Living Like Ed (11 page)

I charge my Phoenix Motorcars sport utility truck using my home’s solar power.

AREN’T YOU JUST MOVING THE POLLUTION TO THE POWER PLANT?

Of course, not everyone has a solar power system that can charge their electric car. Most people purchase their electricity from their utility company.

Naysayers will tell you that electric cars just shift the pollution from a car’s tailpipe to an electricity-generating power plant’s smokestack, but here again I think the upside far outweighs any downside, and I’ll explain why. There are three reasons you’re not just moving the same pollution to the power plant:

1.         
YOU’RE MAKING USE OF OFF-PEAK CHARGING, WHICH IS HIGHLY EFFICIENT AND WHICH CREATES NO NEW POLLUTION.
When you’re charging an electric car, you’re making use of an incredible inefficiency that none of the naysayers talk about. Anybody who knows anything about power generation—talk to the people who run Southern California Edison, the Department of Water and Power, Duke Power—will tell you the same thing. All big power plants have excess capacity during off-peak hours that is not being utilized. We’re not talking about a little Honda generator that is shut down at night when there’s less demand. These big power plants run all night—they have to, just given the nature of the way they were constructed, the way they’re maintained, and the way they work. At some power plants,
some
of the generators can be shut down, but most keep them
all
running all night.

To deal with this excess capacity, utility companies build
shedding facilities.
They get rid of the extra power that’s generated at night—since most power plants keep producing power at the same rate 24/7, and since peak usage for electricity occurs in the middle of the day.

So a shedding facility uses up all that extra power at night. In the L.A. area, a shedding facility actually pumps water uphill at night from Lake Castaic to Lake Hughes. They pump water uphill at night! Did you know that? They pump it uphill at night, and then they run it downhill during the day when they need power.

Why do they do this? Because they have these big generators that are running all night that produce
wasted
electrons. Were they liquid, someone would be literally pouring these wasted electrons down a storm drain.

Utility companies are making lots of electricity that’s wasted. That’s why they’re always asking their customers, “Can you do your laundry at night? Can you vacuum later in the day?” In general, you should try to time as much of your electricity use as you can for off-peak hours. Some appliances can be set to go on later, like your breadmaker. Using power off-peak means you are using power that would otherwise be wasted rather than making the power company make more, and that’s very efficient.

And this is why there’s less pollution from an electric car, even if you’re not charging it on solar. You’re making use of these free electrons, not adding to the energy drain on the power grid during peak hours. Unless you work at an all-night doughnut shop or a twenty-four-hour pharmacy, you’re probably going to be driving during the day and you’ll recharge your car’s battery at night. You may do a little bit of charging during the day, but by and large you’re going to come home and plug in the electric car; that’s off-peak. You’re not causing the utility company to produce more electricity, you’re using what they’re already producing that goes unused.

Now, keep in mind, when we hit a million electric vehicles on the road, that will be a different story. Then we’ll need to get some new solar, wind, geothermal, or other kind of green energy going into the grid to keep all these electric cars charged. But for now, there’s a lot of perfectly good energy going to waste out there. In fact, enough to power up to a million new electric cars—if they were spread out evenly across the country—without creating any new pollution.

2.         
IT’S MUCH EASIER TO CONTROL POLLUTION AT ONE POWER PLANT THAN IT IS IN A MILLION TAILPIPES.
People monkey around with the emission controls on their cars. They give the guy at the smog-check station some bills and say, “I need to pass this test.” You can’t do that at a power plant. I mean, there are power plants that have tried to do that—to cheat—but they’re in violation and are going to court. It’s much harder to control a million tailpipes than it is one smokestack.

3.         
AND ALSO—I SAVED THE BEST FOR LAST—25 PERCENT OF THE GASOLINE CONSUMED BY EVERY CAR OUT THERE IS USED WHEN IT’S NOT EVEN IN MOTION!
It’s called idling, and it uses up 25 percent of the gasoline you pump into the tank.

Here’s why. You’re usually not driving across the plains of Nebraska. If you live in a city like L.A., there’s constant stop-and-go traffic. You sit at the stoplight or the stop sign, waiting for people to cross the street. All the while, your car needs gas to keep it humming—even though you’re not going anywhere.

With a hybrid or electric car, the minute you take your foot off the accelerator, you’re using zero amps. Zippo. You may have your air conditioner on or your CD player or your lights, but these use very little power. The big demand on the car—the motor—is using no power when you’re stopped, and that’s a
big
efficiency.

Convinced?

AN ELECTRIC CAR’S RANGE

Now, I can’t go everywhere with my electric car, for the simple reason that it can only go so far on a single charge. The range of my last electric car, a Toyota RAV4 EV, was 80 miles under average driving conditions. And that was round-trip—unless I had plenty of time and a charger on the other end (because it can take up to 8 hours to charge an electric vehicle’s battery from empty to full).

