"cars are unsustainable" is an interesting assumption, Catherine. We know unchecked population growth -- total or in cities, is indeed unsustainable, but why a particular tool? A car is a tool, as is a hammer. Are hammers "unsustainable?" iPhones may be, if we care about Chinese suicides. ;]

I had a shock one day at a conference when an environmental lawyer came up to me, knowing I was a Sierra Club member, and he said "You know, the Club is too often on the wrong side of an environmental issue".

I was shocked. Shocked! But, after many meetings & concalls with club committees, etc. I came to see the truth -- blind bias was/is often the source & support for policy determination. The Sierra head just came out admitting the club had been taking $ from gas interests -- no effect on policy? He says no more gas $ accepted. What other club policies are biased & counterfactual? Nuclear for one. Biomass for another.

So here we are, dissing cars when it's really our way of doing economics & 'growth'.in unrealistic ways.

Hi Alex,
my favourite article on cars is "My other car is a bright green city" by Alex Steffen of worldchanging fame. He's a regular TED speaker and all round systems analyst and environmental activist. Grab a coffee and check it out. This is simply one of my favourite pieces on how cars and cities interact. It will take about 20 minutes of slow and careful reading to really mine it's depths. I go back to it about once a year!

http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007800.html

Well if someone was to make a list of things that contribute to an 'antisocial community' cars would be pretty far down the list but I can understand why they make the list.

There seems to be an increasing level of ignorance from car owners, especially in residential areas about just how to interact and live with other people in their street, and the way they park their car seems to be a sad reflection of it.

I can only comment about my local area but over the last year I've seen an increasing number of people that seem to think the following is completely fine.

a. Park opposite a T intersection.
b. Park too closely to intersections. (when combined with a. it turns the road into a rats maze).
c. Park so that they take up more space than they need.

I'm surprised that there have been no incidents of street\park rage from suburban areas with people lashing out at the ignorant and selfish parking habits of others.

Sure thing, the car won't be discarded, and I don't know of anybody who is advocating such.

It's all well and good to say "electric is the way to go", but market forces prescribe what consumers end up buying. For the EV market to succeed any time soon needs more than market intervention by government. To date, generous government subsidies are not convincing the markets. We can only speculate at this point, but early signs are that consumers will place a high priority on convenience and that will mitigate in favour of conventional engined cars.

This is the rub: Like it or not, nearly all new cars purchased in the coming decade will be internal combustion driven.

Insofar as people will continue to buy new cars, and enjoy the individual freedoms they represent (ignoring purported costs to the planet and a healthy social environment ) it is a fair enough case to make that governments should intervene heavily to promote EVs over conventional cars. Like many I think the advantages of electric vehicles are way overstated by their devotees, but let's accept that there is enough potential advantage for government to influence the market in that direction.

But, I think the case that is being made that a much higher priority should be placed on policy incentives that re-arrange our cities and pubic transport infrastructure to markedly reduce our car dependence. The issues are not exactly either / or. To some extent they will be complementary.

"Like many I think the advantages of electric vehicles are way overstated by their devotees," -- depends on whether you're a devotee of something else already, Chris.

Your msg agrees with what we all know -- EVs need time to be developed to meet typical needs and there will be various alternatives for years. The key is that if I buy a comfortable car today, it will get better mileage than my '61 Sprite. And in a few years, better still. Or then I may see an EV to buy because the charging & range issues are better, or BetterPlace may have moved into Calif. sufficiently to let me own their car, while they own their battery. Or, maybe I'll just buy a 12-year-old Prius?

This isn't about having it all happening today, or next year. Why use impatience as an argument against something that's always going to be demonstrably better environmentally?

I think the energy consumption from shipping is a very small portion of the total when compared with extraction and processing of metal ores, particularly aluminium. Even recycling is more energy-intensive than shipping them around the world.

Actually, Jonathan, it's the pollution that's most significant because of the lax standards for the open sea. An engineer friend actually consults with port officials around the world to control what incoming outgoing freighters must burn when in/near port.

And, recycling aluminum saves ~90% of fabrication energy.

Yes, big marine diesel engines can burn practically anything, and in practice they burn the cheapest fuel they can get, which is the heavy residual oil left over when an oil refinery can't extract anything lighter or cleaner from crude oil. It's like filthy brown vaseline, can only be pumped through the fuel lines by heating it up, and the soot emissions are horrendous. Nevertheless, the engines are efficient (up to 50% thermal efficiency, which I find very impressive) and the ultimate contribution of shipping to the total "embodied energy" of most shipped goods is negligible.

No it's not true, but for different reasons than you suggest.

Modern, well-tuned internal combustion engines have surprisingly good thermal efficiencies, quite comparable to that of power stations. The newest large marine diesels (turbocharged two-strokes burning filthy bunker oil) achieve an astonishing 50% efficiency. A good vehicle engine can achieve ~30% conversion from embodied fuel energy to torque when running at an optimum constant speed.

This is not really any worse than a power station. Older thermal power stations (such as the big brown-coal ones in Victoria) rarely achieve better than 30% thermal efficiency, fuel to electricity, though the newest supercritical turbines may even with a single cycle get over 40% due to their very high operating temperatures. Combined-cycle gas-fired power stations can do much better, approaching 60%.

But petrol engines in cars don't run optimally and continually. They are built to handle occasional massive power demand spikes ("200 killer wasps?!"), achieve optimal efficiency somewhere around half that power level, and spend most of their time delivering far less power at far lower efficiency -- idling, or just running the aircon, racing without a load, accelerating at low revs, etc. etc. The constantly changing speeds, loads and temperatures do indeed contribute to a lot of interesting chemical emissions (carbon monoxide, nitrous oxides and, from diesels, a lot of soot) as well as inefficiency, but a newish car isn't that sooty or toxic if well-maintained. Ultimately only about 5% of the energy in the fuel an ICE car burns is used in actually pushing the car along.

The electric pathway contributes extra losses : maybe 10% in power transmission, another 25% in the round-trip conversion of charging and depleting the batteries, and 3% in the motor. These are cumulative losses, so ultimate fuel->torque efficiency is maybe 18% : rather *lower* than for a petrol engine running optimally.

The gain from driving an electric car is that an an electric motor doesn't waste power idling or racing. It delivers power at near constant efficiency through almost its full speed range (it does drop off at maximum speed) and -- here's the clincher -- it becomes a generator when it's used for braking. The "ultimate efficiency" could be closer to 12% than an ICE's 5%.

All this means even when the original power source is brown coal, with a little more than twice the carbon emissions per unit energy of petrol, an electric car would still come out about even in terms of grams of CO2 per kilometre driven. With any other power source for the electricity (a petrol engine for instance, in the case of a hybrid, or renewable or nuclear energy), they are way ahead.

This is all about energy and emissions -- nothing to do with cost. The capital cost of a hybrid is substantially higher than an equivalent-sized traditional ICE car. An all-electric car, without the petrol engine, still seems to suffer a price disadvantage today but maybe this will not be too long-lived as "range anxiety" is addressed and production numbers ramp up.

