The European Union made big headlines last year when it said it was hoping to force countries to phase out the sale of internal combustion-powered vehicles by 2035. More headlines were made when Germany, wary of losing jobs and 911s, said “not so fast.” Lately, some in Europe have proposed theoretically carbon neutral e-fuels as the alternative. Alas, the EU has seen the light, and we have a solution that is probably the best of all worlds. Stretch out those cerebral cortexes, folks, it’s time for some rhetorical gymnastics. My point may sound crazy, but follow it all the way to the end and I think you’ll be convinced.
The EU Was Right To Grant The Germans An Exception
Given how the European Union operates, it’s unreasonable to assume that any ban on internal combustion engines was going to be effective if Germany (and Italy, to a lesser extent) was not on board. And Germany, clearly, was not. When you’ve got Germany’s Green Party–a party partially built around the concept of preserving the environment–opposing your plan then your plan ain’t gonna work.
Politics, ultimately, is the art of compromise. I can hear the eco warriors now, kvetching loudly that any compromise fundamentally dooms our planet. And, fair, this is all happening against the backdrop of being told the planet is a ticking time bomb.
So, you may ask, how is this a good thing for the environment?
We have not seen the compromise as it has been proposed, we just have this exclusive report from Reuters stating:
The European Commission has proposed allowing the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines after 2035 if they only run only on climate-neutral e-fuels, a document showed on Tuesday.
Yielding to German pressure, the commission suggested that such vehicles could be among those allowed from 2035 but their technology must be able to prevent them from driving if other fuels are used, the document outlining the Commission’s proposals to Germany’s Transport Ministry showed.
This is pretty much in line with what I expected and it is good news all the way down IF everyone agrees to it. For all we know, this is just an opening salvo and there will be significant back-and-forth over the proposal.
So why do I think this is good for the environment?
- If the planet is a ticking time bomb (it is), then we need to do whatever we can as fast as we can. If this compromise gets the ban approved then we can expect even more investment in EVs and EV infrastructure.
- Here’s an e-fuels explainer, but what’s important to understand is that, if they work, they could provide a carbon neutral way to keep gas-powered cars on the road. (E-fuels actually use carbon dioxide during their creation such that when E-fuels burn, they’re carbon neutral).
- E-fuels could be an expensive boondoggle! They’re energy-intensive to produce. They’re probably quite expensive. It doesn’t really matter, though, because…
- Either it paves the way for a less contentious move away from gas engines towards EVs when e-fuels don’t work OR someone figures out how to make e-fuels effective and not so costly. Even in a future where e-fuels make sense, we’re talking about something for 911s and Ferraris, not VW Golfs. My guess is that this is for less than 2% of the total market.
- If e-fuels get figured out, then this is good for enthusiasts hoping to keep their vintage Scion FR-Ses on the road, but it’s better news for the rest of the planet. Approximately 80% of the world’s population lives in the global south, and the electrification of countries across the globe varies a lot. E-fuels, if they work, could buy the planet more time to transition to electrification in those places. Would the world, on its own, work hard to help out these countries? Maybe. Would callous energy companies and persuadable governments spend billions of dollars so some baron can keep their Ferrari Testarossa running? Absolutely.
- The bit about “their technology must be able to prevent them from driving if other fuels are used” is interesting. Theoretically, newer vehicles can be programmed to only run on a certain fuel mix, and it’s possible that’s what’s being proposed here. I’m guessing we’ll get a carveout at some point for “cars of historical significance” or something similar.
TL;DR: E-fuels may not work at all, but if this gets Germany and Italy to agree to an ICE-ban then the carveout is worth it because: If e-fuels don’t work then Europe’s new cars will be 100% EV from 2035. If e-fuels do work, then we have a chance to help transition the rest of the world to a carbon neutral future.
[Editor’s Note: I’m not sure any of this e-fuel stuff really even makes sense from an energy standpoint, but then again, expecting the grid/infrastructure/rear earth metal-supply to be ready for 100% of cars being electric by 2035 also has its challenges. The fact that Europe wants to ban plug-in hybrids seems questionable to me, as a plug-in could be better for the environment than a full-EV equipped with a giant battery, depending upon a number of factors. This is all just going to be a tricky transition. -DT].
