USA Today automotive reporter Jim Healey was
quite positive about the test drives he took in
Ford and Toyota prototype PHEVs in January:
http://www.calcars.org/calcars-news/911.html

Now he's gone back to several reports released
months ago, including one by the Electric Power
Research Institute and the Natural Resources
Defense Council, and selectively cherry-picked
the most unlikely scenarios under which coal
could be the culprit for PHEVs resulting in
higher emissions. While eliciting worst-case
comments from NRDC, he failed to ask EPRI for its views.

This may be simply be a journalist's report, or
it could signal the beginning of a sustained
effort by a range of liquid fuel advocates to
attempt to slow the growing momentum of support
for the electrification of transportation.

Within 18 hours of the article appearing, over
350 responses appeared on the website. Below is
the story followed by our brief comments and some
posted to the site by Sherry Boschert, author of
Plug-In Hybrids. We expect to point our readers
to further responses from EPRI and NRDC.


Plug-in cars could actually increase air pollution
By James R. Healey, USA TODAY February 25, 2008
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/environment/2008-02-25-plug-in-hybrids-pol\
lution_N.htm

The expected introduction of plug-in hybrid
electric vehicles could cut U.S. gasoline use but
could increase deadly air pollution in some areas, two reports say.

That's because a plug-in's lower tailpipe
emissions may be offset by smokestack emissions
from the utility generating plants supplying
electricity to recharge the big batteries that
allow plug-ins to run up to 40 miles without
kicking on their gasoline engines. Plug-ins,
called PHEVs, are partly powered, in effect, by
the fuel used to generate the electricity.

About 49% of U.S. electricity is generated using
coal, so in some regions a plug-in running on its
batteries is nearly the equivalent of a
coal-burning vehicle. The trade-off is one that
even plug-in backers acknowledge. It could
undercut the appeal of vehicles that appear
capable of using no gasoline in town and hitting
50 to 100 mpg overall fuel economy.

If large numbers of plug-in hybrids were being
recharged with power from the least-sophisticated
coal plants, "There is a possibility for
significant increases of soot and mercury," says
a report by environmental advocacy group Natural
Resources Defense Council. Soot particles can
make it hard to breathe, especially for asthmatics. Mercury is toxic.

"Plug-in hybrids are perhaps not good for all
areas," says Howard Learner, executive director
of the Environmental Law & Policy Center, a
Chicago-based advocacy group. In "states that are
heavily coal, that equation doesn't work out very well for the environment."

After PHEVs drain their stored energy, they
operate like conventional hybrids, triggering
their gasoline engines to help drive the wheels
and recharge the batteries. Conventionals can't
be plugged in; their batteries are recharged only while driving.

The longer a plug-in is designed to operate on
just the batteries, the less gasoline it uses,
but the more electricity it needs to recharge the larger batteries.

Thus, the better the PHEV — that is, the longer
it goes just on its batteries — the greater the
charge required and the more the pollution that
might result from an electric utility's power generation.

Learner calls PHEVs "really important emerging
technology — where the cleaner technologies are used to charge them."

Sulfur dioxide also may be an issue

A study by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency
found plug-ins also could result in more sulfur
dioxide (SO2) emissions. SO2 is toxic in large
amounts and is a component of corrosive acid rain.

The Minnesota study found that use of PHEVs would
lower most emissions compared with other
vehicles, but that resulting SO2 emissions would
be more than double those from gasoline vehicles
and about three or four times greater than from
driving a regular hybrid. Exactly how much
depends on how far the PHEV can run on battery power alone.

The Minnesota study also found that PHEVs would
emit more carbon dioxide (CO2) than driving a
conventional hybrid. CO2 is a greenhouse gas
thought to contribute to global warming.

The Minnesota numbers are striking because they
predict the big jump in SO2 even if 40% of the
state's electricity were generated by wind power,
not coal or other polluting fuels. About 4% of
the state's electricity now is from wind, according to state officials.

The state's PHEV study concludes: "Alternative
vehicles offer benefits, but no single technology
currently stands out as a clear choice."

The NRDC calculus shows that a plug-in charged
from a power plant burning the dirtiest type of
coal still has an overall pollution level less
than a conventional gasoline car. But it would
produce 11% more greenhouse gas emissions than a
regular, non-plug-in hybrid, according to Luke
Tonachel, vehicles analyst at the NRDC and
co-author of the group's report on plug-ins. The
report was produced jointly with the non-profit
Electric Power Research Institute.

He says, however, that charging a plug-in with
electricity from renewable resources — wind or
water, for instance — cuts overall greenhouse gas
emissions to as low as a conventional gasoline
car getting 74 mpg. No current gasoline car does that.

The NRDC and Minnesota studies were published
last year but have yet to trigger alarms. PHEVs
still are experimental; their possible threat is distant.

"It seems a little premature to think of it being
a problem — but there are a lot of issues we
should have been thinking of sooner," says
Charles Griffith, auto project director at the
Ecology Center, an environmental non-profit based
in Michigan. He cites as an example debate over
use of land to grow crops for ethanol fuel vs. for food.

Even so, Griffith says, "The scenario where there
are so many plug-in hybrids plugged into the
(electric power) grid that you'll see a change in
air quality just doesn't sound true to me."

Plug-ins may be on streets soon

Automakers say PHEVs could be on the streets in
significant numbers within five years. Prototypes
being tested by car companies suggest they should
be able to go up to 40 miles on battery power,
which could enable them to deliver average
mileage in the neighborhood of 100 mpg in general driving.

