Commentary: Be cautious linking extreme weather to climate crisis

Posted on 11/13/2012 by guest contributor

A flooded parking garage in New York City following Hurricane Sandy. (Photo by dsgray16 via Creative Commons)

Many climate advocates hope that the recent bout of extreme weather will awaken Americans to the dangers of climate change.

Advocates and scientists have pointed to superstorm Sandy and the Texas drought as clear and present signs of the climate crisis. Although the public does seem to be taking notice, I fear these efforts could backfire if we do not proceed cautiously with our framing around extreme weather and climate change. Our challenge to solve the climate crisis could become more difficult in the end.

How? Let’s consider where efforts to tie extreme weather to climate crisis might lead: →

Midwest Energy News expanding its reporting ranks

Posted on 05/21/2012 by Ken Paulman

I’m excited to announce that Kari Lydersen, a Chicago-based freelance journalist, will be joining Midwest Energy News as our second Reporting Fellow starting in July.

Regular readers are already familiar with Lydersen’s work. She wrote our first enterprise feature back in January 2011, and has been a regular contributor ever since, offering incisive and diligent coverage on issues including Wisconsin’s wind siting standards, the Chicago clean power ordinance, and the struggles of coal gasification projects in Illinois and Indiana.

In addition to her work for Midwest Energy News, Lydersen has written for the Chicago News Cooperative, OnEarth Magazine, the Chicago Reader and the Washington Post. She’s the author of three books and has taught journalism at Columbia College in Chicago.

In her new role, Lydersen will focus her efforts eastward to Michigan and Ohio, while maintaining an eye on developments in her home state. This position was made possible thanks to generous ongoing support from the Joyce Foundation.

Dan Haugen, our first Reporting Fellow, based in Minneapolis, will continue focusing on the western half of the region.

In the coming weeks, we’ll unveil a new design for Midwest Energy News that will capitalize on our original journalism efforts.

As always, thanks for reading.

Is the EPA out to ‘crucify’ oil and gas companies?

Posted on 04/26/2012 by Ken Paulman

This week, Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe is promoting a video clip he says supports contentions by EPA critics that the agency is capriciously targeting fossil fuel industries.

Conservative websites, and even Politico, are running with Inhofe’s claims that the EPA is using “a ‘crucify them’ strategy” as it enforces pollution rules.

The clip in question features EPA Region 6 Administrator Al Armendariz describing Roman military tactics as an analogy for how an agency can enforce regulations with a small staff – to “hit them as hard as you can” and “make examples out of them.”

I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff…the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years.

And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there.

And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up.

Inhofe says the comments are proof that the agency is conducting a “war on fossil fuels.” Glenn Beck’s news website The Blaze also carries the narrative, saying the video “seems to confirm what many conservatives have long suspected: that the EPA is at war with the oil and gas industries.”

But if you actually watch the video, you’ll notice a few things. First, Armendariz doesn’t mention the oil and gas industries, or any particular industries at all (see update below). Second, and more importantly, what he’s describing is a deterrent effect – “making examples” of a handful of violators to encourage everyone to comply with the law. It’s the same reason all laws – from the speed limit to financial regulations – are selectively enforced (as opposed to having a police officer on every corner), and is a common rationale for, say, capital punishment, which Inhofe supports, incidentally.

Even The Blaze concedes that “it’s obvious Armendariz is simply using over-the-top imagery to deliver a somewhat entertaining (albeit macabre) analogy.” Armendariz has since apologized for the remarks.

So is this a damning indictment of the EPA or a political canard by Inhofe? I encourage readers to watch the video and decide for themselves.

UPDATE: The Daily Oklahoman provides more context for the clip, which came from a meeting in which Armendariz was addressing residents’ concerns about pollution from fracking operations:

According to media accounts of the 2010 town meeting, Armendariz was in Dish [TX] to address residents’ concerns about air emissions from oil and gas drilling in the Barnett Shale in northern Texas. He also spoke about hydraulic fracturing at the meeting, although he does not specifically mention fracking in the video clip released by Inhofe.

In a statement released Wednesday, Armendariz said, “I apologize to those I have offended and regret my poor choice of words.

