Category Archives: Energy and Climate Change

News and articles on climate change, vehicle pollution, and renewable energy.

Could EVs Be the Secret to a 100% Renewable Grid?

September 13, 2018Charging, Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and CommentTrevor Larkum

It is possible to unlock a 100 percent renewably powered grid — without any coal, nuclear or gas storage baseload — within the next several years.

And any driver or homeowner could contribute to the solution by using electric vehicles (EVs) as mobile batteries that charge at one location when there’s a surge of renewable energy and deliver it back to the grid at another when it’s needed.

The storage potential of EVs is striking. Aggregating energy across one million EVs amounts to 50 to 100 GWh of storage capacity, according to industry analysts Brattle Group. Putting that into perspective, Tesla’s “big battery” in South Australia, currently the largest battery in the world, stores less than 1GWh.

With electric cars storing and transporting renewable power, we wouldn’t need to continue building expensive storage infrastructure. For utilities, this vast mobile power source could be a savior — or their downfall.

Batteries on wheels

EVs have more capacity than they need on a daily basis: The average daily car trip in the U.S. is about 30 miles, while most EVs have a range of 124 to 310 miles. Current base model vehicles with a 186.4-mile range on a 60 kW battery pack could run a typical house, including air conditioning, for four to five days. And despite some car owners’ concerns, discharging the battery won’t cause noticeable wear, because a typical battery’s life is longer than the lifetime of a vehicle.

Using vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which allows vehicle batteries to store surplus energy from intermittent renewable resources like solar and wind, EV owners could power their homes with energy stored in car batteries or sell it back to utilities, balancing fluctuations in energy demand. Using real-time rates, utilities could encourage EV owners to charge up during the day, when there is excess (and therefore cheap) solar energy, and sell back to the grid during times of high demand.

Myths And Shibboleths About Electric Vehicles: The Long Tailpipe Theory

September 5, 2018Charging, Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, Opinion, PollutionTrevor Larkum

One of the most frequent comments spouted by critics of electric vehicles is “the electricity they use is produced by fossil fuels, so actually they’re more polluting than petrol or diesel vehicles.” The long tailpipe theory, repeatedly trashed by science, is still the fallback argument for the ill-informed.

Where does it come from? The two main sources of air pollution are vehicles with diesel or gasoline engines and electricity generated by coal or diesel oil. Since many countries still generate electricity in this way, the argument goes that electric vehicles are simply transferring the pollution from our exhaust pipe to the chimney of a power station.

Is that true? No. The first reason is obvious: not all electricity is produced by coal and diesel power plants. More and more countries are using sustainable generation such as hydroelectric, wind, solar or other renewables, while at the same time, we are seeing an increase in distributed generation infrastructures such as solar panels in homes. Therefore, even if all we were doing was transferring pollution from one point to another, in the vast majority of countries a certain part of that electricity would come from clean sources.

In fossil fuel vehicles, this is not the case: everything it produces comes from where it comes from, and anybody with a minimum of environmental awareness should be ashamed every time they get behind the wheel.

Grid storage batteries help electric vehicles go truly green

September 4, 2018Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, Energy Storage, News, Reviews and CommentTrevor Larkum

Lower costs and wider take-up promise future where cars supply power to grids

In October 2015 a ruptured well in a natural gas storage facility in Aliso Canyon north of Los Angeles leaked 97,100 tonnes of methane into the atmosphere — making it one of the worst environmental disasters in the US since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill five years earlier. Thousands of people were displaced.

The following year utility Southern California Edison decided to invest in batteries to reduce the region’s reliance on gas for electricity — a contract that was won by Tesla. It was a turning point for electric utilities, which have relied on natural gas plants to provide power for over half a century.

Their greater use of batteries by utilities could help grids better integrate renewable sources of energy that are often intermittent. This in turn would help make electric cars truly green, by reducing their reliance on electricity supplied over the grid that is still often generated from fossil fuels.

Energy storage is set to see rapid growth as the plummeting cost of batteries has made them increasingly competitive with gas plants, providing power at periods of peak demand or when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow.

