by Robert Bryce
• 1959: The New York Times reports that the “Old electric may be the car of tomorrow.” The story said that electric cars were making a comeback because “gasoline is expensive today, principally because it is so heavily taxed, while electricity is far cheaper” than it was back in the 1920s.28
• 1967: The Los Angeles Times says that American Motors Corporation is on the verge of producing an electric car, the Amitron, to be powered by lithium batteries capable of holding 330 watt-hours per kilogram. (That’s more than two times as much as the energy density of modern lithium-ion batteries.) Backers of the Amitron said, “We don’t see a major obstacle in technology. It’s just a matter of time.”29
• 1979: The Washington Post reports that General Motors has found “a breakthrough in batteries” that “now makes electric cars commercially practical.” The new zinc-nickel oxide batteries will provide the “100-mile range that General Motors executives believe is necessary to successfully sell electric vehicles to the public.”30
• 1980: In an opinion piece, the Washington Post avers that “practical electric cars can be built in the near future.” By 2000, the average family would own cars, predicted the Post, “tailored for the purpose for which they are most often used.” It went on to say that “in this new kind of car fleet, the electric vehicle could pay a big role—especially as delivery trucks and two-passenger urban commuter cars. With an aggressive production effort, they might save 1 million barrels of oil a day by the turn of the century.”31
PHOTO 6 What’s old is new again. In 1919, this Detroit Electric automobile stopped for a charge.
Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-46285.
But ignore the headlines of the past and consider the path of Tesla Motors, the outfit named for Nicola Tesla, the electricity pioneer who once worked with Thomas Edison and who went on to invent the induction electric motor. Although Tesla has been dead since 1943, the company named for him is producing the Roadster, which is snagging rave reviews. One writer called it “a frantic road dart on twisty roads.”32 In mid-2009, London’s Daily Telegraph called the car “one of the stars of this year’s London Motorexpo.” The reviewer for the Telegraph praised the car’s acceleration, saying that when one stomps on the accelerator, “the result is little short of astonishing. The Tesla belts away with the seamless surge of a catapult launch.”33 But given its high price, the Tesla is hardly a catapult for the common man,34 and like its predecessors from a century ago, it faces the familiar issues of charging time, weight, and range. The car has a claimed range of 220 miles, and fully recharging the car’s batteries takes at least four hours.35
That point leads to another critical challenge for all-electric cars: long refueling times. All energy sources are limited in how fast they can release energy and how fast they can be replenished. With batteries, the refiller is the killer, particularly when compared with the time needed to refuel with good old conventional gasoline.
In May 2009, with the fuel gauge on my 2000 Honda Odyssey minivan showing empty, I pulled into a Texaco station to fill up. Total elapsed time from inserting the nozzle into my tank until the automatic shut-off valve clicked off, signaling full: 1 minute and 59 seconds—about the time that it takes Michael Phelps to swim the 200-meter butterfly.36 In less than 2 minutes, I pumped about 18.5 gallons of gasoline into the vehicle. That’s the energy equivalent of more than 600 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or about eleven times as many kilowatt-hours as are contained in the Tesla Roadster’s battery pack. Put another way, I loaded about eleven times as much energy as what is contained in the batteries in the Tesla—and I did it in 1/120th of the time that is needed to recharge the Tesla’s battery system. (Recall that recharging the 53-kilowatt-hour battery pack in the Tesla takes about 4 hours, or 240 minutes.) The total cost of refueling my Honda van: $44.32.