“It was an offensive and inaccurate way to portray our efforts to address potential violations of our nation’s environmental laws. I am committed to fair and vigorous enforcement of our nation’s environmental laws.”

Q&A with Maggie Koerth-Baker

Posted on 04/09/2012 by Tom Vandyck

Maggie Koerth-Baker (Photo courtesy Leah Shaffer)

Dealing with the looming energy crunch is more than doable, says Maggie Koerth-Baker, author of the new book Before the Lights Go Out: Conquering the Energy Crisis Before It Conquers Us. We already have the technologies to get started.

All we need to do now is change everything.

Koerth-Baker, a science editor for the website BoingBoing, who was born and raised in Kansas, and now lives in Minneapolis, wrote the book from the perspective of a Midwesterner.

“This is a book about what everybody is doing, not just something for California hippies,” she said, seated in a coffee shop across the street from the old house that she and her energy consultant husband have refitted with pre-programmed thermostats in almost every single room, in her walkable Minneapolis neighborhood, on a busy bus line. “I wanted to talk about how this affects the Midwest, how people in the Midwest think about this stuff, and what they’re doing.”

Before the Light Go Out is not just another rave about electric cars and rooftop solar cells. Koerth-Baker does talk about those things, but above all she takes a long, hard look at the underlying mega-structures that connect all the sexy gadgetry.

“We talk so much about individual technologies, but we don’t talk so much about systems”, she said. “But if you don’t understand how the systems work, you’re not going to understand what the actual problems are, or the solutions.”

Q: Your overarching message is: If we want to do what’s good for us, we have to change everything.

A: Instead of just patching bits and pieces into this system, we have to change the system itself. It’s like your house. You can make your house more energy efficient by replacing a boiler or a dishwasher with something more energy efficient. But if you build a house that makes it really easy for you to save energy, simply because the house itself doesn’t need to use as much, that solves the problem better than just replacing every appliance.

Changing the system is easier said than done. Can we do it?

That’s where I start to get sort of pessimistic. I think we have the technology to do this, and there’s still the possibility that we have the political will to do it. But even if we do that, it’s a coordination job unlike anything we’ve ever done before. Think about the Apollo project. That scale of integration and coordination needs to happen now, but on a much broader level. It would be very, very difficult. I think we’ll do something, but I don’t know if it will be everything we’re capable of doing.

One of the central claims in your book is that you don’t have to believe in climate change to want to do something about energy.

In order to do everything that we can do, you’re going to have to have people buying into climate change more than they do now. But I think that there are a lot of changes that we can make without that kind of public consensus. We don’t have to just sit around twiddling our thumbs until we can get everybody to accept climate change. We can start making changes based on what we can agree on.

Meanwhile, polls show that fewer people believe in climate change now than just a few years ago.

I think there’s a lot of fear behind it. James Inhofe, the Senator from Oklahoma, was on The Rachel Maddow Show recently, where he was talking about how he used to accept climate change, but he decided that he didn’t anymore, because if you believe that climate change is real, and that you had to do something about it, it would just be too expensive. For most people, it’s probably not as conscious as that, but there is a lot of that same reaction. It’s overwhelming. The solutions to this are not easy – they’re hard to wrap your head around, because it’s not just “Replace fossil fuels with magical fuel X.” I think a lot of people get freaked out, and would really just prefer that we don’t have to do anything.

Why did you decide to limit yourself to current technologies for the book? You hardly wrote anything about hydrogen, let alone nuclear fusion, which some scientists claim is now really only ten years away.

I want people to understand that we don’t have to wait for technologies to appear. We already have the technology we need to start making a big difference. While I think we should be doing the R&D on some of these long range things, I think it’s incredibly foolish to sit around hoping that you’re going to have a magic bullet that’s going to solve all your problems.

I think that’s the other reaction you get from people. If they don’t retreat into thinking there’s no problem, they retreat into thinking, “Oh, nuclear fusion will just solve it, and it’s just ten years away, so I don’t have to do anything.” I think it would be great if fusion worked. We should keep trying all these things. But it’s really short-sighted and stupid to count on it.

There is always a lot of talk about giant solar farms and electric cars – the sexy stuff, so to speak. You focus on the things in between: transmission, storage and load management.