Again, is investing in e-fuels the most efficient way to get to the future most of us want? I am skeptical, but I’m also skeptical of hydrogen and other technologies. It’s worth a shot because we aren’t going to save the planet by doing less
Ferrari Admits It Lost Customer Data In A Ransomware Attack
Data breach at @Ferrari. Ransom demand, inevitably with the threat of disclosure. Anyone know which crew was behind this? pic.twitter.com/x7QTdlwOpO
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) March 20, 2023
In the tweet above you can see a letter from Ferrari telling its customers that it lost some of their data. Specifically, “names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers.” Not great. Ferrari says that, based on its investigation, no payment info or other sensitive data was stolen. It also said it was refusing to pay a ransom to the hackers.
Here’s where it gets confusing: Is this the second time this happened or is Ferrari just re-addressing an attack from October of 2022 that sounds almost identical to this one? My sense is that this is just the company reaching out to customers after an internal investigation of the attack they disclosed in October. We’ll keep an eye on it.
Caption Contest
Here’s a real photo of Spain’s King, President, and some VW board members at the launch of the VW’s new PowerCo “gigafactory” in Valencia. Have fun.
BYD Reportedly To Slow Production
Chinese carmaker BYD, technically the largest EV maker in the world, has been kicking butt lately. It’s outmuscled Volkswagen and Tesla in China, which is the biggest market for EVs anywhere. Also, BYD made a car that can moonwalk.
Good times don’t last forever, and BYD is facing the same headwinds other automakers in that country are dealing with as the Chinese government has rolled back its incentives on electric cars. Per Reuters, this means that BYD is going to scale back some if its production in the near-term.
This doesn’t seem like a huge deal, and it probably isn’t, but the Chinese market is partially built on ever-expanding production. Thus, local governments are stepping in to stoke automakers to keep going:
Local Chinese authorities have also been rolling out buyer subsidies to drive demand and some of these programmes have started to extend to automakers to encourage manufacturing.
On Tuesday, the Xian government announced that to encourage local EV production, it would give a 2,000 yuan reward per vehicle for every car produced over 2022 levels to a maxmium of 10 million yuan ($1.45 million) per automaker. It also announced subsidies for EV purchases.
That’s a bold strategy Cotton, let’s see if it works out for them.
Scout Ended Up In South Carolina Because It Was Fast
This year will probably see more electric car sales in the United States, but everyone is waiting for 2024. Next year is the year for EVs. Why? The Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits for EV buyers will become point-of-sale. This means that you can walk into a dealer for a $40,000 EV and immediately get $7,500 taken off the price. No waiting.
This puts enormous pressure on automakers whose vehicles don’t qualify (i.e. aren’t built in North America) to find a place to build their cars as fast as possible, which is apparently how VW’s new Scout brand ended up in South Carolina.
Automotive News spoke to Scout SEO Scott Keogh for this article, and got the details:
Speaking to reporters in a video conference call Monday, Keogh said the Volkswagen Group-owned brand looked at 74 sites in the South, Midwest and Western for the factory, which will produce Scout SUVs and pickups, beginning in 2026. But the process to land on the site in Blythewood “took just 60 days” instead of 12 to 18 months of negotiations and preparations. The factory will have a capacity of 200,000 vehicles.
I’m sure the $400 million the state put forth the fund production of the plant probably didn’t hurt, either.
Is the EU Caving Good Or Bad?
Am I right? Am I wrong? Roast me!
Photos: EU, VW, BYD, Porsche
“Aging boy band Autotune makes a special appearance to promote Power, their first new album in 30 years.”
I think we have our winner!
I wish we’d stop demonizing personal ICE cars for destroying the planet. Cars are a couple notches down on the biggest sources of pollution, and the top notches are WAY bigger.
Every mile ever put on every Porsche ever made probably produced less emissions than a couple months/weeks/days of coal power plants running at full tilt trying to charge up all those BYDs
Coal plants are shutting down all over the world as natural gas plants spin up. No matter how you slice it, motivating two tons of mobile hut to haul one ass of human around is hilariously wasteful whether it’s combustion or electricity providing the energy. Building cars and infrastructure for them is the wrong solution and BEVs are simply a bridge technology until low carbon lifestyles take over (or the jackpot happens and makes it all moot).