“It’s cost-competitive right now,” says Praveen Kathpal, who heads the market applications team at Fluence, a joint venture between AES of the US and Germany’s Siemens. “The declining cost of energy storage is increasing the pace at which those needs will be met by storage. We believe storage is competitive with gas peaking plants almost anywhere.”

The need for energy storage is increasingly critical for states such as California, which has set a target of getting half of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

Utilities have started to invest in ever larger battery projects over the past two years. Last year Tesla installed a 129 megawatt hours battery in South Australia, to store wind energy from the Hornsdale wind farm. Drax Power in the UK said in September it wanted to build 200MW of battery storage at its power station in Yorkshire.

The case for wider deployment of storage batteries on the grid has been helped by the rapidly declining costs of lithium-ion technology that is also used in electric cars. Invented in 1991 and commercialised by Sony for use in its camcorders, the cost of lithium-ion battery packs has fallen by 79 per cent over the past eight years, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Analysts at McKinsey estimate that the total costs for energy storage systems should fall by a further 50 to 70 per cent by 2025 due to economies of scale as well as design improvements.

As a result, consultancy IHS forecasts that the grid-connected storage market will grow tenfold to 52GW globally between now and 2025. The International Renewable Energy Agency predicts the market could hit 175GW by 2030.

Getting there may not even require factories to churn out ever more batteries. As the uptake of electric cars grows, their individual batteries could be linked up to provide a source of energy storage for electric grids, according to Chris Wright, co-founder of London-based battery start-up Moixa.

Why Diesel Cars Are Spoiling Your Summer

August 27, 2018Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, PollutionTrevor Larkum

Many antipollution systems deactivate at high temperatures
Paris bans older cars after pollution soars in heat wave

Europeans aren’t just sweating through the long, hot summer. City dwellers may be coughing and wheezing more, too.

Diesel vehicles, which still command nearly half the market for new cars, are left with barely any pollution controls when temperatures soar above 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit), according to France’s Petroleum and New Energies Research Institute. That means smog-inducing nitrogen oxide emissions that were at the center of the Volkswagen AG scandal spew into the environment unchecked.

“There are higher emissions of nitrogen oxides because the setups don’t work as well when it’s very hot,” said Gaetan Monnier, who heads the unit that led random government probes of cars after the VW scandal. “The atmosphere is also more reactive during a heatwave, making the level of cars’ emissions even more of an issue.”

Carmakers have been under scrutiny since the 2015 scandal that revealed VW had rigged the emissions setup in some 11 million diesel cars globally, the main emitters of nitrogen oxides. While sales have dropped as consumers fret over driving bans, diesels still made up 45 percent of new vehicle sales in Western Europe last year. Excessive emissions of the pollutant linked to premature deaths and respiratory problems have prompted the European Union to sue France, Germany, U.K., Romania and Hungary in May after failing for years to comply.

On-road tests have shown emissions clean-up systems start to reduce their effectiveness in cold temperatures as well as above 30 degrees.

Car emissions scandal: loopholes in the lab tests

August 17, 2018Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, Pollution, VolkswagenTrevor Larkum

Three years after Dieselgate, automakers are still exploiting ‘the lawful but awful ways’ to achieve the best possible scores for CO2 testing in the EU

When Volkswagen was caught cheating diesel emissions tests in 2015, one of the first actions its engineers took was to launch a secret project: to obtain cars from rival manufacturers and conduct tests on their emissions. Its aim was to find evidence of widespread cheating across the industry, so guilt could be spread around and penalties diluted, say two people inside the company.

The Volkswagen Scandal, in other words, might helpfully become the Car Scandal.

Vehicles from Fiat, Hyundai and others were tested for harmful nitrogen oxide emissions by VW engineers at the group’s Wolfsburg headquarters from late 2015 to early 2016. The engineers had a simple conundrum: VW had just admitted to equipping 11m cars with software to detect laboratory tests and enable them to enter a low-emissions mode. If VW’s best engineers found regulations so onerous that they resorted to deliberate fraud, what had its rivals done?