My husband is an energy analyst. He figures out how to make buildings as energy efficient as possible for the lowest amount of money. Over the years he kept coming home and talking about things he realized people weren’t getting as he explained how energy worked to his clients. It just started to occur to me that there’s a big gap between what energy experts know and what the general public knows. And as long as the general public doesn’t know what happens between their light switch and the wind farm, they won’t be able to understand what our problems are. A lot of people think about that as boring, so we kind of gloss over it, but it really determines what we can and can’t do with our energy system.

At the same time, more than a few people within the environmental movement believe that climate change and peak oil will lead to a collapse of the current system, and that we will be forced to live in small scale, agrarian communities, closer to the 19th century than the 21st.

I don’t think that’s constructive. A lot of the stuff that I’ve read from that movement is way too excited about the end of the world.

You can’t help but get the feeling that some of the so-called collapsitarians want to be right so badly that they’re almost looking forward to the end of society as we know it.

Yes, and that bothers me. Also, a lot of times, they don’t look at energy the right way. They tend to think that small towns are the most sustainable way to live. No, they’re not. Dense cities are. The people that use the least energy in America right now live in New York City. We have to pay attention to those facts.

We don’t apply the same standard of evidence-based reality to energy, sustainability and the environmental movement that we do to other things. A lot of it comes back to culture and lifestyle. I think it fits in with this very baby-boomer hippie idea of what is good for the environment, but that doesn’t necessarily match up with the data.

In your book, you make short shrift of the idea that getting a Prius and LED light bulbs are sufficient to do one’s part to save the plant.

It was disappointing for me to find out that your individual choices don’t really matter that much. It all comes back to systems. The reason why Europeans use less energy than us isn’t that they’re more moral or just better people, but because they live in these systems that make it easy to use less energy, where you don’t have to think about it. If they had the systems we have, they’d use every bit as much energy as us.

It’s all about incentives, you write. So what are the best incentives to change things in the Midwest?

“This is where it gets tough, because I’m not a policy wonk. I know that if we had more public transportation in the Midwest, fewer people would drive and they’d drive fewer miles. There’s been some good data that show that if you change zoning laws, so that people can build multistory, mixed use buildings, and add more public transportation to that mix, the vehicle miles traveled fall dramatically.

Right now I can get on the bus and go anywhere in Minneapolis, so my husband and I only have one car. But I can’t tell my friends in Kansas City to only have one car, because, frankly, their bus system sucks. If they had just one car, they’d be cutting themselves off from services they need, their community and their jobs. It wouldn’t be fair to expect people to hurt themselves for the environment. We have to make it so that they don’t have to do that.

The conundrum is: How do you get people out of their cars and exurbs, and into buses and dense urban neighborhoods? A carbon tax comes to mind.

I have come to think that that is absolutely necessary. When people ask me, “What is the one change we could make?”, it’s that. I don’t know if “tax” is the right word, but you have to put some kind of price on carbon, and value it at what it’s actually worth, both terms of its value and its cost. All the other stuff that actually needs to happen would follow from that.

Saving money is a better motivator than saving the planet?

For some people it is. I think we have to be careful about how we use that motivator, though, because a lot of the things that we have to do aren’t going to save people money in the short term. But it’s going to save them money in the long term, because of the things you wouldn’t have to deal with in terms of climate change and peak oil.

“Governments make change mandatory, then businesses find a way to make it cheap”, you write.

They do. We saw that with sulfur and CFCs.

There’s a palpable fear among many entrepreneurs and politicians that a carbon tax and/or a cap-and-trade regime would destroy business.

Those other things didn’t. This would be bigger, obviously, but we have seen that when we make these kinds of mandates, it’s cheaper and easier to solve the problem than we thought it would be, because innovation is driven by the incentive to save money. I absolutely believe in the power of business to do that.

Will we have to build new nuclear power plants to buy ourselves time until green technologies mature enough to be scaled up in sufficient ways?

I have started describing my relationship with nuclear as “frenemies.” I think there are some serious issues that have to be addressed in terms of how we do regulation, and I think we need to figure out what the hell we’re doing with the waste. But I don’t think we can get rid of the nuclear power we have. And we’d probably be better off with more nuclear than with more coal and natural gas.