Now, were I to buy 53 kilowatt-hours of electricity from the local utility, at an average cost of $0.10 per kWh, the total cost of the fuel would only be about $5.30—far less than the $44 I paid to refill my minivan. But then, my van doesn’t need recharging every night—which leads to another key issue with all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles: the lack of recharging locations. According to a June 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office, “about 40% of consumers do not have access to an outlet near their vehicle at home.” The report goes on to say that consumers who don’t have access to electric power near their cars would need “public charging infrastructure, which manufacturers and others told us could be installed at a relatively low cost of perhaps a few thousand dollars for a new charging box.”37
Despite the myriad challenges facing the electric car business, Congress and the Obama administration are hurling billions of dollars at it. Among the most notable recipients of the government’s largesse: Fisker Automotive. In September 2009, Fisker received a $529 million loan from the U.S. government to help finance its startup costs. One of Fisker’s main financial backers is the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a Silicon Valley firm where Al Gore is a partner.38
Fisker wasn’t alone. Nissan got a $1.6 billion loan, and Tesla Motors got a $465 million loan.39 Two Phoenix-based companies, Electric Transportation Engineering and ECOtality, were given $99.8 million in federal stimulus money to help roll out an electric vehicle pilot program in several U.S. cities.40 Johnson Controls, one of America’s biggest battery makers, got a federal grant for $299.2 million to help it build batteries for electric and hybrid cars. General Motors got $105.9 million to help it produce battery packs for the Chevy Volt. In all, about fifty different entities were given federal grants (all provided by the stimulus package passed by Congress) that totaled some $2.4 billion as part of an “electric drive vehicle battery and component manufacturing initiative.”41
In announcing the initiative, President Obama said that the grants were “planting the seeds of progress for our country, and good-paying, private-sector jobs for the American people.” He went on to say that the initiative would help in the “deployment of the next generation of clean-energy vehicles.”42 Obama may be right. All-electric cars may be on the verge of grabbing a significant percentage of the U.S. car fleet.
But history shows that skepticism is in order. I’m not saying there won’t be electric vehicles. There are already millions of them. In 2008, Chinese manufacturers produced some 22 million electric two-wheelers. About 65 million electric scooters are now traveling on Chinese roads. And because most of those scooters use simple lead-acid batteries instead of more expensive lithium-ion units, consumers can buy them for as little as $250.43
Dozens of U.S. companies are selling electric scooters and motorcycles. 44 All-electric vehicles have become so commonplace that in early 2009, a Costco store in south Austin started selling an all-electric scooter for less than $1,000. Some of the all-electric cars now being developed will gain loyal customers, particularly among the rich. The ongoing advancements in battery technology will make electric vehicles more viable. And those improvements will be augmented by ultracapacitors. Unlike batteries, ultracapacitors are not reliant on chemical reactions to store energy. Instead, they store electricity by physically separating the negative charge from the positive charge. (Batteries separate the two charges chemically.)45 A key advantage of ultracapacitors is their ability to be charged and discharged very quickly, a process that tends to damage conventional batteries. By pairing batteries with ultracapacitors, automakers can assure high power delivery to the wheels and do so without wearing out the batteries.46
Though improvements in batteries and ultracapacitors will undoubtedly continue, and hybrid-electric cars will continue gaining in popularity and market share, it’s worth questioning the environmental impacts of the all-electric car. An October 2009 analysis by the National Academy of Sciences looked at the environmental costs associated with various types of automobile fuel. The scientists at the National Academy looked at thirteen different fuel sources and analyzed their total impact on the environment, part
icularly those relating to what they called the “health and non-climate damages” for different combinations of fuels and vehicles. They then expressed those damages in cents per vehicle mile traveled (VMT) for two years: 2005, and estimates for 2030. The graph in Figure 29 combines the data from two charts published by the academy. For the sake of simplicity, I reduced the number of fuels displayed from thirteen to nine. The figure clearly shows that vehicles powered by politically favored fuels such as corn ethanol (E85) and electricity impose more “damages” on society than vehicles that are powered by gasoline or natural gas. The conventional fuels are also less costly to society than plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles are, though the plug-ins are another politically popular choice. Those vehicles are identified in the figure as “Grid Dependent SI HEV.”
The findings of the academy provide more evidence that the era of the internal combustion engine will continue for decades to come. The life expectancy of the internal combustion engine continues to be extended by engineers, who are constantly making incremental efficiency gains. Those gains are particularly apparent in diesel-powered vehicles, which, by 2030, according to the Academy of Sciences, will impose the lowest total costs on society.
