A ground-level view of St. David’s on the left and the adjacent
parking garage. You can see the solar panels on top.
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My name
is Hart Schwartz and I worked with Andrew in Marseille in 2010 as an English
teacher. I research fuels, renewable energy, and automotive trends in the US. I
believe that one of the most important quests in transportation is how to
transform the national fleet of personal vehicles – some 250 million of them –
into a truly clean fleet.
I wanted
to contribute to Andrew’s blog and found a great example of solar in downtown
Austin—it’s the parking garage of the historic St. David’s Episcopal Church,
pictured on the right.
As a
transportation researcher, I was particularly happy to find this parking
garage. It is commonly believed that placing zero-emission vehicles on the
road, such as electric or hydrogen fuel cell drivetrains, will cut emissions.
However, this assumption overlooks the fact that most US electricity comes from
burning fossil fuels, including roughly 40% from coal. This means that even
those wonderful Teslas with their sleek styling and all-electric drivetrains
still consume large quantities of fossil fuels when they are plugged into the
grid for charging.
The
greater public needs to start looking at “well-to-wheels”, which measures the total fossil fuel consumption, from
mineral extraction to vehicle emission, and includes the total fossil fuel
impact and emissions profile of any kind of drivetrain. If we want to create a
true zero-emissions vehicle fleet, we need to design efficient, mass-scale ways
for electricity to be created and transmitted to the zero-emission vehicles.
How does
this work in practice? Are there any places where one can find real-life
experiments in zero-impact well-to-wheels vehicle power generation?
That
brings us back to St. David’s Episcopal Church. This solar installation
provides electricity for the building’s needs (such as lighting) but also services
six electric-powered vehicles. Thus, for any amount of driving that is powered
by these specific EV-charging stations, these EVs can truly be described as well-to-wheels
zero-emissions.
Mr. Schwartz was a researcher for the Fuels
Institute in Washington, DC until December 2014, publishing a white paper on
Driver Demographics. He completed his MBA at the University of Denver in 2012.
He currently resides in Austin, Texas and consults on converting big data into
clear narratives.
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