Did You Really Mean, "Whatever the Cost?"
In California, and in other states where the zero-emissions vehicle idea has taken root, people are about to be taught an expensive lesson by a government more arrogant, more remote from reality than most of them have suspected, or supposed possible. They will find their pockets are being plundered not just by the tax authorities, but by an entirely different class of civil servants they didn't hire and can't fire.
CARB, the California Air Resources Board, began as an oxymoron: A "temporary government agency." The Golden State set up its own gang of smog sniffers back when the federal government was considering the matter of auto emission standards, in its ponderous way. The iodine-tinged haze over Los Angeles was taken as proof positive that conditions peculiar to southern California required lower auto emissions limits, sooner, than Washington then envisioned.
After the usual legislative flatulence CARB was chartered, and it has since grown into the typical bureaucratic monstrosity. But, and this is important, the agency was supposed to exist only for as long as California's emissions standards were more strict than those issued by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. The idea at the time was to create a temporary entity to look after California's air until the federal bureaucracy could assume the burden of regulation.
Over the years the feds' smog rules have come closer to making new cars' exhaust gases a pristine mix of carbon dioxide and water vapor, so CARB is an imperiled bureaucracy: It must, by law, go for tighter standards than those out of Washington or close up shop. CARB's pressing problem is that the federal limits for oxides of nitrogen, unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide leave little room for further tightening. Indeed, they leave so little room that CARB and the other state EPAs would be hard pressed to justify their existence if anyone noticed and started asking questions.
But then some unsung (also undiscovered, and untarred-and-feathered) California bureaucrat came up with a bureaucratically brilliant idea: They would demand a zero-emissions car, which is an unattainable ideal, like Erica Jong's zipless sex. It would be Emissions Impossible, a goal forever beyond reach; it would confer bureaucratic immortality upon smog fighters everywhere.
CARB's paper shufflers have been doubly clever in refusing to say what path auto makers should take in the search for zero emissions. The only direction possible on this side of the time horizon is electric cars, but if that idea comes up snake-eyes, as it inevitably must, and another mountain of taxpayer money goes up in smoke, as it surely will, the agency can say, "Hey, we never said you had to build electric cars."
New-age Luddites, found at all levels in the various EPAs, like to assume the technologies they despise can produce politically correct solutions to any problem if commanded to do so by Morally Superior Beings like themselves. Of course, they also seem to believe you can clean up the exhaust effluvia of an old Volvo wagon by clamping a bicycle rack on its roof.
State and federal EPAs do not operate in a political vacuum. Polls show a large majority of Americans, up to 80%, agree the environment must be protected whatever the cost -- which means a large majority of us are nitwits. Elected representatives, for whom public opinion, however badly informed or stupidly inclined, is the Voice of God, take it from there. They give the EPAs, state and federal, legislative encouragement to do to us whatever the smog sniffers deem good, and to do it whatever the cost. Remember those words. They arise from American politics, which is rooted in the credulity, brief attention span and invincible ignorance of entirely too many American voters.
By the way, being anti-Environmentalist is not at all the same thing as being anti-environment. The linkage between the two disappeared when ecology was abducted from its scientific base and made a religion, with faith and doctrine ascendant over knowledge, under the leadership of zealots and fanatics.
The electric alternative to gasoline and internal combustion, claims to the contrary notwithstanding, is nowhere on the technological horizon. Here are some facts for you to consider the next time you hear some television talking head portentiously out-gassing about the technological marvel the electric car is supposed to be:
First, be advised that the relatively inexpensive lead-acid battery is not going to make it in the electric cars. Why? Because it is a miserably poor energy storage medium, compared to gasoline (petrol), stovewood, or for that matter a herd of hamsters.
Even running at part throttle, well below peak efficiency, the modern internal combustion engine will deliver about two horsepower-hours of work, net, for every pound of fuel it burns, and an American gallon of gasoline weighs about 5.6 pounds. That's 11.2 horsepower-hours of energy content per US gallon. With one horsepower also equaling 746 watts, one US gallon of gasoline (petrol, in most of the English-speaking world) equals 8355 watt-hours.
