 so far this year.

They must have sold like 5 in Dallas and the remaining 16,071 up in the PNW. :p
 
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So, for the rest of us, this is what the reality of that is:
I_a33f01_349970.jpg

Which indeed sucks. However, even with losses due to energy conversion, I wonder what the comparable pollution rates are. Presumably it's more efficient to generate energy at a large scale (power plant) than a small scale (car engine). Or am I wrong?
 
Which indeed sucks. However, even with losses due to energy conversion, I wonder what the comparable pollution rates are. Presumably it's more efficient to generate energy at a large scale (power plant) than a small scale (car engine). Or am I wrong?

Even taking that into account (it is easier to control single point emissions, relatively speaking), you have the problem of the batteries. They are not nearly as easy to dispose of and they are a large toxic waste problem.

Also, there's also the problem that if we were to shift to more electric vehicles, most of the country's electrical grids would crash. They're barely holding on as it is with what we have now, and we do not have enough generation capacity as a country to charge vehicles if even only 5% of the vehicle fleet was changed out for battery electric vehicles. Texas will mostly be fine; we have an independent power grid and we are frantically building more generating capacity and grid infrastructure. Nobody else seems to be interested in that concept, though. In fact, with many plants in the East shutting down without replacement this year and next, blackouts during peak demand times are predicted to become more common in that area.

pwrgrid_interconnects.gif


Me, I'm not terribly interested in slowly freezing to death in the dark because some ecodork just plugged in his family's two Teslas and crashed the local interconnect.

The good news is that there's hope for better than BEV on the horizon. The big Japanese makers are giving up on BEV and hybrids for now and moving to hydrogen fuel cell.
 
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We've had this before. A reasonable number of BEVs can stabilize the grid. They can even be used to enable fluctuating power sources such as wind and solar through large-scale buffering.

Obviously, the grid needs to be able to use it.
 
We've had this before. A reasonable number of BEVs can stabilize the grid. They can even be used to enable fluctuating power sources such as wind and solar through large-scale buffering.

Obviously, the grid needs to be able to use it.

That would require grid reconstruction and massive urban reconstruction not seen since the leveled cities of WW2, since most US urban development sprawls out and the cities are not dense enough to make it a simple prospect. Outside of Texas and a couple of other places, few seem willing to reconstruct any grids *period* and even if they are the NIMBYs and BANANAs turn up and stymie it for decades by tying it up in court.
 
I wish that there was more research going into fixes. Most promising one I heard about was to revitalise plant growth, they reckoned that more Mangrove Swamp could be one idea, still I'd like to see the UK move to wave and barrier technologies, yes I know that there are issues.

It has occurred to me that with smart meters that it may be possible to help even out demand - run your white goods (Washing machines, dishwashers and dryers for instance) and cut costs to manufacturers out of peak, using impossibly cheap electricity that was generated with the use of wave and barrier generated electricity perhaps. A bit complicated but 'doable' IMHO. Just saying.
 
It has occurred to me that with smart meters that it may be possible to help even out demand - run your white goods (Washing machines, dishwashers and dryers for instance) and cut costs to manufacturers out of peak, using impossibly cheap electricity that was generated with the use of wave and barrier generated electricity perhaps. A bit complicated but 'doable' IMHO. Just saying.

That's where a small fleet of battery vehicles can come in. Most of the day they'll spend standing around, ideally plugged in. If you get the economics right you could provide the top 25% or whatever of your capacity to the grid, evening out peaks. When plugging it in from empty you could tell your car if you want it to charge fast at extra cost, or give it a deadline for being quarter/half/full using cheapest/available power. It's all doable, and can be started small. No need for a big bang kind of change, and there is no single silver bullet. For example, some German wind farm has started to commercially produce hydrogen through electrolysis for storage during windy off-peak times. Lots of small steps, combined with a can-do attitude and political will.
 
We had these - they were called milk floats - you now drive to out of town super/hypermarkets and pick your milk up there, put it in your car and drive home.
 
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