Submitted by Darren Smith, Weekend Contributor
If you drive a fully electric car, hoping at least to benefit the environment by reducing carbon emissions, the location of your home can actually affect how carbon neutral your ride is.
Why is this significant? It depends on which electric utility provides service.
Compare two vehicles: The all-electric Tesla S; and the Toyota Prius hybrid, garaged in two neighboring cities: Bellevue, WA; and Seattle. The cities are separated by Lake Washington and a floating bridge. It is not about sunlight or cloud cover it is the utilities used.
It seems your zip code could dictate the environmental benefits more than might be expected.
Seattle residents use Seattle City Light. Bellevue residents have Puget Sound Energy. Seattle City Light receives approximately 1% of its energy derived from coal whereas Puget Sound Energy uses 20% coal derived energy sourced from a coal plant in Colstrip, Montana. The coal plant is dirty by comparison with other energy sources and according to Seattle newspaper “The Stranger” is the eighth largest producer of greenhouse gases in the United States. Puget Sound Energy has a twenty percent ownership position in the plant.
The percentage of coal sourced electricity of PSE nearly eliminates the environmental benefit of using a pure electric vehicle such as a Tesla, making its carbon footprint nearly identical to that of the hybrid gas/electric Toyota Prius.
A study by the Sightline Institute’s Clark Williams-Derry presents some rather sobering news about location and carbon neutrality. Using PSE’s 2012 emissions figures a Tesla Model S with an 85 kilowatt battery emits 0.50 pounds of “carbon dioxide equivalents” per mile, compared with 0.51 pounds per mile for a Toyota Prius C. (This assumes a 5 percent rate of energy loss between the power plant and your outlet; PSE did not provide its specific loss rate, but 5 percent is pretty average.) Williams-Derry believes: “Having a lot of coal in your generation mix significantly reduces the benefits of driving a Tesla.”
Across the water in Seattle, the Tesla becomes greatly better environmentally while obviously the Prius’ difference is none.
PSE for its part has made bona fide efforts in trying to embrace renewable energy, a promising work in Kittitas County with the Wild Horse Wind and Solar Facility that can generate up to 273 megawatts of clean, renewable energy. Yet, the company still sources 30% of its electricity from fossil fuels.
Despite the utilities’ power mix there still remains the possibility the individual electric vehicle owner may install solar panels for charging, but therein reveals the problem of capital outlay costs aside from tax credits and other government and utility reimbursements.
What is clear is the need to address the energy, carbon costs and other pollutants as often as possible. Even the environmental cost of lithium ion batteries exists. But when location can dictate carbon costs for the environmentally conscientious, having to factor in zip codes is a problem best eliminated.
By Darren Smith
Sources:
The Stranger
Puget Sound Energy
The views expressed in this posting are the author’s alone and not those of the blog, the host, or other weekend bloggers. As an open forum, weekend bloggers post independently without pre-approval or review. Content and any displays or art are solely their decision and responsibility.
Keep dreamin’ BK. This country moves forward, not in reverse. Jetson cars, not choo choo trains. I don’t know why you gave up flying, but this is a HUGE country. That’s how we roll here. One of the first countries to embrace flying as a means of transportation was Colombia. The reason was not so much the great expanse we have here, but the mountains. Roads and train are extremely expensive. When I went to Colombia to adopt out son I was impressed w/ their air travel system. It was akin to train travel in the price and number of flights. And, all socioeconomic groups fly. Every country, every region, has transportation systems based on geography and culture. Political correctness will never determine transportation in this country. We are a capitalist nation, thank God!!
Rural areas can be served by buses, either on a regular route or on an on-call basis. Here the buses are quite full, mostly by people who cannot drive or who cannot afford a car. For those who live on the route, the bus stop is at the end of their driveway. There are two morning runs and one or two late afternoon runs. It works for those who use the bus for work and who do errands after work. The buses are run by the counties and there is inter-county cooperation, i.e. there is a common stop used by both counties so that transfers are easy. I will admit that travel by bus is not for those who insist on immediate gratification. But they are great for people-watching or just thinking or even taking a nap.
I’ve taken the train from NYS to Vancouver BC. Great trip. And bullet train in Tokyo. Since I’ve given up flying I wish there were high speed trains that would allow me to travel to large cities all over the country where I could take a feeder train or bus to smaller communities.
bettykath – all of these transportation systems assume that there is a city center however here the businesses are spread all over a hundred mile area. Just getting the cities to kick in for the buses to run thru their cities has been a pain. However, for me to take the bus to downtown Phoenix to be on a jury takes 4 hours, which actually is impossible to get there on time I would be leaving at 5 in the morning and getting back after 9 at night. I also think I have to make two changes.