Basically agree Jonathan, but your pessimism about actual power delivered at the road would mean our 1-litre AH Sprite couldn't climb the hill up the street at 25mph, and it does. Same for EV drive.

Drive trains do lose about 10% of input power under heavy load, but it only takes about 25kW to move a modest sedan at 60km/Hr on a level highway.

Also, the power plants here may be unusually efficient compared to Down Under, but we do get around 50% out of their gas (most fuel in Calif), so EVs with regeneration indeed make lots of sense, in comparison to even the latest 40mpg Toyota.

I wasn't pessimistic about *power* but about *efficiency* :)

A car is near its maximum power output when it's pushing up a hill, and if you choose the right gear the engine will be close to its peak efficiency. If you spend all your time surging up hills or zooming along the freeway at 80km/h you're making the most of your fuel. It's idling and braking in stop/start traffic (throwing away at every stop all the energy you threw into getting the car started since last time) which reduces the *average* energy efficiency achieved by the engine.

Combined-cycle gas-fired power stations can achieve better than 60% thermal efficiency. Coal-fired power stations with a single cycle cannot (and the oldest ones operate at relatively low temperatures so rarely do better than 30-35%), nor can open-cycle gas turbines.

Coal here often operates combine cycle.

Really? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Gasification_Combined_Cycle#Installations

Yes, feeling good is a plus. Proving that we can live modern lives without petroleum is a big plus. Driving on wind power -- priceless ;)

Yes, Jonathan, nice thought to be driving on wind power. I used to think along those lines and then did the calculations on the numbers of wind generators to feed say 15 million EVs. It comes to an awful lot. Both the manufacture of the EVs and all the wind generators and all associated infrastructure have significant energy and materials inputs, electricity being one of those – but also plastics, steel, aluminium, glass... and so forth.

Having done the sums I came to a mathematical conclusion that to supply the electricity component of all that could really only be done by embracing nuclear power in a big way. I don't believe we can massively convert our nation's vehicle fleet without doing so.

That's a snag in itself, because Australian society is very divided on that issue at present, many not seeing nuclear as being 'green'. Others would be untroubled by it.

So you haven't actually read what's been said, eh Chris?

"...the article's original premise holds true – the squeaky clean-green image of electric vehicles does not hold water. The relative advantage of them is very questionable. Technical experts don't agree amongst themselves."

You're sounding like the tortured logic of climate deniers, mu man.

So you missed that just regenerative braking alone returns ~15% of all the energy stored in a vehicle's motion -- 1/2 m v squared?

You miss that burning fuel of any kind at a power plant is more efficient than burning it in individual vehicles?

You missed that EVs/hybrids, when parked, can serve as grid buffers?

You didn't bother to check such benefits, as at betterplace.com?

Even today, the Prius and more efficient combustion-only vehicles have made a dent in US fuel waste. Consumption numbers are down, etc.

So, I don't get what your point is. There remain many improvements to the grid, EVs, storage, etc. As an electrical engineer, I read about those things every day. We even have a 220VAC socket ready in the garage. But, I haven't bought an EV or a hybrid yet, 'cause our Sprite & Hondas do quite well for the amount we drive. Our Jaguars however, well, they do sit around a lot.
;]

Jonathan, too bad wind isn't priceless, but it is wasteful & costly -- about 700 tons of fossil-fuel-prepared material per MW of peak installed (divide by 4) capacity. Yes, those 400-ton wind towers take steel that needs about 1000-2000 tons of coal to make. Then, all wind wastes ~19% in transmission. Their controllers actually consume kWatts from the grid when idle, or when wind is too slow or too fast.

Wind is in the past, except for those who get the rest of us to subsidize them!

Remember, like the article, the goal is to determine what's actually 'green'.

No-one has ever pretended that electricity from the wind has no cost whatsoever, or even that no fossil energy is consumed in the construction of wind machines. *All* electricity generation techniques have these costs, no exceptions.

However you are being disingenuous. The capital costs, including fossil-energy-produced steel and concrete, of wind generation are high, though not very much higher per unit of energy generated than those of nuclear power, which are in turn higher than those of coal. Existing wind power has a high energy-return-on-energy-investment (comparable to current nuclear technology and higher than many new oil wells), and the technology continues to improve. Just as there are new-generation nuclear technologies in the offing, new generation wind machines such as those from Makani Power ( http://www.makanipower.com/ ) promise more power, a higher load factor, and lower cost than existing steel-tower turbines.

Ah, Alex, the point I am making is simply to accord with the original article – to remove the inane 'zero impact' image from electric car promotion. This is a conversation that is needed at this point in history.

Don't mistakenly read this as opposition to EVs. I love technology too. As said, they will have their place in the scheme of things, it's just that they don't offer the dreamy green panacea that is touted for them.

Interesting to analyse the EV market in England, in these early days. Nearly all buyers are fairly well-heeled blokes buying a second car, for short trips to the shops, but maintaining a petrol engined car as the family's primary vehicle. The manufacturers have noticed this trend and so have started to focus their advertising messages to suit this market niche. It's not exactly the niche that they want to sit in in the long run, nor is it a formula for displacing IC engined vehicles.

Again, the market is the market is the market. No amount of wishful thinking can make people buy a product that doesn't suit their needs or aspirations. We'll have to wait quite a few years to see if the market broadens out – especially in the face of opposition from other emerging technologies.

Citizens will adjust their choices a little bit on environmental grounds, but those grounds need to be manifest in order for them to be prepared to pay extra or put up with less that satisfactory convenience.

I will generously predict a 2 percent market share by 2020. Would be nice to get in touch again then and compare notes.

Actually, no, Jonathan. The vast majority of nuclear plant investment lasts many decades. Wind machines don't, and as the Chinese are finding, when the winds change as climate changes, who's going to move the windmills?

The reality is that wind power is high maintenance, consumes vast amounts of land, threatens species, is noisy, ugly and is subsidized more than most any form of power generation, and suffers intermittancy that must be made up for and permanent transmission loss. Nukes at least pay per kW for future de-commissioning. Wind 'farms' investors don't. We've got plenty of the 70's wind junk lying around Calif...
http://webecoist.com/2009/05/04/10-abandoned-renewable-energy-plants/

Not only is wind lower power density than current solar, it will fall further behind, even if the more optimal designs were built...
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/07/14/caltech-vertical-axis-wind-turbines-boost-wind-farm-power-efficiency-10x/
http://media.caltech.edu/press_releases/13430

Win power is just another scam for the few to make $ off the many. Solar DG is truly the future, and is indeed 'renewable'. Wind ain't

It's a fallacy to point at a bunch of outdated equipment abandoned a decade ago due to now-you-see-it-now-you-don't flip-flopping government support and call its contemporary, commercial, industrial, large-scale successors a "scam". Yes, remote intermittent energy has incidental costs including line losses and the need for firming. But you aren't pointing at profitable wind farms built since 2006 in Texas or China, you're pointing at rows of aircraft propellers on rusty radio masts from 1985 -- equipment barely evolved from a 1915 farm water pump.

A lot of older nuclear power stations have been decomissioned too, and more than one was abandoned before it was ever completed. What a scam to rip off consumers!

