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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (70064)	5/16/2016 2:08:30 PM
From: Brumar89	Respond to of 86350

Study finds electric vehicles produce more pollution that internal combustion cars Another article on that Edinburgh study. By Thomas Lifson It’s enough to make a Greenie turn…uh…green. A new study from the University of Edinburgh finds that electric and hybrid vehicles actually emit more harmful pollution running on streets and highways than conventional vehicles. It turns out that those “zero emissions” from the tailpipe are only part of the story of the pollution emitted by a vehicle as it travels. Chris White of the Daily Caller explains: Electric vehicles tend to produce more pollutants from tire and brake wear, due in large part to their batteries, as well as the other parts needed to propel them, making them heavier. These pollutants are emitted when electric vehicle tires and brakes deteriorate as they accelerate or slow down while driving. Timmers and Achten’s research suggests exhaust from traditional vehicles is only about one-third of the total emissions. I will confess that I had no idea that exhaust accounted for only a third of total operating emissions. But it does make sense, especially because those brake pad and tire particulates are so nasty: “We found that non-exhaust emissions, from brakes, tires and the road, are far larger than exhaust emissions in all modern cars,” Achten wrote in the study. He continued: “These are more toxic than emissions from modern engines so they are likely to be key factors in the extra heart attacks, strokes and asthma attacks seen when air pollution levels surge.” A large factor in this weighting of pollutants is the fact that internal combustion engine performance has improved so radically over the past several decades that they actually emit very few pollutants compared to engines of the past. The internal combustion engine is the most highly engineered product on the planet, having been worked on for well over a century by hundreds of thousands of engineers all over the planet. They set a very high bar for electric and hybrid vehicles to beat. The necessity for large, heavy batteries made of toxic materials does increase the weight, complexity, and cost compared to internal combustion vehicles. And the Edinburgh study does not even consider the environmental impact of manufacturing the complex, heavy, and expensive vehicles, nor does it consider the emissions of the electric generating stations that supply the juice. Add in these factors, and that “zero pollution” claim becomes a joke. It is gospel among environmentalists and crony capitalists that electric and hybrid vehicles produce less pollution that conventional internal combustion-powered vehicles – so much so that lavish subsidies, amounting to thousands of dollars per vehicle, are justified, regardless of the fact that the buyers of such vehicles tend to be much richer than the average taxpayers. Tesla Model S: Sleek, sexy, and subsidized by you Joe Sixpack, in other words, is funding the moral vanity of the Tesla buyer in a six-figure luxury vehicle. And now we have the prospect that the Tesla driver is actually harming the environment compared to his gasoline-powered neighbor. Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2016/05/study_finds_electric_vehicles_produce_emmoreem_pollution_that_internal_combustion_cars.html#ixzz48pPZZmSA Follow us: @AmericanThinker on Twitter \| AmericanThinker on Facebook

To: Brumar89 who wrote (70064)	5/18/2016 9:04:34 AM
From: Eric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86350

Renewables Are Leaving Natural Gas In The Dust This Year by Joe Romm May 16, 2016 4:09 pm CREDIT: Nati Harnik, AP In the first three months of 2016, the U.S. grid added 18 megawatts of new natural gas generating capacity. It added a whopping 1,291 megawatts (MW) of new renewables. The renewables were primarily wind (707 MW) and solar (522 MW). We also added some biomass (33 MW) and hydropower (29 MW). The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) latest monthly “ Energy Infrastructure Update” reports that no new capacity of coal, oil, or nuclear power were added in the first quarter of the year. So the U.S. electric grid added more than 70 times as much renewable energy capacity as natural gas capacity from January to March. Of course, generating capacity is often quite different from the amount of power generated, since fossil fuel plants generally are used for considerably higher percentage of the time (their “capacity factor”). That’s why renewables now make up 18 percent of total U.S. installed generating capacity — but only about 14 percent of our total power production. On the other hand, FERC doesn’t track rooftop solar, so its estimate of solar capacity added is certainly low. Indeed, FERC’s data sources only “include plants with nameplate capacity of 1 MW or greater,” so it’s hard to know how much small-scale renewable power generation they may have missed. It is increasingly clear that we don’t need to add significant amounts of any new grid capacity that isn’t renewable for the foreseeable future. In part that’s because demand for utility power generation has been flat for almost a decade — and should continue plateauing for quite some time — thanks to rapidly growing energy efficiency measures (and, to a much lesser extent, thanks to recent increases in rooftop solar). We also know that renewable power — both new wind and solar — is now winning bids for new generation around the world without subsidies. Some bids are coming in at under four cents per kilowatt hour! Studies from NOAA and others — and real-world examples around the globe, such as Germany — show that the U.S. can absorb vastly greater percentages of renewables than we currently have, just with existing technology. Yet NOAA’s research shows that, with nothing more than an improved national transmission system, “a transition to a reliable, low-carbon, electrical generation and transmission system can be accomplished with commercially available technology and within 15 years.” A 2015 study showed that we could “decarbonize the electricity supply with a proportionally small requirement for BES [Bulk multi-hour Electricity Storage] because gas provides much of the intermittency management even when the carbon emissions intensity is cut to less than 30% of today’s U.S. average.” Thus, we really have more than enough natural gas plants in most places to take us to the point where electric vehicles, second-life EV batteries, advanced solar thermal power and other affordable bulk storage would be needed to finish the decarbonization of the grid post-2030. So we may well see many more quarters in the years ahead like the last one. thinkprogress.org