1. Why isn’t more done on this in Europe and Japan. While we complain about our 4.00 dollar gasoline, they have 10.00 dollar Eq. gasoline right now and have been at more than 4.00 gallon for many more years. I would think with the shorter distances and for other things, they would have developed these battery vehicles already. They would have more incentive to do it anyway. I would expect the market for these things would be Europe, Japan and California first and then tricle out to rest of the United States after many years.

2. There might be quite a few trips before the gasoline engine would have to start up. I would assume that the car would automatically want the engine to start up just to make sure that it would run when it is needed to run. These engines need to be started from time to time.

3. Would there be a gasoline/fuel drain on these things. Some people might not use the fuel in the tank for quite some time and the fuel could get old or stale or whatever happens to it when it hasn’t been used for a time. I might want to drive around with a full tank even if the engine doesn’t run that often just for the chance I might need it, but the gas would get old.

4. Has anybody looked into the possiblity of having an attachable trailer for those longer trips that would have the gasoline engine that could supply the power for longer trips. The Trailer could be purchased or maybe rented for that occational long trip.

I have driven natural gas and electric forklifts and from those give me a electric forklift if possible. Yes they are different vehicle requirements than road vehicles, but from that I would look forward to a battery car.

But let’s face facts: Detroit isn’t going to re-tool and manufacture these any time soon unless they see money in it.

If I read your FAQ correctly, $2,000 per car is just the cost of the battery. It will cost Detroit more to redesign the car and re-tool entire factories. What if that number is an additional $5,000 per car?

There needs to be some mechanism — either tax incentives or regulation — to make them move towards PHEV. I’m glad Toyota and VW have started this, but without Ford and GM making PHEVs as well, those numbers will be small.

Note that if one subtracts the PHEV20 number above from the HEV0 number, the range is $1500 to $2000 (I used $2000 in the FAQ).

Now, I think it valuable to mention one of the core differences in the coming PHEVs: serial vs parrallel hybrid. (For example, Volt vs Prius)

Two points for further investigation.

Toyota apparently already has a recycling process/system for lithium batteries.

Car batteries loose capacity over time and when they fall below the optimal range for transportation they still have quite a bit of capacity left.

There is some discussion of giving them a ’second use’ life via utility companies utilizing them for grid smoothing/storage. Then sending them for recycling after they further degrade.

I know what you mean about second use: I would like to replace my PV batteries with the NiMH batteries from my RAV4-EV once they finally are no longer like new (so far 81,000 miles and they are still going and going).

–

To the operators of this site:

I’d like to see a series of articles on all aspects of emerging energy technology - solar, wind, storage, geothermal, etc. Make the articles accessible via a front page list. Don’t let them drift into the back pages.

Create a central point on the web where one could go to get up to date on various topics.

Post the articles with the ability to people to comment as this one is done.

Periodically rewrite the article to incorporate new information and relevant input from the comments. Let the commenting start anew.

As far as engine starts and stale fuel, I doubt this is not an issue on PHEV-20s, but begins to become an issue at -40s and is even more for -60s. It is also probably not an issued for a blended PHEV like the Prius, which requires its internal combustion engine in some situations even when the battery has excess charge. I know that the California Air Resources Board is researching emissions from cold starts (e.g. the Prius stores heat to keep the catalytic converter efficient, and this might be less effective on a serial PHEV). I don’t really see a problem though. Perhaps PHEVs will have, instead of an EV button, an ICE button. Drivers can use the ICE button once a month to see if it still works…

Attachable trailers have been built and successfully used on BEVs (they are still on the road). This is a cute idea because it turns a BEV into a serial PHEV, but only when you need it. During the week you don’t carry around the weight of the ICE, but if you take a long trip on the weekend, you attach the trailer for extra range. When you get to your destination, you detach and drive as a pure BEV again. AC Propulsion built trailers both for the tZero and the RAV4-EV. See
http://www.acpropulsion.com/ reports/ Low_Emiss_Range_Ext.pdf
for more information.

Thanks for the reply and the information on attachable trailers for BEV and PHEV’s. Logically it seems that it would work well.