Contemporary wind turbines work just fine, produce power at no greater cost than modern nuclear power, and can be installed in a matter of months, not the best part of a decade.

Both technologies have a future.

Jonathan, I don;t care which technology has more boosters, I'm just looking at the facts. Wind is at best 1/2MW/acre in power density. solar is now much greater than that and needs no land --DG. Solar has another doubling in efficiency per sq meter, sio wind, even if Caltech;s R&D on verticals were implemented, would still fall behind solar DG, still consume vast lands and still waste power in transmission.

Those are facts. If a wind investor said yes, we are paying into a decommissioning bond at the same rate as nukes, then we could say something better, but the basic engineering reality is that wind machines can never make up for their lack of reliability or loss. Those are externalized expenses to wind investors, just as de-commissioning has been.

Crocodile tears about showing all our '70s wind crap here in Calif. doesn't give traction to present-day wind installations. They remain, 2nd-order, inefficient, intermittent, land hungry devices. And, if they ever tallied up their real costs, as is starting to be done in the midwest, they'd be out of the business.

Alex - I take it you are in the US.

Has there been much press about Low Energy Nuclear Reaction that NASA is exploring?
Is there any news on eCat Rossi has developed and partnered with US backers?

99% of the land "consumed" by wind power is still perfectly useable for whatever it was used for before the wind turbines were built. The only thing it's not good for any more is more wind turbines, or people who are bothered by the noise or think the view is spoiled. Your other criticisms are valid but manageable -- and each one of them also applies to other energy technologies. "Crocodile tears" about just beginning to move past the 80s on nuclear technology notwithstanding.

Jonathan, you make it too easy. Not only is the land taken, including tree cutting in our own eastern-forest wind 'farms. but roads are built at good cost & great damage to the environment. And, transmission swaths are taken, towers are erected (remember all that fossil fule burden for steel, etc? And the power is more variable that even solar. Then we have the bird & bat deaths, which in the US midwest are now beginning to affect farm crops -- bugs that don't get eaten, eat. So the present analysuis shows farmers losing $billions/year simply due to windmills, if built out to planned levels,.

Texas, because of its crazy-quilt grid management (remember ENRON?), already has folks up in arms -- a wind farm next- door that you didn't want gets to put a transmission tower over grandma's grave in you front yard, for example. It goes on, for example...
www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/allan-farago-big-wind-s-inconvenient-truth

A scam is a scam.

Again, I now get you;re an unquestioning wind guy, but just as this article was about vetting EVs for greenness, you should be ready to vet wind, similarly. It fails.

Alex, that's pleasing to hear, at least US server filters are running relatively free.

As for Rossi filing patents, you can't blame anyone for not going down that path without billions, the system has wandered down a different direction since Albert worked patents and Edison was stealing ideas. That "Good Old Boy" Cornel Sanders never went there and neither did CocoCola, that kind of business modelling is worth serious thought.

I read enough quantum physics to leave Rossi and LENR with one eye on them. Critical thinking means just that. Please don't apologise for being half Italian, where would we be without Leonardo the Renaissance, Ducatti, Fangio, Valentino Rossi, Ferrari and Porco Rosso.

I like George Monbiot's quote, we personally have diverged now he is backing IFR at least he could have looked at barium, but it fits our arena of thought today. As for NASA they have lost their "why", so I have lost interest in them.

"We have to challenge the ideas we like far more fiercely than the ideas we don't like," ~ George Monbiot ~

Alex typo - alert -
'barium' should read 'thorium'

The Liquid fluoride thorium reactor process is where generation one should have been commissioned. Russia beat the US on that one. My only concern is the terror issue, with plutonium.

Jonathan, add the development of the "wind lens" and bird, bat and insect strike diminish and there is a boost in efficiency. Turbine design development and improvement is occurring even if it is in Europe and Japan.

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/japanese-breakthrough-will-make-wind-power-cheaper-than-nuclea

This unscrupulous manipulation of legislatures and bureaucracies has always been part of the way business is done in many countries. There's a reason it's called "railroading". It's no different from Enron or forest clearance or shale gas drillers or cattle feedlots or mining or hydro dam construction. It's wrong and I won't defend it, but it's not relevant to the efficacy of a particular technology.

Label me "unquestioning" or however you like, these stories are those of peoples' intense frustration with a legal system which has let them down. The wind turbines are not to blame; I would suggest the problem is people who put profits before other people.

I won't defend unscrupulous turbine operators against noise complaints. There are better ways to solve disputes than to quash the complaints in bureaucracy and other places where it's perfectly appropriate to put turbines.

Good. We agree.

Well, this seems to have turned into one of those rather torrid wind-versus-nuclear debates, which one could say is a bit off the subject matter – electric cars. Except that it isn't. Because it's all about powering up these 'zero emissions' little beasties. And that's blends exactly with the article's main thesis.

I would be happy to concede that at a pinch here in lucky Australia we could provide enough renewable energy to electrify our transport fleet. At a pinch, and with a huge amount of investment that could arguably be better spent building a more resilient society.

Extrapolating to the 900 million cars in the world and this task is beyond comprehension. On my reckoning, it is simply fanciful to think of those millions of vehicles in New York and Bombay and Singapore and London and Paris..... running on wind turbines.

Alex touched on population, another torrid debate, but again relevant. Facilitating private travel for the rest of the world's citizens (and why shouldn't they?) would build up the total global car fleet to 2 billion within 50 years. That's the trend we are facing.

Every way we look at it, there's no free lunch, sorry lads. The long and the short of it is that if we wish to maintain business-as-usual transport modes we have to pay a very heavy price. Perhaps a price that the planet can't sustain.

From a purely technological perspective electric cars are a fine idea and a nice piece of technology. Place them into our real sociological perspective and we have a much more expansive story.

Hi Chris,
but if one day the world runs on GenIV nukes for all energy use, including mining, smelting, the grid and yes, even charging electric cars, where's the Co2 output?

Gen IV nukes will burn nuclear waste and could run the world for 500 years on the nuclear waste we ALREADY have sitting around in cooling ponds. We already have 300 reactor-years experience with breeder reactors and know the physics works. Prof Barry Brooks, head of the climate department at Adelaide University, explains more here.
http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/09/18/ifr-fad-7/

So...Eclipse... you are saying there is a free lunch?

Like electric cars, Gen IV nuclear reactors will (when proven up) will be very seductive to the masculine mind-set. As far as technical fixes go, they are both up there with the best. So, to that extent I absolutely agree with you.

But, like so many of these energy debates, it's important not to place technological innovation on too of a high pedestal. As someone pointed out, the problems of the world don't just boil down to a simple problem that we picked the wrong technology and can magically fix everything up by merely doing a technology swap.

Given technology's importance to energy futures, these promising technologies are relevant, I don't argue against them per se. They just aren't the quick easy panacea that so many earnest subscribers place on them.

Worse, the promise of a quick fix is arguably the greatest impediment to the development of a deeper set of policy responses that address long-term sustainability.

Crudely put, we live in a non-sustainable consumer society and it is a fallacy (but a deeply imbedded one) that we can simply buy our way out trouble. We can't.

