I see all of the memes about electric cars and motorcycles, making fun of the land and resources that are destroyed as we mine the metal to make our vehicles, the rubber for their tires, and the materials to make the batteries. In a sense they are correct, but most consumers overlook one key fact, the engines in our vehicles are incredibly inefficient.
The best Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) peak at about 45% efficiency, but most operate at much lower levels. A carburated, air-cooled, V-Twin may barely convert 20% of the fuel it burns into usable energy, with the rest being wasted. Where does the wasted energy go? In most cases, it’s lost as heat. Air blows past the cylinders and radiator to extract heat from the engine, dissipating it in the atmosphere. The tires heat up as you ride, yes they are softer when they get hot, but that takes energy. The chain or drive shaft warms up, that’s wasted energy. And lot’s of heat/energy heads right out the back of the tailpipe. The noise you hear, that’s wasted energy. And as the rider heads down the road, as the air is pushed aside, it heats up and dissipates into the surrounding air.
There are ways to improve the efficiency of an Internal Combustion Engine, but there are practical limits. A turbocharger is one of the best ways to extract energy that would otherwise be lost, by using that energy to force more air into the engine. People wonder why turbocharged engines are quieter than normally aspirated engines, it’s because some energy is being extracted from the exhaust stream. As noise is a form of energy, a quieter exhaust note is often a sign that more energy is being put to good use. When you hear a really loud motorcycle, just know that the motorcyclist is compensating for a lack of real power, the kind that matters, the kind that rockets you away from the stop sign.
Here is one reason that electric vehicles make sense. When a large power plant produces electricity, they do so in a way that is significantly more efficient than smaller Internal Combustion Engines. Large power plants, burning natural gas and using the newest styles of turbines can achieve efficiency ratings higher than 60%. Most of the fuel they burn is converted into electricity, with very little of it being wasted as heat, or lost to friction. Also, as these power plants don’t have to worry that much about everything being mobile, they employ multiple systems to ensure that the exhaust is as clean as possible. If you stood downwind from a natural gas power plant, you’d notice the heat, but the air would smell relatively normal. Stand downwind from 100 motorcycles, and you’ll smell the oil and other chemicals that were partially consumed during the combustion cycle.
So, not only are power plants more efficient than Internal Combustion Engines, but they are cleaner. Once the electricity is produced, it needs to be transmitted from the plant to the power outlet on the wall in your house. There are some small losses of energy during the process of transmission, but the electric grid is relatively efficient.
If you have an electric vehicle, when you plug it in to charge it up, there are some other losses of energy. The batteries heat up while they are being charged, that’s lost energy. Some energy will naturally be lost while the vehicle is not being used. And, as batteries age, they become less efficient. Once you drive your vehicle, some of the same parasitic losses that plague traditional automobiles also impact electric vehicles. There are some driveline losses (although these can be minimized by housing the motors in the wheels), the motors heat up, and that’s lost energy. The tires warm up as they propel the vehicle, and the the climate controls inside the vehicle consume energy.
There is one area where electric vehicles really makes gains over traditional Internal Combustion Engine. An electric vehicle can be more aerodynamic as air does not need to be forced through a radiator. The front ends can be designed to be incredibly aerodynamically efficient, where as traditional vehicles are designed to force a certain amount of air to impact a flat surface (the radiator) and that consumes a lot of energy.
There are a lot of benefits for the environment that we will see once more people transition to electric powered vehicles, but there are also some downsides. The process of mining the materials to make the batteries is incredibly energy intensive. Large vehicles move hundreds of tons of rock and earth to mine the elements that go into making the batteries. These mining vehicles consume lots of diesel and electricity. The process of refining those materials and converting them into batteries is also energy intensive, and often creates many hazardous by products. It’s not an all-win scenario.
It could be a few decades before we find out if the electric revolution achieved all of the goals that we were led to believe it would. And, as we see, over time, the technology will scale. We are still in the early days of battery technology, and no one knows what things will look like 50 years from now.
It’s amazing to think about how energy works. 500 million years ago a sunbeam shone on our planet. Using chlorophyll, a plant converted that light into usable energy. When the plant died, some of the cells of that plant ended up in a layer of nutrient rich materials that was slowly covered up by other sediments. Over the centuries, heat and pressure converted those materials into an energy rich goo. We drilled for that goo, pumped it to the surface, heated it up, added some nasty chemicals to it, and extracted gasoline. When we drive around in our vehicles, essentially, we are recycling sunbeams that are millions (or even billions) of years old.
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