Is the Plug-In Electric Car Doomed?
One thing is certain: Golden is not a fanboy of the plug-in electric car. “There is this belief that we’ll just ‘plug in’ our cars, but I find this a difficult proposition to accept. Plug-ins based on batteries offer no cost advantage to car makers. Fuel cells offer a much lower cost of manufacturing path for automakers, and there is no doubt in my mind that they will be the primary energy conversion device for electric cars. It will cost more to extend access to plugs than to keep a ‘portable fuel’ model around hydrogen or hydrogen-rich biofuels. Portable fuels are the current model, and oil companies are not going to let utilities beat them in the electric vehicle era. Utilities have no incentive to service transportation fleets. None.”
He does not, however, believe we’ll see a massive shift away from combustion engines within the next decade. “Not a chance. Oil is the dominant fuel well beyond 2020. It is a simple market share extrapolation. The conversion from liquid fuels and combustion engines to electric motors powered first by batteries then hydrogen fuel cells will take years to emerge and at least two decades for a full market share transition.”
Golden brings up another interesting point, and one that video gamers the world over can relate to: automakers have conditioned us to expect a new iteration of each model in their lineup, often with very little real upgrades, every single year. “The real problem is the cost of building cars. And new car models drive revenue. The auto industry needs to move to making money on every mile and every minute spent in car, not just selling new cars. This isn’t a sexy concept for some readers. But the reality is that the revolution is how we build cars, not fuel them.”
No Silver Bullet: The Drawbacks of Hydrogen
Some skeptics agree with Golden and his plug-in negativity, pointing out that hundreds of thousands of plugged-in automobiles could overwhelm grids and generating plants, and that large-scale production could send lithium prices skyward. Others, like Stephen Rees, veteran of the UK Department of Transport and British Columbia Ministry of Energy and now a highly-regarded socio-political blogger, aren’t nearly so high on hydrogen. “Hydrogen is merely a way of storing electricity, and one that is highly inefficient. Hydrogen that is a by-product of chemical processes is not pure enough for fuel cells, so it is made by electrolysis of water. Hydrogen is very difficult to store and handle. No one has yet come up with a cheap way to make or store hydrogen, or a convenient way to put it into a vehicle.”
And that seems to be the sticking point. The concept of electric transportation may be superior to anything else on the drawing board, but the technicalities are unclear. Says Rees, “Electric cars have a role to play – as the success of the EV1 (GM’s mid-90s electric car and subject of the film Who Killed the Electric Car?) showed. But as with all alternate fuels, the fuelling infrastructure needs to be developed before there are enough cars to justify it economically. The Israeli program of building battery switching stations and basing fees on the same principles as cell phones looks very positive. But we still have to worry about where the power will come from. Since cars are now built much better, they last longer and fleet turnover is slower. So electric cars will take a long time to get to a significant market share.”
Golden also concedes the road ahead will be rough. “Electric motors are more efficient than combustion engines. Electric vehicles standing still do not waste energy like combustion engines. The overall energy savings are significant. But people who act as if we can find a silver bullet are ridiculous. This is a weak case against the reality that we are going to go through phases of change.”
The Future of Public Transit
Cleaner cars are one thing. Arguably just as important to the immediate future of our cities are alternatives to the automobile. Visualize for a moment your immediate neighborhood and the town where you live. Notice that none of it – with the exception of undeveloped lands – is free from the influence of the car. Notice how much raw land – from one-lane alleys to eight-lane thoroughfares, from service stations to seemingly omnipresent parking lots – is dedicated not to people, but to comparatively large vehicles.
Mass transit is one answer. Dr. Lee Schipper, Ph. D. has served as transport advisor to the Shell Foundation, authored more than 100 technical papers and books on energy economics and transportation around the world, and is now a senior fellow with EMBARQ: The World Resources Institute Center for Sustainable Transport. He looks not at the physical makeup of future mass transit, but the periphery that surrounds it.
“Mass transport is 90 percent a question of managing streets, neighborhoods, and cities (land uses), and only 10 percent technology. High-speed rail, I have my doubts about. It works well in Japan, France, and Spain because road fuel is expensive, freeways are tolled, and until twenty years ago, the price of an air ticket was high. And above all, because millions of people live within a half hour of a station by mass transit.”
Where Trains Fear to Tread: Personal Urban Vehicles
Schipper favors an integrated, top-down approach. “The most interesting developments will be real bus rapid transit, a kind of surface metro, together with real estate, residential, and commercial development at major nodes. The sleeper to me will be communities of rather high density built for slow, small, safe electric vehicles that don’t need to go fast – and can’t.”
This is a sentiment echoed by Golden, who agrees that high-speed rail will generally play a marginal role within the city, but feels the focus of mass transit should be on “last mile” connecting points to hubs in suburbs and downtown and suburban business districts. As for inner-urban transport, Golden also likes the idea of small, low-speed vehicles. “The big potential concept is the era of ‘personal urban’ vehicles – a new category of vehicles that are not owned by individuals but ‘accessed’ as a service. Urban centers could be markets for mobility as a service. Less ownership, more access-oriented models. I think cities might [ultimately] ban personally owned vehicles and make it more of an access model around smaller, personal vehicles designed for urban environments.”
Rees contends that there’s no magic bullet that meets all needs. “Buses need priority in traffic. The tram – or streetcar – will see a revival here as it has in Europe and Asia. But we also need something that is smaller than a bus, but cheaper than a taxi, to get better penetration into suburban subdivisions. Much better use of existing technology for ride booking and sharing will be needed, but this is the only way to make suburban sprawl work without cheap gasoline and lots of cars.”
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