(I've followed the Gen IV debate with some interest over the years. Fascinating stuff.)

Hi Chris,
as a passionate peak oiler I agree with most of what you are saying, especially about the need for generally more sustainable societies, ecocities, and the population discussion. However, I'd just like to point out a study that said 84% of USA cars could be charged from off-peak electricity overnight: kind of doing away with the concept of off-peak electricity in the first place! It would even demand.

So the challenge is not quite as high as some expect, when considering how much unused spinning reserve there really is at night.

Personally I prefer the work of Roy Leembruggen, the Australian inventor of the double-decker train now popular around the world. He says the good old trolley bus is the answer! We could whack them up 5 times cheaper than trams, and if backed up by a good battery or diesel engine, can even go off-the-line for short trips to escape obstacles on the main road or more importantly, service side streets.
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/07/trolleytrucks-trolleybuses-cargotrams.html

Thanks Exclipse,

Electrification of public transport systems should be ranked several notches above electrification of private cars, in terms of policy priority.

One fundamental problem with the Utopian technology future is that the phasing out of existing infrastructure and building all the new stuff has at least a 25-year lag time. Longer for much of it. Many believe that we are going to run into real trouble well before a wholesale conversion of technology can possibly fix things up – assuming that it can.

For this reason I made a decision some 5 years ago to change focus towards the deep cultural transition that has to take place. There are no end of advocates dealing with technological innovation, I don't need to add to that noise. That said, being trained in technology I am no Luddite. I listen to all that is being said.

Paul, why oh why are you placing your hopes in doubtful schemes like Rossi when we already have 300+ years of breeder reactor experience? We can burn nuclear waste. We already have. GenIV nukes are just tidying up a few new exponentially safer and more cost effective plans. That's all. Stop pretending the physics doesn't work as you were in the other thread!

The 'technological' problem we face is, in fact, one few dare speak of: population control.

Hi Chris,
as I said before, a majority of these cars can be charged with *existing* off peak electricity.

Spot on, Eclipse.

Population has become a very popular issue amongst blogists, and for good reason. But most use the word as if policy measures to bring about population stability are as easy as pie. Mass culling aside, population policy is painstakingly slow and complex. And even if successful, it doesn't resolve the 64 million dollar question put to me recently by an Oxfam manager: "When you manage to lift a nation out of poverty, how do you then prevent that population from becoming just another consumer society?"

Population isn't the whole story. The crisis that confronts humanity is about multiple limits.

And back to technology. Many of the comments in this thread talk eagerly about an idyllic, rosy future where zero-emission electric cars are fuelled by IFR nuclear power reactors, and we all live happily ever after. Again, such a massive transition can't just be invoked in a few years via wishful thinking. To make that happen you would actually need a government so determined to go down that pathway that the production and sale of internal combustion motor cars are legally prohibited. Not likely. The 'market' is pretty well sacrosanct these days, government doctrine is that market forces must determine consumer choices, with minimal intervention.

Unless governments are to become brutal and take control over consumer desires and the market place, then the technology transition we are likely to witness will be far too sluggish to make much difference in the scheme of things. If we look at the electric car's foreshadowed 2% market share by 2020, and then think about other policy measures that could quite easily reduce our travel demand by 10 or 20 percent, then we can get a feel for what is possible or likely within democratic constraints.

New technology is very relevant but, just like population, it sits within a complex cultural milieu.

That may be so whilst the electric car market is relatively small. If it scales up to become a significant component of national power demand then there will be no choice but to add power generation infrastructure.

There's only so much spinning reserve in the system and new gas generators associated with coal power plants are being installed so as to flatten out the peaks. The level of spinning reserve is stepping down as we speak. So I wouldn't overstate this opportunity.

Actually, Chris, "spinning reserve" is already being added in large plants here, in the form of flywheels that fit in the same wells in hydro plants as their generators, and in turbine halls for thermal/nuke plants as well.
http://beaconpower.com/ (one example)

There's no reason to suspect all forms of storage won't advance as quickly as we displace fossil-fuel combustion.

You missed what I said Chris, and what the industry is doing,-- there's a differnece between power & energy, right?

So, a large flywheel at a plant is a resource of stored energy, like a filled reservoir. Nothing much is wasted by spinning it up on off peak times and making its stored energy available as needed.

This is indeed that same as for EV charge/discharge by remote grid control, except utility flywheels are a bit more efficient.

Yes, it's true that full build-out of EV home charging will double our home electrical demand per day, but again, scheduled charge/discharge can limit the size & number of new pole transformers needed -- one house's EV can charge the other house's EV, logically speaking. Same for solar panels with local storage.

The wind 'debate' was over long ago, it's just the fibs & subsidies that keep some folks in it, right Chris?
;]
www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/allan-farago-big-wind-s-inconvenient-truth

My favorite: http://tinyurl.com/bl9vlc7

Well I for one am unhappy with Alex's "conclusions on wind energy", which goes back to your other point about fuel. As long as there are loads on the grid which can be time-shifted, such as EV charging, increased aggregate demand over the course of a day need not require extra *fuel* burning so long as the peak does not increase. These loads are ideally suited for soaking up increased generation from inexpensive but intermittent renewables. Wind and solar PV are very cheap nowadays and are only going to get cheaper.

Also I think you're both nuts being impressed by flywheels and talking about "spinning reserve" as though it's something that needs to be "soaked up". Spinning reserve exists for one reason only : so that if a generator or transmission line suddenly fails, another generator can immediately provide the missing power. There is no scope for "soaking up" spinning reserve without, as you say, dramatically increasing fuel consumption. However large-scale severable loads (like car batteries, water supply pumps or cooling equipment), if under the near-instantaneous control of the network operator, *can* provide much of the same amenity if the short-term power drop can be covered by flywheels or supercapacitors.

Flywheels are used for very-short-term frequency support in similar situations when large loads (or generators) are turned on or off : they're great for rapid power delivery but their energy density is relatively low and losses are high. Pumped hydro storage, and deferred hydro generation, remain cheaper by an order of magnitude and are far more efficient. The reversible heat-pump technology described here ( http://www.isentropic.co.uk/our-phes-technology ) promises to deliver similar amenity to pumped hydro but at lower cost and negligible land space and ecological impact. Batteries such as those developed for electric cars are also suitable for modest short-term levelling over the course of a day.

"Paul, why oh why are you placing your hopes in doubtful schemes" Eclipse Now [sic]

This comment is just being antagonistic. Don't abuse me again.

My comment doesn't constitute "faith".

Saying;
"I read enough quantum physics ................ LENR with one eye on them"
Paul Richards

Is clearly to all an, open approach.
No one would understand both sides of any issue, particularly the nuclear energy debate with out it.

Please, don't project your narrow world view onto anyone here.

This is evident to all who read the comments placed under the anonymous "Eclipse Now". Again this is demonstrating the projecting of personal traits an individual, this has been done with comments by "Eclipse Now" to other well meaning people.

For the record all breeder reactors work, no comment by myself has - ever - or even inferred they do not.

I say again I have never said breeder reactors don't work.