I’ve thought that a good system would be a small engine, like 30 to 50 horsepower, where the engine would run at the engines optimum speed and power much of the time helping to run the car and charging the batteries when stopped. The amount of run time of the engine would be determined by how far you wanted to travel. To go on a 10 mile round trip, the engine might not turn on at all. on a 50 mile trip the engine would run more often. That way the vehicle operator could let the vehicle know how far it would travel and the vehicle would optimize the amount of battery discharge to the amount that the engine would run. Maybe someday.

When I first read about hybrid vehicles, probably 15 years ago, it was in an article written by Amory Lovins. He described a serial hybrid without batteries. The idea was that an engine optimized to produce electricity would be cheaper, smaller and much more efficient than an engine designed to power the wheels. As far as I am aware, nothing like that has ever been commercially available. The Chevy Volt is a serial hybrid with batteries.

Why is it that serial hybrids never made it to market? They seem so much simpler than parallel hybrids. Chevy claims the Volt will get 50 mpg when the engine is running. Take away the cost, weight and space requirements of the batteries, and you have a pretty good car.

There is however a big difference between locomotives and passenger vehicles that tip the advantage to hybrids with batteries, and that is start-and-stop driving. Even locomotives are moving from diesel-electric to diesel-battery-electric. GE is developing one, and they claim, “The energy dissipated in braking a 207-ton locomotive during the course of one year is enough to power 160 households for that year. The hybrid locomotive will capture that dynamic energy and use it to produce more horsepower and reduce emissions and fuel use.”

and these ought to make cars lighter, cheaper, and much more mantainable (as earl knows from his RAV4EV experience).

So, why hasn’t everybody already done it?
Well, among the reasons can be found in Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. A bit chunk of car companies’ expertise is wrapped up in the design an manufacture of engines, drivetrains, brakes, etc, although of course, over he least deacee or so, cars have been turning into “computer centers with wheels”.

It can’t be easy, institutionally, to be willing to dump that part of the expertise.

This is very akin to what happened with minicomputer companies in the 1980s, of which at once point there were many, but bit ones included HP, Digital equipment, Data General, Prime, and many others. Minicomputer CPU designers were quite proud of their skills in designing fast CPUs from combinations of other circuits, sometimes with tricky cooling solutions. Many were quire resistant to the idea that they could replace all that with one microprocessor, whose heat dissipation was far less. Some would argue endlessly that CMOS microprocessors would never be able to catch their handcrafted (ECL/bipolar-blogic) complex designs.

Result: HP (which was aggressively building its own microprocessors) still exists as an independent company. Everybody else switched to micros, got bought, or went out of business.

Anyway, the Christensen book illustrates how hard it is for a big, complex organization to deal with threats that come from below [in terms of price/simplicity.] Of course, there are many distribution issues, safety issues, and other things that go into making a quality car, so current car vendors aren’t inherently doomed …. but there are bad precedents.

Of course, if we could somehow make solar PV, wind, etc. cost competitive with coal then coal use would subside. This challenge is already on the table, with or without PHEV, and is not being taken up.

Joe - you need to stop getting distracted. This site should be focussed on emission reductions not ways to dig ourselves in deeper. PHEV is just a continuation of Kunstler’s ‘happy motoring utopia’!

If you had read the articles on ClimateProgress over the last few months, you would know that Joe has discussed Concentrating Solar Power, wind, limiting coal use, avoiding Oil Tar Sands, increasing energy efficiency and multiple other areas relevant to the total solution. Joe sees PHEV as a key component of the solution, but not the whole solution.

The experts disagree with you. Read the technical reports I linked to in the article. Coal plants operate primarily at one level of output (the so-called baseload). The utility experts suggest most of the power for PHEVs in the short-term will come from natural gas, which is more typically used for variations in load. As PHEVs proliferate, I believe that wind turbines should be built in proportion to the PHEV load, since wind is one of the most PHEV-synergistic and cheapest forms of power (cheaper than coal these days).

Robert said, “Meanwhile global oil consumption will continue unabated, subject to existing supply limitations.”

Oil consumption is now essentially determined by production and nothing else. The price will rise until enough demand is destroyed to match production. In this environment, the question is whether transportation is severely curtailed, or whether we substitute non-greenhouse ways to travel.

Robert said, “Of course, if we could somehow make solar PV, wind, etc. cost competitive with coal then coal use would subside. This challenge is already on the table, with or without PHEV, and is not being taken up.”

