A few questions about electric cars

[Photonfanatic]

Just had a few general questions about electric cars, when it comes to their bottom line. The overall efficiency, and fuel savings, as well as environmental impact. I'll just number 'em.

1. How much does it cost in electricity, to "fuel up" an electric car, to go say... 300 miles. The average I'd expect a car that gets fairly decent mileage these days. Its costs me about $40 to do that in my toyota yaris. Roughly. So if for example, my electric bill is $200 a month, and now I add charging a typical (full electric, non hybrid) car to that bill, what is the extra cost going to be? Is it going to be less than paying for gasoline? I assume so, but by how much?

2. How the heck do you run an air conditioner, power steering, and power brakes on an all electric car? Or even an efficient heater that does a good job? I'm willing to make the sacrifice of paying for gasoline in my Yaris, if it means I get an air conditioner, power steering, power brakes, and a heater lol. I'm not willing to sacrifice all those things unless I absolutely have to. Which currently, none of us do. Currently.

3. Is the overall environmental impact of a full electric car less than that of a gasoline car? You have to take into account not just what its putting out once its on the road, but where the fuel actually comes from. Burning coal to make electricity for our electric cars isn't exactly environmentally friendly. Nor is it friendly if the actual production of the car itself, pollutes more than producing a vehicle that consumes fossil fuels.

[NeilBlanchard]

Cost per mile is fairly straight forward: the Nissan Leaf is a fair-to-middlin' EV and the EPA rates it at 340Wh/mile, so 300 x 340Wh = 102kWh. Around here we pay about 16 cents / kWh so that is $16.32.

Electric A/C, power steering, and brakes are all normal and available. Electric heat is the biggest challenge, but that is because the electric drivetrain is so efficient it has almost no waste heat.

It takes as much or more electricity to run a gasoline car a given distance, than it does to run an electric car the same distance. So, guess which one has a worse impact on the environment?

Gasoline doesn't come out of thin air, either. In fact it takes a lot of energy to produce gasoline and to transport it to your tank. Discovery of oil, drilling for oil, pumping the oil out of the ground (sometimes heating water to loosen it up!), moving the oil via pipelines and/or tankers, refining the oil (which takes a lot of natural gas and a lot of electricity), and then storing and transporting the gasoline, and then pumping it into your tank. A lot of steps, and a lot of invested energy.

[Photonfanatic]

Yeah I just mean which one actually turns out to be greater, and by how much? Since the gasoline itself isn't actually burned to produce electricity to fuel the electric cars. It is the fuel itself. Kind of like how you have to weigh the overall efficiency of solar panels, when their production is quite toxic, and they only last so long before the very sun they're harvesting kills them.

[spacer]

While there are some dirtier aspects to electric cars, which are generally ignored by their fans, they're still considerably cheaper and cleaner to operate than their gas powered counterparts.
The problems are generally in power storage right now.

I like the idea of a plug-in hybrid, which gives you the resilience of a gas powered car, but may never use that powerplant on shorter trips. Yeah, you still have the added complexity of two power systems, but it beats the heck out of the marginally more efficient ones of the last few years.

[Ryland]

Originally Posted by Photonfanatic

1. How much does it cost in electricity, to "fuel up" an electric car, to go say... 300 miles.

I pay 12 cents per KWH, that is also the national average for flat rate billing, of course a lot of power companies offer off peek rates for electric vehicle charging, some are down to 4-6 cents per kwh, but if you go with the national average it would cost me $12.24 to drive a Nissan Leaf 300 miles, my electric car uses closer to 250watt hours per mile, so it's a little cheaper.

2. How the heck do you run an air conditioner, power steering, and power brakes on an all electric car? Or even an efficient heater that does a good job? I'm willing to make the sacrifice of paying for gasoline in my Yaris, if it means I get an air conditioner, power steering, power brakes, and a heater lol. I'm not willing to sacrifice all those things unless I absolutely have to. Which currently, none of us do. Currently.

The largest electric draw in the car is the drive motor so even running a 3000 watt electric heater to heat the cabin will have an impact on rage but not huge, but electric heated seats tend to be 50 to 100 watts each and they heat your body instead of the air, the Leaf comes with a heated steering wheel and electric heat warms up much faster then the heat from a gas engine, as for power steering and other power options, a lot of new cars have electric power steering already, power brakes is just a small vacuum pump, air conditioning is easy to do as electric and also can be a reversible heat pump to provide heat while using less energy.
Most factory built electric vehicles also have an option to time your heat your AC to come on while the car is plugged in or to turn it on with your smart phone.

3. Is the overall environmental impact of a full electric car less than that of a gasoline car? You have to take into account not just what its putting out once its on the road, but where the fuel actually comes from. Burning coal to make electricity for our electric cars isn't exactly environmentally friendly. Nor is it friendly if the actual production of the car itself, pollutes more than producing a vehicle that consumes fossil fuels.