They just haven't ever been proved conclusively economically viable, by normal business standards.

If you want to refute that you will need more than "blog" copy and nuclear sales rhetoric.

My late matriarchal grandmother once told me;
"Evil thinkers are evil doers."

Eclipse Now, remember that truism next time you judge others.

Paul,

The way you try to characterise breeder's it's as if they've all failed and demonstrated that there is no hope, ever, of fixing them. Of making them cheaper and more economical.

However, governments haven't given up on them. They're building more and more of them!

India has just about built the PFBR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_fast_breeder_reactor

India are planning on building 6 more.

//It is planned to construct six 500 MWe commercial fast breeder reactors (CFBR), similar to PFBR with improved economy and safety, during 2013-20. In the CFBR, MOX fuel and the two-loop concept would be retained. To improve economy, other features under consideration include: a twin-unit concept, optimum shielding, use of 304 LN in place of 316 LN for cold pool components and piping, 85% load factor, 60 years design life, reduced construction time (5 years) and enhanced burn up (up to 200 GWd/t, to be achieved in stages), and three SG modules per loop with increased tube length of 30m (for comparison, PFBR has four 23m-long modules per loop). //
http://www.neimagazine.com/story.asp?storyCode=2055120

This Russian BN-600 breeder has been in operation since 1980, and the Japanese were so interested in it's technical specs they paid a $1 billion for the plans and operating specs! Not only that, the BN-350 operated as a reliable desal unit for a whole city.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-600_reactor

//There is a lot of international interest in the fast-breeder reactor at Beloyarsk. Both Japan and France have their own prototype fast-breeder reactors. Japan paid 1 billion [1] for the technical documentation of the BN-600. The operation of the reactor is an international study in progress; Russia, France, Japan, and the United Kingdom currently participate.//

Not only that, but the China Experimental Fast Reactor only started 8 months ago! It's just been completed and has a 30 year design lifetime to prove various new applications and materials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Experimental_Fast_Reactor

Nations are pouring money into developing a variety of breeder technologies because they can all see a day when breeders like the IFR (or thorium versions) will be pumping off the production line at vastly cheaper prices than nukes today. Indeed, maybe even competitive with coal.

Renewables just can't do that.

Paul, we are indeed disciplined enough that our nuclear power systems are very safe, despite having >20 ,of the same style of GE Mark-Is that TEPCO, NISa & the Japanese govt. successfully ruined by negligence.

Local solar, efficiency, nuclear (preferably MSR) -- all we'll ever need.

Alex I don't have your "faith" having seen how the nuclear energy industry was militarised right from the very first reactor. Why is it that only one thorium reactor has been, built and experimental? You know it doesn't produce weaponised material.

What I do have is - faith in is a great number of US civil, nuclear, and electrical engineers that have an opposing mindset to the current status quo, with intent to deliver a safe solution via thorium fuel. But pigs will fly when they get their way, and you know it.

Not to mention US generation I, II and III incidents to numerous to mention here. Remember the consulting in Japan was done by the various clandestine US Military, the US State Department, the US Navy, all new the truth about Fukushima and still do. They are all consultants advising on information decimation, behaviour before and after the incident and technical knowledge. It has been the US military that promoted the Japanese Nuclear Industry and helped lobby for it right from the first reactor, US corporations that commissioned plant and constructed them with Japanese stakeholders. This is a matter of japanese history.

Currently the government in the US is run by the federal reserve, corporations lobbyists and led on with foreign policy dictated by the militaries need to keep the "fear" going to feed it's exponential budget.

I wouldn't like to apply the term jingoism, but you are flying the stars and stripes awful close to Fukushima being just a Japanese incident, when it is a militarised nuclear energy industry incident as well.

I have offered a legitimate source on the current state of nuclear waste and the nuclear industries record of waste management since the first reactor. This documentary has been - vetted by German and French Public TVs news - legal teams, has been found to be true and not defamatory or conspiratorial.

Please explain to me after watching why you still have faith in this industry as it stands. Not what our version utopian version of what it could be, but why we should trust anyone with a history remotely like this.

So far no one has had the kahunas to challenge the documentary in here, you appear to have the cred. Go for it, I dare you to watch the whole 1:39 minutes of it.
I have heard every excuse, literally why other can't watch it, none were legitimate.
http://youtu.be/QEbjYr8rubA

I will except the excuse "I just don't want to know", that's appropriate.

Paul, given WWII, the knowledge that the Germans were thinking about Uranium and E = m c squared, why wouldn't nuclear energy have been militarized first by us?

The point is that the inventor of our resent reactors nad the safer later salt designs was one of those physicists who wrote Truman askiing not to drop A-bombs.

Napalm is militarized fuel oil. Gunpowder is militarized chemistry -- and Nobel made it even better!

No technology has not been weaponized. But, nuclear power plants aren't weapons factories, and in fact, have such a good safety record they score better than any other form of power generation. Even the Swiss study in 1998 (PSI Bericht Nr. 98, Comprehensive Assessment of Energy Systems), after Chernobyl, stated that

The documentary shows some guys messing with barrels of something, and pushing them into the sea from a ship. If it's so dangerous, why are these guys handling what appear to be hundreds of barrels? I'll look at it all later.

We all agree with transparency & know;ledge, but that's not what goes on in many of the hyped news accounts, or opposition group talks -- careful exposition of truth rarely sells. Scary stuff does...
www.monbiot.com/2011/11/22/how-the-greens-were-misled/

And some environmental folks change their minds, after thinking about facts...
http://knowledge.allianz.com/energy/fossil_fuels/index.cfm?526%2Fnuclear-power-debate-climate-solution-pro

I'll get back after seeing the whole 'documentary'.

And here are just a few of the many reasons why Fukushima isn't a "nuclear-power" problem, but a Japanese management illness...
http://tinyurl.com/63pe99a
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/5298-safety-on-thecheap
www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-17/japan-s-nuclear-disaster-caps-decadesof-faked-safety-reports-accidents.html (3/18)
or: http://tinyurl.com/45mvlz7

Alex - because I was talking about the construction of the first reactor, for the Trinity test. The first reactors purpose was to produce plutonium, energy production was to justify the expense to congress, spin if you like in current jargon or sales pitch in car sales talk. Nothing has changed, just the jargon and names, same old story same old motive. You are intelligent, you must have joined the dots and want a good nuclear energy program just like I do. But we are fighting the militarised nuclear energy industry, it really is a dammed shame.

Further the US military employed any body qualified on the development of the Trinity Test, and the Russians chased the US down Alices Rabbit hole. So here we are with today with over 40 000 war heads facing each other off in 2012.

A figurative "sword of Damocles" hanging over the human race, while we punce about talking about GAIA theory, seriously behaving like the "emperor has clothes".

Alex
I left off I never said the Japanese management weren't an issue, they are culturally still semi tribal and certainly very conservative as a SD Level.

I get the Japanese mindset problem of "face" my partner is Chinese. But to distance a global industry from Japans's disaster, is to not recognised what the industry does itself. They are collectively trying to hose Fukushima down, it has the potential to be an end game.

Paul, what does this mean? "They are collectively trying to hose Fukushima down, it has the potential to be an end game."

