Dec 5 - McClatchy-Tribune Regional News - Elizabeth Souder The Dallas Morning News


Electric vehicles promise cleaner air, but reality is slightly smoggy.

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which can draw power from the grid for an electric motor or rely on a gasoline-powered motor, will start hitting the roads next year. Electric companies say the cars cut pollution and help solve global warming.

Energy issues are never quite so simple.

"If they say there's no emissions, they just don't know where power comes from," said Houston mayor Bill White, who's running for governor and who supports electric vehicles.

Electric vehicles do cut carbon dioxide emissions significantly compared with new gasoline cars. At the same time, in Texas, they would create more smog-forming nitrogen oxides and could strain the electricity grid.

Solving those issues requires billions of dollars in grid upgrades, tighter pollution controls on power plants and cooperative consumers.

"Everybody understands this is potentially a great opportunity for the electric industry, but it's also potentially a big challenge if the right incentives aren't in place," said Paul Wattles, demand response supervisor for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas.

Electric vehicles offer power companies a rare opportunity to stump for green energy while boosting sales. Until now, going green in the power industry ultimately boiled down to conservation, which cuts the industry's profit.

Electricity companies are actively promoting plug-in cars and asking for government incentives.

"You need the city and the state to play along," said NRG Energy chief executive David Crane. He has announced plans to work with the city of Houston to install recharging stations as part of NRG's strategy to position itself for a wave of electric cars.

Some studies show that electric cars could cut pollution. Environment Texas, an environmental advocacy group, will publish a paper later this month summarizing various studies showing that plug-in cars are clean.

Environment Texas also helped create Plug-in Texas, a new group to support electric cars. Other founding members are the Environmental Defense Fund, the Texas Automobile Dealers Association and the power generation company Luminant.

"Plug-in vehicles have the potential to make an immediate difference in reducing air pollution and curbing dependence on oil. Over the long term, plug-ins can play a critical role in the effort to stop global warming," the paper says.

Trouble is, power plants still pollute, just like gasoline engine tailpipes.

Texas gets about 37 percent of its electricity from coal-fired power plants. That's lower than the national average but still enough coal to contribute to smog in big cities.

Coal plants emit carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming, nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide that can contribute to heart and lung problems, and mercury, a powerful nerve poison.

Gasoline cars also emit carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides, among other pollutants.

Juicing up an electric car in Texas would create about half as much carbon dioxide as a gasoline vehicle. But, based on data from the Environmental Protection Agency on Texas power plant emissions in 2008, an electric vehicle would be responsible for slightly more nitrogen oxides than a brand-new gasoline car.

Chevrolet's Volt, a plug-in hybrid due out in November, will draw 8 kilowatt-hours of electricity from the grid to go 40 miles. (The Volt also has a gasoline engine; hence, it's a hybrid.)

Plug in the Volt in Texas, and it will produce about 0.1 of a gram of nitrogen oxides per mile on electricity. The EPA recently tightened NO{+x} requirements for gasoline cars, so the average new car will emit only 0.07 of a gram of NO{+x} per mile.

Carbon dioxide emissions look better. A Volt would be responsible for 164 grams of carbon dioxide per mile traveled on the battery. A gasoline car emits 320 grams per mile.

Emissions issues for the rest of the country aren't any better. Some states, such as California, have cleaner power plants. Still, the average power plant in the U.S. creates more nitrogen oxides per kilowatt-hour of electricity than the average in Texas.

Dan Greenbaum led a study for the National Research Council that found that plug-in vehicles in the U.S. would cause more health damage from pollution than other vehicle technologies.

First, half of the country's power comes from coal plants, said Greenbaum, president of the Health Effects Institute, a nonprofit that studies the health effects of air pollution. His sponsors include automobile manufacturers, government labs, foundations and Exxon Mobil Corp.

"The other factor was, it does take more energy to manufacture an electric vehicle, to manufacture the battery pack, etc., etc. Every time you spend energy to do that, then there are more emissions at the manufacturing site," he said.

A separate study came to much more optimistic conclusions about electric vehicles but still conceded that the cars would create more pollution in some areas.

The Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council showed a reduction in pollution in most regions of the country if 40 percent of vehicles are plug-ins by 2030.

"Ozone levels decreased for most regions but increased in some local areas," the 2007 report states. The Electric Power Research Institute found that 61 percent of the population would enjoy less ozone, while 1 percent would have to live with more.

That is, people in urban areas such as North Texas would see smog lift as fewer gasoline tailpipes puff pollution on the roads. But people in places such as East Texas, with a number of coal plants, might breathe more pollution if their plants had to work harder to make electricity.