A number of automakers have been introducing diesel cars into the U.S. market of late. The 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI gets 41 miles per gallon on the highway.47 BMW now sells two diesel vehicles in the United States, one of which gets 36 miles per gallon on the highway.48 Mercedes-Benz is selling three diesel vehicles that use their “BlueTEC” design.49 Audi is selling two diesels, one of which gets more than 40 miles per gallon. 50 And although diesels are relatively rare in U.S. passenger cars, European car owners have been using diesels for decades. Consumers in Australia can buy the Hyundai i30 diesel wagon (cost: about $20,000), which gets about 40 miles per gallon and reportedly has a range of about 600 miles.51 Automakers are also developing diesel hybrids, with Mercedes planning a sedan that could get 88 miles per gallon.52
FIGURE 29 National Academy of Sciences’ Estimate of Total Life-Cycle Damages Imposed by Various Fuels Used in Light-Duty Vehicles, 2005 and 2030
Source: National Academy of Sciences, “Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use,” 2009, executive summary, http://www.nap.edu/nap-cgi/report.cgi?record_id=12794&type=pdfxsum, 11.
Though diesels are more efficient than gasoline-fueled engines, the long-term prospects for gasoline are also good. The gasoline-powered 2009 Honda Fit gets 35 miles per gallon.53 It has four doors and a roomy interior, and the base model sells for less than $15,000. Meanwhile, Ford has developed a turbocharged gasoline engine that will soon be the automaker’s standard for its light-vehicle fleet. The new design, called EcoBoost, is smaller than conventionally aspirated engines while providing more power, and supplies fuel-economy improvements of up to 20 percent.54
Furthermore, diesel and gasoline vehicles are not overly reliant on rare earth elements such as neodymium and lanthanum—both of which are critical ingredients in the making of hybrid and electric vehicles. There is no way to know how the rare-earth-supply question will evolve. Perhaps China will adopt export policies that allow the goods containing rare earths to flow freely in world trade.
At the moment, it appears that thousands, perhaps millions, of hybrid-electric cars will be manufactured over the coming decades, and that those vehicles will continue to improve the overall efficiency of the U.S. auto sector. But remember that those high-tech vehicles are only part of the story. They will have to compete for market share with cheap, dependable vehicles powered by conventional internal combustion engines, engines that are still ubiquitous, cheap, and easy to maintain. Those hundreds of millions of internal combustion–powered vehicles can utilize a variety of fuels, including natural gas, propane, dimethyl ether, ethanol, methanol, used french-fry grease, soy diesel, and of course, conventional gasoline and diesel.55 While all of those fuels will play a role, the key issue, as always, is the scale of the transition.
The introduction of the Prius about a decade ago marked the beginning of the electrification of the U.S. transportation sector. It’s not the full electrification that many people dream of, but it is an important milestone in a process that will take decades. Remember, it took about ten years for Toyota to sell 1 million units of the Prius.56 That sounds like a lot of cars until you remember that the global fleet now numbers about 1 billion vehicles. We can’t be exactly sure how the electrification will proceed from here, but the decades-in-the-future transport system may include a fixed-guideway system that allows cars and trucks to be powered by the electric grid. The fixed guideways would allow vehicles to travel much closer together and at higher speeds than today’s vehicles.
As the price of oil rises or falls in the coming decades, so will the acceleration/deceleration of the move toward using more electrons in transportation. Although opinions may differ regarding all-electric cars versus hybrids and other alt-fueled cars, we can agree on one basic theme: Electrons are good. The more electrons the better, because electricity is the basic commodity of modern life. And that leads to the last myth I want to debunk: the belief that we can create lots of electricity by burning biomass.
CHAPTER 20
We Can Replace Coal with Wood
EVERYONE LIKES WOOD. So when it comes to generating electricity, let’s just replace coal with wood. Easy, right?