Look, we’re not going to be all solar and all wind any time soon, so you’re going to have to make choices. We have to have mature, non-crazy conversations about what risks we’re willing to take, and which ones we’re willing to live with. Because they all have risks. Coal kills 25,000 Europeans per year.

People are justifiably horrified when nuclear accidents happen, while coal largely flies under the radar. But coal’s human cost, as you describe it in your book, is staggering: Almost ten 9/11s per year, in Europe alone.

The number one problem with coal is respiratory issues — particulate matter in the atmosphere. And you’re also talking about radiation. Coal contains radioactive material, and it does the exact same thing in terms of cancer that a nuclear accident would. So you have to account for that. When you have fossil fuels burning at ground level, you also get ground-level ozone, and that, combined with really hot days, can lead to cardiovascular problems. There are a number of ways in which these things happen, but they happen in ways that we just don’t connect back to the source.

There are several different studies with different estimations of how many people died a result of Chernobyl in all the years since it happened. The lowest is, like, 10,000, the highest is more than 800,000. We can argue about which of those studies is correct, but the point I like to make is that in all but one of those studies the death toll from Chernobyl is still lower than the death toll over the same time period from coal.

If all the things that you’re hoping for in the next few decades actually do happen, what will the Midwest look like?

I think we’ll have denser cities. And we’re going to need better ways of transporting people from city to city. When you’re talking about farmland, you’ll have to have personal transportation. You’re not going to replace that with a bus or a train. But you need some way that those people can take their car shorter distances and then meet up with public transit from there. I think buses or trains could work, or even some kind of van pool, if you’re out in the middle of nowhere, Western Kansas. If we’re all going to the same places, at the same time, than why don’t we pool our resources together?

We’ll also start looking more at: What can our communities do? What resources do they have that can be used for energy? In the book I talk about the idea of having one of those maps from grade school social studies class, where you have water resources over here, and you’ve got wind or trash over there. And then you could try to combine all those resources, based on what’s available.

The Plains states are these great wind systems. Every major area has its landfill that we should be using for landfill gas. Some places can have way more small-scale hydro development than they have now. There’s a ton of different things you can do just based on what’s available in your area.

How about people’s daily lives? Will we all have the proverbial electric car that sits hooked up in the garage and feeds power from our rooftop solar panels back into the grid?

For starters, we’re going to have to think about how our houses are built. If we’re going to make our cities more energy efficient, we’re not going to have houses that are built like they were in the 1950s, with super thin walls, and single pane windows.

You can’t go knocking them down, though.

That’s true. You have to work with what there is. But one of the nice things we have in the Midwest is that we have tons of these 1920s and ’30s houses that have a lot of energy efficiency built into them already. My own house has really good thermal massing because of the stucco walls. Older houses are also generally built with windows that give you heat gain in winter, and light during the day. They’re designed for a way of life where you didn’t have energy so easily accessible. So we can use a lot of that to our advantage now.

Also, battery facilities are going to be all over the place, we’ll have to have energy storage everywhere. And your house is going to have some sort of smart panel where you can be a demand-response customer to the grid, and where you can program that stuff into your house.

We’re just going to have people thinking about energy differently, and we’re going to find ways to do this. Because we have to, for one thing, but also because the Midwest comes from this farming-community background. We value frugality, and we don’t waste stuff just because we can. We want to be responsible with what we have, and I think we’ll find ways to do that.

Maggie Koerth-Baker will appear at an Earth Day Tweetup with Will Steger and Sean Otto at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul on April 21 (click on “events”), and will be interviewed as part of Minnesota Public Radio’s “Bright Ideas” series on April 24.

Tom Vandyck is an international freelance writer based in St. Paul. In addition to being syndicated by the International Features Agency in Amsterdam, his work has appeared in the Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor.

This work by Midwest Energy News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

Is the Chevy Volt’s payback period really 26 years?

Posted on 04/05/2012 by Ken Paulman

The Chevy Volt is much more affordable if you strip it of a few options. (Photo by Wired via Creative Commons)

An article in today’s New York Times looks at different types of hybrid and fuel-efficient cars, arguing that many buyers opting for the more efficient models may take years to see any actual savings.

