Imagine a world in which virtually all private and public transportation is powered by computer-optimized electric motors except for the largest diesel engines and aircraft. With the prospect of some promising near-term improvements in battery storage technology, it's time to assess what obstacles to such an idyllic future remain to be surmounted.
Every other aspect of electric motorized transportation is well within the reach of current technology. If the electrical power required for charging the batteries were not merely generated by burning hydrocarbon fuels at a location other than the automobile, the most significant remaining emitters of greenhouse gases would be people and cows. The mountains of money sent to the despots and dictators that now profit from America's dependence on oil could then help our own economy. Food could be grown for eating instead of burning. All that remains is to figure out where so much electricity might come from.
Now imagine that you are in the market for an electric motor to replace the gas-guzzling internal combustion engine that powers your car. Before you make the switch, you're certain to ask: How much electricity will have to be purchased from the power company to take an otherwise identical car as far down the road as it used to go on a gallon of gasoline? Call it the gasoline equivalent electricity. An optimistic estimate--based on the fuel mileage and engine power of our existing fleet of compacts and sub-compacts, and taking into account such factors as the ability of electric motors to recapture some of the energy of motion, as well as the inefficiencies of batteries--would be 40 KWh (kilowatt-hours) of electricity per gallon of gas.
Now, the cost of a KWh varies considerably with the amount used. Indeed, electricity is the only commodity I know of whose retail price increases the more you use it. My own electricity provider, Southern California Edison, charges a minimum of $0.30 for every KWh used beyond a baseline amount, after adding all the taxes and surcharges. So, the net conclusion of this exercise is that to replace a gallon of gasoline for cars that average around 30 mpg, drivers will have to pay the electric company $12 per equivalent gallon. This number goes up rather rapidly for larger or multiple cars. Clearly, this is unacceptable even with gasoline over $4 per gallon. We have technology for electric transportation. What is needed is technology for much cheaper electricity.
In an opinion piece recently published in the New York Times, Thomas L. Friedman, without any reference to the rudimentary calculations provided above, suggests that the idyllic world of electric transportation is nearly upon us. Citing the perils of climate change, the Obama administration has made alternative "green" energy and motor vehicle fuel efficiency a priority for infrastructure and research spending. Without offering an opinion on the scientific basis of global warming theory, an intelligent effort in that direction would at least attempt to free us from an economically damaging dependence on the petroleum industry and foreign cartels. Because 50 percent of petroleum consumption goes to private vehicles and another 20 percent to heavier trucks, trains, buses, and machinery that can potentially be converted to electrical power (with the remaining 30 percent going to aircraft and industrial uses that cannot), there is at least a theoretical possibility that the United States could provide all its future petroleum needs from much cheaper domestic sources.
Unfortunately, President Obama and most commentators on the subject only mention solar or wind power or so-called "clean coal" as new sources of electricity. And in the media, a veritable mythology of cheap, abundant "alternative," "green," and "renewable" energy has arisen. But these stories never ask the fundamental question: What would it cost to generate enough electricity to replace gasoline in the bulk of the transportation system?
According to the most recent government statistics, U.S. -consumption of gasoline in cars and light trucks has been approximately 400 million gallons per day to go a distance of about 6 billion miles at an average of 15 miles per gallon. The average driver might travel 40 miles each day in a compact car of the future optimistically yielding 30 miles per electrical gallon. That would require about 1,600 KWh of additional electricity per month. Suppose, though, that instead of paying an additional $500 per month to the electric company, one elects to install a solar panel dedicated to charging an automobile.
Data offered by salespeople in sunny southern California working for actual suppliers of such systems promise an annualized average monthly production of 30 KWh/month per 14 square feet of solar panel installed. This estimate translates into about 750 square feet of solar panel per compact car. That's a panel roughly 25 feet wide by 30 feet long at an installation cost, leaving aside maintenance issues, at least comparable to the cost of the car. For sections of the country with less daily sunshine, the size of the solar installation might have to double or triple.