Some of the loudest voices on the Green/Left seem to think so. For instance, in March 2009, Joe Romm, a blogger on climate issues, wrote that “The best and cheapest near-term strategy for reducing coal plant CO2 emissions without forcing utilities to simply walk away from their entire capital investment is to replace that coal with biomass.” Romm cited a plan by Georgia Power, a subsidiary of utility giant Southern Company, to convert one of the company’s plants so that it would burn wood rather than coal. The coal-fired power plant had 155 megawatts of capacity. After switching to wood, its output would be reduced to 96 megawatts. Romm praised the effort, saying that switching to biomass was “the most practical and affordable strategy for utilities with coal plants.”1
In October 2009, the New York Times wrote about efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from electric power plants, citing a Sierra Club effort to reduce coal consumption. The Times reporter, Matthew Wald, wrote that the promoters of non-coal sources “say that biomass fuels, derived from wood, waste, and alcohol, could offer an even better opportunity” for capturing the carbon dioxide that is generated during the combustion process. He went on to say that using trees could be advantageous, because “if a tree is cut down and burned in a boiler, a new tree can grow in its place, and absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That makes the process ‘carbon negative;’ for each ton burned, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will decline.”2
In November 2009, Romm was again singing the praises of using wood to produce electricity, with a blog post that cited a news story about a biomass power plant to be built in Ashland, Wisconsin.3
Those biomass-to-electricity pronouncements follow the unanimous 2008 vote by the Austin City Council to approve a plan put forward by the city’s utility, Austin Energy, to spend $2.3 billion over twenty years to buy all of the power produced by a 100-megawatt wood-fired power plant to be built in East Texas.4 Just before the Austin City Council voted on the wood-burning power plant, the city’s mayor, Will Wynn, told the Austin Chronicle that the deal was a “strategic ‘no brainer’ that will keep our electric costs lower than the alternatives.”5
While Romm, the Sierra Club, and Austin’s environmentalists love the idea of biomass-fueled power plants, it appears that few of them have bothered to do the basic calculations that show just how much wood will be needed to replace even a small fraction of our coal needs. Here’s the myth-busting reality: To replace just 10 percent of the coal-fired electricity capacity in the United States with wood-fired capacity would mean more than doubling overall U.S. wood consumption.
The math, as usual, is straightf
orward. The wood requirements for the Georgia Power facility and the East Texas generation project are about the same: 1 million tons of wood per year.6 Thus, both projects will require 10,000 tons of wood per year to produce 1 megawatt of electricity.
The United States now has about 336,300 megawatts of coal-fired electricity generation capacity.7 Let’s assume that we want to replace just 10 percent of that coal-fired capacity—33,630 megawatts—with wood-burning power plants. Simple math shows that doing so would require about 336.3 million tons of wood per year.8 How much wood is that? According to estimates from the United Nations Environmental Program, total U.S. wood consumption is now about 236.4 million tons per year.9 Given those numbers, if the United States wants to continue using wood for building homes, bookshelves, and other uses—while also replacing 10 percent of its coal-fired generation capacity with wood-fired generators— it will need to consume nearly 573 million tons of wood per year, or about 2.5 times its current consumption.
These numbers apparently don’t bother Romm and other cheerleaders of this concept. In lauding the Georgia Power plant’s move to burn wood rather than coal, he wrote that “the key, of course, [is] to make sure this is all done in the sustainable fashion. That will be the job of regulators and the Obama administration.”10
But regulators, try as they might, can’t overcome basic physics. The problems with biomass-to-electricity schemes are the same ones that haunt nearly every renewable energy idea: power density and energy density. Wood is a wonderful fuel for roasting marshmallows and keeping warm on a cold night. But its energy density is less than half that of coal’s. That’s why few people in the United States and in other developed countries use it for their cooking and heating needs. When you combine that low energy density with the low power density of wood and biomass production, the challenges become even more apparent. As discussed earlier, the power density of the best-managed forests is only about 1 watt per square meter.11 And when a particular energy source, in this case, wood, has low power density and low energy density, that leads to problems with the other two elements of the Four Imperatives: cost and scale.