They’re going to put about 25 miles of the CA HSR underground . . . in an earthquake state. I talked with one of the hydrologists about the project. I said, you know that an accident at that speed is not survivable, right? And the worst train accident in history was a HSR in Europe? And that you’re going to be tunneling underground by several fault lines. He agreed that they will probably make several movies about the disasters that will inevitably ensue.
Plus, the air crashes down behind a high speed train. If you thought living next to a regular train was loud and killed property values, try living next to a HSR. And they have been decimating reindeer herds in Europe. The animals are dead before they have a chance to react.
Austerity measures in Europe were needed because they spent themselves off a cliff. Instead of reasonably cutting back on spending while they had the chance, they continued to make promises their wallet couldn’t keep, and now it’s hard and unpopular.
Kind of like if you have a spending problem, but instead of cutting back on the shopping, you keep going until now you’re faced with eating Mac N Cheese for a few years to dig yourself out.
Brooklyn:
Rapid transit works great in concentrated cities. Here in CA it’s a total bust. We are too sprawled out. My husband’s commute to his shop takes 40 minutes. If he took the Metro Link, it would take 3 hours, and require a train change. And it would be more expensive than driving. The buses around here are all mostly empty, in every single city I’ve been to, with the sole exception of San Francisco.
And requiring everyone to live in super-concentrated cities, with no yards, requiring that an urban lifestyle be the only lifestyle, is not an option.
I would love if electric cars were eventually solar powered, or somehow
The more we restrict travel, the more provincial we become.
How do we restrict travel? By increasing taxes on gas or mileage. CA just enacted a gas tax, which will add up to $1.50 PER GALLON, PLUS it is trying to pass a mileage tax. Truckers are not evil wasteful fiends. Anyone who buys a head of lettuce at a grocery store or farmers market benefits from a driver. Anyone who gets their home remodeled hires someone who spends all day driving from job to job to job. And when we treat them like the enemy, and increase taxes to make driving anywhere prohibitive, guess what amazingly happens? People either go out of business, or they pass on their costs to everyone. And who gets hit hardest when the price of that head of lettuce doubles? The poor, who have less margin to waste in the first place. So in the name of environmentalism (these are all carbon taxes), we hurt businesses and the poor, and the money just goes to Gov Brown’s shameless port project vacation train that is a gift to his union buddies. We have some of the most pot holed streets in the Western World here in CA, and yet the state is spending $65 billion at least on a stupid vacation train to SF, that will take 3 hours and cost almost as much as a plane ticket. All while Metro Link ridership has DECREASED by 650,000.
If a business did that, it would go out of business. But it’s different when you spend other people’s money.
Brooklin, I grew up in the northeast which has the best mass transit network in the US. I also lived in Chicago which has good mass transit. There are corridors that are ripe for high speed train. I’ve ridden high speed train in Europe. Took one from Milan to Florence last December. I loved it. It was quicker than I could have driven, That said, there are VAST areas of this great country, probably 80%, that are not conducive to choo choo’s. The most ripe corridor for high speed, limited stops, luxury, train service is LA-LV and San Diego-LV. Potential gold mine.
John, nothing against hydrogen in concept, but I understand the infrastructure to support it would be huge. Less so for electric.
BB, Toyota established a near-term goal of hydrogen fueled cars. That could be the elixir.
That’s the strongest reason it won’t happen in this country and they do (because no one conserved).
I meant to say, “That’s the strongest reason it won’t happen in this country. And it’s a good part of the reason private automobiles driven by humans will disappear as quickly as they do.”
Hey Nick 🙂 Always enjoy your twist on things and agree with you on some. Have you ever tried a high speed train? By the time you can say, “choo”, twice, you are in another city, or so it seems, even at US distances.
I agree with Dust Bunny Queen, we need different solutions for different places. That’s what a network is to me. But I also believe a major part of the solution is a conservative one – that is, one of conservation. And a full infrastructure of public transportation as bettykath puts it, would be a logical part of such conservation. The myth is that it must be painful or ugly or inconvenient or particularly that it must eliminate private automobiles. The truth is actually the contrary on all counts.
The real problem is that if it were done in such a way as to be really usable by the public at large, and thus conserve by numbers, it would eat into some forecast-ed profits. That’s the strongest reason it won’t happen in this country and they do (because no one conserved).
The reason electric cars have such good potential in terms of reducing carbon emissions, has been mentioned in comments above, the coal plant of today may be gone tomorrow but the car and the technology and the infrastructure can stay the same.
C.N.G.
bettykath
“Instead of more cars of any kind we need a full infrastructure of public transportation. We need to be taking trains, buses, trolleys, etc.”
Anything else you parasites need? obamacare, perhaps?
Well there you go. No holding back the truth of liberal/socialist/progressive/ collectivist democrats.
