The 114-mpg electric car (but there's a catch)

  The US Dept of Energy lists the Nissan Leaf as having the equivalent of 114 mpg fuel economy on its fueleconomy.gov website.  For comparison, the Tesla Model S sedan gets a little bit lower fuel economy, but not much: 95 mpg in the 60 kWh battery system model.  Are these numbers for real?  Do the math: the Leaf is rated at 30 kWh of charge used for 100 miles of driving, according to USDOE.  That works out to 3.33 miles per kWh.  A gallon of gasoline has 115,400 Btu of energy content and a kWh has an equivalent of 3,412 Btu, so dividing the former by the latter gives a value of 34 kWh per gallon.  Multiply this by 3.33 mi/kWh and you have approximately 114 miles per gallon equivalent.
   So what's the catch?  Well, if a Nissan Leaf is a 114 mile per gallon car, then it has the equivalent of a 1-gallon gas tank.  On a good day.  The same USDOE webpage puts its range at 80 miles per charge that you could get consistently, so you'd need favorable conditions to go as far as 114 miles, the equivalent of one gallon of energy content.  Again, the Tesla does a little better (equivalent of 2 or 3 gallon gas tank), but that is because to own one you have shelled out serious money for a very high-capacity battery system.
   Now if only someone could figure out how to build an EV with 114 mpg AND the equivalent of a 10-gallon tank...don't hold your breath..../

Looking for a different driving experience? Try renting an electric car.

I recently discovered that our local branch of Enterprise Rent-a-car has a fleet of three Nissan Leaf's available for rent.  So last weekend (Aug.31-Sept.1) I rented myself one to get a feel for this new technology -- and gave rides to family, friends, children of friends, friends of children...here is what I learned:

1. Get the freshest car on the lot: Before issuing the car to me, the agent checked which one was the most charged, to make sure I had as many miles of range as possible.  As I drove out of the lot, the range meter said 99 miles of range.
2. Fun with guess-your-range: The dashboard tries to guess your remaining range based on charge left in the battery.  If you turn on the A/C, it goes down by 2-3 miles.  If you turn on "Eco" mode (accelerator is damped so that the car is not as powerful), it goes back up by 2-3 miles.
3. Smooth, powerful, and quiet: the vaunted high torque at low speed lived up to expectation, the car accelerates very quickly from a standstill even on a grade -- especially if you take it out of "Eco" mode!  There is also something cool about going down the expressway at 65 mph and all you can hear is the road noise from the tires -- very quiet.
4. Regenerative braking: The car took 15 miles of range off to climb a 1,000 vertical foot hill out of Ithaca, which was an actual distance over the road of 2.5 miles.  But it used -7 miles (in other words the range increased by 7 miles) to go back down the same hill, thanks to regenerative braking.  The motor can power the wheels at a max rate of 80 kW, but the wheels can regenerate back into the battery through the motor at a max rate of 30 kW.
5. Open your own front yard refueling station: The rental car came with the 110V charging cable.  We parked it in our front yard over night with a Kill-a-watt kWh meter on the cable, and in 13 hours put 17 kWh of charge back into the battery system.  Which raised the charge level from 17% to 80%.  At $0.14 per kWh, that's...$2.38?  Pretty cheap.  There is also a new faster 240V charging station in Ithaca, which I tried to charge after hours, but could not because I did not have an RFID-enabled credit card.
6. Best part of all: you don't need to return it fully recharged to the rental agency: This makes sense, since it takes so long to charge.  But in any case, your last charge is replenished by them and not you.  This arrangement saves you time and doesn't cost them that much.

A Note on the occasion of passing 400 ppmv atmospheric CO2 and a possible new approach

   Recently it was in the environmental and climate change news that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million volume (ppmv).  Great that the mainstream media covered this unhappy milestone, but to hear some of the news anchors talking about it, you would think that it came as surprise, like an especially intense heat wave that will stick around and then go away again.  Actually, it was entirely predictable, based on the amount of CO2 we are emitting and the way the atmosphere responds.
   The countries of the world emit a lot of CO2 each year.  Not all of it gets reabsorbed, so the ppmv figure goes up.  It used to be rising at around 3 ppmv per year back when we crossed the 350 ppmv threshold, but  the amount of CO2 emitted each year has been going up (and not down as we would like in order to protect the climate).  So now the rate of rise is about 4 ppmv per year.  In 2010 we were at 388; 3 years go by and it rises by 3 x 4 = 12, so hey presto we get to 400.  If we don't start curbing the global emissions rate -- not just for a subset of countries, but for the entire world community -- at the rate of 4 per year we'd surpass 450 ppmv 12 or 13 years from now, in 2025 or 2026.  Average global temperature bounces around more, but the general trend is up there too.
   Obviously this news is disheartening, but so that I don't go out on a gloomy note, maybe there is a possible solution hidden in these numbers, a new way to attack the problem.  President Obama talks about 80% reduction by 2050, and Bill McKibben talks about returning the level to 350 ppmv, but what if we start with a stepping stone toward those more distant goals: In the last 20 years, all of the years but two have had MORE emissions than in the previous year, and both of those coincided with worldwide economic recessions.  So what if we pick a year very soon in the future, and make sure the WORLD emissions in that year are LESS than they were the year before.  If we succeed with that one year in lowering emissions, we go for lower emissions in the next year, and the year after that...maybe we need to learn how to walk before we can learn how to run?

