Jump to content
Create New...

The EPA’s Electric Vehicle Mileage Fraud


CSpec

Recommended Posts

The EPA’s Electric Vehicle Mileage Fraud

Forbes

The Nissan Leaf was rated at 99 MPGe. To reach this number, the EPA created a conversion factor between a quantity of electric energy, measured in kilowatt-hours (KwH) and a volume of gasoline, measured in gallons. They did this be dividing the potential energy or heating value of a gallon of gasoline (115,000 BTUs) by the energy in a KwH of electricity (3412 BTUs) to get a conversion factor of 33.7 gallons per KwH. Using this factor, they can convert miles per KwH of electricity in an electric vehicle to an MPGe that is supposedly comparable to more traditional vehicles.

The problem is that, using this methodology, the EPA is comparing apples to oranges. The single biggest energy loss in fossil fuel combustion is the step when we try to capture useful mechanical work (ie spinning a driveshaft in a car or a generator in a power plant) from the heat of the fuel’s combustion. Even the most efficient processes tend to capture only half of the potential energy of the fuel. There can be other losses in the conversion and distribution chain, but this is by far the largest.

The EPA is therefore giving the electric vehicle a huge break. When we measure mpg on a traditional car, the efficiency takes a big hit due to the conversion efficiencies and heat losses in combustion. The same thing happens when we generate electricity, but the electric car in this measurement is not being saddled with these losses, even though we know they still occur in the system.

Lets consider an analogy. We want to measure how efficiently two different workers can install a refrigerator in a customer’s apartment. In both cases the customer lives in a fourth floor walkup. The first installer finds the refrigerator has been left on the street. He has to spend much of his time struggling to haul the appliance up four flights of stairs. After that, relatively speaking, the installation is a breeze. The second installer finds his refrigerator has thoughtfully been delivered right to the customer’s door on the fourth floor. He quickly brings the unit inside and completes the installation.

So who is a better installer? If one only looks at the installer’s time, the second person looks orders of magnitude better. But we know that he is only faster because he offloaded much of the work on the delivery guys. If we were to look at the total time of the delivery person plus the installer, we’d probably find they were much closer in their productivity. The same is true of the mileage standards — by the EPA’s metric, the electric vehicle looks much better than the traditional vehicle, but that is only because someone else at the power plant had to do the really hard bit of work that the traditional auto must do itself. Having electricity rather than gasoline in the tank is the equivalent of starting with the refrigerator at the top rather than the bottom of the stairs.

An apples to apples comparison, then, would compare the traditional car’s MPG with the Leaf’s miles per gallon of gasoline (or gasoline equivalent) that would have to be burned to generate the electricity it uses. Incredibly, the DOE actually established and published such a standard in a rules-making process way back in Clinton Administration.
The standard, called “well to wheels,” adds a couple new factors to the MPGe calculation we discussed above.

First, the DOE looked at the electrical generation efficiency, and determined that only 32.8% of the potential energy in the fossil fuel becomes electric energy in the average US power plant, which it further reduced to 30.3% to account for transmission losses. However, they realized it was unfair to charge electric vehicles for these losses without also charging gasoline-powered vehicles for the energy cost of refining and gasoline distribution. They calculated these as adding 20% to the energy it takes to run a gas-powered car, but rather than reducing exiting MPG standards by this amount, they instead gave a credit back to electric vehicles. The 30.3% electric production and distribution factor was increased to a final adjustment factor of 36.5%. This means that the conversion factor discussed above of 33.7 gallons/KwH must be multiplied by 36.5% to get a true apples to apples MPGe figure.

The end result is startling.
Using the DOE’s apples to apples methodology, the MPGe of the Nissan Leaf is not 99 but 36! Now, 36 is a good mileage number, but it is pretty pedestrian compared to the overblown expectations for electric vehicles, and is actually lower than the EPA calculated mileage of a number of hybrids and even a few traditional gasoline-powered vehicles.

Supporters of the inflated EPA standards have argued that they are appropriate because they measure cars on their efficiency of using energy in whatever form is put in their tank (or batteries). But this is disingenuous. The whole point of US fuel economy standards is not power train efficiency per se, but to support an energy policy aimed at reducing fossil fuel use. To this end, the more sophisticated DOE standard is a much better reflection of how well the Nissan Leaf affects US fossil fuel use. The only reason not to use this standard is because the EPA, and the Administration in general, has too many chips on the table behind electric vehicles, and simply can’t afford an honest accounting. In the private sector, this is called accounting fraud and a number of high profile executives are in jail for doing something similar.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You are posting as a guest. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.



×
×
  • Create New...

Hey there, we noticed you're using an ad-blocker. We're a small site that is supported by ads or subscriptions. We rely on these to pay for server costs and vehicle reviews.  Please consider whitelisting us in your ad-blocker, or if you really like what you see, you can pick up one of our subscriptions for just $1.75 a month or $15 a year. It may not seem like a lot, but it goes a long way to help support real, honest content, that isn't generated by an AI bot.

See you out there.

Drew
Editor-in-Chief

Write what you are looking for and press enter or click the search icon to begin your search

Change privacy settings