The first plug-in vehicle in production, however,
is likely to be General Motors' Chevrolet Volt,
which is not a hybrid. Due in 2010 or 2011,Volt
runs entirely on battery power. Like PHEVs, its
battery pack can be recharged by plugging into a
normal outlet, using electricity from a utility
generating plant. A small gasoline engine
recharges Volt's batteries when an outlet isn't
handy, but unlike in a hybrid, that engine never
directly powers the car. GM could sell 60,000 or
more a year, forecasts consultant J.D. Power and
Associates, if the price is $30,000 or less.

GM said at the Detroit auto show in January that
it also will produce a plug-in hybrid version of
its Saturn Vue SUV near the same time Volt is to launch.

Toyota Motor and Ford Motor each showed a
prototype plug-in hybrid at auto shows this year
and will test the designs. "It will come," says
Toyota's Jaycie Chitwood, senior planner at the
automaker's advanced technologies unit in the
USA. "It's more a question of 'when' than 'if.' "

Ford's Greg Frenette, chief engineer of
zero-emission vehicles, says it should take no
more than five years to decide if plug-ins can be
made reliable and inexpensive enough.

The U.S. Energy Department is backing PHEVs.

In January it offered $30 million for projects to
"deliver up to 40 miles of electric range without
recharging" and to make plug-ins
"cost-competitive by 2014 and ready for commercialization by 2016."

"We look at plug-in hybrids as the next
generation of hybrids. They run cleaner, they
save oil and they can save consumers money at the
pump," NRDC's Tonachel says. But, he says, "Until
our oldest power plants are replaced or upgraded,
there could be increases in local particulate matter and ozone."


FELIX KRAMER'S BRIEF RESPONSE:

The groundbreaking EPRI-NRDC that is the basis
for much of this journalist's report really
amounted to a series of models and projections
for how the US power generation industry will
evolve and how plug-in hybrids will come into the
marketplace. Under every realistic scenario,
PHEVs will bring substantial environmental
benefits. (See our summary and links to the
original report in our June 19, 2007 posting at
http://www.calcars.org/calcars-news/797.html .)

HERE'S A PARAPHRASE OF THE CONCLUSIONS OF THAT REPORT:
Models of this system show greenhouse gas
improvements for PHEVs in every region of the
country, for every scenario reviewed, even the
ones that assumed the least progress in the
electric sector for improved technology, emissions, and efficiency.

The USA Today report in discussing non-greenhouse
gases doesn't recognize that the "dirty coal
plants" are on the way out, and that "criteria
pollutants" are already capped by the Clean Air Interstate Rule.

PHEVs won't arrive in volume for some years, and
by the time they are in widespread use, there
will be fewer and fewer dirty-coal plants providing night-time power.

That's why electric drive vehicles are the only
vehicles that can get cleaner as they get older
because the power grid gets cleaner.


RESPONSE BY SHERRY BOSCHERT:

I wonder if Mr. Healey bothered to read the NRDC
study, and if he's ever heard of the EPA. And I
wish the headline writer hadn't confused local results with national ones.

- The NRDC/EPRI study concluded that NATIONALLY,
all emissions (including carbon dioxide) will
decrease with plug-in hybrids, even though a few
small pockets of the country near old coal plants
could see a few increased emissions ASSUMING that
we increase our overall use of coal to 60% of
electricity (when in reality, we are moving away
from coal). For my summary of this and more than
40 other studies of emissions from plug-in vehicles, see
http://www.pluginamHerica.org/images/EmissionsSummary.pdf

- The Minnesota study (which I just read, and is
not yet in my summary) reports local emissions,
not national ones. It concludes that with heavy
coal use (60%), plug-in hybrids reduce all
emissions compared with today's cars except for
sulfur oxide (SOx) emissions. Lots of other
studies have found that same theoretical increase
in SOx with plug-in cars, but in the real world
(which the reporter ignored), the federal
Environmental Protection Agency has laws and
regulations that limit power-plant emissions. As
a result, as our energy-hungry society produced
more and more electricity between 1993 and 2004,
SOx emissions fell from 15 million down to 10
million metric tons per year. No matter how much
more electricity we produce, SOx emissions will
continue to decline if the regulations continue to be enforced.

- The Minnesota study also has a hypothetical
scenario in which the only cars out there are
hybrids. Compared with them, and using 60% coal
electricity, plug-in hybrids theoretically
increase SOx (but not really, see above), and
could increase carbon dioxide emissions by 0.5%
-- or 1/500th more than hybrids. Essentially, the
greenhouse gases would be the same, and that's
assuming that in the decades it will take for all
cars on the road in Minnesota to become either
hybrids or plug-in hybrids, we make no other
advances in limiting the use of dirty, nasty
coal. (If that happens, the planet is toast, no
matter what we drive.) The Minnesota study says
nothing about the greater reductions in carbon
dioxide on a NATIONAL scale if we had plug-in
hybrids, nor about the benefits of using far less
imported, expensive gasoline with plug-in hybrids
compared with conventional hybrids.

I'm sure the oil companies will spread this
unfortunate article far and wide. As a member of
the California Sierra Club's Climate-Energy
Committee, I'm going to have to do a lot of
re-education of any environmentalist friends who've read it.

Sherry Boschert, author
Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars That Will Recharge America


-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --
Felix Kramer fkramer@...
Founder California Cars Initiative
http://www.calcars.org
http://www.calcars.org/news-archive.html
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --