Randal O'Toole is coming to Houston

Anne · 2008-05-10 16:08:57

Barry Klein passes along this email announcement from Randal O'Toole:

Last week, the Cato Institute released my report on rail transit and the environment. The report shows that most light-rail lines use as much energy per passenger mile as an SUV and emit as much greenhouse gases as the average automobile. I conclude that cities that want to save energy or minimize greenhouse gas emissions should not build rail transit, but should instead take steps to reduce emissions from automobiles by relieving congestion.
You can download the full report from http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-615.pdf
I will present this report at the 2008 Preserving the American Dream conference in Houston this May 16-18. The conference will also feature speakers on the environmental impacts of various land uses and residential densities as well as many other topics. Plus this will be an unparalleled opportunity to see what life is like in a major city without zoning. For more information, go to http://americandreamcoalition.org/pad08.html

Link to post: http://www.bloghouston.net/item/7015

pwang · 2008-05-11 08:07:33

BTUs is a unit of measure that I have absolutely no intuitive feel for. I am suspicious about how the conversion was done from gasoline/diesel/electricity to BTUs.

Far better to look at kilowatt-hours per passenger mile, because we do have direct comparisons to electric vehicles. If you take the TH!NK 100% electric car from Norway, it goes 124 miles on a 30 kilowatt-hour charge, and will carry four passengers (but you'll need olive oil and a shoehorn to get them in and out of the vehicle). www.think.no

Therefore, the TH!NK does 4.13 passenger miles per kw-hr on a single-occupancy basis ($0.036 per passenger mile*) , and must therefore get less than 16.52 passenger miles per kw-hr in sardine mode... let's say 15 miles per kw-hr ($0.01 per passenger mile).

I would be seriously interested in knowing the kilowatt-hours used per passenger mile on the METRO LR line. It would be very interesting to compare it to the TH!NK. I'll send Mary Sit an email today.

By comparison, a 45 MPG Prius, costs $0.08 per mile to run on $3.60 per gallon gasoline... more than double the TH!NK. And a 12 MPG Hummer or equivalent truck or large SUV? It costs more than 8x the TH!NK.

I am very enthusiastic about the TH!NK class of vehicles, especially when you consider that you can buy electricity from renewable providers. Mitsu, Nissan are going to trial 100% e-vehicles in the US. And GM might make an all-electric version of the Volt (no gasoline engine). This is going to all happen in the 2010-2012 timeframe.

* based on $0.15 per kw-hr, Reliant's price

Last edited by pwang (2008-05-11 08:10:06)

rorschach · 2008-05-11 08:47:54

pwang, and you call yourself an applied scientist? What do you mean that you have no intuitive feel for BTU's and therefore we should dispense with them and instead use KWh instead which has both an energy and a time component. so instead of using a unit that is directly convertible to watts, you want to use a unit that includes a time component in which you cannot factor back out easily.

perhaps this will help you learn unit conversions.
http://www.efunda.com/units/convert_units.cfm?From=42

pwang · 2008-05-11 12:52:55

I also don't have an intuitive feel for temperature in Celsius... are you going to lambaste me for that, too? And I can't order my steak by grams, I order it by ounces. I am American. My gosh, you are an irritating, nit-picky person.

So what's wrong with wanting to understand the energy consumption of an electric vehicle (the METRO train) using electrical energy units, which we all see on our utility bills? Making things concrete and understandable is important for scientific communications to the public. BTUs... huh? BTU is a niche unit for the HVAC industry.

You've got it all completely wrong, by the way, kilowatt-hours REMOVES the time component, because it multiplies the watt (the power term, which is energy per unit time) by the time applied, yielding energy, which has no notion of time. Please, before you nit-pick and criticize, get it right, OK? It will save you lots of embarrassment. "Power" and "Energy" have very specific meaning in physics, and you are using them indiscriminately.

Let's say you have a battery whose label says "100 watt-hours". That's energy. That means you can draw 10 watts out of it for 10 hours, or 100 watts out of it for 1 hours. Or, I suppose, 10,000 watts for 36 seconds, although I would not want to be around when you do it. The time rate at which you draw is immaterial for watt-hours.

