When I flew to Los Angeles for the 1999 AEC Systems show, in which vendors showed all the latest and greatest cad and other software products to architects, engineers and contractors, my high school buddy Jim picked me up at the airport in his EV-1. It was an impressive vehicle, very sleek and stylish compared to the EVs I had seen before or had imagined from Popular Mechanics covers.  

Jim lived close to the campus where he taught, and charged his EV-1 overnight in his garage. There were a handful of charging stations around the city, and even a 120V adapter if he was really desperate, though he said it would take a numbingly long time at that voltage. Back then it was easy to believe that EVs were a much better choice than CO2-spewing vehicles, but I was disappointed to find that I couldn't lease one in my state. GM later crushed most of them, making them tragically endearing.

Now Nissan is actually selling a real live EV, the Leaf, and GM is selling a largely electric vehicle, the Volt, and there is all sorts of talk about plug-in Priuses. But in the meantime I've read enough to wonder if a car-sized EV is a solution to anything, or just more of the same unsustainable 'drive everywhere' lifestyle. I also wonder if EVs will actually be cost competitive with hybrids and small ICE cars. I already posted this Haaretz article attacking consumer pricing by Shai Agassi's Project Better Place in the news section last week:
 

The problem is that Better Place's calculations display a troubling resemblance to the pricing tricks employed by the cell phone companies. It turns out the the average private car in Israel travels 16,700 kilometers a year. But the minimum package that Better Place customers will have to buy - for once they have bought the electric car, they will have no choice - is for "up to 20,000." And just like the cell phone companies, which never return a single cent for unused portions of a package, Better Place, too, will presumably not refund the change from unused kilometers.

If you compare the cost of going 16,700 kilometers in a regular family car, you will discover that this car's owner spends NIS 1,000 less on gas than the cost of the Better Place package. And comparisons with hybrid cars are even more problematic: The gas the average hybrid car uses to travel 16,700 kilometers costs from NIS 5,000 to NIS 8,000 less than Better Place's minimum package.

One could say, "Oh, this is just a pricing issue," but if EVs are being advertised as something that will save you money, the price you must pay is important. Of course you can always charge your EV yourself, as Jim did with his EV-1, but there may be a limiting factor on self-charging - someday.

In The Electric Car Jungle: Battery Swap And The “Natural Monopoly” Of Grid Management, at The Truth About Cars, Ed Niedermayer took a thorough look at a Better Place study comparing their recharging and battery swapping model with an unmanaged scenario where everyone just charges their own vehicle at night. The study assumes that Washington-Baltimore suddenly has one million EVs, and purports to show the effect of each approach on the electrical grid.
 

This joint study firmly concludes that the increases in wholesale energy cost due to the additional load of 1 million EVs in the Washington-Baltimore Metropolitan Area can be reduced by hundreds of millions of dollars per year if the charging is managed by a CNO [Central Network Operator] responding to real-time LMPs [Locational Marginal Prices].

So while the writer of the Haaretz piece thinks Better Place is gouging, Ed concludes that EV drivers will actually pay more (someday) without Better Place, or someone like them, to manage large scale recharging.
 

By simply giving consumers credits to buy EVs, the government is setting up the same consumers to overpay massively for their electricity, grids for overstress and utilities for waste and inefficiency. Rather than encouraging these negative outcomes, perhaps governments should consider investing in Better Place’s holistic network management approach. The upfront costs of a Better Place-style CNO are indeed large, but the alternative is well-over $350m in annual increased wholesale energy costs (in one city alone)… waste without end.

EV enthusiasts have always claimed that there is cheap electricity to be had during low-demand hours overnight. Utilities rarely stop generating electricity, so the EV would just use power that is going to waste now. Better Place is making the argument that it won't be nearly that simple once there are a lot of EVs in use, but keep in mind that A - Better Place coauthored the study, and B - Nissan has only sold 5,000 Leafs in six months, so it will be a long time before any city has a million EVs.

I've mentioned ArchDruid John Michael Greer's doubts about the grid itself before, and in Salvaging Energy he has doubts about putting new EVs on the grid.
 

... the vast majority of electricity in America and elsewhere comes from coal and natural gas, and so choosing an electric car simply means that the carbon dioxide you generate comes out of a smokestack at a power plant rather than the tailpipe of your car.

This is known as the Long Smokestack argument. Better Place hoped to finesse that criticism and power all their vehicles with electricity from wind and solar, but Israel has mostly fossil fuel-based power.
 

... the processes of turning fossil fuel into heat and heat into electricity, storing the electricity in a battery and extracting it again, and then turning the electricity into motion is less efficient still, so you’re getting less of the original fossil fuel energy turned into distance traveled than you would in an ordinary car. ... you’re burning quite a bit more fossil fuel, and dumping quite a bit more carbon in the atmosphere, than a petroleum-powered car would do.

That's quite a claim, and several of his 224 commenters took Greer to task over the math behind it. My take is that with newer power plants and better fuel, it is clearly false, but with older plants using cheap brown coal, it may be a closer call. But I have read that EVs will exceed the lifetime energy costs of hybrids unless over half the electricity they use comes from hydro, wind and solar. One commenter noted that getting cheap hydro power cost them their cheap salmon.  

What Greer really wants to talk about is salvaging instead of buying new:
 

... the energy cost of manufacture needs to be taken into account. If you buy a used car – let’s say, for the sake of argument, a ten-year-old compact with decent gas mileage – instead of a new electric car, you’ve just salvaged the energy cost of manufacture that went into the used car, most of which would otherwise have been wasted, and saved all the energy that would have been spent to produce, ship, and assemble every part of the new car.

Unfortunately Cash for Clunkers has lead to a pricey used car market, especially for compacts with decent gas mileage. But formal or informal car-sharing may be a reasonable alternative.
 

... the price difference between a brand new Nissan Leaf and a ten-year-old compact will buy you a solar water heating system, installation included, with enough left over to completely weatherize an average American home. It’s a win-win situation for everything but your ego.