The article comes with a handy chart, using data from TrueCar. The chart compares the price differences between comparable conventional and hybrid cars, and using a figure of $3.85 per gallon and 15,000 miles driver per year, estimates the number of years it would take to recover the cost difference in gas savings (assuming the price of gas never goes up or down).

For most of the cars TrueCar looks at, the break-even point is ten years or less, well within the typical lifespan of most new cars. But there are two outliers – the Ford Fiesta vs. the Fiesta SFE and the Chevy Volt vs. the Chevy Cruze, both with payback periods in excess of – are you ready? – 26 years.

At this point, if you’re Rush Limbaugh, you’ll be rushing off to the microphone to declare the Volt a waste of money. The rest of you may be wondering if that number is really accurate.

The missing mpg figure

The figures for the Fiesta are pretty clear (and trivial, the cost difference is only a few hundred dollars), but for the Volt, we’re left with a mysterious dash where there ought to be a data point – the assumed mpg.

Working backwards using a spreadsheet, I found that the missing number is 46.7 – that would be the mpg equivalent you would have to achieve with a Volt in order to reach a payback period of 26 years. That seems a tad pessimistic, considering the EPA rates the car at 93 mpg equivalent in electric mode and 37 mpg running on gasoline.

The problem with pinning down a mileage figure for the Volt is that it depends entirely on how much you drive in electric mode. A person driving fewer than 35 miles per day (the Volt’s approximate range on battery power) would theoretically never have to buy gas at all. Some Volt owners have reported average mileage in excess of 1,000 mpg, and figures reported by a handful of Volt owners on fuelly.com run from a low of 77 mpg to as high as 168 mpg.

But wait! You can’t just make estimates based on the cost of gasoline burned – electricity costs money, too.

The EPA says the Volt can go 100 miles on 36 kWh, and for simplicity’s sake, lets assume a cost of 10 cents per kWh. So at 37 mpg (in gasoline mode) with gas at $3.85, the Volt costs about 10 cents per mile to drive on gasoline, versus 3.6 cents per mile on electricity.

Still with me?

Your mileage will vary

To get to that 26-year payback figure, we’d have to assume the Volt was driven 11,000 miles in gasoline mode, but only 4,000 miles in electric mode. Assuming the car exhausts its battery on each trip in order for gasoline mode to kick in, that would mean the car was only driven 114 times each year for an average of 131 miles of driving each day. That’s not very typical driving behavior, unless you’re a part-time pizza delivery driver.

So let’s assume the car is charged and driven every single day. Over a year, that works out to 41 miles per day, 35 in electric mode, 6 in gasoline mode. Again using the spreadsheet, that puts our payback at 11.8 years.

Or, we can assume the car is only driven on weekdays. That means 57.7 miles per day (35 in electric mode and 22.7 in gasoline mode). That would put the payback period closer to 15 years.

And, just for kicks, if you drove the car in electric mode 100% of the time, the payback would be around 10 years – more in line with the other cars in the Times’ comparison.

Now, that’s still a long time, but it’s also based on some other unlikely assumptions – such as, the price of gasoline remaining below $4 for the next decade (anyone willing to wager on that?).

A recent analysis by Edmunds pegged the Volt vs. Cruze payback period at 15 years with gas at $3 per gallon, and 9 years with gas at $5 per gallon, though those numbers seem to have been reached simply by comparing EPA mileage figures.

The bottom line is that the Volt is a different beast, whether it’s a smart financial decision will vary dramatically depending on an individual’s driving habits. In fairness, the Times does make this distinction deep in the text of the story, but no such nuance can be found in the accompanying graphic.

The 26-year payback period that the Times is reporting is based on a pretty unlikely scenario, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Why people are confused about climate change

Posted on 03/23/2012 by Ken Paulman

Temperature departures from average from March 8-15. (NASA image, lazily pilfered from Climate Central)

Last spring, I wrote about how asking whether climate change “caused” a weather event is simply a bad question:

A better question might be, “how likely would this weather event have been if not for global warming?” Or, “as the atmosphere warms, will this sort of thing become more frequent?”

