Siemens Looking To $1 Million To Fuel A Single Car -- July 2, 2015; Part III

Top 20 selling cars in the US, most recent reporting period (approximate sales, rounded):

• Ford F-series P/U, 60,000 (slight drop; working Americans)
• Chevy Silverado P/U: 50,000 (a pop in sales; working Americans)
• Toyota Camry: 40,000 (a slight drop; a sign of struggling economy)
• Ram P/U: 30,000 (no change; working Americans)
• Toyota Corolla: 30,000 (no change; low end of the market)
• Nissan Altima: 30,000 (nice pop; maybe a shift from Toyota Camry to Nissan Altima, cost?)
• Honda Civic: 30,000 (big drop; a shift to newer makes/models; folks getting tired of the Civic?)
• Honda CR-V: 30,000 (nice pop; cross-over; okay with adequate crude oil supply)
• Honda Accord: 30,000 (big drop, see Honda Civic)
• Hyundai Elantra: 25,000 (up 55%; best bang for buck; struggling economy?)
• Ford Fusion: 25,000 (big drop; see Honda Civic)
• Toyota RAV4: 25,000 (big jump; see Honda CR-V)
• Ford Escape: 25,000 (down a bit; less worry about price of gasoline going forward)
• Nissan Rogue: 20,000 (rising fast; huge jump; what is the Rogue? an all-new cross-over)

Tarantino Soundtrack

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This is not a good sign for the EV movement when even The Huffington Post can see through this charade. The HuffPost is reporting:

The idea that gasoline cars might cause less environmental harm than electric vehicles seems impossibly backwards. But consider the following thought experiment before you dismiss it out of hand.

A view from the tailpipe gives EVs a clear edge: no emissions, no pollution, no problem. Shift the view to that of a smokestack, though, and we get a much different picture. The EV that caused no environmental damage on the road during the day still needs to be charged at night. This requires a great deal of electricity generated by a power plant somewhere, and if that power plant runs on coal, it’s not hard to imagine it spewing more emissions from a smokestack than a comparable gas car coughed up from a tailpipe.

So the truth of the matter hinges on perspective—and, it turns out, geography. That’s the sobering lesson from an incredibly sophisticated new working study by a group of economists. Using a fine-grained, county-level measure of U.S. vehicle emissions traced to tailpipes and electricity grids, the researchers mapped where gas cars and EVs cause more respective pollution.

In some places electrics do so much relative harm that instead of being subsidized, as is currently the case, they should actually be taxed.

“What we find is that the benefits are substantially different depending on where you are in the country,” study co-author Stephen Holland of the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, tells CityLab. “The real big take-home message is: location, location, location.”

And that's why EVs are called "coal-burning cars." 

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Thank Goodness For Comments

When I read a story like this, I need help putting it into perspective. First the story, reported by Reuters:

Siemens will on Thursday start an energy project to convert wind power into hydrogen for re-use as a general fuel or in natural gas pipelines.

Siemens' electrolysis plant in Mainz  (Germany) is based on Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) technology, which allows the capture and storage of electricity into hydrogen.

It said the plant can process up to 6 megawatts of electricity, making it the biggest PEM installation of its kind worldwide and able to supply 2,000 fuel cell cars.

So, what does this mean? Sounds like they sold the idea for a wind farm to test this technology but in fact are using it for tax credits. Not many fuel cell cars out there yet. 

Fortunately my good friend Andrew provided the perspective:

Interesting tech but how much does this factory cost? Its impossible to evaluate this without knowing the cost of the plant itself.

Great it can process 6 MW of electricity (which isn't very much in the grand scheme of things).

Now if it costs $2 billion then that is $1million per car that it can fuel. That is not a very smart way to spend $2 billion!

Even if the plant gets it down to $200 million that is still $100,000 per car that it can fuel.

Now I have a Prius that is coming up on 200,000 miles and its getting pretty old and worn down. I have averaged 45 mpg over the life of the car. That means I have bought about 4500 gals of gas to fuel that car. At an average cost of $3/g that comes to $13,500 spent on fueling that car over its useful life.

Even at 15mpg like a lot of SUVs get that is still only $40,000 spent on fuel over the life of the car. If we use that as the break even point where this tech starts to make economic sense then the plant can only cost $80 million and ideally should cost considerably less as it also needs to make a profit if it is going to attract the kind of investment it will take to spread this all around the world.

I will grant that its an emerging tech and that always costs more in the early days but unless Siemens has projections that show they could 1) scale this up so that a lot more of these plants could be made and 2) that the costs could get below $80 million per plant then this is just a glorified science project. NEED COST NUMBERS TO KNOW! 

Friends In Low Places, Garth Brooks