Unrestricted “one man, one vote” “democracy” to dilute American elections and manipulate the vote to accomplish a national, one-party state and the “dictatorship of the proletariat” to completely and conclusively nullify and void the original intent of freedom through self-reliance of the Founders, and the Preamble, Constitution and Bill of Rights, including the rights given by “God,” such as “moveable” or personal private property, before government was established, to enslave the global population under communism and the “one-world government.
Hallelujah, Comrade Commissar Betty Kath!
Hallelujah!!!
A topic worth visiting, but gradients are needed in everything from more electric cars to less coal burning. I have a Prius for my runaround car. I tow it in an enclosed trailer with my Chevy box van full of rugs. When I get to my destination the gas guzzler stays put for two weeks or so and the trailer becomes a smaller rug display area. I’m happy driving my ‘sissy’ Toyota or my ‘macho’ Chevy but short trips or long fast runs are best done with the hybrid.
Never happen. Americans are not Europeans and the US is not like European countries. As DBQ points out, public transportation is good in metro areas and in metro corridors. We love our vehicles, Need to make them cleaner and more fuel efficient. Why do so called progressives always want to go back to the 1940’s riding choo choo trains.
Instead of more cars of any kind we need a full infrastructure of public transportation. We need to be taking trains, buses, trolleys, etc.
Notice that I said transportation network and seamless integration. That does not mean elimination of automobiles. Since major cities are also areas with major portions of the population, you get major reduction in carbon emissions. As France proved, when the public transportation system is sufficiently robust, timely and comfortable, AND affordable, it works amazingly well as an optional system. Unfortunately global finance has become aware of this and views it as leaving money on the table that should rightfully belong to them, so the days of such a seamlessly well integrated public and private transportation system are numbered.
I’m still waiting for the Jetson’s cars.
“Making public transportation more attractive in the form of high speed trains, as well as more robust, timely, and comfortable public transpiration networks including buses, better rentals, and other means would be the most logical way currently at our disposal to cut down on current levels of traffic generated pollution, but that has conveniently been sold to the public as “socialism””
Once again…fine solutions for those people who live in urban areas or within a short distance of urban areas. One size fits all thinking. You can solve the issue of traffic in a small geographic area. What about the rest of the United States. What about the rest of the world that isn’t highly urbanized. Canada. Brazil.
There is no public transportation in many areas and the feasibility of establishing any is remote as well as economically out of the question.
Electric vehicles are a good application for SOME areas. SOME only.
Wind and solar are good supplements for now, but they are not ready for prime time.
Electric cars, with all their limitations, are probably the best potential for transition to non fossil or “greener” fuels. Particularly as long as we continue our love affair with consumerism, entire vehicles dedicated to essentially single passenger transportation, and the ideological assumption that population and capitalism must be locked down onto a parallel iron track of perpetual growth in a finite world of finite resources.
Making public transportation more attractive in the form of high speed trains, as well as more robust, timely, and comfortable public transpiration networks including buses, better rentals, and other means would be the most logical way currently at our disposal to cut down on current levels of traffic generated pollution, but that has conveniently been sold to the public as “socialism” and used to stigmatize people as being poor by the oil and finance industry. Just as any sensible rules or regulation regarding possession of firearms are considered “verboten”, so is even the seamless integration of such an incredibly successful public transportation system as France has had until recently with its own robust system of private automobiles.
Wind turbines have real problems that are going to be difficult to solve, but these have little to do with what’s happening in Europe right now, called austerity (where subsidies are being eliminated due to policies dictated by the corrupt banking and finance industry) , and even less to do with what happened to the first generation of wind turbines created by our as usual corrupt private enterprise bribing legislators as usual to give them massive hand outs (socialism for the rich) for poorly designed and implemented wind fields.
If wind and solar had even half the government subsidies that are given to the oil and fossil fuel industries every single year, they would be making leaps and bounds in terms of solving technological problems and there would be few if any abandoned fields (though it is also true that wind alone simply will not solve our energy needs). Of course even the abandoned wind farms there are today pale to nothing in comparison to the huge numbers of abandoned oil rigs and outdated oil refineries dotting the country (not to mention our oceans) for which citizens have almost invariably been the principal source of revenue when dismantling, rather than just rotting in the open, has been necessary.
DBQ – I am not impressed with wind turbines. They have some serious issues that need to be fixed before we get all excited about them and blanket America. As you’ve pointed out, they decimate bird populations, including endangered species. Wind farms are common in CA. I absolutely hate the sound they make – chopping the air. We even have a few people in my neighborhood that have private ones, and I hate riding my horse by them. I cannot imagine how they sleep at night, or the impact they must have on wildlife, whose hearing is more sensitive than ours. And they look like eyesores in otherwise pristine open space areas.
Would love to see an application of Dyson technology – no more fans, or chopping of air (or birds.)