The EV’s are coming

[mp4guy]

There is a crap ton of EVs being introduced in the EU right now as well.

For the first time, EVs are outselling diesels in the new car market.

Some of them seem plausible, unlike previous ones. They're getting better at it year by year.

[HalfPint]

EV’s work ok in Europe where you have alternative means of transportation.

Why would anyone think an EV is a zero emissions vehicle?

[HalfPint]

My eyes hurt. No spacing or paragraphs.

Yeah, a lot of effort was put into that but it was unreadable, so it was wasted.

[Fiat500USA]

Yeah, a lot of effort was put into that but it was unreadable, so it was wasted.

I fixed it. My apologies. It may have been a problem with the forum software mashing it all together.

[map]

EV’s work ok in Europe where you have alternative means of transportation.

Why would anyone think an EV is a zero emissions vehicle?

True. Even bicycles and walking generates emissions. It's just that EVs produce significantly few emissions.

[HalfPint]

True. Even bicycles and walking generates emissions. It's just that EVs produce significantly few emissions.

Electricity is created mostly from fossil fuels, in many places from nasty lignite coal. Human exercise is not.

[smark]

Electricity sources, produced in my state. Coal is still the primary source. Lots of EV’s where I live. Plenty of charging stations for EV’s. ICE vehicle spew out tons pollution. ICE vehicles will become dinosaur in the next 5 years.

[HalfPint]

Electricity sources, produced in my state. Coal is still the primary source. Lots of EV’s where I live. Plenty of charging stations for EV’s. ICE vehicle spew out tons pollution. ICE vehicles will become dinosaur in the next 5 years.

The electricity produced in your state is not really a relevant measure, as there is no good way to confine those sources to what comes out of your outlets. You'd have to look at the sources feeding into the regional grid network, and even then it's not that well defined.

Also, the pollution created by nuclear is the worst of all, as it will essentially never go away.

[map]

That's true, coal is a dirty energy source, producing 15 times as much carbon as NG turbines, while being about 74% as efficient. On the other hand it's about 50% more efficient than an ICE engine in a car (44% vs 30%).

The saving grace of the EV is it uses the energy more efficiently. In areas where most US electricity is coal powered, EVs show as low as 45 MPG (based on pollution output), a bit below a comparable hybrid car.

That's an average for all EVs and modern ones have improved. The Porsche Taycan gets 79 MPGe, up to the Tesla 3 at 134 to 141 MPGe. Fortunately for smark, wind is usually peak in evenings. That probably means half his charge is coming from wind power. My city buys all its power from BPA, a major supplier in the NW.

"Wind without RECs" would be those owned by the utility. The non-specified is mostly from independents feeding power back to the grid, mostly solar and wind privately owned.

[HalfPint]

That's true, coal is a dirty energy source, producing 15 times as much carbon as NG turbines, while being about 74% as efficient. On the other hand it's about 50% more efficient than an ICE engine in a car (44% vs 30%).

The saving grace of the EV is it uses the energy more efficiently. In areas where most US electricity is coal powered, EVs show as low as 45 MPG (based on pollution output), a bit below a comparable hybrid car.

That's an average for all EVs and modern ones have improved. The Porsche Taycan gets 79 MPGe, up to the Tesla 3 at 134 to 141 MPGe. Fortunately for smark, wind is usually peak in evenings. That probably means half his charge is coming from wind power. My city buys all its power from BPA, a major supplier in the NW.

Those efficiency numbers include no information about charge rate, so I will assume they are at a rate that makes EVs look most advantageous. In the real world losses go up as the square of the current, so charging faster means much greater losses. Then there is the very real capacity limit of the electric grid, which simply does not have the spare capacity to supply all of our automotive transportation energy on top of what it's doing now. That's in terms of generation, transmission or distribution.

As I've said many times, you can make a really nice EV, but you cannot build an automotive transportation system that works anything like what we have using EVs. The process of transferring energy into some portable chunk of matter is fundamentally different than moving around some energy dense liquid with energy already stored in it - it takes a lot of time for every refill, and that time hit alone will make the system not work anything like it does now (and it's not the only major problem). Long trips will be impractical. That means in the end the number of vehicles will be much lower, and that smaller number of vehicles won't be able to support the road and highway infrastructure.

So yeah, companies that make vehicles see that what they're doing now won't work, so they'll tell you EVs are the future.

Last, in the PNW you have lots of hydo generation. How much extra hydo capacity is there? Because that present hydro generation is already doing something and significant increase in EV use would be a massive increase.