Large car batteries usually have an energy storage capacity of around 65 ampere-hours, which at 12 volts is 780 watt-hours, which means you need 11 of them to equal a gallon of gasoline. Better make that 13 big batteries, as the lead-acid battery is a container you cannot empty: Lead-acid batteries do not give useful voltage at high discharge rates until fully depleted. Under the best of conditions you get only 80% of nominal battery capacity.
The deep-discharge cycles of electric vehicle use cause flaking erosion of the lead oxide coating on batteries' positive (+) plates, quickly leaving them dead as a politician's promise. Some lead-acid batteries have support mats to hold the lead oxide on their positive plates for longer life in deep discharge cycles. They also have plates, positive and negative, four to six times thicker than those in conventional starting batteries, which means they are very, very heavy.
Batteries made for deep-discharge duty, which can survive up to 1500 charge/discharge cycles (four to five years of service), provide at best only about 12.5 watt-hours per pound. So you're looking at a hefty 800 pounds of these batteries to equal a single gallon of petro-fuel. An acceptable number for fork lifts, maybe, but seriously heavy for anything that is going to be accelerated or braked at freeway speeds.
The best energy density yet obtained with lead-acid batteries is about 18 watt-hours per pound. You'd need a minimum of 557 expensive pounds of them to equal one gallon, 5.6 pounds, of gasoline. You trade durability for the higher energy density and will get only 750 to 1000 charge/discharge cycles, two or perhaps three years of service, before laying out US$1500 for another gallon's worth of batteries.
Here we have one of the dirty little electro-vehicle secrets. If you reside in California you'll get the electricity from a utility for, say, US$0.12 per kilowatt-hour, the energy equivalent of gasoline at just over US$1.00 per gallon. With the kinds of discounts utilities offer people who recharge their electro-vehicles in off-peak hours, the cost per gallon-equivalent will come down to perhaps US$0.84. However, if you add battery replacement cost it goes up to more like US$2.55 per gallon equivalent.
Don't count on the electro-car concept being rescued by a big reduction in the price of lead-acid batteries. We presently make millions of the things for cars' starters, and all economies of scale in manufacturing have long since been realized. There may be some gains in deep discharge durability, but it won't be enough, even with tune-up and oil change savings, to make battery power anything like as cheap as gasoline.
If not lead-acid, then what?
You can make a battery of sorts out of any two metals, or two forms of the same metal, and an electrolyte. Lead-acid batteries use lead and lead oxide in sulfuric acid. Nickel-cadmium batteries use those metals in both pure and hydroxide forms, and caustic potash as an electrolyte. The good news about "ni-cads" is that they are lighter than lead-acid, and can be charged and discharged very rapidly. The bad news is, they are pricey and the cadmium in them is toxic to humans and many other living things. But then, so is lead:
Lester Lave, Chris Hendrickson and Francis McMichael of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University warn that increased environmental lead from mining, smelting and recycling of lead incidental to the use of batteries would be a disaster. Even with technologies not yet available, they say, producing batteries for an electric car would put six times as much lead in the environment as a small automobile burning leaded gasoline. "If everybody started driving electric cars, it would be a problem that would dwarf anything coming out of automobiles now," Lave predicts.
Nickel-metal hydride batteries are a promising alternative to lead-acid, if you don't care about price and never heard of gasoline. They have about 2.5 times the energy density of lead-acid batteries, meaning you only need 223 pounds of them to equal one 5.6-pound gallon of petro-fuel. They also have a much longer service life, lasting for 2500-plus charge/discharge cycles.
Bob Stemple, one-time head of General Motors, has signed on as a consultant to a company formed to produce nickel-metal hydride batteries for electric vehicles. Waving Mr. Stemple's name around in Washington may conjure up government funding, but it won't solve the exotic battery's problems: Nickel-metal hydride batteries have a price density dauntingly near that of gold, and such batteries cannot be produced in the quantities required without significant environmental insult.
