Power production

["Peter VanDerWal" <peter_v@primenet.com>]

I've been doing a little online research and found some interesting things.

Please note these figures are from 1990, but I doubt they've changed much.
Most of this information came from
http://www.gpukids.com/library/key_facts/Welcome.html the conclusions are
mine.


Only a small portion(5%) of the electricity in the US is produced from fuel
oil (desiel fuel).  However I'm going to use it for comparison since I know
what kind of milage cars get running desiel fuel and I don't know what they
get running CNG. And almost nobody runs cars directly powered by coal (56%
of the electricity is produced by coal).

Anyway one gallon of fuel oil produces 14.29 kwh of electricity, after
transmission losses (7%) that's 13.29 kwh of power at your outlet.

Now we've had this discussion on the list several times and as I recall the
best full sized EV gets about 5 miles to the kwh (from the outlet) and the
worst gets about 2 miles.

So that means that EV's that draw power from companies that burn fuel oil
get between 26 and 66 miles per gallon of fuel.   That's prety much exactly
the same as you'll see on current production ICEs running desiel.

Current Hybrids are already doing as well as the most efficient EV and are
getting better.

Conclusions:
    Hybrids will be more fuel efficient than EVs powered by fuel oil and
most likely less polluting.
    Hybrids are already less polluting than EVs powered by coal (it takes
almost 1 pound of coal to produce 1kwh).

    Contrary to what's be touted on the list EVs are NOT more efficient
than ICEs (at least not much).

    Hybrids powered by CNG would produce very little pollution though I
don't know how they compare efficiency wise.  Anybody know how far ICEs
converted to run on CNG go?  It takes 10.5 cubic feet of natural gas to
produce 1kwh of electricity.

Nice to know items:
    While our nation has pretty much maxed out our hydro production
capabilities there are vast amounts of untapped wind power available.
    Household electricity use only accounts for about 34% of electricity
consumtion, this means that if everybody switched to EVs power demand would
only increase 25-30% (not everybody owns a car).

Bad news: If everybody switched to EVs power companies would most likely
build more fossil fuel powered plants.

P.S. None of the power in this country is produced by burning crude oil.
>From an energy and pollution standpoint there is little difference between
refining crude into fuel oil vs gasoline.  Fuel oil and desiel are
virtually the same thing.