Good grief: COAL-powered 2011 Chevrolet Volt named Green Car of the Year

from theblogprof by The blogprof


Good grief: COAL-powered 2011 Chevrolet Volt named Green Car of the Year: "

Last week Motor Trend has beclowned itself and insulted its readers by choosing the Chevy Volt - a car that hasn't sold a single unit on the open market and for which the government has to pay consumers $7.500 to buy - it's 'Car of the Year. It's award is not about technology or style, but rather about Obamunist propaganda. These prizes for the Chevy Volt are marketing stunts and nothing more. Add another award to this list of the farcical: 2011 Chevrolet Volt named Green Car of the Year

The 2011 Chevrolet Volt was named Green Car Journal's 2011 Green Car of the Year — the first-ever electric vehicle to take the top prize.

Except that it's not an electric car but rather a series hybrid with the capability of becoming a parallel hybrid under certain conditions. Nowhere in either this award article or in prior one is last year's claim that the Volt gets 230 miles per gallon (Confirmed: Chevy Volt 230 mpg claim is bs).

Granholm has called any criticism of the Chevy Volt 'un-American,' but I would be remiss if I didn't point out the environmental downside of the technology that is being touted as an advancement for green cause. Going electric or plug-in hybrid will simply offset some gasoline with coal. Not the best trade-off in my opinion but there it is. From another News piece: DuPont to help automakers reduce dependency on fossil fuels

With 20 percent of DuPont's annual sales in automotive applications, DuPont for example is working on developing new technologies to help extend the life of electric vehicle batteries and make them safer. The company also continues to work with automakers to help cut fossil fuel dependence...

Converting a car to hybrid may in fact save 120 million gallons of fuel per day (a number that some environmental groups have been claiming), but that will come at the cost of using a whole lot of coal. Let's do a bit of math. Gasoline weighs 8 lb per gallon and has an energy content of 47 MJ/kg. Coal is at 30 MJ/kg. To get the same amount of electrical energy as that in 120 million gallons of gasoline, it would take about 1,840 million pounds of coal assuming a power plant efficiency of 33%! That is nearly 1 million tons of coal! Extra! That is, beyond what we are using now! The overall efficiency of coal power including transmission losses and losses due to charging and discharging a battery is no better than a modern spark-ignition internal combustion gas engine, and falls far short of the efficiency of a diesel. It's not an environmental winner by any stretch of the imagination (Government report: electric cars won’t reduce carbon emissions and likely create more). And let's not forget where lithium comes from for lithium-ion batteries:

As for the lithium, Bolivia, under the thumb of its leftist leader Evo Morales, has about half the world's proven reserves. 'The United States has supplies of lithium, but if demand for lithium exceeded domestic supplies,' warns the GAO, 'the U.S. could substitute reliance on one foreign source (oil) for another (lithium).'

Then there are environmental consequences. Just as coal and oil must be extracted from the earth, so must lithium. 'Extracting lithium from locations where it is abundant, such as South America, could pose environmental challenges that would damage the ecosystem in this area.'

So in totality, switching from gasoline-powered vehicles to battery-powered or partly battery powered vehicles will switch our dependence from one set of bad guys to another, and without nuclear will simply make the pollution problem far worse, not better. In addition, with cap-and-trade potentially coming down the pike of bills signed into law, electricity will be far more expensive than it is now, thus providing a disincentive for the switch. Which may in fact be a silver lining without more nukes.

Previously:
Nobel Peace Prize given to Obama's expensive, coal-guzzling car that the government has to pay you $7,500 to buy and hasn't sold one unit yet on open market
Detroit Free Press clueless that the Chevy Volt is a hybrid
Video of Granholm: Criticizing the Chevy Volt is un-American!
Top auto supplier CEO: Government too focused on electric vehicles, 'ignoring' other technologies
Video: 'The Truth About Cars' Editor Edward Niedermeyer on why the Chevy Volt is a $41,000 electric lemon
That $41,000 price tag for the Chevy Volt? Could be $61,000
Robert Gibbs: Hey - I bet Rush Limbaugh doesn't drive one of those awesome GM F-150s
Granholm to Congress: Put battery incentives in energy bill because it will do for jobs nationally what it did for jobs in Michigan
Obama comes to Michigan, touts money he's giving to KOREAN battery plant to create jobs at $504,667 each
Irony: Michigan touts electric cars for economic growth, but denies permits for power plants to charge them
Detroit News: Buyers won't recoup extra cost of electric vehicles, but electric vehicles will save Michigan's economy or something
Confirmed: Chevy Volt 230 mpg claim is bs
Side-splitting headline of the day: GM touts Volt with 230 mpg city rating (by using Enron accounting methods)
Another Plug-In Hybrid False Mileage/Energy Savings Claim
Government report: electric cars won’t reduce carbon emissions and likely create more
UNTRUE! - Enron Accounting on the 100 mpg Hummer H3
DetNews: 12 projects expected to create 2,900 jobs

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