The best battery in energy density terms is the molten sodium-sulfur type used in Ford's experimental Ecostar. These weigh 125 pounds per gallon equivalent, which is 3.7 times better than the best lead-acid batteries. On the other hand, they're 22.3 times worse than gasoline, don't last but three years, must hold their cell temperatures close to 600 degrees, F, and have a replacement cost high enough to cause cardiac arrest in anyone spending his own money.
Once you get past high-tech batteries the energy storage game gets really weird. You have people working on, for example, flywheel-based systems, which are conceptually very simple. Electrical power drives a motor that makes a flywheel spin, storing electricity as kinetic energy. Once the flywheel has been spun up to speed the motor serves as a generator and can convert the kinetic energy back to electricity. Or, if you overspeed the flywheel, thus exceeding its tensile strength, you can turn it to fast-moving shrapnel.
Flywheel energy storage probably isn't going anywhere, because the physics of the things contains contradictory demands:
A flywheel needs mass in motion, a requirement best satisfied with a thick flywheel rim; but the energy stored rises as the square of velocity, which means an absolute need for a high rotational speed. The difficulty is that as rim speed rises the rim's connection with the hub must be thickened to keep the flywheel from pulling itself apart. Therefore, the faster you spin the flywheel the more of its total mass has to be moved inward from the rim toward the hub to give it adequate strength. So you trade mass for speed and hope improvements in materials strength will put you ahead of chemical energy storage (batteries).
Attempts to balance the conflicting requirements of mass and rotational speed produce very strange flywheel shapes, thick at the hub and tapering to near-nothingness out at the rim. Such flywheels are far more likely to be made of carbon fiber than metal. The technology is hugely expensive (Livermore Lab's small flywheel "battery" goes for US$50,000 per copy), and looks even less promising than savagely reactive mixtures of molten metals and electrolytes.
You are entitled to wonder why, given what you have been told here, so many car makers are making prototype electrics? Ford has one, as noted, and so do General Motors and Chrysler, plus all the American Big Three's competitors in Europe, Japan and elsewhere. Their reason?
The important difference between you and General Motors, in the context of electric vehicles, is that you can't quite believe the smog sniffers really mean it. GM, and Ford, et al, know they do, just as they meant it when the EPA was pushing the auto industry to cut exhaust emissions faster, at times, than means to measure them in vanishingly-thin concentrations could be devised. Mandate-driven engineering is expensive, which is why car prices went up so fast during the '70s and '80s. The forced march toward cleaner exhausts was costly; more costs were added for air bags, anti-lock braking, and DOT labels on all parts big enough to take them.
Weenies everywhere applauded the mandates, having been told by Ralph Nader, the King Weenie himself, that the evil manufacturers would have to pay for them. But money never goes anywhere without coming from somewhere (GJ's First Law of Economics), and the cost of compliance showed up as higher vehicle prices.
The cost of electrifying vehicles is going to be a budget-buster, far worse than anything that has gone before. Much of the bite initially will be concealed from the taxpayer with the usual legislative blue smoke and mirrors. The staggering expense of electric vehicles will be hidden by pricing them below cost and making up the difference with higher prices for gasoline-fueled vehicles. Tax credits will be granted to create the illusion of offsetting the high cost of battery replacement, and the money for that will come from higher taxes on motor fuel.
For a time, the cost of electricity to charge all the batteries and/or spool up all the flywheels will also be hidden. Our public utilities presently have an excess of generating capacity in off-peak hours, so the load created by a few hundred thousand electric vehicles mean added revenues without any increase in capital investment, or so the utilities like to believe.
In reality, the electrical load imposed by recharging electric vehicles can be accommodated by existing generating capacity only if people behave as utilities and government prefer to assume. If people don't, if folks drive home from work and immediately hook their electro-zoomers on the chargers so they can later go out on the town, the nation's power grid will start to smoke and we'll all be in BIG trouble.
