CCS will not happen for a long time, if ever. So, it is realistic to assume the worst case scenario for at least a decade and possibly longer. Those, like Senator Obama, who tout this as a clean alternative, are blowing smoke, literally, into the atmosphere, if not up our ass.

Also, as the study said, only in a few places in the U.S. would the worst case for the PHEV occur because of mixed sources for power geneation. In addition, we should be phasing out coal plants, anyway, unless they can sequester their co2.

Since the study resullts are in, the bill subsidizing these plants should not be allowed to pass. If they want to further study the issue, fine, but no funds should be allowed unless it can be convincingly shown that we could actually improve our co2 situation.

Also note that, even if one includes the embodied energy of batteries, it is still better to go for PHEVs.

Further improvement could possibly be achieved by v2g technology and/or consideration given to recharging these vehicle at night with wind as a way of overcoming the disadvantages of wind variability.

I hope other Senators who oppose this plan bring it up in the next debate.

iamsancho69:

Any CTL plants would take many years before they are complete, so in the short term they won't make a difference anyways.

And if we did allow these CTL plants to gain a foothold, they would be damned near impossible to shut down when we finally did want to get serious about cutting CO2 emissions. Not building them in the first place makes far more sense to me.

And for that matter, I think battery technology is a lot closer than you think.

The use of CO2 as a feedstock to grow algae in bioreactors , whatever the configuration, should be aggressively applied to all fossil fueled facilities - power plants, chemical plants, oil sands processors etc., etc. This would increase the total useful output (energy & other raw materials) of the facility, making processes such as oil sands extraction and CTL more environmentally palatable. Most of the CO2 captured by the algae will eventually be released into the air when the fuel created from it is consumed, but at least more useful energy is ultimately extracted from the original fossil fuel, and therefore not as much needs to be used.

Another way to cut down on CO2 would be to stop the destruction of the rain forests, and try to revive the ones that have been razed. Is it just me, or why am I suprised I don't hear more about that?

Regarding coal plants, they cut back on production, but there's a still a minimum base load that needs to be maintained. For that matter, we could run a lot of PHEVs on just the excess based load that is not being used. So, until we ramped up total production considerabley, the net co2 impact of the early PHEVs could be zero.

READ "BIG COAL"

This study will hardly be surprising to anyone here, but it will be nice to have a study to point to when someone less informed gives me the old "pollution elsewhere" argument about my BEV.

I am enthusiastic about this study, and about PHEV technology in general. I continue to resist the urge to void the warranty on my Prius, but I don't know how long I'll hold out.

Still, I'm nervous about some of the study's assumptions. The authors assume that PHEV-60 is available. That's a tall order.

Furthermore, I once did a calculation which suggests that Americans can't all drive PHEV-60's at this time anyway, not without building more power plants. I concluded that putting a PHEV-10 in everyone's driveway was practical today, but not much more than that. I'll provide details if anyone wants them.

Building more power plants to service PHEV could defeat the purpose of avoiding CTL. Renewable energy would be best, of course. But we would be likely to see more natural gas and coal plants constructed. These would add to pollution, CO2 emissions, and could decrease our energy independence.

I would have liked to see an analysis which included PHEV-10 and PHEV-25, so that we could see whether the benefits of PHEV can be obtained at an earlier, more achievable stage.

The chance such an academic study will talk louder than money from the coal industry is almost zero. All we can do is write to our senators and at least bring their attention to it. Right now the coal industry is trying to get a goverment garuantee for purchases over the next 25 years...

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0917FD3F540C7A8EDDAC0894DF404482

DS if what you posted is true I wonder what the powers of the USA country are smoking on a day to day basis... how the **** can you just ban something that's renewable and clean? Better yet WHY THE **** MAKE IT A CRIME? WTF ARE YOU SMOKING DOOD?

Go BTL, for ICEs, then transition to biomass fired electric plants as PHEV and EV gain market penetration. Use IGCC setups for electric generation and liquid/gas fuels production.

Unfortunately, the American Wind Energy Association losses a lot of credibility with people like me when they state things like "one thousand times lower than bird mortality associated with house cats." Anyone that has read about the problem knows that the issue has nothing to do with how many versus how many twitty birds fluffy eats. The problem is that in ill suited locations, such as Altamont pass in California, many environmentally sensitive species of birds, particularly raptors such as hawks and eagles, are being killed. In certain other locations bats can be put in unnecessary harms way.

While THIS particular piece of legislation may indeed be an anti-wind ploy requiring inspections that are then not funded, if after all these years people have known this issue it's only the AWEA's fault for not having already come up with workable regulations. They state that the Audubon Society supports wind power, they don't state that Audubon opposes this bill. I would tend to check with someone like Audubon and see what their view is of this bill rather than trust the AWEA position.

Its amazing how ready some are to swallow nonsense.

Wind Power is NOT pollution free. Wind is just a manifestation of the world trying to equalize temperature extremes in weather. If you steal energy from the wind, you steal energy from this equalization process, condemning some places to so-called bad effects; "hot spots" to "global warming" and cool spots to "global cooling". That is elementary Thermodynamics for any thtat managed to graduate without a modicum of Science training.

Please dig the dirt of the kindergarten level ecology you've been taught out of your ears.

Like "Coal is BAD". "WIND is pollution Free and GOOD". Please use the noggin that you came equipped with for a change.

Every Energy extracting method has some drawbacks. Every single one. The measure of how much of want you want is created, versus what you don't want (where the bad side effects usually occur) is called efficiency. Hence, the least meretritious methods are generally the most efficient ones. So those that produce least side effects by being efficient, are generally more benign.

Wind energy extrtaction is not very efficient. Lots of effort for not much return. So you need lots of installations, over lots of territory, to accomplish much. Is it any wonder that windfarms end up being a visual blots on the landscape? Or that they kill lots of Birds? Or that they are difficult to maintain? Or that they must be tax-subsidized to waste resources constructing them? Or that soon after the subsidized tax benefits expire, and they break down, it is too expensive to repair them? Aand they become junkyards on the skyline?