POWER PLAY | Cheap electricity, a changing climate This is part of
a series exploring how the world’s hunger for cheap electricity is complicating
efforts to combat climate change.
ROTTERDAM
— In this traffic-packed Dutch city, electric cars jostle for space at
charging stations. The oldest exhaust-spewing vehicles will soon be banned
from the city center.
Thanks
to generous tax incentives, the share of electric vehicles has grown faster in
the Netherlands than in nearly any other country in the world.
But
behind the green growth is a filthy secret: In a nation famous for its
windmills, electricity is coming from a far dirtier source. Three new
coal-fired power plants, including two here on the Rotterdam harbor, are
supplying much of the power to fuel the Netherlands’ electric-car boom.
As
the world tries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and combat climate change,
policymakers have pinned hopes on electric cars, whose range and convenience
are quickly improving. Alongside the boom has come a surging demand for power
to charge the vehicles, which can consume as much electricity in a single
charge as the average refrigerator does in a month and a half.
The
global shift to electric cars has a clear climate benefit in regions that get
most of their power from clean sources, such as California or Norway. But in
areas supplied by dirtier power, like China, India and even the Netherlands,
which is on track to miss ambitious emissions targets set for 2020, the
electric-car jump has slimmer payoffs. In some cases, it could even worsen the
overall climate impact of driving, experts say.
The
dilemma highlights the crucial importance of clean electricity in global goals
to slash greenhouse-gas emissions, the focus of a December summit in Paris. Cutting
transportation- related emissions can help — but not if pollution is simply
shifted from the tailpipes of cars to the smokestacks of coal-fired power
plants, which generate 40 percent of the world’s electricity.
Amid
revelations that Volkswagen faked
the emissions of its supposedly clean diesel cars, even more
hopes have been pinned on electric vehicles. Global sales are expected to more
than double over the next decade.
“The
overall emissions of electricity generation in Europe still haven’t gone down,”
said Luc Werring, the former principal adviser to the European Commission on
energy issues. “If you drive your car on mixed electricity, then you’re not
reducing carbon as much as you’d expect.”
Driving
electric cars, he said, “is not as positive as some would like.”
Embrace of electric
In
Rotterdam, city leaders have been searching for ways to cut the smog that has
long plagued the gridlocked center, where skyscrapers jostle with low, postwar
office blocks. Generous Dutch tax incentives have cut the cost of electric
vehicles, and the high cost of gasoline — nearly $7 a gallon — has also spurred
more people to buy the cars, making the country second only to Norway in terms
of percentage of electric vehicles on the road. Four percent of all cars sold
in the Netherlands last year were electric.
And
starting next year, Rotterdam will ban from its city center all gasoline cars
built before mid-1992 and diesels built before 2001.
Drivers
say they appreciate knowing that they’re doing something positive for the
environment, even as they contend with having to adopt a new driving style.
Play
“You
get more relaxed. You don’t want to push down too hard because that will really
drain your battery,” said Paul van den Hurk, an electric-vehicle consultant who
drives a Nissan Leaf, an electric car with a range of about 85 miles. “You
can listen to the music on your stereo because you don’t hear the roar of your
engine.”
In
many ways, the Netherlands could be an ideal home for electric cars: The
country is densely populated and smaller than West Virginia. The best vehicles
can now cross the nation on a single charge. Tesla, theCalifornia-based manufacturer of high-end electric cars, has
made the Netherlands its European beachhead, opening a new factory in the
central city of Tilburg in September, where vehicles are assembled for the
company’s growing European market.
For
now, the plant is putting out 90 vehicles a day, whose prices can run well over
$100,000, but it could triple that production rate. In a high-profile
endorsement, 200 of the taxis that serve Amsterdam’s airport are now Teslas,
and the city wants to convert its entire taxi fleet to electric within the next
decade.
But
for all the efforts both locally and nationally, the Netherlands will blow past
its 2020 emissions targets, the result of the new coal-fired power plants and
delays in expanding wind power. Two of the new coal-fired plants are in Rotterdam’s
port, where their tall smokestacks belch exhaust across the city.