The reality is that batteries' tiny energy capacity means a lot of electrical vehicles will be on the charger in hours when the load on the grid is not conveniently light. As that confounding truth rises up from the warm, concealing treacle of wishful thinking, all the electrical power producers will demand, and necessarily get, rate increases high enough to finance more generating capacity.
If any significant number of electro-rollers coming into service will mean creating an elaborate and wildly expensive support infrastructure. We will, after all, need everything from rewired homes to the electrical equivalent of service stations. Where will we get the capital? By diverting it from other investments, causing a major distortion in our economy, which I admit will spare many of you the inevitable tax burden increase. You won't have jobs to produce income to be taxed.
None of the electro-car planners are talking much about the how all the electrical power their scheme requires will be produced. In fact, all but a tiny fraction of it will have to be generated by burning fossil fuel, using the heat to boil water and make steam, using the steam to drive turbines and the turbines to spin generators exactly as we do today. The sole difference is, we'll burn more fossil fuel than at present.
Solar power has its fans, but no advance in photo-voltaic cell or steam from sunshine technology is going to take us to the Promised Land. Sunlight's energy is thinly spread, which is good as we otherwise would burst into flame after a minute or two at the beach; but it means building collectors of enormous size and prohibitive cost to make solar power useful.
Wind power? We've used it for centuries, but we switched to other sources more powerful and reliable. All the high-tech windmills flailing in the breeze east of San Jose in California exist because tax payers' money put them there. They'd never make it off the sketch pad on their own merits.
Environmentalists should be told the Pacheco Pass windmills' whirling blades have been killing birds, a number of them eagles high on the must-protect list of endangered species. Of course, the windmills also slash and kill the less glamorous large birds, like buzzards, not presently on the endangered list but will get there if we build enough windmills.
Geo-thermal power seems like it should be hot stuff, so to speak, but boiling hot ground water dissolves the rocks around it, which resume solid form in an electrical generating facility's turbines and heat exchangers and do awful things to them. Scratch the geo-thermal option.
Say, Environmentalists, how about some more nuclear power plants?
Jokes aside, America will have to get the energy for the proposed fleet of electric vehicles from the same hydrocarbon sources as now power our lights and microwave ovens. Coal fuels a huge electrical power plant up in the four-corners area of Arizona. The coal is strip mined on a Navajo reservation and ground to a coarse powder, which is then mixed with water and the slurry piped to the plant. There are well-founded concerns about the rate at which this facility is drawing down the level of ground water, a life-and-death issue in the desert southwest. Some of the leeward communities also complain about the plume of gases trailing eastward from the plant's towering stacks.
Some cleanup of flue gases can be accomplished with more scrubbers and precipitators, and electrical generating stations' voluminous nitrous oxides output can be reduced, but not without cost. Cleaning up the oxides of nitrogen will require lowering combustion temperatures with a matching loss of efficiency, fitting absolutely huge three-way catalytic converters, or both. The price, in new equipment and/or increased fuel costs, will be equally huge.
I don't think the smog sniffers ever consider the economic consequences of their actions; they chose their goals regardless of cost. Neither do those pushing for electric cars seem to have given any thought to the scheme's safety implications, which are more than ordinarily frightening.
All the chemical and kinetic alternatives to gasoline have a low per-pound energy density, so all electro-vehicles will be overweight. The only thing that will keep them from being hopelessly heavy is ultra-light construction, like that employed in GM's "Impact," and what a fine name for an electric car that truly is. Think of the Impact as an egg shell with 1100 pounds of lead, and you, inside. Think of the fate of Humpty-Dumpty to visualize what will happen when an Impact impacts anything solid.
