The Hype over the Volt

Vincent J. Curtis



9 January 2008

*The piece below was intended to be published in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, but never saw print.*

            Every so often environmentalists go stark raving mad.  In 1997, the Kyoto Treaty, a product of environmentalism gone mad, called for unrealistic reductions energy consumption, through government regulation, just as India and China grew into first world countries.  In 2000, fantasies about the hydrogen fuel cell exploded on the world with its false promises of an economic, pollution-free source of energy for cars and homes.  Now, General Motors is about to launch its own green machine; an electric car called the Volt. 

            The new, experimental GM Volt is a four passenger automobile powered by a lithium-ion battery supported by a 1000 cc gasoline engine.  The Volt is supposed to be Detroit’s near-zero emission car of the future. The Volt is the car environmentalists have claimed the big car makers have been hiding for nefarious reasons.  Humbug!

            Though I am sure the Volt is a nice car to drive and works perfectly in accordance with the specifications, electric cars have hidden economic and environmental costs that seriously limit their usefulness as a means of reducing pollution over-all.  These limitations are quite similar to those that make the hydrogen cell propelled car forever uneconomic and of questionable environmental value.

            The hydrogen fuel cell worked by the conversion of hydrogen and oxygen into water with nearly perfect conversion of the energy of that reaction into electricity.  The lithium ion cell of the Volt converts lithium into a lithium salt with the nearly perfect conversion of the energy of that reaction into electricity.  So far, so good.  The problem lies in regenerating that hydrogen and that lithium from water and lithium salt.  Regeneration requires the input of electric power from some outside source; that is, from the increasingly strained electric grid.

            The problem of regeneration does not occur in gasoline and diesel engines.  Internal combustion engines take fuel we found in the ground and simply burn it in a way that provides motive power.  The sun and the earth created this energy source for us millions of years ago, and we are simply taking advantage of the energy content of material we found in the earth.  We don’t try to regenerate it.

            Unlike combustion engines, the lithium cell and the hydrogen cell require that their fuel be regenerated.  Recharging, it is called.  While the lithium cell presents far fewer practical and engineering difficulties as a rechargeable power supply than the hydrogen cell, like the hydrogen cell it also uses electrical generation from outside itself to recharge   Therein lies the fundamental economic and environmental fallacy of the electric car.

            Let’s look at the fallacy in a small scale and then the large scale.  Let’s say the power goes out, and you have to recharge the car by connecting it to the gas-powered electric generator you keep for such emergencies.  Because of the losses inherent in energy conversions, it would have been a more efficient use of the gasoline to have burned it in a car engine to propel the car directly than to have used it to create the electricity to regenerate the lithium and then to use the lithium in order to propel the car.

            In fact, the Volt carries its own gas-powered generator.  A one litre gas-powered motor mounted in the Volt provides the car with on-board regenerating capacity for the lithium cell.  Plugging in the car at night merely relieves the gas tank of the Volt from supplying the chemical energy necessary to convert lithium salt back into useful lithium again.  If the power was out, and you didn’t have a gas powered generator, you could idle the car in the driveway until the lithium cell was recharged.

            On a large scale, suppose that electric cars become popular and lots of people buy them.  Where is the grid electricity going to come from for all these cars?  Well, to replace gasoline made from Alberta tar sand, the expansion of the electrical supply will have to come primarily from the burning of West Virginia coal and from nuclear reaction of Saskatchewan uranium.  If electric cars become popular, we will have to build more coal-burning and/or nuclear powered generating facilities to replace the Alberta tar sands we no longer use as liquid fuel.  Wind power and solar power are fantasies that cannot fill the gap in Ontario.

            Burning coal is a dirty business; nuclear generation is extremely capital intensive; and these hidden environmental and economic factors have to be considered when evaluating the overall advantages of electric powered cars like the GM Volt.

            The economy in driving a Volt lies in the fact that the car is driven by a 65 hp, 1000 cc engine, the performance of which is enhanced by a battery, so long as it lasts.

            Electric cars can be useful in reducing air pollution in dense urban areas where traffic is intensive, like New York, Los Angeles, and London.   A one liter motor creates less air pollution than a 2.2 litre motor; and the air pollution caused by the burning of coal for electrical power is created out of the downtown area in a facility designed to mitigate the pollution released.  Electric cars can be a small piece of the puzzle of solving certain, restricted air pollution problems.

            However, if you believe that man-created carbon dioxide is bad for the environment, and that nuclear power is next to nuclear weapons on the scale of evil, then you can only support the development of electric cars by hiding your eyes from the unintended consequences.  The Volt and cars like it will not take us on the road to environmental nirvana.

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Vincent J. Curtis was employed as a Research Scientist by the Ontario Research Foundation, and worked on high energy density batteries in the 1980s.