Pinstripe Guy has an almost Sean Connery supervillain smug grin going on. “With this, we shall rule the WORLD!” Guy to his left is definitely a sycophant. Guy to >his< left, well….hair kinda looks like when I seriously overload my plate with pasta.
Caption? Uh,
One Factory to Rule Them All?
I swear, all the picture needs is someone haughtily petting a white cat
There was a lot of noise in the article about “if e-fuels work”.
They do work. I was doing combustion research on them 15 years ago. Most of the current vehicle fleet can run on them already. The problem is cost, the fix for cost is volume, and volume comes from banning the sale of fossil fuels and allowing the continued manufacture of ICE machinery. It’ll cost more than petrol, but only slightly more than green hydrogen would, if hydrogen was ever going to be a practical fuel for passenger cars, which it isn’t.
There was also a lot of noise in the article about how this is for Ferrari and Porsche, which is balls. Both of those companies will be successful selling EVs. Porsche already is. E-fuels allow the current vehicle fleet to be driven carbon neutrally. Banning fossil fuels is the smart move for the environment, and when that happens I’ll be happy to be able to buy some sort of fuel to keep my 86 on the road, rather than hitch it behind 200 slightly feeble actual horses.
E-fuels let us have carbon neutral cars that work just like the ones we have now.
Also they’d keep my powertrain career going long enough to retire some time around 2040, which would be nice.
I’m not only the Hair Club president, but I’m also a client.
All I want to know is whether e-fuels will be compatible with two-stroke oil.
Come to think of it, enclose this in a set of quotation marks and it’s also my entry for the caption contest.
I’m not scientist, but thinking just doing carbon sequestration for the carbon released in creating ‘regular’ fuel, would probably have less environmental impact than the smoke and mirrors of creating these ‘e-fuels’.
It’s not like all the oil suddently goes away in 2035, or even that we stop refinging it. I think the limit should be on how many gas cars produced, not cold turkey stop, as Jay Leno has said, enthusiast gasoline cars will become like horses have, for sport and for fun less than for daily use.
I’m not even touching that caption of a bunch of white guys, many of whom are German, with the word “power” lit up all in white, that’s just asking for trouble.
I can’t possibly trust the people who flare and leak methane to capture carbon.
“Sure, we did….it’s, umm, over there… Yeah over there”
You hit the nail on the head…. “probably 2%”. This is a big giant don’t care. E-fuel is a waste of time. By this time, that “2%” can just be made from where we get it now, cause we’ll be using that much less of it. Again, it’s a don’t care.
TLDR; gas is awesome, electricity is awesome. We need to just leap from one to another, and stop wasting our time on everything else.
“banning sales of new” is about 5 – 10% as many cars as “banning operation of existing”; not great to talk about the one as though it were the other when considering things like grid constraints.
Also, American needs to redefine its fuel standards for automakers. Their 1970’s crap definitions have led to MORE crossovers, SUVs, and trucks in the hands of the average citizen.
That lifted pickup truck with the knobby tires is consuming the gas of 2-3 sedans going the same speed down the highway.
Cars are not polluting nearly as much as industry! Yes, they are a contributor, but stop giving a pass to major corporations!
Not to mention ships, or airplanes
Strictly speaking, the biggest single source of emissions is power generation, followed by industrial manufacturing, and then transportation of all sorts.
Every time pols grandstand about car emissions whilst saying not a word about power plants and manufacturing facilities you can be guaranteed they are full of bovine excrement.
Get rid of all of the coal plants, and you could give everyone in America and the EU a Charger Hellcat while still enjoying a 95% reduction in emissions. Quibbling about the last 5% to wage some political culture war is despicable.
You missed the part about Electrofuel being manufactured using captured carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, together with hydrogen. Guess maybe the Hydrogen debate may be less of a thing if that part gets out.
… care to guess what the prime source of feedstock for Hydrogen is?
Hydrocarbons!!! It’s a lot easier to get hydrogens off hydrocarbons than by cracking water.
