Plugging In

The other day I was walking down the street engaging in my frequent pass time of trying to think of new arguments for views I already hold. "Even if we fully converted to the use of plug-in hybrids," I said to myself, "we wouldn't see an especially dramatic improvement in the carbon situation unless we also made an implausibly large change in how we generate electricity in order to compensate for the higher demand for electrical power." Then I decided I should probably check to see if that was true before I wrote it, which I didn't feel like doing.

Well, what do I read on Gristmill except a post about how I'm totally wrong and there's a new report out from the Electrical Power Research Institute explaining my wrongness in some detail. To make the point qualitatively, though, power plants are much more efficient than are internal combustion engines, so whatever fuel source you use a plug-in hybrid is radically cleaner than a conventional car. Of course, insofar as you use clean energy instead, things get even better, but the switch is a big improvement even without changing the electrical structure.

Photo by Flickr user Mike Weston used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

I'm curious about another aspect of our national energy consumption. Why do companies still insist on flying so many people all over the world only to have them spend several days eating, drinking, gambling and carousing while occasionally fitting in a meeting allegedly crucial to furthering some new project? My company sends me hither and yon several times yearly only to sit in meetings perfectly suited to a video conference format. I know the airlines depend on business travel but untold millions of gallons of jet fuel could be saved if we dispensed with the notion face to face interactions were crucial to conducting business. Then again many of these meets are to further the interests of the very same hotels, golf courses, resorts, casinos, bars, restaurants, sports venues and whorehouses the meeting attendees frequent while visiting the city they've been air-dropped into. I say if you want to talk about the new inkjet printer marketing campaign pick up the damn phone and hash it out with the rest of the team that way. Three days in Scottsdale, Las Vegas or Aspen aren't required.

Posted by steve duncan | July 23, 2007 8:52 AM

I'm a very reluctant convert to nuclear power. (And other non-carbon sources to a lesser extent.) We need to switch almost completely and soon from carbon fuels. (And we need to sequester huge amounts of carbon we've already put into the atmosphere.) Hybrid transportation fueled "wisely" from more efficient carbon-fueled power plants just won't cut it: it's just pushing the problem into another corner.

Returning to pre-Industrial Revolution levels of CO2 emissions from a population >4 times as large would be an almost impossible task if it were simply an engineering one with carte blanche from all of the politicians, carbon energy interests, and other foot-draggers. Of course, those people are never going to give up their "lovely way of life". So, the great probability is that we're going to be hit with the full weight of whatever it is that Global Warming has in store. Here's hoping it turns out to be merely inconvenient.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | July 23, 2007 9:03 AM

Steve,

You totally missed the point of the meeting. The point is to spend "several days eating, drinking, gambling and carousing" You need to bond as a team in order to work well together. There is no way you're going to bond via a video conference.

I think if you took over the company and ended those meetings you would soon find that your "inkjet printer marketing campaign" would take longer and be far less sucessful than the project where everyone on the team spent a few days eating, drinking, gambling and carousing.

I work with people all over the country on many different projects. We have con calls, video conferences, etc. But, when we are all literally in the same room we can get 10x as much work done as when we are all working remotely.

Posted by Jmo | July 23, 2007 9:07 AM

Matt--

With due respect, while it may be true that power plants manufacture electricty from oil, coal, gas, nuclear, hydro, etc., more efficiently than internal combustion engines manufacture thrust from gasoline and diesel, converting the auto and truck fleet into hybrids would require a very large increase in our electricity grid capacity. This would mean the construction of a great many more power plants than we currently have. With all those new power plants (if they ever got built in the first place, given the rampant BANANAism in this country) burning all that carbon-based fuel (as most of them would), I'm not certain how much carbon savings you're really getting. Besides, the batteries required to run hybrids are very damaging to the environment to manufacture.

Mr. Davis is correct--this is all just a tradeoff, and we're moving our environmental damage from one area to another. Yes, overall there might be less damage, but only by a modest amount. The truth is, there are just too many people.

