Blessed by the Potato

I was woken up this morning at 10 am by a knocking at the door. Crawling out of bed to answer it, I found a confused woman “This… this isn’t the Erskine house, is it?”

Damned Erskines, we keep getting their mail — same street number, one block away, both streets start with the same letter, and their postal code is only one (very similar looking) letter off of ours. Of course, I bring their mail up to them, but they’ve never had to re-deliver our stuff. I haven’t noticed anything missing, but I would be surprised if the mail was never lost in the other direction.

Now we’re getting their visitors, too!

Damned Erskines.

After slacking off for a (busy, rainy) week, I finally managed to hit the bike trails today on a lovely June evening. I managed to hit 10 k fairly easily, which made me feel good — hopefully I’ll have some time to rent a bike while on vacation and keep up with it. The dandelion fluff was sailing through the air, rather heavily in parts — like dandelion snow (which, BTW, WMAGNFARB — a Dave Barryism that has suddenly become very important in our world as all the names I can think of for Rock Band names are taken on Xbox Live).

Tim from Canadian Dream made a minor mistake last week in his thoughts on electric cars. “Where are you getting the power to fuel the cars? …Depending on…”

Ah, “Depending on”. I love those words, they open up so many possibilities for playing with numbers and outlining scenarios. They can make life so interesting.

Really the only factor Tim discusses is where the power comes from: coal is dirtier than other sources like hydroelectric or natural gas, so, he concludes, maybe you shouldn’t get an electric car if you live somewhere where there’s a lot of coal generation. After all, electric cars aren’t completely clean, they get their juice from the grid. The thing is, that’s one of the few variables that isn’t a factor in making the decision to go to an electric car — several studies I’ve seen have said that electric cars are so much more efficient that they always beat out regular gas cars, even if 100% of the power comes from coal [though other studies, such as the german WWF one, indicate that for real-world power mixes electric cars beat out gassers, but may narrowly emit more CO2 on 100% coal — but that’s with a highly optimistic 6.6 L/100 km fuel consumption assumed for the gas car; they figure an electric car on coal would produce 200 g of CO2/km, and a gas car only 160 g/km — but for the US, the average is 210-250 g/km, and probably higher for real-world driving]. With the really efficient hybrids it becomes more of a toss-up, but still not something you need to worry about with all the other factors to consider.

Why is that? Well, first off thousands of tiny internal combustion engines on the road is a fairly inefficient way to move people around: in the best case, a conventional car is only about 25% efficient (at most). That is, only about 25% of the energy in the gasoline gets translated into actually moving the car (and none of it when you’re idling/creeping in construction season). Hybrids do better (especially those with atkinson-cycle engines), topping 30%, to as much as 37% efficiency (and perhaps touching 40% for the 2010 Prius). Now, here’s where my numbers differ from Tim’s: I’ve heard that properly run coal power plants can top 50% thermal efficiency, whereas Tim says in the comments it’s 30-40% — if that’s the case then a hybrid can beat out an all-electric in cases with high levels of coal use.

Now of course, even if the thermal efficiency is higher, you have to consider that coal has more carbon emissions per unit of energy than oil does — but then, even Alberta isn’t a 100% coal-fired province (though it is up around 75%).

Plus there are other pollutants to consider beyond just carbon dioxide: just like having a tiny engine is inefficient, having a tiny exhaust scrubber is also inefficient, so you can generally get fewer bad things out of a centrally-managed power plant than a distribution of cars (pollutants like nitric oxide, carbon monoxide, etc). You also shift those pollutants from sidewalk level in the downtown core to a distant location where the power plant is — good for the people living in the cities, even if it’s a wash to the atmosphere. Coal may have more sulphur and mercury though. By charging off-peak, the extra demand can actually help improve the power grid by smoothing out the demand (and with a smart grid, electric cars could give back power when needed).

Now that’s sort of the worst-case scenario for electrics, and even there they might lose out to hybrids on some counts, but at worst it’s a wash with a gasser. But most provinces do have cleaner energy mixes than that in real life (and Albertans aren’t reading this anyway) — this a no-brainer factor.

So what are the other “depending on” factors?

