(Auto Forum) 5 Year study aims to study the impact of 'Green' Cars

blog.wired.com...

Efforts to make cars more environmentally friendly could have negative effects on the planet, prompting researchers to study the possible unintended consequences.

The numerous questions -- such as the materials required to make more fuel-efficient vehicles, how they can be recycled, and how will consumers respond to higher priced vehicles -- have prompted the Rochester Institute of Technology to start a five-year study.

Well, I'm glad they are at least making the effort, even though I think they will be disappointed when their results come back negative.

The problem with Green cars as I see it is nobody seems to be looking at the larger picture.

Lets take electric car for example. Our electrical grid in some cases can't hold up to summertime air conditioner use. Can you imagine what the load would be if we added thousands of electric cars into the mix?

Many people think that electric cars are not polluting our planet.. They are wrong, all that happens is the point of pollution changes from the individual car to some powerplant (coal in many places) that has less strict rules for pollution, or sweetheart deals form the Gov that gives them "credits" for some green thing they do and allows them to not meet environmental rules. Not to mention the nasty stuff that is inside the batteries that have to be replaced every 5 years or so.

These types of issues pop up with any green technology that people want to replace fossil fuels with. What needs to be done is not to have one replacement for oil we need 20 or 40 replacements that are all equally available. By spreading out the demand to many different things the total effect on our environment will be lessened.

IMNSHO

Originally posted by Cug
Lets take electric car for example. Our electrical grid in some cases can't hold up to summertime air conditioner use. Can you imagine what the load would be if we added thousands of electric cars into the mix?

Increased usage of EV's will prompt the grid providers to upgrade. You know, the thing they've been promising to do for decades now. They already started it in response to the Great NE Blackout. They estimate that the "Smart Grid" will be operational by the end of next decade. A decade after that, the power transmission efficiency should have increased dramatically as well due to new transmission technologies(Room Temp Superconducting).

They are wrong, all that happens is the point of pollution changes from the individual car to some powerplant (coal in many places) that has less strict rules for pollution, or sweetheart deals form the Gov that gives them "credits" for some green thing they do and allows them to not meet environmental rules. Not to mention the nasty stuff that is inside the batteries that have to be replaced every 5 years or so.

Do you realize how efficient internal combustion is? 32 % of the raw energy presant in the gasoline gets converted over to usable electricity. The rest is wasted.

With larger energy generating facilities, the efficiency skyrockets. The larger the generator, the more efficient it becomes. Coal plants, for instance, can get efficiencies upto 80 %.

Pollution from Big Power Plants are much easier to deal with in comparision, and if you take everything into account, you'll realize that it will probably be cheaper for the taxpayer to mandate emission controls on Plants then it would on Cars.

BTW Hydrogen has the exact same problems(with a few unique ones to boot).

You're comment about the Carbon trading scheme is a bit one sided, because for every Carbon Credit purchased by a pollutor, a Credit has to be created by another company who either Plants trees, Manufacturs Solar Voltaic Panels, or has just setup expensive pollution control equipment on their factories. The scheme works on paper, it just needs to be tightened up a bit so a company(say SynCrude) can't claim carbon credits on exporting Shale Oil claiming they are "taking it out of the Canadian ecosystem" or some crap like that.(True story, they did try to do that due to ambiguous wording in the agreement)

These types of issues pop up with any green technology that people want to replace fossil fuels with. What needs to be done is not to have one replacement for oil we need 20 or 40 replacements that are all equally available. By spreading out the demand to many different things the total effect on our environment will be lessened.

IMNSHO

I've been preaching this all along.

BTW You might have noticed the (Auto Forum) tag infront of this thread. If you are interested in an Auto Forum on ATS there are two things you could do to help.

1. Sign this petition thread

2. Start posting Automotive threads in the Chit Chat forum following the rule of always making sure that (Auto Forum) is in front of the thread title to make it more visible.