“People
say we are Joe Windmill, but we missed the boat in developing wind energy,”
said Jacques de Jong, a former Dutch energy regulator who is now a senior
fellow at the Hague-based Clingendael International Energy Program. Dutch
authorities are scrambling to catch up, but they face stiff resistance from
local residents who dismiss the windmills as unsightly.
Rotterdam’s
grid operator says that it faces a challenge with the increase in electric
cars, even as it encourages their use. Household electricity demand will rise
as the vehicles spread. The amount of electricity the vehicles will need will
increase by 50 percent by 2023, according to government projections,
although it is still just a fraction of the overall consumption of the country.
Electricity
generated from renewable sources is increasing in the Netherlands, but with
overall demand for electricity rising, the percentage of coal-generated
electricity is staying stubbornly high. Coal provided 29 percent of the
country’s electricity last year, and it spiked even higher this year. Dutch
government forecasts expect coal to provide about the same amount of
electricity in 2030 as it did in 2014.
Amid
a surge in U.S. coal exports, the dirtiest fuel is so cheap that it is upending
European attempts to switch to cleaner sources of electricity.
“There
was a discussion going on to shut down the coal generators, and that’s over.
The coal price is too low,” said Marko Kruithof, the manager of sustainability
and innovation at Stedin, the grid operator for Rotterdam and much of the
region surrounding it.
In
Rotterdam, Stedin has helped build thousands of charging points for electric
cars. A charge-up for a Tesla costs about $20, and that gives it a 250-mile
range. It’s much cheaper than driving a gasoline-powered car.
Proponents
believe electric cars are on the verge of a breakthrough that would
significantly reduce their cost while extending their range. Chevrolet, Nissan
and other manufacturers say they will soon roll out cars that could travel up
to 200 miles on a single charge, the distance that many analysts believe is
necessary to broaden their appeal beyond a niche market. Tesla, whose cars
already exceed that range, plans in 2017 to start producing a model aimed at
the mass market that would cost $35,000.
Benefits vary widely
Advocates
think that because the vehicles store energy in their batteries, they could one
day play a useful role in smoothing out the surges in the grid caused by the
increased use of wind and solar energy, which provide electricity only when the
sun shines or the wind blows. But those clean-electricity sources will need to
grow simultaneously for the climate impact to be positive.
“In
electric vehicles, you cannot decouple the car from the electricity
generation,” said Paul Nieuwenhuis, co-director of the Electric Vehicle Center
of Excellence at Cardiff University. “If we don’t manage the demand, we would
need to build more power stations to deal with it.”
In
the United States, where a natural gas boom has helped push down emissions from
the power sector, the potential climate benefits of electric cars vary widely
depending on the cleanliness of the electricity mix.
In
coal-fired Colorado, a gasoline car with fuel economy better than 34 miles per
gallon will be better for emissions than the average electric car, according to calculationsfrom the Union of Concerned Scientists. In hydropowered Upstate New
York, in contrast, the same gas car would need to achieve 112 miles per gallon.
In the Washington region, the figure stands between 60 and 63 miles per gallon.
On
average in the United States, at least in major markets, electric cars would
offer an improvement on carbon emissions, said Nic Lutsey, program director at the
International Council on Clean Transportation. “It seems that on the whole, the
carbon footprint will only get better,” he said, because efforts to reduce
greenhouse-gas production in electric power plants are moving forward more
rapidly than electric-car production.
But
environmentalists look at other regions with mixed feelings. The biggest market
in the world is China. Sales of electric cars nearly tripled there between
January and August compared with a year earlier, according to the China
Association of Automobile Manufacturers.
Chinese
leaders have embraced electric cars as a way of cleaning up cities that have
some of the worst air quality in the world. But the Chinese electricity market
is heavily dependent on coal; the pollution is simply being taken from the
centers of cities and moved to their outskirts.
Amid the
mixed picture for electric cars, some environmentalists say that money spent on
them might be better directed elsewhere.
“The
economics do not make sense to push more electric vehicles onto the market” to
improve the climate, said John DeCicco, a professor at the University of
Michigan Energy Institute. He said that attention might be better focused on
making conventional combustion engines more efficient.
“There’s a
movement toward cleaner energy, but it’s not there yet,” said Hugo de Bruijn, a
sustainable mobility adviser in Rotterdam. “From an energy perspective, it’s
not ideal.”
