Plugin enthusiasts have often, rightfully so, been asked "how clean is the electricity?" This is the first article and study I have seen that goes into detail for oil. Not All Oil Is Created Equal When It Comes to Pollution - Scientific American And the full study... http://carnegieendowment.org/files/know_your_oil.pdf I haven't yet done more than scan through the study. Takeaways: Oil from different sources vary in GHG emmissions by up to 80%! The yardstick they use is CO2 equivalent/barrel, so some additional work is needed to make any type of "per gallon" comparisons. As they mentioned, they suggest this data be used as a guideline and not defininative, as their data comes only from oil wells and refineries where they could get sufficient data. Outliers may likely exist. It looks like they have some calculations for GHG emmissions due to petroleum products used as fuel for refineries! First ever I had seen this.
How about, do you know how dirty your electricity is? Before you make / lease that plug in do your homework on your utilities before plugging in. I think a lot of people would be better informed before acquiring the plugin they are looking at. DBCassidy
I think many of the people actually buying plug ins now do check their grid emissions. Hence, why a good portion have PV or pay extra for cleaner electric. Fueleconomy.gov has a regional calculator linked right from the car's emissions entry. For gasoline cars, however, the site has one size fits all approach for upstream carbon emissions. Leading people to believe it doesn't matter where the oil comes from. Texas light, sweet is seen the same as shale 'oil'.
In Indiana, pretty dirty, in the Pacific Northwest, pretty clean, all else being equal. However... Renewable Energy Certificates are an interesting wrinkle, that are in some ways analogous to carbon offsets, which means anyone reading this who already equates carbon offsets to papal dispensations will already have the beginnings of a sneer, but there are some differences worth noting. The idea is, if it is for now more expensive for utilities to build renewable plants and they are concerned about recouping the difference when selling the output in a competitive wholesale market, but if there is a marketable interest in energy from renewable sources, the utility can sell two different things, that don't have to go to the same buyer. One is the generated energy itself, at the same wholesale price as from any other source. Really this makes a lot of sense, because you can't distinguish electrons from each other, and they're all being dumped onto a grid that doesn't much distinguish where they go. Sure, there are some basic physical reasons why the actual electrons shoved around in Oregon aren't ending up in Indiana, but for equally basic physical reasons that just doesn't matter much. The second thing sold is the added value of having generated that energy renewably, at whatever price the market demand might establish for that. Unlike carbon offsets, which represent a certain net carbon reduction that has to be established by some kind of appraisal/estimate process that skeptics may question, a Renewable Energy Certificate represents one megawatthour of energy generated from a renewable source. Megawatthours aren't estimated by appraisal, they're read off of electric meters. And if the generating plant is a renewable one, each MWh generated can be sold at wholesale and is also counted as one REC that can also be sold. Two consequences of the scheme: if a utility is participating, and sells RECs separately from the generated electricity, customers buying only the electricity are not able to claim they're using renewable juice. Even customers living in the Northwest surrounded by all that lovely hydro should not necessarily think of their EVs as running on hydro, if the utility is selling the RECs separately and the customers haven't bought them. By the same token, customers anywhere who do buy the RECs, in an amount equal to the number of MWh they consume, can justifiably say their EVs are clean, even if their local utility is burning coal. The REC guarantees that one MWh of renewable energy was placed on the grid somewhere. Because of that, for a given consumption of energy from the grid, and the fact that the grid does not store energy, somewhere one MWh from a nonrenewable source was not generated that otherwise would have been - and this is enforced not by some body of bureaucrats, but by Kirchhoff's Current Law. (It's not just a good idea, etc., etc.) Granted, if the purchaser of the REC is far from the renewable source that sold it, the purchaser's local environment will still see the effects of the fossil fuel burned to support the purchaser's consumption; the burn that was prevented was probably at a fossil fueled plant nearer to the alternative source. If the purchaser is mostly concerned about the local environmental effects, this is not a real substitute for a renewable plant going up nearby. But if the concern is about overall fossil fuel use, the math does work out (and can't not work out); over the wider geographical area, fossil C emissions have been avoided for that purchaser's electric use. The scheme does depend on bureacrats as far as to make sure utilities aren't double-selling their RECs or the like, but that only requires green-eyeshade accountant types who can verify numbers add up ... a much simpler task than the judgment calls that have to be made for carbon offsets (how many tons of C will ABC Corp's new green roof absorb, and are we sure they weren't going to build it anyway, etc., etc.). Last I checked, the most common way for people to buy RECs was through programs with their local utilities, who would just add RECs onto the bill in amounts corresponding to usage, at a markup bringing the total cost to maybe $10 per REC ... in other words, adding about a penny a kWh to the normal utility bill. Finding a broker to buy RECs directly could cut that by about half, though with restrictions like minimum purchases. -Chap
In gives utilities incentive to build renewable power generation. It has had very good results here in MN where wind and solar are growing rapidly. To the comment about the source of electricity's cleanliness, there are many studies and papers on exactly that. The reason I posted this paper is it is the first one that addresses the same issue for oil. Both are excellent questions to ask, we just haven't had many answers about oil until now.
Don't hold your breath waiting to see an oil free society in your lifetime, not even in your great grandchildrens' lifetime. DBCassidy
The bar I'm after is an oil free family. Once the economic tipping point is reached (and we are closer than most realize) then this might be a fun post to point to in 2115...when we can stop holding our breath.
