EVs and GVs: which use more electricity?

...she was of course featured in the Who Killed the Elec Car video. She even stops by here once in a while. I became a Twitter follower when I liked what she said about Telsa during the Model S New York Times fiasco last winter. But I do not use Twitter much yet.

 

No I used a ballpark figure that is widely used for efficiency for gasoline from conventional oil. Gasoline only is about 20 gallons of the approximately 45 gallons of distillates for a barrel of gasoline. If you add all the refining energy to diesel and gasoline, gasoline drops to about 81% efficient. Even with the 84% number, this figure is getting worse, as oil sands require about an extra 7kwh of natural gas liquids, natural gas, and diesel to get the gas from mine to pump, or 71% efficiency, 47kwh. For oil sands the amount is much debated as there are many methods, the methods from 5 years ago were much less efficient.

Again averages here don't make much sense. There is much debate about what actual marginal levels will be, but we are not yet at 1 Million plug in vehicles, and 1 million plug ins could likely be powered by building 2 fast cycling 500 MW ccgt plants, 100 MW of wind and solar, and idling 500 MW of old coal. These are the type of changes happening to the grid today, but we don't know about tomorrow. The changed scenario allows more peaking power, full recharging of all the cars, and less need to use less efficient ocgt natural gas, while using approximately the same number of kwh of fuel, but substituting natural gas for coal. Assumptions are the coal has a utilization of 90%, natural gas 70%, renewable 30%.

If you assign all the coal, which we are shutting down, and not building for the plug-in fleet, you are going to get a bad number. If you use what we are building for the plug-in fleet, and plug-in owners choices, you are going to get a much lower number for fuel use. The marginal power for charging plug-ins is ccgt natural gas in most situations - heavy coal states and hawaii are exceptions. The marginal fuel for gasoline though is oil sands. One is getting cleaner as the other gets more dirty.

Many in the US would be happy to switch oil with more natural gas, as the natural gas is cheaper, cleaner, and less dependent on our enemies. The same goes for switching coal for natural gas and renewables, but this has more to do with the old polluting coal technology in the majority of plants that burn it. All energy sources are not equal.

 

For the bulk of oil these costs are very low, and were included in my 84% efficiency costs. But yes national average is inaccurate and misleading, as if we look out 50 years, it is likely we will use all conventional oil, which means on the margins reducing gasoline consumption reduces use of unconventional oil like the oil sands which are much less efficient, something like 71%, and cause a great deal of environmental damage not included in that efficiency number.

On the other hand using the national grid for a plug-in is even more misleading. Many can opt to power the car with wind or solar, or can use their own utilities marginal environmental and efficiency foot print.

The canadian government and the US government seem to do a lot of this.

 

Include the output too. Emission from recycling or dumping it. There is a term for it - Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). Toyota used it before they came out with Prius.

 

Still, you can't beat the energy density of gas vs. battery. Gas wins hands down.

DBCassidy

 

Instead of turning them to "good vs evil", Toyota make them work together to produce synergy and HSD was born.

 

Thats why all those high energy density gas car fires are not near as interesting (or deadly) as battery fires