Posted by Claudius | July 23, 2007 9:16 AM

> converting the auto and truck fleet into
> hybrids would require a very large increase
> in our electricity grid capacity.

Vehicles would primarily charge at night when there is grid capacity to spare. After 5:30 PM demand drops off quite a bit, even on the hottest days.

I have to read the EPRI report in detail, but I suspect that it assumes that charging will occur at night using nuclear baseload capacity.

Cranky

Posted by Cranky Observer | July 23, 2007 9:24 AM

Claudius,

Using battery powered-cars, whether plug-in hybrids, or purely electric cars like the cars made by Tesla Motors, will use a lot less oil, since most of our electricity isn't generated by burning oil (Global Warming fears aside, I think we can all agree that being less dependent on foreign oil is a good thing). A lot (most?) of our electricity is generated by burning coal, but if you are an adherent to the global warming religion, there are ways to make coal 'kosher' for you, by liquifying it before burning it and sequestering its carbon. We could also start building nuclear reactors again. France has the same number of reactors as us with one fifth our population.

Posted by Fred | July 23, 2007 9:32 AM

This would mean the construction of a great many more power plants than we currently have. With all those new power plants (if they ever got built in the first place, given the rampant BANANAism in this country) burning all that carbon-based fuel (as most of them would), I'm not certain how much carbon savings you're really getting.

As I understand it, the report methodology accounted for this.

Posted by Dave White | July 23, 2007 9:35 AM

I remember when liberals were suspicious of industry-backed research claiming that their industry's existing practices were totally in tune with environmental imperatives.

Not saying the report is wrong. Just that it's convenient for the sponsors.

Posted by Jim Henley | July 23, 2007 9:39 AM

Also,

What Jmo and Cranky said.

The CEO of Tesla anticipates that drivers of his company's electric cars would charge them overnight, when demand is down and electricity rates are low. It would cost you about $4 to fill up the Tesla roadster's 200 mile-range "tank" with electricity.

Jmo makes the point about team members bonding to which I'll add the point about building relationships with clients which is essential to grease the wheels in sales. Most business travel is in support of sales. Just because it looks like fun doesn't mean it isn't necessary. If two companies offer similar products and prices, and the representative of one buys you a steak and a lap dance, he's got the advantage in getting the business. Is it worth saving a few hundred dollars to miss out on a $10 million order?

Posted by Fred | July 23, 2007 9:43 AM

jmo and Fred, like it or not people and companies are going to have to adapt and get used to a different way of doing business. If a successful ad campaign, product launch or closing the sale requires personally getting drunk with a client, a round of golf and buying him a whore maybe either you or your product are lacking value independent of, or superior to, the perks you're lavishing. Once oil is $100 or more a barrel airfare invoices will cause many corporations to think the same way I do. Get your liquor, tee times and call girls now because they'll be a scarcer commodity in the future.

Posted by steve duncan | July 23, 2007 10:09 AM

There is, actually, a fairly well developed research literature on questions of face-to-face vs. technologically supported communication for various kinds of work. A lot of the research focuses on what sorts of tasks are best done w/ people in the same room vs. not, and there's also a lot of work on the development of new tools to support long-distance work.

Face-to-face work is generally important at the outset of complex projects and at major decision points than between such points, when people can work more independently and communicate through "leaner media", i.e., media that restrict communication to some extent by, for instance, complicating the spontaneous use of documents and whiteboards and reducing access to nonverbal behavior.

To the extent that the quality of such tools improves and people develop the skills to use them, the liabilities of communication at a distance can be overcome, but I doubt we are there yet.

It's been a while since I've been involved in this field, but anyone really interested might look up "distributed work", "telecommuting", or "computer-supported collaborative work". Those terms would take you into both the academic work and more practical accounts and recommendations. See, for instance, this precis of a major and not too old collection of research papers in Distributed Work.