Obama's "All of the above" energy strategy doesn't add up

   In the State of the Union address on Tuesday night (2/12/13), President Obama touted his "all of the above" energy strategy.  First he talked about clean energy sources like solar and wind, and the need to protect future generations from climate change.  Then he talked about efforts to expand gas and oil extraction to keep prices low for consumers.
   Fact is, if you are going to expand gas and oil extraction and use (and the resulting CO2 emissions) then there is just no point in developing solar and wind, because gas and oil wash out the savings in CO2 emissions that are the purpose of clean energy.  It is like hiring a crew of workers to take all the hay bales out of your barn, and then hiring a different crew of workers to put hay bales in the barn at the same time.  Renewable energy isn't just a veneer that a country puts on to "look good" or develops an industry in so that they can get more market share than other countries (like China).  It has a real economic, ecological, and security purpose, and needs to be done right.
   What we need instead is an "orderly exit" from fossil fuels.  The president should know something about orderly exits, since he oversaw one from Iraq already and is now overseeing another from Afghanistan.  The exact details can be worked out, but one fundamental pillar is that you work only with the fossil energy sources you have now, and wind them done systematically, at the same time ramping up renewables and efficiency.  And not adding even more, cheap fossil energy sources.

Shell Energy ad for shale gas in Atlantic Monthly Magazine backfires

An advertising from Shell Energy in the July-August 2012 issue of the Atlantic Monthly Magazine promotes development of shale gas in the U.S. (from newly developed horizontal shale gas drilling techniques) as follows: 1) Shale gas will help the environment because it produces half as much CO2 emissions per unit of electricity produced compared to coal, and 2) the U.S. has a 250-year supply of this gas.
   The problem with this ad is that it gives you the evidence you need to argue against the environmental merits of shale gas, within the very text of the ad itself.  If the supply is 250 years, and the emissions are 50% of the emissions from coal, then the emissions from using up that gas are the equivalent of burning coal for 125 years.  In 2008, the world emitted 30.3 Gt or gigatonnes (billion metric tons) of CO2 to the atmosphere, in 2010 that figure had increased to 31.8 Gt.  That's a lot of carbon, and the number keeps getting larger each year.  In the face of mounting problems from climate change, the proposed reductions in emissions from the implied proposal of replacing massive use of coal with massive use of shale gas hardly seem worthy of much excitement.

Climate of confusion: we can't even agree on the definition of reality

To the climate change "believer" (the opposite of a climate change denier -- this blog fits squarely in the camp of the climate change believers), the climate change problem is like a ship with holes in the side, which is slowly sinking.  The climate change believers would like to get at those holes to fix them, but in their way stand the climate change deniers, who are doing their level best to keep them away.

To the climate change deniers, on the other hand, the climate change problem is like a ship with no holes in the side, which is not sinking.  The climate change deniers think that the climate change believers are imagining the holes, and they are trying to keep them away from the sides of the ship, for fear they will make real holes and sink the ship.

After the summer of 2012, the climate change believers may have gained more followers, but both sides remain strong and adamant that they are right.  Which leads to the most basic problem of all: if we can't even agree on what is reality and what is fantasy, how can we possibly solve such a complicated and daunting problem as climate change?

Response to Cathles and Victor interview on NPR

Note: this post is in response to an NPR interview of Profs Larry Cathles and David Victor on NPR's ALL THings Considered on Sun. July 15, 2012. A shortened version was posted to the comments for the story at npr.org
 There are problems with both Cathles’ and Victor’s arguments as presented in the piece.

 First, Cathles talks about up to a 40% reduction in CO2 by converting to natural gas. He doesn’t mention time frame: this conversion would 2-3 decades, by which time we should be looking at an almost complete phase-out of fossil fuels to at least stop making climate change much worse – by that time we will almost certainly have our hands full with the effects of climate change, thanks to the carbon that we have already emitted, or are about to emit in the coming years.

There is also no mention of current uses of natural gas for space and water heat, as well as industrial heating. In the absence of renewables these emissions would probably continue unchanged, and they are substantial. The bottom line is that we currently get roughly 85% of our energy from fossil fuels. Even if you convert that entire amount to natural gas from coal and oil (electricity, heating, transportation) you may reduce a lot of carbon, but you still have a lot left.

As for Victor, his notion that “renewables will have to learn to compete with gas” when it makes electricity for 2 cents a kWh ignores the basic physics of energy conversion. Renewables are expensive because they are diffuse, so you need lots of infrastructure to concentrate the diffuse energy into a form that we can use or transmit long distances. Even if you get clever about the turbines or photovoltaic cells, you are left with vast amounts of steel, concrete, and wiring needed, and that stuff is getting more expensive, not less. It’s hard to “prove” that something can’t be invented, but when I look at the whole-system cost (haven’t even talked about storage or smart grid yet) I just don’t see how it can be done.

Gas, like other fossil fuels, on the other hand, Mother Nature has done the work of concentrating the energy for us – we just figure out a system for getting it out of the ground, and away we go. Also, we get to control when it is burned and when it isn’t – dispatchability. Very nice stuff indeed.

Solar and wind are within range if we are willing to absorb higher costs and adjust, but if we insist on renewables at 2 cents a kWh with no tax on carbon emissions, we might need to wait a long time for that to work out, if ever. And a long time is one thing we just don’t have.

Which points to the solution: instead of subsidizing renewables to make them cheap, gradually phase in a carbon tax, cap and trade system, or renewable portfolio standard that will slowly but surely make fossil fuels that emit carbon to the atmosphere more expensive. Society would adjust, both by building more renewables and adapting energy consumption habits to reflect the higher cost. As a bargaining chip, offer the existing fossil fuel industry a path to transition to a new role in this new energy future, like we offered a “Peace Dividend” to the defense industry at the end of the cold war. This approach isn’t going to win any beauty contests, but if we care about our children and grandchildrens’ future, I think it is the only one that will work.