Are Electric Cars Really Green?

Have you seen the advertisement for an all-electric car, the $ 500 offer from LIPA if you buy one or the GE individual recharger? Have you ever wondered what are the unintended consequences of an action, what has been left unsaid, examined or not even contemplated?

A mechanical engineering friend, who has been involved with electric car technology for more than twenty years, is convinced this is the way to go because of the increase in mileage per equivalent units of energy, i.e., miles per gallon (MPG) for gas operated vehicles versus miles per gallon equivalent (MPGe) for electric cars. For more information on comparing apples to oranges, see Scientific American, July, 2010.

A vast amount of infrastructure work is needed to support electric cars and with that, new jobs and opportunities. If it is true that the maximum distance between recharge is 100 miles, what infrastructure is required? We’d have to build recharge stations. This would create construction jobs. There might be a need for attendants and staff – more jobs.

If recharging takes an hour, how large would the recharge station be? That would depend on how many cars you want to be able to recharge in an hour. What services would these new stations need to support since for safety reasons you wouldn’t want to wait in your car during recharging?

Is there an economy realized if you make recharge facilities identical? Because you have high and low traffic volume areas, you’d want to plan to accommodate the anticipated number of vehicles so the answer is no. And long trips will take time because of the number of required stops to recharge. In other words, what do you do with the kids for an hour?

How does one provide power to a new recharge station? The existing electric grid is inadequate for current needs, no pun intended. New power plants will have to be constructed. That will create jobs. Should they be nuclear? Is nuclear green? How do you transmit power? We’d have to build transmission lines that require electric substations. We can build substations – lots of them!

Mr. Don L. Short II, President of the Tempest Company, Omaha Nebraska was cited in Engineering News Record (July 5, 2010). He estimated what he thought it would take to drive cross country from New York to San Francisco. The 2,900 mile trip would require 290 recharge stations. This represents 6 % of the 46,900 mile interstate system implying close to 5,000 stations are needed for the interstate system. If interstate travel is one third of all miles driven, then an additional 10,000 stations are required. Maybe it’d be a good time to encourage those squirmy kids who ask, “Are we there yet”, to major in electric power generation. Has anyone seen an estimate of the carbon emissions to construct the support infrastructure for electric cars? How about the cost?