In you previous comment, I wonder what you mean by "militarised nuclear energy industry" -- there's none! The only relation is that civilian reactors use mildly-enriched Uranium for fuel -- useless for weapons.

Napalm is far closer to the gasoline in your car than reactor fuel is to nuclear weapons material. I don't get the relation you're drawing between military & civilian nuclear power.

In fact, most existing wastes from all nuclear endeavors can be used & consumed in the newer reactor designs, all while generating power for cities. Just as we accepted Russian weapons material after the Cold-War, for conversion away from weapons, we have great opportunity to use all the fertile/fissile materials lying around for peaceful power production, with or without the Thorium cycle. For example...

www.monbiot.com/2011/12/05/a-waste-of-waste/
www.columbiatribune.com/news/2011/dec/13/used-nuclear-fuel-is-a-good-energy-source/

Alex "They are collectively trying to hose Fukushima down"

Maybe I am hypersensitive to it or aware but at every stage of the Fukushima incident and since TEPCO, the Japanese government, US nuclear military and US civilian consultants have been acting to deal with the Public Relations fallout. It has had a wide ranging negative impact globally, ergo; potential to be an "end game".

In other words the nuclear industry has been at risk from the loss of support by the global political centre of gravity. Primarily for negligence of design, joint commissioning of the US / Japanese reactors, subsequent maintenance, nuclear incident cover up and inappropriate reaction to the disaster last March.

Not mention what will be the most efficiently documented set of medical records on a whole generation of children and adults exposed to a nuclear reactors fallout in history. Drawing definitive irrefutable conclusions about corporate nuclear industry behaviour, death rates, mutation effects of contamination and long term damage to the environment. The Pacific ocean from Japan to west coast US will be under the microscope by marine biologists. This incident hasn't the benefit of Russian, or US media manipulation, the worlds media attention will be acute.

I hope that clarifies my meaning.

I agree waste can be converted, that waste can be reprocessed, but what of it? We both know the inventory of reprocessed waste could run current reactors for a hundred thousand years or longer. How have they handled it though? Seen the video?

I am on your side with thorium reactors, with the caveat there is a serious reforming of the current culture to remove the remnants of the military mindset.

Russia, China and US have moved to the arena of space and extended the race for domination, committing trillions and trillions to this new theatre. Honestly, we have to ask what money is left to clean up what the military has started down here?

Do we trust the corporate nuclear energy industry, with a culture of secrecy and deceit adopted from the military to be trusted with the safety of the planet having a track record they have?

I have read George Monbiot since before he started at the Guardian, corresponded with him via email one to one, understand he has changed camps. George knowns my position and I receive his weekly article and read it, we no longer talk. I do respect his perspective, he is a quality source of information on the industry, but like me baised.

But Alex, it changes nothing of what he wrote before his changing teams and his motive is still unresolved in my mind. As for his need to vilify Caldecott, well that's beneath him, she is a highly emotive advocate with a largely female audience and not worth it.

Ok, Paul, so the reality is there's no "end game" for even the nuclear power we were supposed to be done with by 2000. The resurgence of new nuke construction around the world is not only real but necessary -- late, but still necessary.

The 30-year study of Fukushima will indeed be eye opening, because, if it's honest, it will find few if any deaths attributable to the quite restricted fallout areas We'll see, but your wording above sounds like you'll attribute anything that happens to anyone within 100 or maybe 1000 miles, to Fukushima emissions.

That's not only impossible, but a disservice to the Japanese, who already have high cancer rates for other reasons.

If you want to develop an honest, competent opinion, the do read texts on radio-medicine, like...
Radiation and Health, and Radiation and Reason.

There really are biological reasons why the whole world didn't die after Chernobyl. Not even many folks who were unscrupulously denied Iodine pills died. there. And no one, even the highest exposed workers, have died from Fukushima radiation.

Hundreds of medically-challenged folks did die from being scared by the government evacuations there, and, of course, >18,000 died because the government of Japan allowed unsafe land use there.

As to your opinion of Monbiot, or maybe the co-founder of Greepeace, who both now see the error in being blindly anti-nuclear, don''t you think people owe it to all to think & change when it seems the best way? Rigidity serves no one. How is an uniformed opinion better than an informed one?

On Caldecott, I directly critiqued a consciously erroneous publication that her PSR put out. Others criticized it scientifically too. Did she engage to determine the facts? No. If she were visiting her doctor, would she expect facts? So, the R in PSR apparently doesn't stand for "Responsibility". I simply told her my contributions would go elsewhere.

Liars on either side of the environmental debates we must have, hurt us all.

I haven;t finished viewing the nuclear dumping video you gave me, but it does indeed a problem I supported cleaning up, because I support Greenpeace, but it also makes some unnecessary distortions that help no one.

Alex - there is no time to elaborate tonight. But if the cognitive bias we all suffer from has meant you haven't picked up on how inappropriate the treatment of Japanese contamination has been I am sorry.

One issue alone amongst many, they have been removing contaminated waste unsafe for humans, and mixing it with concrete and building in Tokyo among many cities. The radioactive material is still harmful, just untraceable. Newly constructed buildings are reading of the safety scale and sky high, you and I would never move in knowing what we know.

Alex - again the Japanese government act in an almost child like way, I believe although consulting with the US Military and Civil nuclear energy industry opt for face saving at citizens expense.

Another issue following the concrete is the summer Rice Crop;
Contaminated rice from the region, was piled up an burnt it. Releasing radioactive paticulants into the atmosphere, these have been taken into peoples interior to sit for the next 20 years mutating cells. So instead of ingesting cesium as food they breathed it in. You and I both now what cesium does - inside - the body.

Children have me moved back into close proximity after decontamination. As you know the growing body is a greater risk than adults.

The Fukushima region it is now common knowledge that the top soil is contaminated and pockets have been "decontaminated" for schools and other public facilites. However the rain is washing the contamination through to the ground water. Since the Fukushima region is 95% forest any contamination of ground water means the blossom time every year pollen will now carry cesium.

This blossom distribution via pollen will go on indefinitely, again cesium will enter the body, where it causes mutation of cells. Since cesium in decay is a danger to humans for three hundred years this is serious.

Not only will humans ingest it but the decision to remove the top 5 cm of soil from the whole region, will be utterly pointless after next spring. The recontamination cycle will start again and again year after year.

I could go on and on, the issue of radiation and it's ability to contaminate is endless, we have largely been shielded from the permutations of contamination, even Chernobyl's story has been largely suppressed by the Russian government.

So as I said unlike the Russian's who controlled the media, Japan is open to the world and a microscope will be on every single issue by the anti nuclear lobbies in every country of the world. Having learned from the misinformation and smoke screen done at Chernobyl, these groups will not be caught out again. We will have a definitive answer about nuclear contamination from nuclear energy reactors that can't be swept under the carpet and hidden by PR agencies.

I have (finally!) made the time to watch the entire documentary.

While it is clearly biased against the nuclear industry I wouldn't have gone so far as to call it an agit-prop piece, and I'd say the criticisms it raises are perfectly valid.