E-Fuels are definitely a back-door escape for the high-end German automakers. They glommed onto that life-rope like a drunk falling off a party yacht. They are very inefficient to produce and so far the processes have not been shown to be scalable. However, there is something in this idea.
The problem we have with sustainable power generation is storage. What do you do when there is no sun or wind? If you use clean off-peak electricity to produce e-Fuels, then vehicle charging will no longer be a burden on the grid. Unlike hydrogen, we already have a usable fleet of gasoline vehicles and expertise in building them.
Exactly: use otherwise wasted green electricity capacity to make e-fuels which are easy to store and ship where they are needed. This is the energy storage solution we need.
The Ferrari Data Breach: “Your information may have been stolen, question?”
We are checking.
While I personally wouldn’t jump straight into EV yet, PHEV make more sense in the US than in Europe. Euro car companies could probably get away with subcompact evs with 100 miles of range or less, and their customers would be absolutely fine. We need less battery packs such as the 246.8 kwh in the hummer( holy fucking shit it only gets 330 mi of range), we can have more bolts with their 66kwh pack and 260 mi of range. For comparison, the 2023 Prius prime uses 13.6 kwh for 39 miles of range. We need to focus on smaller personal vehicles, and save the giant packs for public transportation
The 2nd Gen Chevrolet Volt had 18.4kWh pack rated at 53 miles range…
Your second issue is in getting the masses to want to use public transportation, which seldom goes to destinations where 99.4% of people need to go.
Caving is good because the sky is falling dire predicament much like any good scam tries to scare the recipient into immediate action with no time to think. No thought or planning on the 2035 EVERYTHING must be EV. Well maybe hey we will be retired by then and not have to worry about all the problems that arise. No thought about charging vehicles, or grid capability, or materials for batteries, build capability, the poor so horribly screwed on this deal, emergency service vehicles, NO THOUGHT AT ALL. I wonder how much extra carbon will be put into the air building new factorties for cars and batteries, new mining for rare earth materials for batteries and regular mining for steel and other car building needs, plus shipping all those cars by rail, truck and ship? All the land fills needed to dump ice cars ahead of time? All the carbon and pollution from EV fires and putting them out plus where to store damaged batteries that might start a fire no matter where they are stored. Yeap not a bit of thought because the environmentalists wisdom of keep doing anything without thinking.
Yep, you’ve got it, Tacotrudckdave. The thousands of people who’ve dedicated their professional lives to this transition haven’t thought about the dumb stuff you just half-Googled and typed in all caps.
Bad take Dave strikes again. You’re doing this as parody, right?? Right??
Considering most PHEV’s in Europe were never plugged in, their banning them makes sense. Also considering that some PHEV’s here have modes to recharge the battery to full using gas, I get why. If carbon reduction was really the goal, such modes would not exist. Find a plug and plug in the battery like an EV! And if the PHEV won’t run in a geofenced city because it’s running on gas, tough. Plug it in like it’s supposed to be!
“their technology must be able to prevent them from driving if other fuels are used”
I’m no expert, and I’m no European either for that matter, but wouldn’t it be easier to just mandate that only E-Fuels be allowed to be sold in their member countries than trying to have the car figure out what sort of fuel it’s running? I mean, if the octane and everything is the same how would the car even know? This will just lead to one morning the car’s sensors will get all fiddly and even though you dumped the expensive E-Fuel into your tank the ECU will be like “I’m not sure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” and refuse to start.
Yeah this kind of implies they expect gas or diesel to still be available somehow (which would be good), but it’s unclear why.
Is there going to be a robust black market in refined fuels in 2040?
I’m guessing cars sold before 2035 would still be able to buy gas and diesel. This would prevent new cars from using the same pumps as the older legal gas burners
I don’t know enough about these E-Fuels but can’t older cars burn that just as well?
some say yes, some say no. Ethanol is an issue for classic cars that have not been updated with modern fuel systems. But Lead in the gas and Zinc in the oil is also made to work with upgrades these days.
It sounds like “smart gun” legislation to me. Nobody is sure it can be implemented or work, but a government official sold the concept without worrying about those minor quibbles.
