Automakers plugging in for less pollution

Luke Tonachel, a vehicle analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the study indicates that “a significant increase in plug-ins would only cause an increase in electricity use of about 7 to 8 percent overall.” That is not enough to be a problem, Tonachel said.

And Mark Duvall, program manager with the Electric Power Research Institute and one of the study’s authors, said that the increase of 7 to 8 percent in electric use to fuel cars would reduce U.S. oil consumption by close to 4 million barrels per day by 2050, which seems like a fair trade-off.

Would this increased dependence on electricity cause further air pollution — this time coming from smokestacks instead of tailpipes? Duvall argues that it would not. He said that even if utilities are called on to generate more power, they can’t increase their emissions beyond a certain point, because of government regulations.

“If you demand extra electricity from a utility sector that is already producing its maximum amount of emissions, the utility sector will have to respond by switching to cleaner fuels, building cleaner and newer plants, or adding pollution equipment,” he said. “We don’t want to move forward with electricity as a transportation fuel if it creates air quality problems, and that’s unlikely.”

A trade group for companies in the electric industry agrees with Duvall’s assessment.

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Jim Owen, a spokesman for the Edison Electric Institute in Washington, said his group believes that the increased use of plug-ins would improve air quality overall and that utilities can handle the demand, particularly since most people are expected to recharge the vehicles at night.

“The way it works is, you come home at night, and you plug your car into a conventional socket. And at night, when the demand on the electric power system is at its most modest, everybody’s recharging their car for the next day,” Owen said.

“The theory is that if you do it that way, you don’t really have to build very much new power plant capacity," he said. "Most power plants are not very heavily taxed in the evening hours.”

Owen conceded that there would be some added pollution from using more electricity, but not so much that it would outweigh the benefits of switching from gas-powered vehicles to plug-ins.

But of all the challenges facing plug-ins, the biggest one is swaying consumers to make the switch in the first place, said J.D. Power’s Omotoso.

“We’re not really expecting a significant volume in plug-ins in the next five to seven years,” Omotoso said. “Manufacturers are concentrating on hybrid electric vehicles such as the Toyota Prius, the Lexus RX, the Ford Escape Hybrid and so on. One of the restrictions is battery power. Toyota was quoted recently as saying that the battery capacity would have to be doubled for plug-ins to really work. And, of course, that takes up extra space in the car and costs extra money. Most manufacturers are experimenting with plug-ins now, but it’s at a very small level.”

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