As we are confronted with yet another outbreak of off-the-charts bizarre weather, it doesn’t look like reporters are doing much better on this front. At least, not if this story from yesterday’s New York Times is any indication:

The rapid mating cycle started a few years ago, said Jeffry Mitton, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. He and other researchers blame climate change. Some meteorologists suspect the warm weather is an effect of recent solar flares. Still others say the early spring is part of the weather pattern known as La Niña. And then there is the explanation from the National Weather Service: a large subtropical high-pressure system is lingering above the western Atlantic, blocking cold air from blowing down.

Whatever the reason, the early weather is throwing all kinds of ritual spring activities off kilter.

Wow, can’t those scientists and meteorologists get their acts together?

The problem here is that the reporter is treating these explanations as mutually exclusive, when they’re not (except maybe the solar flare thing). Nothing about the immediate weather phenomena leading to the heat wave is inconsistent with a warming atmosphere.

It’s a bit like saying: “Some say it’s snowing because it’s winter. Others say it’s because there’s moisture falling from the sky. Whatever the reason, we’re going to have some shoveling to do tomorrow!”

It’s frustrating that while the Times has ample column inches to tell us about restaurant patrons who are confused about why they can’t get fresh asparagus in March, it can’t take the two or three sentences needed to make the relationship between weather and climate clear. Andrew Freedman of Climate Central shows how it’s done:

Although studies have not yet been conducted on the main factors that triggered this heat wave and whether global warming may have tilted the odds in favor of the event, scientific studies of previous heat events clearly show that global warming increases the odds of heat extremes, in much the same way as using steroids boosts the chances that a baseball player will hit more home runs in a given year.

See? Not that hard.

There’s a big difference between carefully reflecting the genuine uncertainties of climate science and obtusely sowing confusion about it.

‘Energy Bills’ take fear out of efficiency

Posted on 12/12/2011 by Ken Paulman

In Minnesota, where I live, Xcel Energy offers a really good deal on home energy audits for its customers. For as little as $30, inspectors will check your home’s insulation, windows, doors and heating/cooling system and make recommendations for improving your efficiency. Other utilities throughout the region offer similar programs.

I’ve known about this program for a long time, and like most people, have been putting off taking advantage of it.

That’s because it’s a bit like taking the car to the shop or going to the dentist – there’s probably going to be bad news, and it’s probably going to be expensive. It’s a lot less painful to just put the plastic up on the windows again and live in denial.

That’s where the Energy Bills come in:

The video series, produced by Energy Impact Illinois, features two “Bills” – Little Bill, who is wise in the ways of saving energy, and Big Bill, who is as dumb as a box of hair (“Water heaters kind of regulate how long your showers last because — I do it until the hot water runs out”).

The videos are actually entertaining, and more importantly, make the energy audit process feel more accessible. Because at least you’ll be in better shape than the guy who tries to save money by never changing his furnace filter.

(h/t Grist)

Is the Chevy Volt dangerous?

Posted on 11/29/2011 by Kevin Clemens

(Photo via NHTSA)

November 29, 2011

By Kevin Clemens

For electric vehicle proponents, the timing couldn’t be worse.

With the extended-range hybrid Chevrolet Volt and all-electric Nissan Leaf finally available in all 50 states and a host of new plug-in hybrids and all-electrics ready for launch in 2012, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has announced that it is opening a “preliminary evaluation” of the Volt’s battery assemblies.

NHTSA’s concern stems from a fire in June that started in a Chevrolet Volt sitting in a storage lot, three weeks after the vehicle had been evaluated in a side pole crash test. The source of the fire was the Volt’s 400-pound T-shaped battery pack that holds more than 200 individual lithium ion cells.

Subsequent impact tests of just the Volt’s battery pack produced a fire a week after impact damage to one pack, a temperature increase from another pack one day after it was damaged, and sparks and smoke from a third pack.

The announcement has led to a surge in media coverage questioning the safety of battery-powered vehicles. The New York Times recently declared the news “a setback for electric cars,” while Fox News has gone as far as to declare the Volt an “utter disaster.”