Interesting that I haven’t heard about smart guns in quite a while now. Perhaps they’ve quietly accepted that failure.
I thought of the exact same thing when I read that sentence. Nevermind how difficult it would be to actually implement, let’s just mandate it anyways.
I frequent a YouTube channel “Forgotten Weapons” where a guy explains the history, mechanics, development, etc. of specific guns in some detail.
(I can be suspicious of his politics, but obviously it’s a contentious topic by default, and either way it only ever creeps in on the Q&A videos, seldom on the gun reviews themselves.)
He did one on that smart gun and mentioned that the company got death threats.
Between existing complexities in making guns that work and adding that kind of complexity to it, never mind finding a market, it’s just a really tough nut to crack.
You need to be able to disassemble guns to clean them, so it’s not like the “smart” component can just be some kind of fully-sealed unit.
I don’t know if there’s a solution to the question, but either way that company is long gone, I think.
So Ferrari lost customer data to a ransomware attack. That affects, what, like 12 people?
All those poor YouTubers.
Nah, I’m sure the exotic rental places they work with had them covered.
12 obscenely wealthy people
Oh no….anyway
Yeah, but they perfectly fit the demo of people you would want to spam with boner pill and penis extension ads. It’s not the quality of data, it’s the quality.
I just wonder how well all this EV shit will work when 3rd world countries can’t even have a snowballs chance in hell of ever becoming green….
I’m sure places that have electricity 8 hours a day, unstable governments, rampant disease and no sanitation are really worried about carbon. So we’ll send all the EV-angelists there to show them the way. Maybe the idea was to get rid of all the true believers.
That’s been a major geo-political bone of contention for a number of climate treaties and plans. Developing countries argue that they highly developed countries got to their current state through the use of plentiful, cheap energy. They (understandably) want to maintain their access to cheap, plentiful energy to continue to develop and view restrictions on carbon emissions from all sectors as debilitating to their development.
It’s all about fitting the technology to the market though. Many developing countries skipped landline phones and built out cell phone infrastructure because building a large wireless network with nodes is easier to build and maintain than miles of wire. Similarly, there’s opportunities for more distributed electricity generation through solar, wind, geothermal, or hydro to help lessen impacts of grid disruption, plant downtime, or plant capacity. Their grid may end up looking completely different from the US or EU because of those consumer demands.
Caption: “Welcome to Power, the game show where the rich get richer! All you have to do is pick out which envelope has the best executives compensation package, the rest are just extremely lucrative board positions! Then we have a long martini lunch expensed to the company account where we discuss how many workers to lay off, what non-relevant global news item to blame it on, and how much of the savings should go towards political lobbying to cut social services!”
VW Board Member: Your highness, we all agreed to wear blue suits. Every board member is in a blue suit. You’d think the king and president of Spain would have a blue suit.
The current state of affairs pretty much everywhere if you are symptomatic with any degree cynacism. –
“Smoke em’ if you got em'”
At the end of the day I think this is good, because the one (BEV) size fits all solution to making cars carbon neutral is ridiculous. Governments have gone all in on it as a political grandstanding maneuver. We genuinely have no idea what potential long term consequences building BEVs will have, we don’t have the infrastructure to support them locally or globally and likely won’t even by 2035, and being mandated to develop them is putting a huge strain on manufacturers that’s resulting in consumers paying more for worse products.
You could build tens of thousands of hybrids and PHEVs for the amount it costs to develop a single, functional, ground up EV. The technology just isn’t there yet. Don’t get me wrong-I’m far from anti EV, and my next car may well be a BEV. But I am against putting the cart before the horse, and that’s what governments are doing. I also think a lot of this is a ridiculously transparent ploy by politicians to shift the blame for climate change on to individuals because they don’t want to hold the serious culprits-corporations, militaries, airlines, etc. accountable because they write the checks.
Do individuals in cars pollute? You bet, and it’s important that we continue to work on finding a solution for that. But we’re small drops in a big barrel at the end of the day, and the parties I listed above and others need to be held accountable too…and unfortunately I doubt they ever will and that our impending doom is unavoidable.
