Why not electrical cars?

Question

I've heard a rumour that the amount of energy needed to charge a battery now and again, causes more pollution indirectly i.e. by means of coal-stations. Is this true, so what about other sources of electricity like hydro power or the like? getting rid of the major greenhouse culprit CO2

Answer 1

Simply bypass the burning of fossil fuels with electricity? no. Most electricity is made by burning fossil fuels. Powerplants are however slightly more efficient than your car. Oh and if you want to you can hack a Prius so it will run on a plug. But Ethanol is eaiser.

Answer 2

Who's your source, Shell ?

The process of producing batteries require a large amount of energy, and then it takes energy to charge, and recharge those batteries. Although battery technology has improved greatly, there's still the problem that batteries don't last very long before they need to be recharged again. The power needed to recharge the batteries has to come from somewhere, and since solar power is still a far way from being practical for that purpose, it comes from power plants.

However, a huge central power plant requires less energy per kwh, than having a number of cars with fuel-powered engines produce the same amount of energy.

Batteries still don't last forever, after a few thousand recharges they're nearly useless, and have to be discarded. In the end, the energy required to produce the car, the batteries, and then replace the batteries and recycle the old ones, in many cases exceed the amount of energy to save by driving the electric car.

Until battery technology reaches a level where they can outlive gasoline powered cars, they're not a real viable solution for transportation.
In the meantime, we've gotten hybrid cars... cars where the engine produces electric power, and serves as a power plant to drive the electric motors, and only runs when necessary. Now if only they'd put diesel engines in them, instead of gasoline, those cars would actually be a affordable alternative to the common gasoline slubbering cars.

If you want to save the environment in the short run, drive a diesel insted of gasoline powered car. Modern diesel engines burn with 96% efficiency, meaning a near perfect energy consumption, resulting in almost clean exhaust. A modern gasoline engine rarely passes more than 70% efficiency, meaning a lot of the fuel is wasted, and a lot of excess pollution is generated.
Diesel oil is cheaper to produce and buy, it requires simpler, and lighter, engines to use, and because the engines are more efficient, a diesel powered car will go a minimum of 25% longer on the same amount of fuel, as a car of the exact same weight and power but with a gasoline powered engine.

Answer 3

The basic problem with pure-electric cars is the present state of battery technology. The amount of energy that can be stored in a battery is tiny compared to the amount of energy available in the same weight or size quantity of gasoline. That means that the number of miles you can drive on a battery charge is less than what a tank of gas would produce. Batteries take time to charge, and use about 10% more energy to charge than can be recovered in use. There are a variety of ways to produce electricity besides burning coal, or other fossil fuels. As long as the government continues to subsidize the fossil fuel industry, alternative means have an uphill struggle to compete. With our present fleet of gasoline-burning vehicles, CO2 production is an inevitable outcome. If we switched to electric vehicles, at least some of that CO2 production could be offset depending on how we choose to generate the power. In the absence of better battery technology, however, the distance you could drive would be fairly limited.

Answer 4

Electric cars are a very good and important alternative to fossil fuel powered cars. There are a couple of problems with electric cars, one of which you mention.

Electric cars use electricity for fuel. Electricity is generated in several different ways including fossil fuels: coal, oil, and natural gas. Two other major sources generate electricity nuclear and hydroelectric. There are a number of much smaller sources as well: geothermal, wind, solar electric etc.

Of these most of our electricity is generated by fossil sources, all of which generate pollution. Coal is especially bad for pollution generating the most CO2 and surprisingly the most radiation as well. Coal is our single biggest way of generating electricity.

Nuclear power also generates a lot of pollution in the mining and production of nuclear fuel and then there is a terrible problem of waste disposal, which must be safeguarded for several hundred thousand years.

Hydroelectric generates very little pollution but does have significantly negative impacts on river ecosystems and fish such as salmon that spawn in rivers.

The other alternative energy sources are much less polluting. Wind and Solar are especially good in terms of pollution. Both are new comers to the utility industry and both are growing very fast.

Because much of our electricity is generated with fossil fuels electric cars are not pollution free. Because electrical generators are large centralized plants it is relatively easier to upgrade them to have better pollution controls. All new power plants are much cleaner than the average plant so electricity is getting cleaner. Renewable energy solutions like wind and solar power both generate electricity so electric cars benefit from the ultra-clean new sources.