This is wrong. I plan to write about this next week. Briefly then, let me explain. First, wind is already cheaper than new coal (references to be provided). Second, it confuses new energy prices with old energy prices. Getting new renewable energy to be cheaper than new fossil energy changes new construction; it does very little to the sunk-cost old energy power plants. One cannot drive them out of business for several reasons. Price certainly won’t do it. Only government action is going to close a sunk-cost coal plant.

Robert said, “Joe - you need to stop getting distracted. This site should be focussed on emission reductions not ways to dig ourselves in deeper.”

I second John Hollenberg’s reply.

As far as engine starts and stale fuel … I don’t really see a problem though. Perhaps PHEVs will have, instead of an EV button, an ICE button. Drivers can use the ICE button once a month to see if it still works…

no, the easier thing to do is what’s already done with air conditioning, work the for-maintenance stuff into regular operation. for A/C, it’s hooked to the defroster so the A/C gets some work during the winter. for a PHEV it’d probably take one subroutine. “if (today - gasLastUsed) > recommendedInterval then doRunICE()”.

ok now this is from the FAQ:

Don’t PHEVs cost more to buy? How long does it take to break even?
PHEVs require a larger battery pack compared to a hybrid, and the additional batteries do add cost. A mid-size sedan with 20 miles of electric range (a PHEV-20) would require 6.7 kWh of additional batteries, costing an extra $2000. If this amount were financed with a 5-year auto loan at 5.5%, the monthly payment would be $38. Using today’s gasoline prices ($4.08/gallon), electric operation might reduce the car’s monthly fuel expenses by $57, leaving a net savings of $19. As gasoline prices increase, the savings increase. With a loan or lease paying for the batteries, small savings begin in the first month, and increase at the end of the loan term. The resale value of the car is also increased.

“just finance it.” sheesh. what a thing to be suggesting at this point in time. will there really be such easy credit available to everybody?

apart from that, if a PHEV costs anything like $8,000 more than a 30mpg non-hybrid car with the same interior space — i figure the plug-in only breaks even if gas averages $7+/gal over time of ownership. and the gas-only car’s higher depreciation might be canceled out by its lower insurance and finance costs.

this is an estimate, done quickly, but i think disproving it falls on advocates of PHEVs. we’re gonna be broke for years is how it looks right now.

and… why hasn’t europe gone electric.

everyone may have noticed that europe, already well-supplied with 40+ mpg small family vehicles, bet on a “fuel of the future” instead? to some famous results, including “splash-and-dash” and “indonesian deforestation.”

And actually Europe went electric a long time ago in their rail and subway systems. Decent transit is one reason cars are less important there than the US. The wealthy don’t need to worry about efficiency; the middle class either drives a very small car or takes public transit. Tell middle-class Americans to do those things and you’ll probably fail. It seems more sensible to offer them something that will succeed.

that means, and i just put most of the night working this through, that a light, efficiency, gas-only car with the same interior space (and more hauling power) is yet more thousands cheaper than the PHEV.

how far into the future are you talking about? 5 years?

As far as financing, that is the fair way to compare things with different up-front and operational costs, as it takes into account the time value of money.

as i figure it, even at an average of $9/gal over eight years, today’s prius costs almost $10,000 more to operate than a honda fit. you can finance that if you want and just put it on people’s tabs, with their health care, and their retirement, and their increasingly regressive taxes, and housing, and all their other costs. only, no matter what your credit union’s doing, there’s no pile right now, it’s a bonfire, and it’s an increasingly small number of people who haven’t seen that yet.

the $10,000 number is for a smaller class of car, the kei car.

the honda came out about $3700 under the prius. a mass-production plug-in would probably come near the 8-year cost of the current fit, at $9, but lose to the fit by thousands at a $6 average.

have to wait and see what honda’s about to announce with their smaller hybrids in september.

the part about useful interior space still stands.

the priuses’s’s batteries will need replacing. if we’re going plug-in, and i agree that we are, today’s prius might not look like that great a deal to a buyer in 201 when compared to ready-to-plug-in cars with highly optimized ICEs with fresh-new-improved batteries.

obviously a wide selection of today’s cars will be worth little more than their weight in metal. my point lately seems to be that today’s smallest wagon-vans can depreciate massively in relative value without costing their owners much absolute money and the buyer doesn’t have to sacrifice utility. today’s green cars are miserable bad working vehicles for the price.