Regardless, we need to be giving all carbon neutral or reduced emission vehicle solutions a seat at the table right now…because it’s going to take several to achieve our goals. Forcing everyone to switch to BEVs isn’t viable….but a combination of BEVs, better rail infrastructure and public transit, hybrids, PHEVs, synthetic fuels, and maybe even hydrogen sure could be.
I was just thinking about that the other day! My father works at a regional electric utility and so many people in that industry have major concerns about what a rapid EV rollout would mean for our current grid, which struggles to keep the lights on for folks during peak demand hours…without EVs in every garage and charging stations in significant numbers. There’s a lot of work to be done, which is fine, arguably good, but we need to be realistic in regards to how quickly the transition happens.
I’m with you, PHEVs are a huge step that’s being left out. So many people don’t buy EVs because there’s a handful of times a year they take a long trip. With a PHEV, they can run on electric 98% of the time and still have a car for long trips. Plus smaller batteries (that can also be charged with the ICE) require less energy from the grid. My mom wants one for her next car, she’s the perfect use case. Most of her driving is within a 25 mile radius of their house, but she does visit relatives on the other side of the state every couple months.
This is the use case for my wife and I as well. I bought my car as a sort of last ICE hurrah and as much as I love driving it I don’t love paying to fill it up. My wife’s next car will come way before mine will and she wants a PHEV. It’s perfect for her/us because she never drives more than 10-15 miles on a normal workday but we have to do a 300 or so mile drive a couple times a year to see her family.
I’ll likely either go PHEV as well or a full electric when the time comes since we technically don’t need two cars to make road trips in…and I maybe drive 50 miles total every work week.
This 4x a year range anxiety keeps being brought up but i have never heard it actually stated by an individual. Now me Im not buying an EV. WHY? I Dont buy new cars. Frankly I DD a 2001 and just bought a 1978. Why? I can work on them and the DD I did buy new plan to die driving it. So why plop out $45,000 for a new EV or ICE? Also if the DD goes down a few grand for another ICE.
For all the knowledge available on this site I have never seen a knowledgable breakdown on the purchase of new to used car buying in the EV stories. Hey wont the next pandemic be fun when there are only EV avsilable cars and the supply train of rare earth minerals really hits fan?
I’ll give you a real world example of the 4x a year range anxiety problem.
Last August I went on a family trip from LA to San Francisco and back. That’s 350 miles one way, includes huge elevation changes, heavy A/C use, traveling at 80-85 mph, and included only 2-3 20-30 minute stops for food. I think under those circumstances there isn’t an EV on the road today that could make it without having to stop at a charger. And no, I want to eat at the restaurant I want, when I want, rather than planning everything around charging stops.
Last December my wife and I went on a cross country trip from LA to Florida and back over a two week period. We covered anywhere from 450 – 650 miles a day and frequently arrived at our destinations late in the evening. We visited family members in multiple states along the way and there was always a shortage of time when trying to travel between two points on the map. None of the hotel or family’s houses we stayed at had chargers for EVs, and stopping to charge even once during the day would have slowed down our progress significantly; it would be the difference between having dinner with relatives or not seeing them at all. If we had tried to do our 5500 mile trip in two weeks with an EV, our trip would not have gone well at all.
Next June I have a 400 mile trip to Yosemite from LA with a car full of people and suitcases, A/C, elevation change, etc. etc.
To be clear, I am not anti-EV or anything like that. I drive a 2022 Camry Hybrid because I can only afford one car right now and I need a car that’s efficient AND fulfills 99% of my needs, not 90% of my needs. With the price of electricity here in California, I’m not even spending a ton more on gas than I would on electricity if I owned an EV. I’m willing to own an EV one day so long as I can charge it at home and I have at least one car that is a PHEV, but my experience represents a legitimate, real-world example of the 4x a year range anxiety problem.
TLDR:
Range anxiety is a real problem for people who can only afford one car at a time and travel several times a year. It isn’t just a boogyman for people who hate EVs.
I wanted to buy an EV and realized that I wasn’t going to pay new car money for something that would present an unacceptable compromise for me 10% of the time.