A third person in the company insists there was a more innocent explanation for the tests. Engineers uninvolved in the original cheating had to use rival cars as control variables to better understand their own sophisticated software — some of it supplied by third parties and used by rival brands. “We were not dirtying others’ hands to make our own look clean,” says this employee.

Volkswagen declined to comment on this previously unreported episode.

What the engineers found shocked them. Rival brands’ NOx emissions were considered “a complete disaster”. Performance on the road was “completely different to the technical data”, says a VW worker briefed on the results. The overall summary of whether rivals were also skewing emissions results was clear: “It’s not only VW who is cheating.”

What is unclear is whether rivals were deploying the same strategy as VW — using a “defeat device” to illegally trick regulators into believing its cars were green — or if they had simply become better at bending the rules on tests, a problem that still exists with petrol cars today, as the European Commission revealed last month when it disclosed the latest “tricks” carmakers were using to exploit loopholes for incoming 2020 emissions procedures.

The distinction is blurred but important. VW paid the consequences of crossing the line and cheating NOx emissions tests in the US. But the efforts of other carmakers to legally undermine testing for both NOx and CO2 in Europe have never resulted in real penalties.

“Legal optimisation was done on an industrial scale,” says Nick Molden, chief executive of Emissions Analytics, which conducts real-world driving emissions tests. “It became so ingrained in how cars were certified that the carmakers didn’t understand they had done something wrong . . . That’s the scandal in Europe: that these actions were not illegal.”

Electric Vehicles: Headed In The Right Direction . . .

July 27, 2018Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, SalesTrevor Larkum

The United Kingdom’s newly published Road to Zero report recommends that all new homes should be equipped with chargers for electric vehicles as part of plans to move toward zero emissions and in line with its objective to eliminate diesel and gasoline vehicles by 2040. The plan includes public charging being incorporated into streetlights, gas stations and freeway rest areas, but no incentives for scrapping diesel vehicles; in fact, the bulk of the money to pay for the plan comes from taxes on diesels.

The outlook for the electric vehicle is changing rapidly, despite the oil lobby’s best attempts to spread misinformation. In countries such as Japan, the number of recharging points has long exceeded the number of gas stations, although obviously, many of them are in people’s homes. Electric buses are increasingly seen as a logical option for public transport by more and more cities around the world, which is hitting the oil companies hard.

The automotive industry will undergo unprecedented change: after weathering Dieselgate, Volkswagen has announced the launch of a car-sharing service for electric vehicles next year as part of a plan to win back the trust of users and regulators, supported by an alliance with a Chinese battery manufacturer that will also supply BMW, which says the deal was a way to accelerate its transition toward the mass manufacture of electric vehicles, which until recently it said would not be possible until 2020.

All of this suggests we’re heading in the right direction, but far too slowly. The U.K.’s announcement of a ban on diesel and gasoline vehicles from 2040 was little more than a gesture aimed at keeping the country in line with the rest of the EU, while avoiding the ire of the automotive industry and the users. In practice, within two years, when electric vehicles will outprice their diesel and gasoline competitors, market forces will take over and the internal combustion engine will be seen for what it is: outdated, expensive, overcomplicated and bad for the environment.

Electric vehicles alone could cause peak oil demand within decade

July 23, 2018Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, Oil, Peak OilTrevor Larkum

In an aggressive scenario, electrified transportation could displace 8 million barrels of oil per day.

When Tesla announced that it had built 7,000 cars in a week, I got excited. Even though electric vehicles (EVs) make up only a small percentage of new car sales in most countries, those sales are growing rapidly.

But how long before they really start to take a bite out of oil demand?

Norway offers some clues, where years of generous—some would say unsustainable—incentives saw EVs and plug-in hybrid sales grow to 55% of the new car market in March. And the cumulative impact of those sales may have FINALLY translated into a drop in overall demand, with gasoline in particular seeing a 2.9% drop in sales.