However, while there are as many as 287,000 vehicle fires in the U.S. each year, General Motors points out that there have been no “real world” fires caused by the Chevrolet Volt.

“The Volt is a five-star safety car. Even though no customer has experienced in the real world what was identified in this latest testing of post-crash situations, we’re taking critical steps to ensure customer satisfaction and safety,” said GM’s North American President Mark Reuss in a written statement. GM sent a letter to all Chevrolet Volt owners on November 28, assuring them that their cars are safe and offering to provide a replacement GM vehicle for owners to drive “until this issue is resolved.”

The NHTSA also said in a statement that Volt owners who haven’t been in a major crash “do not have reason for concern,” and the Detroit Free Press reports that Volt owners don’t seem to be nearly as concerned about the fires as the media is.

So what’s all the hype about? Do electric cars really post a fire hazard?

To answer that question, we need to take a closer look at battery chemistry.

Not all batteries created equal

Lithium-ion batteries have become a prime mover of our wired and interconnected society ever since Sony developed them in 1991. They can carry six times the energy of old-fashioned lead-acid batteries and have three times the energy density of nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries like those in the Toyota Prius hybrid.

Containing all of that power, however, requires a certain amount of care when it comes to manufacturing, transporting, handling, charging and discharging these technical marvels. Get it wrong, and the magic can quickly escape from the bottle.

Although it is too early in the investigation for NHTSA or GM to report on exactly what is happening to the Chevrolet Volt’s battery pack, the mechanisms by which individual lithium ion cells can catch fire are well understood.

All batteries have negatively and positively charged terminals immersed in an electrolyte. When a battery is charged, an electrochemical reaction leaves an excess of electrons at the negative terminal.

When a battery is connected to a device such as an electric motor, electrons flow from the negative terminal, through wires to the device and back to the positive pole of the battery, where they recombine with positively charged ions that have traveled through the electrolyte to the positive terminal. In lower-energy batteries like lead acid or nickel metal hydride, the electrolyte is water-based and cannot catch fire.

However, because lithium compounds react with water, the electrolyte used in a lithium ion battery cannot be water-based. Instead, the electrolyte is an organic compound that happens to be extremely flammable.

Because lithium ion batteries are compact, the positive and negative poles must be kept apart by a permeable plastic separator. Early lithium ion laptop batteries could catch fire when impurities floating in the electrolyte damaged the separator, allowing electrons to flow from the negative to the positive poles and causing an internal short.

In the worst cases, this short would heat the battery, melting the separator and causing thermal runaway that would cause the electrolyte in the battery to catch fire. Critics of electric cars have been quick to point to Sony’s recall of millions of lithium ion laptop computer batteries in 2006-2007 after some fires were started by the compact high energy cells.

It is important to note that while lithium metal itself is highly reactive (it will spontaneously burst into flames if placed in water), there is no elemental lithium metal in a lithium ion battery, and the lithium compounds in the cell are not particularly flammable. It is the organic electrolyte, the plastic internal separator, and the carbon-based negative terminal that provide fuel for a fire. Once one cell has undergone thermal runaway, the chances are good that it will overheat adjacent cells, eventually causing a fire.

Volt’s gas tank drained, but not the battery

It isn’t just manufacturing defects that can compromise the integrity of the internal separators. In a July 2011 report (PDF), the Fire Protection Research Foundation found that damage to individual cells or packs of cells could result in internal damage that could result in a fire, and recommends that if physical damage is suspected the batteries should be quarantined and monitored for evidence of cell internal shorting.

The report also noted that the state of charge of a lithium-ion battery had a big effect on the chances of thermal runaway within the cell: cells with a low state of charge were unlikely to experience the kind of runaway that could lead to a fire.

That’s why GM recommends that the electric energy be drained from the Volt’s battery after a crash, something that was not done following NHTSA’s crash test in May that resulted in the June fire three weeks later (the NHTSA did, however, drain the Volt’s gasoline tank, as is standard procedure for all cars).

The Fire Protection Research Foundation study also noted that the fires caused by lithium ion cells are fed by the flammable electrolyte and plastic separator and packaging, and that both the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the U.S. Navy recommend the use of water for fire suppression with lithium ion batteries.