@earl:

The reality of today’s world is that people are prioritizing efficiency over wheel trim.

i’m not making up numbers. i’m looking at them differently. the camry isn’t the top selling car now; that’s the honda civic, 30mpg, base price $16,000. my guess is if we could fill every showroom floor right now with 10 million honda fits, 10 million civics, 10 million priuses, there’d be priuses left over, and some of the prius sales would be due to constrained supply for the other two.

While a conventional car sits on the dealer’s lot for an average of 65 days before it sells, a Toyota Prius, the most popular hybrid, lasts just six days — or sometimes only six hours. … Ford Escape Hybrids are the next stop, but there aren’t any to see. Even though the dealership placed requests, the manufacturers can’t keep up with the high market demand. The wait is six months long. … How about a used hybrid? At the largest CarMax retailer in the country in Laurel, Md., there was not one hybrid on the lot to test drive. Out of its 25,000 vehicles nationwide, CarMax has only 50 hybrids in total.

On what basis do you say that Prii batteries will need replacing? According to howstuffworks on Prius batteries,

And Toyota claims that not one has required a battery replacement due to malfunction or “wearing out.” The only replacement batteries sold–at the retail price of $3000–have been for cars that were involved in accidents. Toyota further claims that the nickel-metal hydride (NiMH) battery packs used in all Prius models are expected to last the life of the car with very little to no degradation in power capability.

There are Civic non-hybrid models as expensive as $20,710. Again using Consumer Reports as a guide, since they price similar option packages, the hybrid is $22,400 and the non-hybrid is $19,610. Stop comparing apples and oranges.

I own an Audi A6 TurboDiesel 6 speed (1997) fully loaded, leather, bose stereo, etc etc. At 100 mph on the autobahn cruising in 6th gear I get 40mpg. Rock solid at that speed because of sport suspension and good roads. Diesel here is cheaper than gas but road tax is higher so unless you drive a lot you don’t save much. Gas right now is 9 dollars a gallon.

I am retired so don’t drive that much so bought a couple of small scooters for me and wife to zip around the villages. Only time we use car is when weather is bad.

The hottest thing selling here right now are electric bicycles and you can Google SPARTA ION to see some great models. Of course we have paralleling bike paths to all roads here so its more conducive to enjoyable biking. The Sparta Ion has a 25kph top speed but you can choose econ or full for up hills. Also peddling only if you have to…..range is up to 100 km which is enough for most people. charging time 1.5 hours.

Another thing our govt has done to ease traffic tieups and save fuel is to build all roundabouts instead of intersections with traffic lights…makes traffic flow more smoothly……….yes, it costs us billions but we love our country and don’t mind spending tax money to do it.

Even with the high cost of gas here, the freeways are packed daily almost up to the point of gridlock. Right now there are loads of RV’s on the highway for vacation time. People have money and I don’t hear much complaining about gas prices.

The same in regards to cooling in the southern latitudes, so that the HEV needs to generate constant power supply ( the engine runs constantly when the outside conditions require climate control on the passenger cabin). Batteries loose their efficency with extremes in operating temperatures, a problem that has also slowed hydrogen fuel cell applications.

Winter driving conditions also impact overall performance, the combination of low vehicle weight and road conditions can remove all benefits of electric vehicles simply by making them unsafe in those conditions.

There is real world data on the efficency of Hybrids in climate ranges here
http://www.hybridexperience.ca/

Make note of the distance travelled versus fuel economy based on temperature and compare to average daily commute. Getting 12l/100km (19.6 Mpg) on short distances in cold weather does not sound like a savings to me.

So a solution for climate change must respond to climate changes, If I buy a car in CA I want to be able to move it to Minnesota in December.

Now luckily most people live where it is temperate, so it is still a good solution for certain geographical regions, it is not yet globally applicable and hence the reluctance to market by automakers ( offering region restricted vehicle models is a recipe for disaster for automakers not only on a PR level but a legal liability level as well, hey cannot restrict where people take the vehicle, why do you think there is so much resistence to CA mandates for EV deployments?) It is not about the oil, or some sinister oil company scheme or plot to stop the development of EV technologies, it is about the product and the applicable markets, leveraging mature technologies, product viability and liability exposure.

@earl: consumer reports’s approach is just as addicted to cheap credit and cheap oil as anybody else’s. what they review reflects a situation that has already gone away, in this country.

sure, the civic EX is near the price of the civic hybrid. i don’t see a lot of EXs around, tho, and this is a very “honda” neighborhood of mostly homeowners. ever wonder why the car companies don’t break out their sales figures by trim level?