Of course 2.9% is not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s important to remember that change is rarely linear. If it really is due to electric vehicles, then that figure should grow each year as adoption rates increase and older model gasoline cars retire from the fleet. And that, in turn, could lead to further drivers like gas stations closing, or lower resale value for fossil fueled vehicles.

Similar dynamics will be at play on a global scale, albeit many years behind. Now the carbon/finance geeks at Carbon Tracker have launched an interesting EV Demand Displacement Tool that allows users to explore how rates of EV adoption, mileage and efficiency gains in internal combustion engine (ICE) cars might interact to displace oil demand, and how that in turn could lead to major disruption for investors and volatility in oil pricing.

Electric vehicle sales promise shock for Big Oil

July 22, 2018Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, Oil, Peak Oil, SalesTrevor Larkum

If motor manufacturers are right about the prospects for electric vehicle sales, an oil price crash won’t be far behind.

LONDON, 5 July, 2018 – Oil and gas companies have underestimated probable electric vehicle sales and the effect they will have on their own businesses and profits, a new report says.

If the car manufacturers’ projections of future sales of electric cars are correct, then demand for oil will have peaked by 2027 or even earlier, sending the price of oil in a downward spiral as supply exceeds demand, says Carbon Tracker (CT), an independent financial think-tank carrying out in-depth analysis on the impact of the energy transition on capital markets.

It says fossil fuel companies have taken into account some engine fuel efficiencies and the effect they would have on oil demand, but not the expected increase in electric vehicles themselves. There is a big mismatch between forecasts of EV market penetration from vehicle manufacturers and from oil majors, says Laurence Watson, a CT data scientist.

“The oil industry is underestimating the disruptive potential of electric vehicles, which could reduce oil demand by millions of barrels a day. Increases in fuel efficiency will also eat into oil demand and the industry’s profits. The oil majors’ myopic position presents a serious investor risk,” he told the Climate News Network.

Women will drive transition to electric cars, study finds

July 21, 2018Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, SalesTrevor Larkum

Men generally want speed, acceleration, style. Women want there to be a planet when their children grow up. That’s pretty much the findings of a University of Sussex study into who will buy electric vehicles and why, writes BRENDAN MONTAGUE

A rapid and comprehensive transition to electric mobility will require a combination of technological, regulatory, institutional, economic, cultural and behavioural changes that together transform the sociotechnical systems that provide energy or mobility services.

More focused marketing of electric cars to women could be more effective in creating the required revolution away from more polluting vehicles than universal government intervention, a new study has said.

Highly educated women are an untapped but potentially lucrative market for electric vehicle sales because they have greater environmental and fuel efficiency awareness than men, says a new study by researchers at the University of Sussex and Aarhus University in Denmark.

The research also recommends the newly retired be targeted for electric vehicle promotion, even though they as a group have less interest in more environmentally friendly vehicles. Pensioners have high car ownership, drive short distances, have high budgets for car purchases and are less interested in design – all characteristics that could make them ideal electric vehicle owners.

Illegal levels of air pollution linked to child’s death

July 20, 2018Electric Cars, Energy and Climate Change, News, Reviews and Comment, PollutionTrevor Larkum

A nine-year-old girl’s fatal asthma attack has been linked to illegally high levels of air pollution.

Ella Kissi-Debrah lived 25m (80ft) from London’s South Circular Road – a notorious pollution “hotspot”.

She experienced three years of seizures and hospital stays before her death in February 2013. During that time, local air pollution levels breached EU legal limits.

No individual death has previously been directly linked to air pollution.

According to a report by one of the UK’s leading experts on asthma and air pollution, Prof Stephen Holgate, there was a “striking association” between Ella’s emergency hospital admissions and recorded spikes in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and PM10s, the most noxious pollutants.

His report said there was a “real prospect that without unlawful levels of air pollution, Ella would not have died”.

The evidence will be submitted in an appeal to the attorney general to re-open an inquest in to Ella’s death.

Ella often walked to school along the South Circular Road and Lewisham High Street, a journey that would take 30-40 minutes. Or she would be driven and have to sit for lengthy periods in traffic jams.