Plug-in cars could also boost the cost of maintaining the electric grid for everybody. If drivers juice up in the late afternoon, during the hours of greatest power demand, Texas might need more power plants or lines to accommodate them.

Plugging in "during the day, you just exacerbate a problem," said Bob Shapard, chief executive of North Texas' power line company, Oncor.

"That's a big drain on our system," said Don Clevenger, vice president of external affairs for the company.

If 1.2 million Texans were to buy Chevy Volts and plug them into the state's grid at the same time, late on a hot afternoon, Texas would need more power plants to accommodate them. That many vehicles would wipe out the extra reserve margin, or the cushion of excess power plant capacity. ERCOT aims to keep at least a 12.5 percent reserve margin to ensure reliability.

If 3.4 million Volt drivers in Texas plugged in simultaneously on the afternoon of the hottest day of the year, the grid could black out.

That's an awful lot of electric vehicles.

"That's a really aggressive number and something that's highly unlikely ... that we'd see that in the next 10 years," said Rob Peterson, a spokesman for Chevrolet. He pointed out that President Barack Obama has set a goal of 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2015 for the entire U.S.

Electrical engineers have been noodling on pollution and grid strain for years. The key is persuading electric car owners to plug in after about 9 p.m. That's when demand eases and there's plenty of grid capacity to handle the cars.

That's also when wind kicks up in West Texas. Most of the state's wind power comes online in the middle of the night, allowing dirtier power plants to dial down. In a perfect world, millions of electric vehicle owners would juice up around 3 a.m., making use of the cleanest power available on the grid.

But few people will set their alarms to go to the garage to plug in their cars in the middle of the night.

Chevy, Oncor and several retail electric providers think they have solutions.

The Volt comes with a timer. Drivers can plug in the car as soon as they get home and program it to begin charging at a certain hour.

Oncor is installing high-tech meters at every home and business in North Texas. The digital meters can read electricity use constantly and communicate with appliances. So an electric car owner could, when the technology and software are ready, log on to a Web site and program the meter to allow the car to charge only during certain times.

The meters also allow electricity companies such as TXU Energy and Reliant Energy to charge more for power used during the afternoon and less at night. This would create a financial incentive for electric car owners to do the right thing.

Environmental advocates say it's much easier to cut pollution at a few power plants than for millions of vehicles. The EPA is working on stricter nitrogen oxide regulations and has recently tightened rules for mercury emissions.

"As the way we generate power in the state becomes cleaner, we have the opportunity to feed cleaner energy into the grid, and drivers don't have to update their technology," said McCall Johnson, a clean energy advocate for Environment Texas.

Others argue that nitrogen oxides emitted by power plants in rural areas are less likely to combine with other pollutants to form smog than NO{+x} emitted by cars in a big city.

White argues that electric vehicles can help ease the burden on the grid. He expects electric vehicle owners to eventually be able to sell battery power back to the grid when demand shoots up.

"There are some days in the summer when the wholesale rate for power can be 30, 40 cents per kilowatt-hour," he said. So power companies must build plants that sit idle for most of the year and fire up only occasionally, on the days of greatest demand.

"Basically, the dilemma for the last century and a half, as we built out these power grids, has been the inability to store electricity economically. Through battery storage in vehicles ... at least we would have one resource that we could call on to reduce that peak demand for electricity."

Wattles, at ERCOT, doubts the candidate's vision will happen anytime soon.

For the electricity industry, he said, the more immediate task is to simply generate demand for excess power plant capacity at night.

"There's a huge amount of unused capacity on the system if you look at the overnight hours and the wind power we generate at night. It's potentially a new market for that off-peak power, and that's when the power's the cheapest," he said.

ERCOT is considering programs that would give electric car owners discounts for shifting or cutting their loads when demand spikes.

"We see a move to where the garage will become the gas station of the future," said Jason Few, president of Reliant Energy, which aims to sell recharging services to electric car owners.

That would also make the power plant the tailpipe of the future.

CARE AND FEEDING OF A PLUG-IN HYBRID

Chevrolet and Nissan plan to introduce plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in 2010. They aren't the first plug-in cars available in America, but it will be the first time that plug-in hybrids are widely available at prices that average Americans can afford.

When you buy a plug-in car, you will need to hire an electrician to install the proper electrical socket in your garage. Auto manufacturers and electricity providers are considering offering this service.

You won't find a charging station outside your garage for some time. Don't panic -- when your plug-in hybrid loses juice, it will automatically switch to the gasoline engine.

It will take three to six hours to fully charge Chevy's plug-in hybrid, the Volt.

To ensure that your hybrid never uses dirty power, sign up for wind energy with your electricity provider.

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News research

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