Cost: hey, batteries are expensive, and at this point electric cars are limited-production items, so the up-front cost is often steep. Since electricity is cheaper than gas, joule-for-joule, in every locale I know of (or at least, mile-for-mile), you can do a lifecycle analysis and may find that in the long-term an electric will be a wash or even cheaper, but the upfront cost is a hill to overcome, especially if you need to install 220V service or a special charger in your garage. That analysis gets worse if you move a lot.

Access to charging: It might be nice to charge at work or the mall, but probably isn’t strictly necessary. However, if you live in an apartment building (or even a house with street parking rather than a driveway/garage), odds are an electric car won’t work for you just because you don’t have good access to charging.

Going Off-Grid: No one I know has their own oil refinery in their backyard (Reggie would, but it’s against the condo bylaws), but if you want to be self-sufficient (for instance, to get away from the coal use in your local grid), you can install your own solar panels or wind generator or other renewable energy source and charge your car at home.

Range: Electric cars will have a limited range, and until fast charging stations or battery swaps become common-place, that’s probably going to make range the #1 “depending on” issue for people considering an electric car. They won’t work for everyone, but the fact is most people do most of their driving in a very limited area: to work, to the mall, to the curling club, home again. For something like 95% of trips people make, the range on an electric will suffice. Many households also have more than one car, so an electric commuter and a larger, gas (or hybrid)-powered “cottage van” would probably work.

Practicality: Batteries have much lower energy density than gasoline, so they take up a fair bit of space. This makes the equivalent electric car slightly less practical than a gasoline one. Plus, electric cars tend to be tweaked for efficiency (small, often 2-seater commuter vehicles). This is not a requirement of electric cars — there’s nothing really stopping one from making an electric Cadillac Escalade, it’s just that the batteries and motors to make that behemoth move (esp. with any kind of decent acceleration) would be prohibitively expensive. Although it would greatly improve the handling and roll-over characteristics since you tend to put the batteries in the floor.

Maintenance: Even though it only takes seconds, some people just don’t like the idea of having to plug in every night. On the flip side, electric cars have much fewer maintenance requirements: no oil changes, no exhaust testing, no belts to replace, no spark timing to fiddle with, no air intake filter. You’ll still have to remember to do your cabin air filter and top up the washer fluid periodically, and eventually the friction brakes will need servicing, but they’ll likely last 4 or 5 times longer thanks to the reduced wear with regenerative braking.

Canadian Winters: I wish I could say for sure that batteries have no problem with Canadian winters, but unfortunately, your range will be cut down if only from the energy needed to run a heater (not a problem gas cars typically have since 75+% of their energy is lost to heat anyway). High-voltage batteries do look to perform better than the lead-acid starter battery in your car, and the car will run, but more real-world testing is still going to be needed. But other than that it doesn’t look like there will be any major problems.

Battery Chemistry: Nickel-metal batteries are a time-tested technology that have been working great in automotive applications, from the EV-1 and Rav4 EVs to the variety of hybrids on the road today such as the Prius, Insight, Civic, Escape, etc. They last essentially the life of the car with very few failures. However, due to some bad politicking, they are patent-protected by a company that seems to have little interest in selling batteries affordably, or possibly at all. So pretty much all electric cars are going with either older lead-acid batteries or new lithium-ion batteries. While lithium ion batteries are lighter and can put out more power, they don’t have the track record yet to say for sure that the heat issues have been solved or that they can last for a long time (they may have a time decay/aging as well as decaying with use/mileage).

