"80% of electricity is still generated from coal and probably always will be."
Where does he even get that number?
In the UK, where these trucks will be running, it's only 37.5%
Globally its only 26.5%
Even in the USA, there coal is still King, coal only supplies 51% - and it drops to just 49% when you factor in the grid interconnects with Canada.

Jonas; please read Donald's last post.

an EV in the real world gets .5 kwhr/mile * 25miles = 12.5 kw * 1.4 lbs CO2/kw = 17.5 lb CO2/mile

a gallon of GASOLINE has apporximately 19 lbs/gal not 22 so you are maybe 7% better.

~80% of the electricity in the US is generated from fossil fuels

EVs arent a bad option, they are not the holier than thou, magic bullet solution you all seem to think and they certainly are not ZERO emissions vehicles.

Ai_vin, I don't find it a credible source. Because it doesn't take a lifecycle perspective.

What's more, the argument about putting renewables in the grid is pretty bogus. Neither wind nor solar provide baseloads or peakloads. So you remain continuously dependent on fossil fuels. The only renewable baseload is biomass.

So unless you succeed in developing energy storage technologies for wind and solar, or unless you make a system the baseload of which is based on biomass - I don't think electrification is beneficial from a climate perspective.

EVs cost way too much, which means we're spending money on a technology that could better be spent elsewhere. Moreover, EVs imply investments in expensive renewables, making the entire picture even more cost-heavy.

I have nothing against EVs per se, provided cheaper batteries become available based on materials that are plentiful (that excludes lithium-ion), and provided a robust renewable electricity infrastructure is in place first.

Wrong. Geothermal provides baseload. CSP technology provides peaking power and with thermal storage can displace a fair amount of NG fired power. Hydro also provides baseload power, but like geothermal, it's applications are limited. Technological advances in geothermal will probably allow it to become a bigger player in the future. Wave and tidal power have the capability to provide something close to baseload power. All of these can be backed up with NG in the short to midterm.

Jonas, if not EVs, where do you propose spending the research money? Not hydrogen I hope.

The comparison always seems to be made between gasoline and coal fired electricity generation, despite the fact that electricity generation is cleaner on it's own let's not foget that refined gasoline does not flow out of the ground; crude oil has to be transported, stored, refined and shipped again - all taking vast amounts of fuel and electricity. If we reduce this transport and refining energy hog alone we've reduced the impact ...

Came across this video clip related to the opening story here -

http://uk.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=82253&videoChannel=5

And this other one too

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=739242345

Tripp, I would spend it on the following priorities:

1. avoiding deforestation and the associated biodiversity loss in the tropics, which seems to be a better deal for the money and the planet.

To achieve this, we need to invest in the creation of efficient high-rise cities to house all the people who now make a living off the forest, and we need to spend as much money as it takes to achieve the Millennium Development Goals for these people.

This will lower the fertility of these developing nations (now in some countries 7 women per child), and reduce pressures on the world's most valuable ecosystems and their services, which are of planetary importance.

This costs only a few hundred billion dollars, much less than electrifying mobility in the West, and the benefits are much larger.

2. simultaneously you spend the rest on reforestation in the tropics - also only a few billion dollars.

3. what you have left you spend on the first step needed to electrify mobility: a moratorium on coal plants wihtout CCS, and the coupling of CCS to biomass. The development of affordable CCS has potentially much larger benefits for the planet as a whole, than investments in renewables like wind or solar.

4. the final step is to invest in biotechnology to develop systems that yield a lot of biomass (better trees for reforestation and bioenergy use) and that limit emissions from agriculture (since we want to plant more forests and keep existing ones intact, we need highly-efficient agricultural systems to be implemented on the limited land.)

After that, feel free to plug in your EV. The benefits of electrifying road transport are marginal compared with using gasoline vehicles; the extra cost needed to achieve such a marginal benefit is better spend on these other priorities which offer better stuff for the money.

"~80% of the electricity in the US is generated from fossil fuels"

According to the DoE ~29% of all electrical generation (including industrial and combined heat and power) was NOT fossil fuel derived in 2006. That would put it closer to 71% of electricity from fossil fuels with 20% of the total coming from natural gas.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html#_ftn3

Where does 500Wh/mi come from? How do you know this to be a "real world number"? Is it just made up like saying "80%" of the electricity is generated by fossil fuels? It looks like a worst case in the Tesla roadster would be ~275Wh/mi.

psssst...