Very well said. My wife and I usually have a few planned long road trips each year, and now I have an unplanned 2600 mile one coming up next week. I can’t afford to have a car that can’t handle those needs even if “90% of the time” it’s just fine. What, I’ve got to rent something for the other 10%? If BEVs were cheaper than ICEs instead of the other way around I could see it, but as it is I need to spend my limited resources on something that can do everything that I need it to.
PHEV’s usually don’t get plugged in. In Europe where PHEV adoption was encouraged, something like 80% of them were not plugged in regularly if at all. Given that information, IMO it’s a waste to make 30-50 mile PHEV’s. A better use would be a 100-150 mile EV with a range extender ICE. Then the driver can have the gasoline safety net to limp to a charger. And the things would be plugged in since the ICE experience would be purposely terrible.
For the grid, we need to expand more at work chargers. That pairs well with daytime solar or wind when the sun isn’t shining. And as much as it pains me to say it, keep the nukes running until a viable alternative can be found. Then a goodly number of cars can charge overnight when other loads are lighter. Comments welcome!
Nuke power is great and current generation designs can be really safe. I’ll take the tradeoff of having to process some radioactive material after 30 years or whatever for reliable power as part of a larger distributed wind and solar with storage power generation system.
Regarding e-fuels “making sense”:
From a strictly energy efficiency standpoint, probably not. Presumably electricity is used to create the fuel, with associated losses. Although this is mitigated a bit by being able to create it at scale, in a centralized refinery, which might be reduce some losses compared to distributing electricity to thousands of flung charging stations.
But for as long as battery technology remains limited, the energy density of the fuel is more important than its ultimate efficiency. Gasoline has 34 kWh per gallon. Even a subcompact car is able to carry the equivalent of a 400 kWh battery on board (twice the size of the Hummer’s) and recharge it from 0-100% in 3-5 minutes. There’s just no way a battery can compete with that, especially in larger vehicles.
Pure EVs will probably always be cheaper to run, because it’s not likely e-fuels can be made profitable for what gas costs now. But as I’ve said many times, there’s no way 100% of the fleet can be made electric without a paradigm shift in battery density, recharge times, or ideally both.
To add to this, who cares what the energy efficiency is if the energy that gets put into the process is cheap and green? Projections for solar energy are in the $0.02 – $0.05/kW-hr for utilities over the next decade, and using excess solar during the middle of the day when production is highest and electricity use is lower could reduce this price further by using excess capacity that would otherwise either be stored (incurring efficiency losses this way too) or wasted.
You could even think of e-fuels as an energy buffer and transportation system instead of batteries, pumped hydro, and transmission lines. We have a huge amount of infrastructure in place to move energy in liquid form already in place, and because of the energy density of liquid hydrocarbon fuels, its pretty cheap to transport. Lets go a step further and set up solar farms across the midwest & southwest where the sun & wind are plentiful, agricultural waste (corn stalks, wheat chaff etc) can be trucked in from nearby for carbon, and water can be tapped from the Mississippi or the Gulf of Mexico for electrolysis to produce H2. Then, the resultant liquid HC fuel (probably ethanol) could be piped & shipped around the country, allowing for cheap and green energy storage and transportation to better utilize the periodic nature of renewable energy generation
I hope lawmakers in blue states are listening, because what you just outlined is 100X more feasible and desirable than blanket EV mandates in 2035.
Utilities will not offer you electrons for $0.02-$0.05 per kWh…
You’re probably aware of this but not everyone is, it takes massive amounts of electricity to refine gas. Alas I don’t know if it’ll take more or less electricity to produce ‘green’ gas.
It takes so much power to refine gas the refinery’s stopped giving us that data. Then when you’ve made that gas you’ve still got to get in to the gas station, to the car’s fuel tank only to be burned at a very low rate of efficiency.
You’re 100% right about needing better batteries for transportation (static storage can be less energy dense, as they aren’t being moved), and better recharge times. We also will need a MUCH better charging infrastructure. I think the biggest hurdle we have to quicker adoption outside of dealers gouging on EVs is the terrible charging network.
You’ll hit battery energy density storage limits within the next 3-5 years…
*Pure EVs will probably always be cheaper to run*
PG&E enters the chat….