The Saint is a bit of a closet environmentalist (but don’t get him started on the subject of the carbon tax or this column could go on forever). He’s also an optimist who believes technology will tame the twin threats of global warming and diminishing fossil fuel supplies before humanity is forced back to the
Stone Age.
So this week’s
report that
Siemens is developing an inductive charging system for electric car batteries caught the eye. The company is working with BMW on a system that can be incorporated into roads so that when electric cars park they can boost the batteries.
Siemens says it’s developing the technology because “one big obstacle to the use of electric vehicles is the lack of extensive and reliable charging infrastructure”.
This is something of an understatement because it’s not one big obstacle, it’s the big obstacle. And it leads on to a major point in the debate about electric vehicles: are the automotive manufacturers guilty of trying to boost their green credentials by rolling out a technology that hasn’t been properly thought through?
Electric cars have some obvious advantages; for example, they produce no noxious emissions. But your correspondent wonders if – when everything is taken into consideration – today’s electric vehicles end up generating more carbon than a car powered by an ultra-efficient internal combustion engine.
Just manufacturing an electric vehicle, assuming it’s powered by Li-ion batteries that use Lithium mined in South America (at no small environmental cost) that then has to be shipped halfway round the planet, could well be more energy intensive than assembling a conventional car.
And that’s without considering where the power to charge those batteries is likely to come from. In Australia, certainly for the near future, the electricity would be generated in a coal-fired power station – hardly the carbon-freest technique for energy production.
Your correspondent will readily admit he hasn’t done the maths to determine if an all-electric car would be more environmentally friendly than an efficient, lightweight, internal combustion-engined vehicle over its entire life (including manufacture, maintenance, operation and disposal). But he wonders if proponents of electric cars (or hybrid-, hydrogen- or fuel cell-powered vehicles for that matter) are guilty of not doing the calculations either.
Perhaps today’s automotive engineers should focus on designing fossil fuel-powered vehicles that are ultra-efficient, cleaner, lighter, simpler and more recyclable as a greener way forward than plunking electric vehicles in car showrooms without supporting infrastructure. The fact that there are facilities for supporting conventional vehicles next to virtually every supermarket in Australia adds considerable weight to this argument.
Better Place Australia, which describes itself as “a global company dedicated to zero emissions driving,” that plans to “enable the mass adoption of electric cars in Australia by providing the infrastructure and services that make it easy, affordable and attractive for motorists to adopt and drive electric vehicles,” did respond to
Electronics News’request for information on the carbon footprint of an electric vehicle.
Due to short deadlines, the company didn’t have enough time to put together a detailed argument, but did, in a statement, put up a sterling defence of the electric car.
On the subject of Lithium-ion batteries, the company notes that modern EV batteries will have long lives powering vehicles, followed by a ‘second life’ helping to stabilise the power grid, supporting the expansion of clean, renewable energy and reducing carbon emissions from electricity production.
And when it comes to carbon emissions, it seems internal combustion engines do have some way to go to clean up their act. According to Better Place Australia, “[petrol] vehicles are a major contributor to carbon emissions in the developed world, accounting for 33 percent of carbon emissions in the U.S. and as much as 50 percent of carbon emissions in some of the countries in Europe. In Australia, transport is the second most significant contributor to carbon emissions, producing 14 percent of overall carbon emissions”.
The company went on to say that switching to electric cars powered by renewable energy sources, such as wind, is considered to be one of the most effective available ways of reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Every 100,000 electric cars (powered by renewable energy) would reduce approximately 400,000 tons [363,600 tonnes] of carbon emissions from the atmosphere per year. Note that Better Place does concede that the key to these carbon savings is a combination of electric cars and renewable energy sources.
The Saint wonders what readers think: more efficient conventional vehicles or electric cars? Perhaps a combination of both is the way forward. Your comments are welcome.
Of Universities and graduates
Elsewhere this week, the Saint was intrigued by an
item that reported the rankings of universities according to the quality of their electrical and electronic engineering education.
It seems that your correspondent’s
fears about the calibre of students leaving our country’s schools aren’t compounded by the performance of higher education facilities. The report notes that Australian universities generally put in a strong performance, with 15 ranking in the top 200 for the category.
The top ten is dominated by ‘ivy league’ (if not
the Ivy League) institutions such as MIT, Stanford and Harvard in the U.S., and Cambridge, Oxford and Imperial College in the U.K. The University of Melbourne is the
top Australian school, coming in at number 15.
Perhaps this is to be expected, after all, the top performers are rich, august institutions with long histories. Even the youngest (Imperial) is over a century old. What was unexpected, though, was the paucity of Asian Universities in the top 200.
Granted, the National University of Singapore is ranked at 10, and the University of Hong Kong comes in at number 21 (notably, both trace their roots to institutions founded by British colonists), but the first Chinese university (Peking) is at number 36, and the first Indian institution (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) is in 41st place. There are just seven mainland Chinese universities in the top 200 list, less than half the Australian total.
It would be smug to conclude, then, that while Chinese and Indian Universities are churning out hundreds of thousands of engineering graduates a year the quality of the few thousand leaving Australia’s universities will be higher.
This may be true today, but like all things associated with the development of China and India, you can be sure things will improve. It would be interesting to go back and check last year’s rankings to see how the positions have changed, but, sadly, this is the first year this particular league has been published. But you can be sure your correspondent will be poring over the 2012 table as soon as it’s out.
Perhaps we shouldn’t read too much into the results though; even the Vice-Chancellor of Australia’s top ranked university, Melbourne’s Professor Glyn Davis advises caution.
“While celebrating these results, we all appreciate that rankings are imprecise, volatile, and focus on different aspects of university performance and reputation,” he notes on the university’s website, adding “rankings are not the only indicator of an institution’s value.”