Posted by THS | July 23, 2007 10:36 AM

Steve,

Um oil is already $70 a barrel and a ticket to cali from Boston on Jetblue is less than $400. If oil went to $100 and fuel is currently %27 of an airlines cost then my ticket should go from $400 to $440 to cover the cost of $100 a barrel oil. I don't think that would change very many travel decisions.

One more question - do you object more to the waste or to the fact that people are having fun?

Posted by Jmo | July 23, 2007 11:05 AM

"One more question - do you object more to the waste or to the fact that people are having fun?"

Posted by Jmo
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Golf courses, bars, call girls and casinos are everywhere. Do you have friends? Relatives? Um, you know, people that you don't have to fly 2000 miles to join in "fun"? Or them flying 2000 miles to see you? No, I don't object to fun. However there are millions of citizens having fun without access to the funds needed to criss-cross the nation having it. IBM won't go broke if you restrict your drinking to the bar down the street and do it with you personal friends. Same goes for your golf game, your adultry and your filet mignon.

Posted by steve duncan | July 23, 2007 11:21 AM

I wonder how much the mining of the nickel for all those extra batteries damaged the environment?

http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/?page=article&Article_ID=14304

Posted by Dave | July 23, 2007 12:03 PM

One of the too seldom mentioned positive effects of having a large amount of electric vehicles is that it would add flexibility to electricity demand. That, in turn, allows more wide-scale use of "unreliable" carbon-neutral production methods, such as wind power. Instead of having to maintain expensive and large capacity of backup power generators (gas turbines and such), you could just turn off a part of consumption when the windmills slow down.

Posted by Teemu | July 23, 2007 12:23 PM

Steve:

Your business travel appears to be a lot more entertaining than mine or that of most people I know.

Mine tends to involve early AM departures, late meetings and later dinners, more mornings the next day, and a flight that brings you home in time to get to bed.

I guess I need to change jobs.

Posted by THS | July 23, 2007 12:47 PM

Steve,

If I "restrict your drinking to the bar down the street and do it with you personal friends" how will I ever get my company to pay for that? I have only have a few ways of sticking it to the man, please don't take this one away from me.

On a more serious note, humans are social animals and doing business requires building and maintainng these social relationships. In addition, the customers I work with aren't buying a product that exists, we are building something new together. If you are buying something that doesn't already exist, and are entrusting someone with 10 or 20 million dollars, would you not want to meet with them before you comit to the deal?

Posted by Jmo | July 23, 2007 1:01 PM

While the production of electricity vs an internal combustion engine may be efficient you also need to factor in transportation. I do not know the answer, but electricity transportation is very inefficient.
So you could get an entirely different answer if you compared efficiency including delivery cost.

Posted by spencer | July 23, 2007 1:29 PM

Claudius, if you read the linked report, you'll find that the things you confidently assert are false. Switching the entire fleet to plug-in hybrids would raise electrical demand very little -- something on the order of 6% if I recall correctly -- and that increased demand could be met in any number of ways other than building new coal plants.

The larger issue to keep in mind here is that we have three choices with transportation:

1. Try to find greener liquid fuels (ethanol, liquid coal, etc.).

2. Shift to electric transport and try to find greener sources of electricity (they are legion).

3. Change land-use and settlement patterns to encourage walking, biking, and public transport.

Naturally I prefer #3, but even under optimistic scenarios that will take a long, long time. So it's 1 or 2 for the time being.

#2 is much easier than #1. Liquid fuels suck, even the purportedly greener alternatives. In contrast, there's a panoply of ways of greening electricity, lots of which are already happening -- efficiency, better storage, smart grid improvements, wind, solar, cogeneration, biomass, incremental hydro, all sorts of micropower, etc. etc.

Electrifying transport is inevitable. Better to embrace it now and try to speed it along.

Posted by David Roberts | July 23, 2007 1:34 PM

"more mornings the next day"

Man that sounds really rough.

Posted by mpowell | July 23, 2007 2:17 PM