Different cars, different batteries

The exact chemistry of lithium ion cells varies between battery manufacturers and can be a factor in how well the batteries will withstand abuse. The nickel-manganese-cobalt, or NMC chemistry used by Korea-based LG Chem for the Chevrolet Volt battery is fairly standard within the industry. Michigan-based A123’s lithium iron phosphate cell chemistry is considered by industry experts to be “safer” than the cobalt-based cells. Chevrolet has chosen A123’s batteries for its upcoming all-electric subcompact Spark, and A123 cells can be found in the newly launched Fisker Karma plug-in hybrid.

Unfortunately, it isn’t the first time that GM has been under investigation for fires caused by side-impacts. GMC and Chevrolet pickup trucks built between 1973 and 1987 had “side-saddle” gas tanks, mounted outside the frame, which could rupture in heavy side crashes. In court cases resulting from numerous lawsuits it was clear that GM knew of the problems with its vehicles, but was reluctant to make costly changes to its designs.

Meanwhile, the Volt and the Leaf will be joined by more than a dozen new plug-in hybrids and all electric vehicles that will hit the North American market in 2012, all of them powered by some version of the lithium ion battery.

While the issues with the Volt’s battery raises some concerns, the bigger question for the automotive industry is developing proper protocols, standards and procedures for electric vehicles.

Mary Barra, senior vice president of GM’s Global Product development, says the company has established a senior engineering team to examine electrical fires and said, “This isn’t just a Volt issue.”

“We’re already leading a joint electric vehicle activity with the Society of Automotive Engineers and other automotive companies to address new issues, such as this protocol of depowering batteries after a severe crash.”

Kevin Clemens is a freelance journalist and author who trained as an engineer and environmental educator and has been an editor and contributor at some of the transportation industry’s most influential magazines. He lives in Lake Elmo, Minnesota.

This work by Midwest Energy News is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.

The post read ’round the world

Posted on 11/17/2011 by Ken Paulman

Monday’s post on the lights from the Bakken oil field being visible from space has taken on a life of its own.

Former colleague Bob Collins at Minnesota Public Radio was the first journalist to pick up the post. Then someone submitted it to Reddit, the popular link-sharing site, and the post subsequently showed up on news sites in the UK, China, and Romania.

And German TV news program, Focus, even put together this video segment:

At least, I think that’s what they’re talking about…

A new direction for Midwest Energy News

Posted on 10/28/2011 by Ken Paulman

Dan Haugen, stellar reporter and all-around nice guy.

When Midwest Energy News launched back in March 2010, it was an aggregation-only news portal. And while the region’s news organizations generally do a good job reporting on energy issues, it didn’t take long to realize that there’s a need for deeper, broader and more thorough coverage.

In December, we started this blog, and in January, we published our first piece of enterprise reporting. In the months that followed, we’ve become as much a destination for this original work as for our daily headline roundup.

Starting next week, we’re expanding our reporting capabilities. Dan Haugen, a Minneapolis freelancer and frequent contributor to Midwest Energy News, will begin our first Energy Journalism Fellowship. Dan will be producing regular features as well as offering regular insight and analysis. He’s a top-notch reporter and we’re grateful to have his help.

Dan will write about issues throughout the region, but over time and as funding allows, we hope to contract with additional reporters to cover individual states, as well as write about specific subject areas.

Midwest Energy News‘ original journalism is funded entirely by foundations and individual donations (every little bit helps!). You can read more about us here.

And while we’ll be focusing more on original work (and eventually redesigning the site), the daily aggregated report will still be a priority, and we’ll continue sending out the email digest at 11 a.m. sharp each day.

If you like what we do, here are some ways you can help out:

Pitch a story! Send ideas to Dan or to me.
Give us money! Seriously, every dollar helps.
Tell your friends! Encourage people to sign up for our daily email digest, or follow on Facebook or Twitter.

And, as always, thanks for reading.

Tag Archives: media

Commentary: Be cautious linking extreme weather to climate crisis

Midwest Energy News expanding its reporting ranks

Is the EPA out to ‘crucify’ oil and gas companies?

Q&A with Maggie Koerth-Baker