Parts of it are exceedingly disturbing : the cavalier attitude of Russian authorities in particular to the victims of those several major leaks of radioactive material less well publicised than Chernobyl. People really are dropping dead of cancer along extensive lengths of major rivers, where there should be total exclusion zones just like around Chernobyl and Fukushima. The closed town of Seversk aka Tomsk 7 (site of Russian nuclear fuel reprocessing activity, shown from a distance and in satellite photos in the film) is, not mentioned here, the site of more miscarriages due to chromosomal defects than anywhere else on the planet. This may be due to gradual leakage from the UF6 tanks shown in the satellite photo, or it might be more spectacularly associated with some of the several documented spills and accidents at the site including a major explosion in 1993.

Leaving humans exposed to high levels of long-lived radioactive contamination is reprehensible. Coverups also disgust and disturb me. These things are far more disturbing to me than the thing Alex repeatedly posts about the poor gentleman with the headache he ascribes to wind turbine noise and the miscarriage of justice in the state of Maine. I can hear a washing machine, a truck doing compression-braking on the highway, and a coal train (carrying coal from Lithgow to Port Kembla for export, perhaps to Japan to be burned to produce electricity hastily-mothballed nuclear reactors might have made) right now. All three are loud. I have a headache. I know there will be another coal train coming past around 3am which might wake me as it often does. But I don't ascribe any of my symptoms to the noise.

On the other hand the documentary makes a big deal of things which aren't a big deal. Humans and other species can survive and thrive under conditions of elevated radioactivity as millennia of continuous habitation in various places with high natural radioactivity attest.

The reason for putting low-level radioactive waste into the ocean is to keep it away from humans. It might "enter the food chain" but it could take centuries to make its way back onto land, by which time it is really unlikely to do any harm to people. Feel sorry for the sea pens, polyps and kelp which can't escape by all means, but don't expect seafood to be more dangerous to humans from discharged cobalt 57 than from the mercury oxides from coal smoke.

I was more shocked by the ignorance on both sides in the French presidential candidates' debate than I was by the release of 85Kr at the La Hague fuel reprocessing site. There's no secrecy. Krypton 85 is a gas, a beta emitter, not dangerous at all at low levels, decays only to 85Rb which is stable so if it is inhaled and decays in the lungs, it won't leave a solid radioactive particle in your body (unlike radon which has a long decay product chain including solid metallic alpha, beta and gamma emitters).

The documentary leaves me unmoved. It's a little sensational but not counterfactual. Its comments on the failure of democracy are more interesting to me than the information on radioactive material dumped by Western countries ... all the most severe issues seemed confined to Russia. It doesn't directly document elevated deaths due to radioactive pollution (so it can't act as a counterargument to those who make the silly claim that wind turbines kill more people per unit energy delivered than nuclear) but such documentation does exist eg. by wading through documents like this : http://www.urcrm.ru/files/abstracts2010en.pdf

Unlike carbon dioxide and despite counterexamples with widespread atmospheric pollution and fallout like Chernobyl, dangerous radioactive isotopes generally tend to sink and remain in or near the country of origin.

Nuclear energy's renaissance, such as it is, is centred in China where it is desperately needed and where more Russian-style coverups are likely to occur. I have mixed feelings about this as you can imagine. I doubt very much that nuclear energy will affect the people of China worse in the near future than coal-fired electricity already does, which is horrendously (several hundred direct coal-mining deaths, and many thousands of "excess" deaths attributable to atmospheric pollution, each year); also various technologies associated with renewable energy (PV and rare earth metal production) are also responsible for toxic pollution in that country. Even so there is reason to fear as the industry expands that people in some regions of China may be left exposed to long-term elevated radioactive pollution, as in Russia.

My position is unchanged after watching the documentary. Nuclear power is expensive and dangerous and thrives only under in centralised bureaucracies without popular scrutiny. It would have been nice if the film elucidated a bit on possible mid-term advances in nuclear technology rather than just mocking French politicians' ignorance on the subject.

Other technologies, less spooky and less closely examined, are more dangerous still and do get by just fine in relatively open democracies.

I still like renewables.

Hmm. I think you have it exactly backwards. An electric car has a big fat battery, and storage attached to the grid is great for load levelling and peak shaving. Charging big batteries is exactly the sort of thing you can have network operators choose to do exactly when it suits them. They'll pay to time-shift the charging load and they'll pay even more for the ability to partly draw down the battery at peak load times.

http://www.google.com.au/search?q=v2g

In theory, yes. In practice, people will mostly charge up their EV when they need to, not when the price suits them.

To some extent time-of-day pricing can help to prevent additional spikes on the grid, but your happy EV owner is not always going to sit there with a flat battery waiting for the price to come down before they charge up again.

No doubt cars are not well handled in our present transport systems, Paul. But trenchant metaphors like EVs effectively: "swap deck chairs on the Titanic" miss the point that proper, efficient, convenient transport alternatives aren't common.

In the distant past, cars were rich folks' toys, and things like high parking fees and exclusion zones return them to the privileged. The car is a physical symbol of personal freedom around the world now, even if traffic is terrible.

So, as Atlanta did with its Metro, NYC has done for decades with its subways & transit, frequent, nearby, inexpensive access to transportation is the key. GM worked directly against that in the 1900s, by lobbying mayors to dump electric trolleys & buy busses. Our US inner-city transit was pretty good before that happened. And now, it's an uphill battle.

But the EV isn;t making things worse, it can't. We've already made things about as bad as they can get, certainly in Chinese cities. So, indeed, public transport needs great improvement everywhere. And, the independence of having a car to use for other reasons will, and should, remain. EVs will actually have their own urban exclusion pressures -- lack of charging ports, not just parking spaces. Providing good mass transit will simply make things far better. EVs aren't the problem, past & present urban authorities are.

Alex, you have clearly got very defensive.

"But the EV isn;t making things worse, it can't"
Alex Cannara.

I agree.

Neither did the "...... deck chairs on the Titanic"

Meaning if we source energy from the wrong place it won't matter, if they are electric, oil or nuclear. The energy has to be clean that runs these vehicles, literally. Otherwise we will still sink.

Back to my point, we need to change our culture. Our political centre of gravity still centres around dirty energy sources. Promoting petro-chemically driven vehicles, or even backing dirty electrical vehicles, trams, trains, trucks, cars etc.etc. just isn't good enough.

Changing the mode of transport is the "myth".

We need clean energy sources for our transport infrastructure while we continue to humanise our cites designs.

Gotta love blog exchange manipulations -- the other fellow is "defensive", so you win something Paul? Really?

I agreed with the need to vet hyped entities. I agree the EV isn't perfect, but you brought up two incorrect points -- that peak load and the effect of EV on energy source.

The simple fact that EVs/ hybrids can regain ~15% of their kinetic energy, originally derived from combustion, is huge. Since combustion efficiency is low, anything we can do in the vehicle to prevent extra combustion (that 15% becomes much more at the plant) reduces the emissions from any combustion plant. You seem to have missed that as a fundamental benefit of electric drive, regardless of how general transport works. and if people still do what they do now.