@both: yes there’s demand for priuses. there’s a waiting list for almost every reputable high efficiency car because the manufacturers have drastically screwed up.

>>>

I wouldn’t bet on it Joe, there are quite a few people with big SUV’s here in Europe where gas is 9 dollars a gallon….I don’t see them driving any less……of course we aren’t up to our necks in debt either.

ah ah ah error.… the $10,000 number is for a smaller class of car, the kei car.

the honda [fit] came out about $3700 under the prius. a mass-production plug-in would probably come near the 8-year cost of the current fit, at $9, but lose to the fit by thousands at a $6 average.

i have the feeling you have an argument with someone else you want to win through talking with me. if you say we can only compare the same trim levels of the same make and model of car — cup holder to cup holder, heat zone to heat zone — does that mean the prius is incomparable? nobody’s allowed to ask whether it stands on its own merits, at overall cost, because there’s nothing just like it on the road?

in the meantime we’re also not allowed to notice that the “4-banger” hybrids all have s*** for trunk space and cargo ability. which will most definitely improve. in a couple years. and in the present, people inching closer to losing their homes and jobs both in the same year can’t get rid of their personal four-wheeled chunk of “irrational exuberance” and it’s eating away their pocket money.

i forgot to address the battery question. we’ll have to find out if “the life of the car” extends to the end of its first decade of use and beyond. i read a couple places estimating 20% loss. would that be a 20% cut in city mpg? 7 mpg? probly not that much huh.

i like how battery leasing works. eventually i hope that batteries are standardized enough that a buyer — fleet or individual — can buy a “blank slate” car and pick brand and function of batteries themselves. this will address the temperature problem, too, allowing cold weather folks to easily switch winter (heated) and summer (ordinary) batteries with a quick stop at a mechanic.

Dirk — I think you miss the point. Yes Europe has much higher gasoline prices. Any you still have (some) SUVs. But not only do we have a lot more SUVs here, but we now have hundreds of thousands that are beginning to flood the used-car market. In a few years, I can’t imagine why anyone would buy a new SUV, since they will be giving away the used ones.

Thanks for your replies to my earlier post, but I still think all this focus on things like PHEV is just a way of ignoring the big picture. CO2 emissions in the US (and the world as a whole) are rising and will continue to rise within, ultimately, the limitations set by the availability of coal,oil and gas:

http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/usa.htm
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/glo.htm

Yes, we can build wind farms, CSP and so on, but the danger is that these are simply additional energy sources. The world has to find a way to leave most of the remaining oil, coal and gas in the ground - forever.

http://consumerguideauto.howstuffworks.com/ hybrid-batteries-none-the-worse-for-wear-cga.htm

hee hee — i got the 80% from this FAQ itself. it just got jumbled in.

right. so the stock prius battery lives forever because the computer babies it. the risk of tiny battery performance loss comes in with the full charge-and-discharge of the intermediate battery in a plug-in kit.

then take the beatings the prii are taking at the hands of taxi drivers into consideration and they’re a good bet — especially with the possibility of much better/cheaper plug-in conversions a few years from now — as long as nothing radical happens regarding gasoline use. unlikely but much less so than one would have thought.…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BvaFjdNl-E

“The only way to make an apples to apples comparison is to compare grams of CO2 emitted per mile traveled. Andrew has given us the figure 0.321 kwh per mile. The average emissions in the US to generate electricity is 1.4 pounds of CO2 per kwh based on the mix of generation sources. Therefore the Tesla emits 0.321 x 1,4 x 454 or 204 grams of CO2 for each mile travelled. Let’s go back to the lowly Escort that gets 30 mpg. A gallon of gasoline has a mass of 6.3 lbs. Gasoline has 2 hydrogen atoms for each carbon so gasoline is 12/14 carbon or a gallon of gasoline has 5.4 pounds of carbon. Carbon dioxide is 44/12 as heavy as gasoline so a gallon of gasoline equals 5.4 x 44/12 pounds of carbon dioxide or 19.8 pounds. The Escort has CO2 emissions of 19.8/30 x 454 grams per mile or 299.6 grams of CO2 per mile. The Tesla has 32% lower carbon foot print than an Escort. Now let’s compare the Tesla to a Prius that gets 50 MPG. The Prius has CO2 emissions of 179.8 grams per mile or 12% lower than our Tesla. This is the only real comparison to make. It is time for Tesla to update the website and admit that if a Prius has a size 8 carbon footprint the Tesla has a size 9.”