Existence: For now, there really aren’t many choices for electrics. Most of the new ones (like the Zap and the Zenn) are “glorified golfcarts” or neighbourhood electric vehicles — low-speed cars that are not capable or safety-rated for highway speeds. That adds extra limitations, making it harder to settle for one — and of course, they’re only legal in two provinces. There are some Rav4EVs from the late 90’s CARB zero emission experiment rolling around, and from the sounds of things they seem to be in great shape still… but very few of them are offered for sale (hey, their owners were the fanatics who got an electric car in the 90’s!). The Volt, though a PHEV, is a powerpoint dream that’s perpetually just a year away… and that doesn’t look any rosier with GM in bankruptcy. Which pretty much leaves the Tesla. Their roadster has the usual limitations of a two-seater sports car, including a hefty price tag. They’ve unveiled their model S, a luxury sedan to come soon (and I desperately want to see how they wedged those kiddie seats in there to make it a 5+2 seater, ’cause I just don’t believe it from the exterior shots). A variety of others are in the works, such as a mystery car from Nissan (and I for one fully expect the Honda Clarity to surprise! come out as an EV in a few years, since it’s basically an EV now with a fuel cell where the battery should be… the hydrogen fuel cell test car is a clever smoke screen for the competition). There are a few do-it-yourself kits — I’ve seen a 1980’s-vintage Civic at Sunnybrook that was converted to electric, with the trunk and backseat replaced with an array of lead-acid batteries — as well as garages that will rip the gas engine out of a car for you and do a full conversion (a PriusChat member recently gave his Porsche that treatment).

PHEV: Plug-in hybrids, through conversions and maybe soon OEMs (Volt??) will let you have your cake and eat it too: you can have a reduced all-electric range (and reduced all-electric speed in the case of the Prius conversions), perhaps just enough for your daily commute, letting you run cleanly (and cheaply?) off the grid for most of your driving, while having the security blanket of a gas engine that gives you the essentially unlimited range our current cars and gas station infrastructure provide.

They’re not going to work for everybody, but if they work for even 50% of the 66% of families with more than one car then we’d off to a flying start.

Hmm, I don’t know how I have a whole post on EVs and didn’t manage to link to Darell’s EVnut page. There you go.

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Sam Raimi’s Drag Me To Hell is a horror movie in fine form. It was genuinely scary (mostly startling with a decent level of suspense), accomplished almost entirely through music, camera angles, and facial expressions. The man knows his craft.

I don’t have too much to criticize one way or the other, except to say…

Spoiler warning!

…that the old gypsy woman was really over-used, especially once she was dead. Ok, the first time she showed up in the bed it was a dream so it was ok, but the next few visions of her (such as in the shed) while the girl was awake were just getting silly; I would have preferred at that point if the Ilyma spirit took over as the boogeyman at that point.

Here’s an interesting question: if there’s some chance that any given cell in your body will turn cancerous per unit time, then if you have more cells, and you live longer, it follows that you have a higher chance of getting cancer. If you extend beyond a human to something big and long-lived, like an elephant or a whale, you wonder: why don’t all whales have cancer?

This is called Peto’s Paradox, and is an interesting one I just heard about.

In fact, cancer is not homogenous across species — humans get it at about 10 times the rate of any wild species. This is partly due to civilization: we don’t die as young from other natural causes, so cancer gets more of a shot to kill us, and of course our penchant for frolicking in toxins (pet dogs and St. Lawrence belugas also get cancer at a higher rate for similar reasons). But even then cancer is not homogeneous: various tissues have different propensities to cancer based in part on genetics, hormones, and environmental exposure (for instance, aside from skin cancers, there aren’t a lot of UV-light caused cancers). So in one sense part of the reason for the paradox is that one of the base assumptions — that any given cell has the same chance to turn cancerous — isn’t quite true.

But the special case of humans (and our domesticated animals) aside, why is it that a wild mouse and a wild whale still have fairly similar rates of cancer? Have whales evolved a resistance to cancer that we should investigate, or could it be related somehow to a fast/slow metabolism (there’s more than one research source that suggests a low-calorie diet for longevity). A recent paper suggests otherwise: that hypertumours (tumours that form inside other tumours) may come into play when you start dealing with larger tumours. After all, a golf-ball sized tumour can kill a person, but would probably go unnoticed in a whale, where it might take something the size of a volkswagen to sink it. In the time it takes that tumour to grow, perhaps a secondary tumour would spring up and feed on the first! It’s an interesting proposal, and the topic of a recent paper.

Complicating this is the interaction between cancer and infectious disease: certain viruses (such as HPV) can increase the likelihood of getting certain cancers. If viruses underlie more cancers than we think, it might explain why the cancer rate is so similar across species of such different sizes.

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