BTU, Joules, kilowatt-hours are all energy. Watts and horsepower are energy per unit time. If the Cato paper was going to be internationally scientifically correct in terms of publication standards for academic scientific papers, it should've used Joules. BTU is a bit obscure; not wrong, mind you, but hard to grasp and non-standard.

There are fundamental physics unit conversions, and then there are "funny business" or "NASA Mars Lander" unit conversions that people wash their data through when they want to obfuscate or confuse or bolster their particular point. Sometimes they are careless, sometimes clueless. With some people's "conversions" if you make a complete round trip you don't get back to where you started. I have seen this done, I see problems on a daily basis with physics units, and I am always leery of units and conversions. You always have to ask yourself... "is this right? does this make sense?" Or else you'll get bit. And sometimes you still get bit.

rorschach wrote:

pwang, and you call yourself an applied scientist? What do you mean that you have no intuitive feel for BTU's and therefore we should dispense with them and instead use KWh instead which has both an energy and a time component. so instead of using a unit that is directly convertible to watts, you want to use a unit that includes a time component in which you cannot factor back out easily.
perhaps this will help you learn unit conversions.

Last edited by pwang (2008-05-11 13:05:27)

Ubu Roi · 2008-05-11 23:25:42

Google is your friend. Being suspicious about whether a conversion was done accurately is one thing. Being suspicious of the conversion itself is just silly; given that it's a known scientific measurement, such a statement borders on superstition. If someone said they were suspicious of Celsius to Fahrenheit conversions, it wouldn't be much sillier. Where it's commonly used is just not relevant.

1 kwh = 3,413 BTU

Note that kwh is convenient for the study of an electric rail or car; it isn't necessarily convenient for a gasoline or diesel-powered vehicle. The normal expression of efficiency for an auto is mpg, but mpg is a measurement of the effect of energy input, not the amount of energy itself. The missing variables are the efficiency of the engine and mass of the vehicle. Thus, a direct comparison of mpg to kwh is impossible.

Hence BTU is necessary as the unit of measurement, because it is a straight measurement of how much energy is being input to move a vehicle of any type, not what effect that energy had (i.e.: moving it one mile or ten). The same question rears its head with an electric train; measuring how many miles it moves on 1 kwh isn't the key. Measuring the total energy input is.

Where efficiency becomes important is at the end of the equation: total up all the people moved by any given form of transit and divide by the amount of energy it took to move them. That's what this study is trying to do. Whether it does it accurately and fairly is up to the reader, I'm not expressing an opinion on that either way.

Also, the issue of kwh's time component is irrelevant, as pwang's own comments should show, however. Any energy is being expended in some finite amount of time; a kwh just fixes the time at one hour. If you took all the energy contained in 1 kwh, and expended it in one minute, it would still be 1 kwh, and it would still be equal to 3,413 BTU.

pwang · 2008-05-13 10:13:23

Numbers from METRO. The trains use 646,633 kwh per month. They run 77,044 miles per month. So, they use 8.39 kwh/mile.

Remember our litle friend, the TH!NK electric car, which uses 0.242 kwh/mile? The METRO train uses 34.7 times as much electrical energy per mile than the TH!NK.

So if you 35 people on the train at any given moment, or about a dozen per car, then it is as efficient as a TH!NK car, which by anyone's measure is a very efficient and miserly car.

So I don't see how O'Toole concludes that trains like METROs are as efficient as SUVs on a per passenger basis. He's off by a large amount.

Unless he delves into the, "well, if we used the fuel used to generate the electricity and combusted it in the vehicle, it would be more efficient" argument, which is an apples to oranges comparison, because:

1. we don't use gasoline and diesel to generate electricity
2. we can generate electricity from nuclear, wind, hydro, in addition to coal and nat gas
3. and you can't burn coal in any car, neither nat gas

My concern is the our "oil supply demand problem" (if you don't want to call it peak oil, that's your choice, but the choice of words doesn't change the flow rates) is going to manifest as a liquid transportation fuels problem first and foremost. Therefore, I am totally in favor of electrified transport of all kinds. I don't care if it's a train on a track or a rubber-tired electric bus fed from an overhead wire, but if we don't get off of oil as much as possible, we are toast, my friends.