Or, how about this more complete and utterly terrifying scenario:
Suzy Shopper is whirring along in her electro-wagon, headed for the mall, and meets up in a major, 90-degree, cross-purposes way with a similar device driven by Sam Dropper. Collisions of this sort are memorable now, but the mingling of 2200 pounds of charged batteries will, I think, raise the affair to a newly lethal level of excitement. All that short-circuiting of plates and wiring; all the sparks and melting; all the spraying of sulfuric acid and clouds of hot acidic vapors!
Vehicular clangers will be awsome when cars energized by molten sodium and sulfur batteries come to grief. The spatters of running hot sulfur will combine with oxygen in the air to send up billows of sulfur dioxide, making breathing a real challenge. Breathing won't be your concern if you get sloshed with molten sodium, which for one hideous moment, before eternal night descended, would take your mind right off any other discomfort you might have thought you felt. Molten sodium ignites spontaneously in air, will set the asphalt under your vehicle ablaze, and give any firemen who unwisely squirt water on it an unforgettable chemistry lesson.
I figure flywheel energy storage research is absolutely certain to get megadollar government funding, but you shouldn't bet on this being what powers any useful electric vehicle costing less than the space shuttle. If I'm wrong, and flywheel storage comes into use, you should know it holds its own promise of excitement:
One of Car and Driver magazine's editors, who should have known better, explained that an exploding carbon-fiber flywheel would just turn to harmless carbon fluff. He did not mention the trifling matter of where the flywheel's kinetic energy would go? The only place it can go is into heat, with the flywheel equivalent of a gallon of gasoline making the heat equivalent of burning that gallon all at once! Of course, there is a thin chance that in a crash the flywheel would not become fluff and 2400 Btu, but might instead escape its enclosure and become a 200,000 rpm Frisbee. Wouldn't one of those put some utterly thrilling moments in your day?
If some of this stuff begins to sound like scenes from Woody Allen's movie, Sleeper, it's only because that's the kind of future too many government dweebs are planning for us. They have the best of intentions, but no understanding of why anyone would want to drive a car for any reason other than transportation, why you'd ride a motorcycle at all, or why we are not grateful for government's efforts to lend order to our messy lives.
Will government's multitudinous environment dweebs get their electric vehicle future? Will you find yourself driving a wheeled battery? Not a chance! Government is about to discover, again, that you can lead a horse to water -- but with a mile of rope, two dozen hobbles and a pistol in his ear you still may not be able to give him an enema.
Nothing less than ropes, hobbles and pistols will get Americans into electric vehicles. They may think raising new gasoline-car prices and selling electros far below cost will get us to fall in with their scheme, but it won't. Government agencies will buy (at taxpayer-subsidized prices, with taxpayers' money) a few electric cars, as will utility companies. The rest of us will decide to stick with our internal combustion-propelled devices, and if the prices of new petrol burners get to be too elevated by electro-vehicle transfer costs we'll leave them in the showrooms.
The folly of the entire zero-emissions scheme will become plain long before fleets of electric vehicles flood our streets and highways. But it may not do so before a huge bundle of your tax dollars gets wasted on this latest bit of governmental silliness.
If you accept my conclusion that the electric car idea will be proved a huge dud, and that the EPA ninnies whose scheme it is will escape the consequences of their folly, as they always do, you must ask yourself, "what next?"
Don't expect to see too much focus on motor vehicles after the electro-car debacle has run its course. The EPA guys aren't going to start looking for honest employment, but they won't be too eager to launch another savior-car project, either. Maybe one of them will notice that in Los Angeles, where America's national obsession with smog began, the increase in the number of Mexican restaurants matches inversely the decline in air quality. I mentioned this to an old friend, a physician employed by the EPA, and after smiling he thought a moment, then said, "Well, you probably get a pint of methane or more in flatus per person, per day. It's worth thinking about."
We'll know it if my friend mentions Mexican restaurants to others in the EPA. If he does, in a couple of years the smog sniffers will announce "Operation Blue Flame," a plan that will ask us, in the name of saving our planet, to wear personal catalytic converters at all times. Why not? Most of us have repeatedly said we want to protect the environment whatever the cost. They're going to find out if we mean it.