Practically, I could only go 40 miles each way in that car. That was enough to get me to most places I would normally drive. For example, it’s a 17-mile drive to Los Angeles International Airport. The other end of the Valley, Chatsworth, is also about 17 miles away. Hollywood is just 7 miles away. Downtown is 13 miles away. Acton, where I often had to go for film shoots, was 38 miles each way. I could make it there and back, but I couldn’t go any farther. If there was roadwork and I had to make a detour, I’d end up charging somewhere.

So yes, an electric vehicle’s finite range is somewhat of a limitation, but it has increased dramatically since my very first electric car, which could go only 15 miles between charges. And battery technology continues to improve. Today, many companies are focused on increasing the amount of energy that can be stored in ever smaller, ever more durable batteries—even batteries that use greener materials. On the one hand, it’s part of an ongoing trend toward miniaturization—things like computers and radios and calculators and cell phones getting ever smaller. And it’s also part of an ongoing trend toward better, smarter batteries that can hold more energy and that don’t need to be fully charged—and fully discharged—each time you use them. You’ve seen improvements like these in your cell phone batteries, digital camera batteries, and laptop computer batteries. Those advances in battery technology mean electric vehicles’ range will no doubt get even better in coming years.

                  So what’s it like to drive an electric car? You turn it on and you hear nothing. It’s a go-kart. It’s very quiet. You get accustomed to the sound of a gasoline engine, so when you turn on the electric car and it just goes
click,
you wonder, “Is it on?” Many times, when we’ve left the car with the valet, they go
click, click, click,
and try to make that
vroom
sound. When we get our car back they say, “It’s broken!” You have to be extravigilant about pedestrians because they can’t hear you coming—there’s no indicator—no beep, beep, beep. That’s the danger of it. But it goes fast. I like it. It’s fun.

And I’m all for Ed’s new electric car. It’s great. The only downside is how far you can go on a charge.

A QUICK HISTORY

Some people think electric vehicles are a new idea, but they’ve been around for centuries. A Scotsman named Robert Anderson invented the first crude electric carriage powered by a nonrechargeable type of battery between 1832 and 1839. Thomas Davenport is credited with building the first practical electric vehicle—not a horseless carriage, but a locomotive—in 1835. Jump ahead to 1891, and William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa, built the first successful electric car in the United States.

Recently, I got to ride in a 1909 Baker electric car owned by Jay Leno. What an amazing vehicle. It was way ahead of its time. Back in 1909, cars didn’t even have electric starters. They had gas headlamps. But this car was
fully
electric. Interestingly, it was designed for women, for them to go shopping, since it was clean and quiet and quite elegant inside, with a vase for fresh flowers and a mirror mounted on the door to check their makeup. It’s incredible just how advanced this car was.

Sadly, by the 1920s, electric cars had lost their allure. Cheap and plentiful gasoline—and the longer range of cars with internal-combustion engines—temporarily made electric cars all but unsalable.

Then we had that first gas crisis in the early 1970s—and, about the same time, people became concerned about pollution—and all of a sudden, there’s an interest in alternative fuels again. The government got involved, too, and began pushing the companies that manufacture automobiles to make vehicles that would get better gas mileage and create less pollution. In 1976 Congress passed the Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Research, Development, and Demonstration Act. Its goal was to encourage development of new technologies, like improved batteries, electric motors, and other hybrid-electric components.

Electric vehicle development really got a boost in 1990, when the California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed the Zero-Emission Vehicle Mandate. It required 2 percent of the vehicles in California to have zero emissions by 1998, and 10 percent by 2003. Unfortunately, CARB was not able to enforce its policy. In 2002 General Motors and Chrysler—along with the Bush administration—sued CARB to repeal the mandate. By 2003 CARB had weakened the mandate to the point that automakers could get zero-emission vehicle credits for non-ZEV vehicles.

Now there’s almost no
incentive
for automakers to develop electric vehicles, which is why GM, Toyota, Ford, Honda—companies that offered electric cars just a few years ago—have all gotten out of the electric car business. They’ve got some interesting pure-electric concept cars, but not one of these companies offers a pure-electric vehicle that you can buy today.

So what are your choices, if you want to drive an electric car? Several smaller companies have been developing electric vehicles on their own. After doing a lot of research, I’ve gotten involved with a company called Phoenix Motorcars. I now drive the company’s sport utility truck (SUT), and I’m a big fan. It’s a five-passenger vehicle, and its new battery technology has increased my range to more than 100 miles per charge. I’ll let my friend Dan Elliott, the company’s CEO, tell you more about it.