And, your talk about peak demands, setc., simply undersocres the great opportunity for EVs in particular, to provide levelling, eventually about equal to the demand changes from the homes/stores in which they park.

That 15% and that levelling via controlled charge/discharge is huge for the future of efficiency,, lower emissions all around and grid robustness.

If you want to change people's habits, that's a different story. And no one has brought up the real issue -- population control.

Alex did you understand the analogy in the context it was meant? It still isn't clear.
As for winning, you are projecting with this one.
My personal philosophy is win win and I don't have a blog, unless you count FB.
I - win - if you grasp my context you - win - if you do as well and we conduct common dialogue.

As for "kinetic energy" and "levelling", these principles apply to light and heavy rail and motor drives of private transport equally as it is part of good design infrastructure. Technically I agree pollution from exhaust emissions, is different from coal, gas, oil and nuclear. But dirty energy, is dirty energy, both produce a poor environmental outcome.

Some would also argue, that the combustion engine is no where near peak efficiency, and until the Exxon / Ventor algae genomics exercise is realised that's on the back burner. But a worthy candidate. Personally I like the electric motor, and understand this world could have been a different place if the oil cartels were broken sooner in the 1900s.

We may differ on the statement of grid robustness, because there is evidence that the current grid approach is corporate, centralised and holding us back now. Evidence suggests a localised approach achieves greater autonomy and efficiency.

Paul, no idea what you;'re drawing this our for. I explained the scientific & engineering oversights in you previous statements, that's all. You can "win" if that's important to you, but my purpose is simply to be an honest broker for science & engineering, so other folks don;''t get misled.

Alex, honest broker is worthy. However critical thought, does require George Monbiot's approach. Even though we disagree on IFR, he has a point.

"We have to challenge the ideas we like far more fiercely than the ideas we don't like," ~ George Monbiot ~

Kinetic energy return is nice in stop start driving but consider the full efficiency equation and electric vehicles are more efficient when they use fossil fuels and city air quality is much improved but the difference is not as much as you might think.

In the final analysis a fully electric vehicle powered by a coal power station is really only about 25% efficiency and powered by gas is about 35%. A modern diesel with fuel made from typical crude oil is about 20% efficiency - see below for explanation. If you consider renewables as the power station then the efficiency is negative until the energy used to make the solar panel or wind turbine (mining, refining, manufacturing) has been collected which is typically about 3 to 10 years after installation with todays technology. EROEI numbers are always interesting!

When we extracted and refined the oil and distributed the fuel to the car we need to use equivalent of about 40% of the embodied energy in the oil to extract and refine and distribute for a typical crude oil. The modern diesel engine efficiency is about 30% but that when taken back to the conversion from crude is 30% of 60% - sio the real efficiency is only 20%

From our friends at Wikipedia : Typical thermal efficiency for electrical generators in the industry is around 33% for coal and oil-fired plants, and up to 50% for combined-cycle gas-fired plants. Plants designed to achieve peak efficiency while operating at capacity will be less efficient when operating off-design.

Efficency in electrical grid power distribution is about 95%, efficiency of Lithium Ion battery charging is about 97%. Efficiency of electic vehicle is then about 80%. So the final efficency of conversion of fossil fuel to electric car wheel is about 25% for coal and 36% for gas power station.

James,
As Jonathan indicates, your numbers are also wrong for regeneration, which is multiplied by the (1-efficiency) loss you mark for a power plant plus transmission loss. The kinetic energy recovery in an EV is over 80% efficient. No use of a fueled engine in a vehicle lacking regenration could come close to the 35% or less you rightly mention.

To field EVs/hybrids without regeneration is to simply mean power plants burn more & emit more.

Alex regeneration is a fringe benefit if you are braking a lot and on long journeys is almost negligible added efficiency. Nice to have no doubt in a crowded stop/start city but EV true efficiency is going to be less than 35% due to the inefficiencies of power generation that feeds them - i actually left out of the equation the energy invested to extract the coal or gas fuel and transport it to the power plants, so in reality EV efficency is likely to be closer to a modern diesel (20%) once you take that into account, maybe very slightly more efficient i dont have the efficiency numbers for coal power plant that include the energy needed to extract and transport coal or gas.

James, you have it backwards -- the lower the generation efficiency, as when including coal extraction/transport, the more value regeneration in the vehicles becomes. It would even be of value to the coal haulers!

Not sure what you're missing, but if an EV/hybrid doesn't have to draw battery/fuel power just now, because it stopped or decelerated back there, it's ahead of any energy need it will have when later parked for recharge. And, that recharge reduction is multiplied by about 3 in terms of thermal efficiency/waste at the coal power plant.

Even we rest up when walking a bit downhill, to be ready for the next uphill.

Alex - you cannot create energy. The power generator efficiency is the starting point and it goes downhill from there.

Right James. But you forget we can indeed store energy, and that's exactly what the kinetic energy of a vehicle is. Regeneration thus uses it locally, at higher net efficiency than if the energy were dissipated to heat via brakes, then demanding the power plant replace that at ~30% efficiency.

Starting a vehicle up on energy stored from its previous stop greatly reduces the energy needed to be drawn from an in-vehicle combustion engine, or later, from the combustion power plant serving the owner's charger in his/her garage.

Don't you get that?

Alex, i do get it. Regeneration is a nice feature and is worth having! But lets keep it in perspective - even if the vehicle is frictionless and has no aerodynamic drag and 100% efficient regenerative braking - the overall efficiency of such a vehicle cannot exceed the efficiency of the electrical power plant that made its power - if we say that the thermal efficiency of a coal plant is 33% and then take into account that we had to mine the coal and transport it to the power plant conservatively you could say that the efficency of the perfect EV using coal generated electricity is 30% efficency. If you had an EV that had normal regenerative braking its overall efficiency would decline to say 25% on the highway and 27% in the city because we are going to use energy to overcome aerodynamic forces whenever we arent stopping and lets face it we are not stopping most of the time on the road or we would never get there. Dont get me wrong - every efficiency is useful, but lets keep it in perspective.

Thanks mate. Interesting stuff. It's not only impossible to replace current nukes fast enough, but going to be impossible to cure climate change without rapidly advancing most of our economies onto new nukes. You probably know far more about the technical specs of all this than I do, as I'm not very technical, but I listen to the experts. Like James Hansen. Have you heard this quote of his?

"Can renewable energies provide all of society’s energy needs in the foreseeable future? It is conceivable in a few places, such as New Zealand and Norway. But suggesting that renewables will let us phase rapidly off fossil fuels in the United States, China, India, or the world as a whole is almost the equivalent of believing in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy."

http://bravenewclimate.com/2011/08/05/hansen-energy-kool-aid/

Here is a good summary for the lay person (myself included) of a particular type of nuke James Hansen supports; the Integral Fast Reactor; the nuke that feeds on nuclear waste. As you know it will solve global warming and peak fossil fuels by also solving the nuclear waste problem: they are essentially Integral (or Integrated) Fast Breeder Reactors. Apparently today's waste could run the world for the next 500 years!
http://www.thesciencecouncil.com/steve-kirsch/95-the-integral-fast-reactor.html