Jonas is keyrayzeee...

Shameless self-correction: "seven hungry women per child" should read "seven hungry children per woman".

Someone call Freud please ;-)

~ means approximate, I was off 9% BFD...

As for the 500 whr/mile. Its called google, try it sometime.

http://www.driveev.com/jeepev/home.php

also see
"100,000-Mile Evaluation of the Toyota RAV4 EV"
Author: Thomas J. Knipe
Co- Authors: Loïc Gaillac and Juan Argueta
Southern California Edison, Electric Vehicle Technical Center

it states about .42 kwhr/mile for a EV Rav 4 so there you go.

Last time I checked the Tesla wasnt forsale and is not a realistic vehicle for most people. Main stream EVs will be considerably worse (heavier and worse aerodynamics), nice try with the spin.

Again I dont hate EVs. I think they are good, but not perfect.

Quoth Neil:

In their worst case scenario (local power shortages), they can always put some PVs on the roof of their warehouses.

Quoth Lee:

"Personally I look forward to the day I can buy an all-electric motorhome."

Sign me up too, ASAP and please cover the roof and awning of mine with PV.

Quoth Jonas:

What's more, the argument about putting renewables in the grid is pretty bogus. Neither wind nor solar provide baseloads or peakloads. So you remain continuously dependent on fossil fuels.

• Nuclear.
• Storage such as CAES (well-suited to wind)

You can't take average watt/hours per mile data from automobiles and apply it to trucks. Auto engines run lightly loaded most of the time, whereas, truck engines run heavily loaded.

I was a utility driver for Fedex Ground for a while, meaning I ran nearly every route in the system, based out of a Midwestern medium sized city of 45,000. I drove between 160 and 350 miles per day.

The only route, out of 13 in total, a truck like the TNT Newton could have been used on would have been the pure city run covering stores and warehouses within the terminal city itself, and even then it would have been nip and tuck getting back to the terminal with the out-going picked up shipments.

There was no mention in the article for cargo reduction due to weight of the batteries. I can see the applicability of trucks like these in a high-density urban area for high-volume, low-weight cargo delivered in a limited geographic area close to the originating warehouse. But they're not ready yet for 90% of freight.

There was mention made of wind power not being baseload. Here in the Upper Midwest, Xcel Energy, the largest power supplier, considers wind to be baseload power. New turbines average 40% capacity factor, much higher than in Europe. The Great Plains of North America have the ability to be our primary baseload electric supplier, with wind replacing coal. The key is not energy storage, since wind is so reliable on the plains, but systematic development, especially of the collector grid of transmission lines. See http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3934#more

"...I can see the applicability of trucks like these in a high-density urban area for high-volume, low-weight cargo delivered in a limited geographic area close to the originating warehouse. But they're not ready yet for 90% of freight..."

Absolutely right Fred. Smith themselves readily acknowledge that hybrids will dominate for the vast majority of routes and that pure EVs will only make sense in localised depot-based fleets. But there are literally tens of thousands of such fleets and sub-fleets, so there's plenty to go at for the next few years. More than enough business for Smith, and for the other half dozen makers of roadgoing electric trucks and vans who have lately joined in now that the concept has been proven to be economically viable and practical.

"..There was no mention in the article for cargo reduction due to weight of the batteries..."

This point is addressed in recent news releases from the company, and in part on the Smith website. Most of the vehicles in their range come with a choice of battery pack size and type. Obviously there is a trade-off between extra batteries and/or extra load which will differ between customers with differing usage patterns. But equally obviously, several components necessary for a combustion engined truck don't exist on an electric truck. With a hybrid of course you have the weight of the batteries and electric motor in ADDITION to the combustion engine and its associated components - whereas with a pure EV the electric components are instead of.

Here is a good picture of six of TNT's newly bought Smith Newton electric trucks

http://group.tnt.com/images/london_tnt_hybrid_truck_2_tcm31-383946.jpg