December 22, 2010, 5:45 pm
From environmental blog the Thin Green Line:
McDonald’s has been a frequent target on this blog, and many others related to health and environmental issues. But mark it on your calendar: This post is in praise of Micky D’s, for installing EV charging stations at a new West Virginia location.
Yes, it’s just about the strangest place you could pick, given that the Huntington, WV, location is not on a throughway connecting EV early-adopter towns like New York, D.C., or San Francisco. The location clearly has more to do with its proximity to partner American Electric Power’s Columbus, Ohio, headquarters — but we’ll give kudos where kudos are due. With 58 million people eating at McDonald’s everyday, the burger chain isn’t a bad spot to enable electric vehicle drivers to charge up.
99% of West Virginia’s electricity comes from coal, so its interesting to see environmentalists championing the switch from gasoline to coal. Notwithstanding the fact that the fossil fuel use of electric vehicles is being grossly under-estimated, charging up your EV in WV is a great way to take positive steps to increase your CO2 footprint.
November 24, 2010, 11:38 am
After several posts yesterday, I rewrote my thoughts on EV’s and the new EPA mileage numbers. I am more convinced than ever that this standard borders on outright fraud, particularly when the DOE published what should be the correct methodology way back in the Clinton Administration and the EPA has ignored this advice and gone with a methodology that inflates the MPG (equivilant) of EV’s by a factor of nearly 3. For example, the list the Nissan Leaf with an MPGe of 99, but by the DOE methodology the number should be 36.
The full article is in Forbes.com and is here. An excerpt:
The end result is startling. Using the DOE’s apples to apples methodology, the MPGe of the Nissan Leaf is not 99 but 36! Now, 36 is a good mileage number, but it is pretty pedestrian compared to the overblown expectations for electric vehicles, and is actually lower than the EPA calculated mileage of a number of hybrids and even a few traditional gasoline-powered vehicles like the Honda CR-Z.
Supporters of the inflated EPA standards have argued that they are appropriate because they measure cars on their efficiency of using energy in whatever form is put in their tank (or batteries). But this is disingenuous. The whole point of US fuel economy standards is not power train efficiency per se, but to support an energy policy aimed at reducing fossil fuel use. To this end, the more sophisticated DOE standard is a much better reflection of how well the Nissan Leaf affects US fossil fuel use. The only reason not to use this standard is because the EPA, and the Administration in general, has too many chips on the table behind electric vehicles, and simply can’t afford an honest accounting.
Tags:
Clinton Administration,
CR,
DOE,
economy,
EPA,
ev,
fuel,
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Nissan Leaf,
US Category:
Energy,
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12 Comments
May 5, 2009, 9:09 am
Despite years and hundreds of millions of dollars of effort on electric vehicles, competitors are coming out of the woodwork to beat it to market with an all-electric sedan — and, from the specs, seem to be beating it on price and features as well.
Miles Electric has confirmed that it’s working on a family sedan-sized all electric car for release in North America sometime next year. The car — which will be released under a different, unknown brandname — will be a first for the company, which specializes in neighborhood cars that only go up to about 25 miles per hour. The sedan will have a top speed of around 80 miles per hour, and a 100 mile range. It will also require 8-12 hours to fully recharge its dead lithium-ion battery. Miles is currently running the vehicle though crash tests, and expects to see about 300 of them on the road in California sometime next year. The going rate for one of these? About $45,000.
Radical shifts in technology often obsolete first mover and scale advantages. The winners in the market for diesel electric locomotives (GM and GE) were totally different players from those who dominated the steam locomotive market (Alco, Baldwin, Lima and others). It will be interesting to see if such a change occurs in the auto market.
August 16, 2006, 11:19 am
The one the government did not support, plan for, or subsidize.
It increasingly looks like hybrids, particularly newer plug-in hybrids, will be the high MPG, low-emission technology winner in the foreseeable future. The US and California governments, among others, have subsidized (and at times mandated) pure electric vehicles, hydrogen vehicles, natural gas powered vehicles, and fuel cell powered vehicles. While some governments have come along with ex-post-facto promotions of hybrids (e.g. ability to use the carpool lane), hybrids have been developed and won in the market entirely without government help and in places like California, effectively in the face of government opposition (because they were stuck on zero emission vehicles, low-emission vehicles were opposed)
Plug in hybrids have many of the advantages of electric vehicles without the range problems. They use standard gasoline so they avoid the new fuel distribution issues of natural gas and hydrogen. And fuel cell technology may be great one day but is not there yet. I was reminded of all this by this article by Stephen Bainbridge on why the EV-1 failed.
Update: This reminds me of the 19th century transcontinental railroads – UP, SP, NP, GN etc. Only one of these transcontinentals did not get any federal land grants or government financing — the Great Northern of James J. Hill — and not coincidently the GN was the only one not to go bankrupt in the close of the century.