A closely related type of car, the Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle (PHEV) is also a very exciting alternative. It shares the long range that fossil fuel cars have with the cleanliness of electric cars.

A pure electric car will not have a great driving range right now because batteries do not store that much energy. The best electric cars have about 150 mile range making them OK for commuting but not so good as a general purpose car. Also it takes quite a while to recharge an electric car so if you drive somewhere and have to recharge you might have to wait around for a few hours before you can drive again.

The PHEV has none of those problems. The battery pack is small with about a 50 mile range, but it also caries gasoline or even better ethanol and can go 500 or more miles using the liquid fuel. Because most driving trips are under 50 miles it uses electricity most of the time and therefore gets extremely good mileage. People have converted Priuses to run this way and can get between 80 and 250 miles per gallon.

Eventually we probably will all drive electric vehicles.

Edit: Metalbunny needs to check his facts. Battery life is very dependent upon how deeply the battery is discharged. If discharge is carefully controlled batteries will last many thousands of cycles. I drive a Prius, which has nickel metal hydride batteries. The Prius computer prevents the batteries from being deeply discharged and as a result they last a very long time. People are reporting battery life of 200,000 miles now. I have had my Prius for 120,000 miles and I still get 50 mpg and have had no battery problems.

I would also point out to Metalbunny that gasoline engines also take a great deal of energy to make and furthermore they use a considerable amount of energy to operate over their lives, which is why people are starting to say the internal combustion engines are not economically viable.

Answer 5

There are fully electric cars in existence, they have just not gained widespread use (causing some to think they don't exist).

It is true that it will ALWAYS take more energy than you will get out to charge a battery, but it will not always produce more pollution.
They key is the energy source one is using to charge the battery...whether that energy came from a coal burning power plant, or from an array of solar panels (or hydroelectric power, ...).
If one was to burn gasoline to turn a generator to charge a battery....one would be better of to simply use the gasoline in the first place (assuming that both "fuels", electricity and gasoline, are used at the same efficiency).

If everyone used electricity obtained from "green" sources like solar and hydroelectric power, we would eliminate a huge percentage of the production of green house gasses like CO2.
On the other hand, if everyone used electricity obtained from coal burning power plants then our situation would be even worse than it is today.

Remember the first two laws of thermodynamics,
-Energy cannot be created or destroyed
-Entropy is always increasing
Knowing these laws is of key importance when examining energy usage.

Answer 6

The amount of charging time and the low amount of milage allowed between recharges are the main reasons for electric cars not being feasable. It would be very expensive to buy renewable energy to produce electricity, and way over 10% of the electricity would be wasted in the transferral between the car and power-station.

However, some progress is being made in this area, with small go-cart like vehicles being produced on a trial basis and with more mainstream hybrid cars.

Answer 7

Yes u heard the right thing. An electric car can only be pollution free wheen its battery is charged with electricity drawn from a renewable source like wind or sun. The most pollution free cars now a days r those which run on hydrogen which give out only pure water as by product.

Answer 8

Yes, this is an important concern. People think electricity is some magical energy source, but most electrical power plants burn coal, and many of them are nuclear, which produces radioactive waste.

Plus, as electricity travels through wires, it radiates outward, and much of the power is lost along the way.

There are certainly benefits to electricity, but notice how the story is always one-sided, and you are never told the down side.

I am wondering why we never hear anything about geothermal power. The earth has unlimited heat that we can tap for producing electricity, so what gives?

Answer 9

Well you could the get your own Household Electricity from Wind Farms which produce zero CO-2 Emissions. But that might be Expensive for some people.

Answer 10

I agree that just plugging in your electric car to charge it up is no better than just driving a gasoline powered car.
But you could buy a bunch of solar panels or windmills to charge your electric car. Or if we used more nuclear power to generate electricity, like France does, we could reduce global warming with electric cars.

Answer 11

Why not bicycles and geothermal-powered electric mass transit systems?

Because global corporations and their shareholders won't profit and increase their power base.

We seriously, seriously, have to ditch the whole car culture. Soon won't be soon enough.

My legs are my SUV.