pwang · 2008-05-13 10:30:06

I would really like us to get off of oil from nice places like Nigeria, Mexico (oh wait, they are going to stop exporting in about 5 years, nevermind them), Saudi Arabia (isn't Wahabiism grand?), Venezuela (Hola Presidente!), etc. The amount of wealth we are transferring to them every second of every day is sickening.

rorschach · 2008-05-13 11:53:54

pwang, as you certainly know we have LOTS of oil, but the Dummicrats won't let us drill for it. there is the entire Florida coast, the eastern and western coasts, ANWAR. All have LOTS of potential oil deposits. But they'll just sit there because we'd rather throw money hand over fist at farmers to brew moonshine.

yamadude · 2008-05-13 12:01:29

I wouldnt mind driving an electric car but I also wouldnt mind not having the risk of getting squashed like a bug.

Ubu Roi · 2008-05-13 13:26:22

rorschach wrote:

pwang, as you certainly know we have LOTS of oil, but the Dummicrats won't let us drill for it. there is the entire Florida coast, the eastern and western coasts, ANWAR. All have LOTS of potential oil deposits. But they'll just sit there because we'd rather throw money hand over fist at farmers to brew moonshine.

And don't forget the loonies are trying to have the Canadian oil shale declared as "dirty oil" and thereby erect regulatory barriers to its use in the U.S.

Coal is the single dirtiest form of energy generation. Water and wind are limited; especially since there are only a few areas that generate enough steady wind in Texas to be clearly viable. (Hint: one of them is NOT on the southern gulf coast where a certain mayor keeps trying to waste money for another buddy.) Nuclear... we haven't built a nuclear plant in over 30 years and the NIMBY disposal problem is nearly intractable. It needs to be solved, and soon.

The problem I have with the current oil situation is that we're acting like we're addicted to expensive fast food when there's a pantry full of uneaten food in the kitchen. "But the cans are dusty! I might get dust in my food!"

edit:

pwang wrote:

Remember our litle friend, the TH!NK electric car, which uses 0.242 kwh/mile? The METRO train uses 34.7 times as much electrical energy per mile than the TH!NK.
So if you 35 people on the train at any given moment, or about a dozen per car, then it is as efficient as a TH!NK car, which by anyone's measure is a very efficient and miserly car.
So I don't see how O'Toole concludes that trains like METROs are as efficient as SUVs on a per passenger basis. He's off by a large amount.

Furthermore, by definition, the train does NOT go directly to the rider's destination, meaning further energy has to be expended (via public or private transport) to finish the trip.

pwang · 2008-07-19 11:11:45

Refutation of the claim that electric vehicles produce more CO2 and use more energy than comparably-sized internal-combustion vehicles, in the form of, oh my gosh, a real-world test with real data!

http://www.autobloggreen.com/2008/07/19 … iev-stats/

Looks like the EV wins hand-down.

rorschach · 2008-07-19 21:38:09

It does nothing of the sort, because the story does not discuss the CO2 emissions involved in the manufacture of the vehicles involved, it also does not discuss the CO2 emissions in shipping the vehicles to the US since both vehicles are manufactured and driven in Japan. the only shipping involves the raw materials to Japan. which is not applicable to hybrids/ev's sold here which have raw materials shipped from North America to Japan, then shipped back to North America for sale. All on ships burning bunker oil without ANY emissions controls.

blogHOUSTON.net forum

#1 2008-05-10 16:08:57

Randal O'Toole is coming to Houston

#2 2008-05-11 08:07:33

Re: Randal O'Toole is coming to Houston

#3 2008-05-11 08:47:54

Re: Randal O'Toole is coming to Houston

#4 2008-05-11 12:52:55

Re: Randal O'Toole is coming to Houston

#5 2008-05-11 23:25:42

Re: Randal O'Toole is coming to Houston

#6 2008-05-13 10:13:23

Re: Randal O'Toole is coming to Houston

#7 2008-05-13 10:30:06

Re: Randal O'Toole is coming to Houston

#8 2008-05-13 11:53:54

Re: Randal O'Toole is coming to Houston

#9 2008-05-13 12:01:29

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#10 2008-05-13 13:26:22

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#11 2008-07-19 11:11:45

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#12 2008-07-19 21:38:09

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