Quote is from Lindsay Leveen in a comment on this page:

http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/?p=67

Any comments on whether his calculations are correct? Of course, I realize that it all depends on where you are getting your energy. If you can get the electricity from low/zero carbon renewable sources, you would do a lot better. It also doesn’t take into account benefits like achieving energy independence.

How about the EV? Click “Compare side-by-side”, then 2002, Toyota, RAV4-EV. See that the RAV4-EV is 3.9 tons or 235.9 g CO2e/mi, and this is comparing a SUV to a sedan. The primary reason to look this vehicle is because the Tesla is not available. We can scale the 235.9 by the ratio of the Wh/mi for the RAV4-EV and the Tesla. If you cick on the “original window sticker”, you see ratings of 27 and 34 in kWh/100mi (a strange unit–don’t ask me to explain it), or 270 and 340 Wh/mi. They don’t combine them for you, but the standard weighting is 55% city and 45% hwy. That comes out to 301.5 Wh/mi. So if we scale the 235.9 by 321/302 giving 251 gCO2e/mi. That is 4% more than the Prius. Tesla pays a price for building a Ferrari competitor, apparently; being less efficient than a SUV is “wow”.

Of course, in Tesla’s home state of California, the CO2e/kWh is about half of what it is in the rest of the U.S., so Tesla drivers in California will be getting 125 gCO2e/mi. That’s an indication of what is possible as the U.S. grid is cleaned up.

I recommend you study the fueleconomy.gov web page, as it is filled with useful stuff (e.g. air pollution score, annual fuel cost based on frequently updated nationwide gasoline prices, and so on). You can even customize the annual miles and fuel prices to your liking.

The annual fuel cost for the Prius is given as $1335. The RAV4-EV is $362, and again that is an apples to oranges form factor comparison.

P.S. thank you for your helpful comments at Climate Progress.

Cabin heating in my current EV is provided via 3000 watts of ceramic heaters, which provide heat within seconds on even very cold days. I have also used programmable pre-heaters that warm the cabin before I get into the car. The GM EV-1 had a cabin pre-conditioning feature (mostly about pre-cooling) that would activate before you went out to the vehicle.

In my previous EV, we had lots of battery weight over the drive wheels, which made for superb traction. Intelligent distribution of battery weight can improve vehicle handling.

By the way, not all gas cars are designed for Canadian winters. Corvettes are unsafe on wintry roads as the weight is in the nose and the drive wheels are at the rear, and they fishtail madly. I have had Renaults that could not defrost the windshield, as was the case with VW Beetles that belonged to friends of mine. We make allowances for climate changes in our gassers today: installing block heaters, battery blankets, supplementary defrosters, bigger or even parallel starting batteries, changing to lighter oils and transmission fluids, using gas-line anti-freeze, changing the engine coolant - even the windshield washer fluid.

BEVs produce much less waste heat than combustion engines, making less work for air conditioners in the summer, and presumably the PHEV will have similar characteristics.

In short, with forethought and good design, BEVs and PHEVs will be better at dealing with climatic conditions than the gassers they will be replacing.

In the next few weeks we are going to do some serious research on hybridizing my wife’s 2002 Saturn Vue, which will turn it from an ICE to a PHEV. Should be an interesting project. (My wife bought the Vue partly because Saturn announced there would be a hybrid version of it later, which GM never delivered on that platform - the BAS system is a joke, not a hybrid).

Darryl
current daily driver - electric 1973 Porsche 914 conversion
(my son drives a human/electric hybrid bicycle to commute)

[EK: wind for PHEVs would not require spinning reserve capacity, IMO, only feedback to manage charging in response to what is being generated. I’ll follow-up in a separate comment later.]