The amount of electricity it takes to pump crude oil, refine it and deliver it is one of the largest uses of electricity in the country, each gallon of gas took enough electricity to power a car like the Nissan Leaf for around 22 miles, so if you were to replace a 22mpg car with an electric car the over all demand on the grid for electric power would stay the same, of course with gasoline you still have the pollution from burning the gasoline and as I said already, if you charge with off peek electricity you are evening out demand on the grid, oil refineries demand that electricity 24/7 but you have options as to when your car is going to charge, most of this can be preprogramed and timed to be automatic or controlled by the power company to turn off for a few minutes at a time to lower peek day time demands with devices like are used to control water heaters and air conditioners.

[Ryland]

Originally Posted by Photonfanatic

Yeah I just mean which one actually turns out to be greater, and by how much? Since the gasoline itself isn't actually burned to produce electricity to fuel the electric cars. It is the fuel itself.

The amount of pollution from charging an electric car off 100% coal (as dirty as you can get) is about the same as driving a gasoline vehicle that gets around 90mpg and that is before you add on the environmental impact of extracting the crude oil and refining it.

Kind of like how you have to weigh the overall efficiency of solar panels, when their production is quite toxic, and they only last so long before the very sun they're harvesting kills them.

Do you have a source for that statement? I hate to have this thread get off topic, but PV panels have a 50+ year life span (25 year warranty is standard) and most of the toxic metals that are used to make them are kept in a closed loop system in the factory and I'm not sure what the current energy pay back on making PV panels are, but 10 years back or so it was less then 3 years to and I think I've heard that their embedded energy pay back is now less then a year, Home Power magazine has published info on this in the past.

[Photonfanatic]

Never heard of this PV. Who are they? I might be interested in buying some panels from them later this year if all that's true. As for my source, I only have my own personal experience. Rather, the personal experience of my next door neighbor. He bought some panels, (don't know what brand) back in 2000. They lasted about 10 years before they stopped working. Lived next door to him all my life so I know when he put them up and when he took them down. When they quit working we got up there to see, and they had done... something, some kind of oxidization. So he called the company and found out they were out of warranty, he'd have to buy new ones. They said it was probably due to the elements and that they do finally wear out. Offered to sell him some new ones. He said that all in all, over the course of the ten years they probably saved him about $3000 after professional installation.

He paid somewhere in the area of $18k for 3000 watts worth of solar panels. Covered much of the roof of his house. That's what I was going off of, I had assumed that the technology hadn't improved much. It seems to improve oh so slow.

[nemo]

PV = photovoltaic = solar panels

[Ryland]

Yes, PV = photovoltaic = solar panels, thanks Nemo.
And yes, there are cheap types of solar panels that don't hold up and they tend to have lousy warranties, but the industry standard is 25 years, it used to be 30-35 years but there are apparently some countries that don't allow warranties that are that long and they didn't want different warranties depending on the country you are in, besides, 25 years is decent.
What your neighbor most likely had were Thin Film solar panels and those do break down in sunlight, failing over time but people buy them because they are cheaper, much cheaper, it's also hard to find any that are made by any companies that have a reputation to uphold.
My parents have PV panels that are around 27 years old, some that are 18 or so years old and some that are just over 10 years old, all of them are working flawlessly, still putting out above their rated output and they just ordered some more that will be covering their barn roof.

One question that you did not ask about electric cars, that is often asked, is the batteries and if they are going to fill our landfills, lead acid batteries are the most recycled thing in our country, over 99% of the lead acid batteries are recycle at the end of their life.
Lithium batteries can and should be recycled and it's not so much the lithium in the battery that we are after but it's the other metals, the copper and aluminum, if I remember right a lithium battery from a Nissan Leaf is worth about $500 as scrap, so I can't imagine anyone setting those out with the trash and that is if they even reach the end of their useful life because it's much more likely that there will be 2nd uses for those batteries and that it will be decades before they start being recycled in large numbers.

[NeilBlanchard]

Electric cars put out much less pollution and much less carbon dioxide per mile than gasoline cars.

As I posted above, it takes more electricity to run a gasoline car the same distance as an electric car. So the gasoline car has all the pollution of the electric car PLUS the pollution from the gasoline, and from the natural gas that is also used to produce the gasoline.

The so-called "long tailpipe" argument against electric cars is completely negated by this. Yes, pollution is emitted by electric power plants, but even more pollution is emitted all through the process of producing gasoline. And the gasoline itself produces more pollution than the electric car.

Another point we cannot forget is we can get electricity for the next *Billion* years or so -- as long as the earth still exists. How long will oil last? How is it that we have the "right" to burn up the oil and gas and coal as quickly as we can? Don't we owe our lives to this earth and a clean environment? How can we justify completely upending the climate and using up all the resources as quickly as we can?