To replace petrol with electricity just for private vehicles would require generating 16 billion KWh/day. Using the annually averaged solar power generation for the Sunbelt of 1 KWh/day per 14 square feet of panel it would take 8,000 square miles of solar panel to produce that much electricity. Add another 3,200 square miles of panel for diesel trucks and buses and you would need over 300 billion square feet. Current installation costs in the southwest are about $40 per square foot with an expected lifetime of 10 years not counting maintenance. Let's assume that further R&D doubles both the solar power conversion factor and the transportation fleet mileage efficiency, and that increased investment and volume produces a 60 percent discount on solar panel pricing. This would reduce the cost of installation by 90 percent--yet even then, it would still take $1.2 trillion every 10 years to convert solar power into the required energy. Once you add maintenance and transmission costs from the southwest to the rest of the nation, it's clear that solar panels will never be competitive with other sources of energy for powering electric vehicles.
Hydropower has always been competitively priced and could benefit from upgrading existing facilities, but we seem to have run out of rivers to exploit. The Geysers geothermal field in northern California produces 800 megawatts or about the equivalent of one nuclear reactor. But this, too, is a limited resource. As for wind, with the exception of hurricanes and tornadoes, it is the least concentrated form of renewable energy and, therefore, requires an even greater commitment of real estate and hardware than solar panels. Indeed, taken together, solar and wind are not likely to ever provide more than the current 1 to 2 percent of U.S. electrical power consumption. Simply put, the reason we still use hydrocarbon fuels is that they provide a more concentrated and, therefore, a more easily extracted form of energy.
While we do have an abundant supply of coal for generating power, the environmental limitations on its use impose severe competitive cost burdens on electricity production, soon to be exacerbated by the Obama administration's proposed carbon tax. So-called "clean coal" requires more than improved burning efficiency and filtering of sulfur and particulates. Actual sequestering of the greenhouse gases emitted from the burning of coal requires that power plants divert a substantial amount of the power generated to the conversion of CO2 gas to other forms. Among all of the above options, only hydropower, with its all-too-limited availability, enjoys the efficiency and economy of scale to compete with fossil fuels.
So is there an equally or more concentrated energy source not prone to belch carbon into the atmosphere and less monopolized by unfriendly purveyors? There is one--nuclear power.
In the United States there are 104 remodeled conventional nuclear power generating plants. These have been profitably operating with perfect safety records for the last 25 years in private hands, at about twice the efficiency of the original reactors. On average they produce more than a gigawatt (a billion watts) each or about 22 percent of total U.S. electrical consumption, without sending a single drop of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. At the risk of some cross-border envy, Canada's Bruce Power Co. operates an eight-reactor plant on the shores of Lake Huron that produces 6.4 gigawatts. By upgrading our own 100-plus plants to that level, we could produce enough cheap electricity to competitively replace gasoline and charge the batteries of every potentially electrified car and light truck in the United States. An additional 40 such plants would be sufficient to power all our buses, heavy trucks, and trains. With 200 plants, augmented by existing and upgraded hydropower, we could replace all hydrocarbon-based power-generating plants and virtually eliminate the U.S. carbon footprint. If this seems too big a task, one need only look at France which gets 80 percent of its electrical power from nuclear plants.
The obstacles to rational power generation in this country are political, not scientific or technical. Unfortunately, the word nuclear entered the language as a pejorative term and was not much ameliorated by Chernobyl (a typical Russian disaster) or Three Mile Island, where no one was even injured. Historically, when the federal government invested capital in the railroads, the highway system, and hydroelectric power, there was great economic benefit to the nation as a whole because this sort of infrastructure fostered and supported unprecedented free enterprise. Leverage on the government's investment made up for the typical inefficiency with which it conducts most of its economic business. Durable tax receipts on new enterprises return a substantial multiple of the public investment when the latter is prudently made.
Instead, the new administration proposes to make electricity even more expensive through cap and trade taxation, and to spend the revenue on the least productive alternatives. That is diametrically opposed to influencing consumer behavior in the direction of energy independence and conversion to electric transportation. Given that taxation is the government's tool of choice, raising the price of gasoline for private consumption to the European level of $7 or $8 through taxation and then spending the revenue on subsidizing electricity costs to the consumer would have the desired effect. And if that revenue were used to help build privately operated nuclear plants for the most cost effective "green" electricity instead of impractical alternatives, even the government, i.e., taxpayer, could profit. Imagine what a Manhattan Project or moon-landing-style effort could accomplish in the hands of competent scientists if it were aimed at revamping our entire nuclear industry for the production of copious cheap electricity.
If only our leaders could embrace a real vision of genuine energy independence, we could achieve a paradigm shift in the basic economy and potentially climb out of the morass they threaten to perpetuate.
Halbert Fischel is a retired physicist and inventor living in Santa Barbara, California.