A friend reported the following to me. So, I did not witness this event. So, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the following:

A friend of mine witnessed a collision between a Prius and an SUV. The SUV got the better of the Prius and, evidently, demolished much of the battery bank. According to my friend, the police restricted access to the road and an environmental clean-up crew needed to come in to clean the street of the debris created when the batteries were punctured. Perhaps, the town over-reacted. I do not know. Does anybody know whether the contents of the batteries represent a serious environmental risk if they are not contained? Are the costs of cleaning up the debris from collisions included in the various analyses of the benefits of plug-in hybrids? (I am amazed that I only have heard of one such collision in my home state of New Jersey which, I believe, contains all of the worst drivers in the United States.)

Let me take this as a question about how clean EVs and PHEVs are when charged from the Northeast grid. I used the EPA’s power profiler to lookup the NPCC eGRID subregion and found that NOx emissions are 1.0 lbs/MWh vs. 2.1 nationwide, SOx are 2.4 vs. 5.4, and CO2 emissions are 909 vs. 1363. If you then go to http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/sbs.htm click on 2002, then Toyota, and then RAV4 EV, you will get data on what a pure electric SUV does nationwide. The annual tons of CO2 is 3.9. If you scale that by the EPA power profiler NPCC to US ratio, you get 2.6 tons. The Air Pollution Score is 10 out 10, so the lower NOx and SOx won’t improve an already perfect score. It looks pretty good to me. The more electric miles in New England, the cleaner the air and the less greenhouse pollution produced.

While you’re at the EPA website, next click on Compare side-by-side, then 2002, then Toyota, then RAV4 2WD, and finally Automatic…. This is a pretty apples to apples comparison, comparing the electric and gasoline versions of the same vehicle. Note the CO2 emissions of the gasser are 8.0 tons per year (vs. the 2.6 estimated above) and the Air Pollution Score is only 2 out 10.

Using the pure EV to represent the electric side of PHEVs, the numbers look like quite an improvement to me, both nationwide and in the Northeast in particular.

I guess that the accident that my friend witnessed must have been a side-on collision. That is the only way that I can imagine that the battery pack could have been punctured. (The only accident that I have had during the past 20 years is just one such collision. A person turned left into my side as I was proceeding straight through an intersection. New Jersey drivers!)

It is curious that the Toyota manual does not contain any cautionary language concerning clean-up.

I’ve now done as you suggested and I agree that, were the plug-in hybrid to be charged with power generated by the average power plant in New Jersey, there would be a net environmental benefit. But I believe that I was making a different point.

Charging of hybrids will represent an increase in utility loads. And, unlike some industrial processes, the load duration curve for charging plug-in hybrids is likely to be highly skewed. (I personally am not a big fan of load duration curves. They do not take into account the volatility of demand.) Fortunately, the skewing generally will be towards true night-time demand — off off-peak. But even the EPRI-NRDC study (http://mydocs.epri.com/docs/public/PHEV-ExecSum-vol1.pdf) on plug-in hybrids shows an increase in daytime load presumably caused by charging plug-in hybrids while their owners are at work.

The beneficial effect of having the charging take place at night (or, better still, using smart grid technology to control when charging occurs) is that it flattens the average load served by power generators and allows more efficient (and, therefore, less polluting) power plants to be dispatched to charge the vehicles.

Of course, the reverse is true for daytime charging. The daytime charging presumably would cause a rise in the loads that today are served by the most highly polluting power plants. (A fleet of vehicles in the parking lot of a suburban office building all being charged on the afternoon of a 95-degree day would really lean on the system.)

Now, with smart grid technology, we might be able simply to prevent people from charging their cars when “green” resources are unavailable. So, for example, if one were to want to charge one’s car on a day that the wind does not blow (or at a time when the wind is not blowing) or if their are insufficient “green” resources to charge all of the vehicles seeking to be charged, the utility might simply shut off service to the plug-in hybrid’s charger. Also, we might simply require office buildings where charging facilities are installed also to have solar panels installed.

But, to the best of my knowledge, the technologies that actually are being put in place by those utilities facilitating some form or another of smart grid technology are not up to those kinds of tasks. Pacific Gas and Electric and Southern California Edison definitely are not installing equipment that sophisticated. The smart grid equipment currently being installed by Duke Energy and Xcel Energy might have these capabilities. It is unclear from their literature.

I have attended the last two conferences held by the Smart Grid organization. At these conferences, I have been told (a) that the most sophisticated smart grid equipment (equipment that would permit real time management of flows to a plug-in hybrid charger, or a water heater, or an air conditioner, or the defrost cycle equipment in a refrigerator) requires enormous communications bandwidth and that that b