Any plans to deal with http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news…">SPD's decision to have their lead-foots cruise around our city in gas-guzzling SUVs?

Any plans to deal with SPD's decision to have their lead-foots cruise around our city in gas-guzzling SUVs?

@2: Until there is a very reliable and omnipresent infrastructure for recharging electric cars, I have to imagine police and emergency vehicles will be gasoline powered.

Unless all the electric power for charging originates from solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric, it's just a "feel good" change at the sacrifice of reliability and is also a waste of precious revenue.

@4 Seattle's electricity is Hydroelectric

@5: Sure, but Seattle is connected to the national grid. So it really does not matter. You are only as clean as the grid.

It is a nice, easy, short-term help. No real fix for transit, but better than nothing.

The idea that occurred to me, about 10 minutes after I moved here, was an elevated line that runs above the 99 corridor, from downtown Everett to the Airport. I still have never heard a good reason not to do this, certainly nothing that is more difficult, expensive, or wasteful than our current hodge-podge of unconnected rail projects and deep digs. Honestly, 3 strong rail lines, (or better, completely grade-separated bus roads- Hello, Brasilia) overlaid on I-5, 405 and 99 could pretty quickly and relatively cheaply take a huge bite out everything we think of as commuter traffic.

Wonderful. When it still takes my bus a half-hour to navigate the Allentown goat-fuck during evening rush, I'll feel so much better that all the cars causing the jam are electric.

"Unless all the electric power for charging originates from solar, nuclear, or hydroelectric, it's just a "feel good" change at the sacrifice of reliability and is also a waste of precious revenue."

Wrong, and wrong.

The Union of Concerned Scientists recently weighed in on this and found that in all regions of the US, an EV has more environmental benefit than an internal combustion vehicle.

http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/ele…

Also, it seems to me - although I have nothing to back this up scientifically, but do have an utility operational background - that if you choose to charge an EV off of a mostly coal driven fuel source in the off-peak hours, you are making that plant more efficient, for coal plants run at a set capacity 24/7, and those electrons are otherwise wasted. And while coal is a nasty fuel source, if you are taking tailpipes off the road, you are still ahead in terms of emissions. Remember, not every part of the country has the strict emissions standards for cars that we have.

In any event, if current trends continue, there will be fewer and fewer coal plants on-line.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Coa…

That leaves natural gas generation, which is arguably as bad as coal, but as renewables become cheaper than fossil sources, natural gas will become more a backup/peaking resource. And who knows - with the way storage is going, natural gas could be even further marginalized.

As for the "sacrifice of reliability": Huh? Who's reliability are your concerned about? The grid? Don't. That's not your problem. The range of the car? That's pretty much a non-starter, and will continue to be less of a non-starter as batteries evolve.

and "waste of precious revenue" Double huh?

"Sure, but Seattle is connected to the national grid. So it really does not matter. You are only as clean as the grid."

There is no "national grid" (other than the east coast utility that is named National Grid) There's the Western Interconnection Grid (US and Canada), the Eastern Interconnection Grid (US and Canada) and Texas (There's also Quebec, but we'll leave them out of this, because they'd want me to post this in French as well).

The Western Grid has less fossil fuel generation sources than either the Eastern Grid or Texas, and what the west has of that is mostly natural gas. That's primarily because there's not as many people out here as there is back there.

The electrical generation and distribution industry is undergoing a radical revolution, but it's such a boring industry that no one is paying attention. If renewable technology continues to progress in the astonishing ways it has in the last ten years, we are going to see a completely different generation portfolio in the not-too-distant future.

And I should have added: As others have said, It doesn't matter if a car is electric or gas when it comes to traffic. It's still a thing occupying space that usually has only one person in it.

@6 - while the overall grid is important, Seattle and Seattle City Light are a bit of a case onto their own, since the city utility originally built and strung the wires from hydroelectric dams into the city, some 110 years ago. While of course there are inputs into Seattle's grid from the larger regional high-voltage bulk power grid, by historical design, SCL's infrastructure is fairly insular and based around the fact that SCL dams still provide 89.6% of the city's power and are directly connected to the city's distribution infrastructure. In the modern era, SCL built wind turbines provide 3.6% of additional power.

Simply put, by design, Seattle is a city with its own homebrew power generation, energy storage and distribution system. With a minor amount of conservation, the City could easily keep running, even if the regional or national power grid faced an outage and went offline tomorrow. Add to the fact that the privately owned Seattle Steam is one of the last district heating systems (and based on burning wood byproducts, pallets & construction waste), the city is able to function almost entirely without fossil fuel inputs.

http://www.seattle.gov/light/FuelMix/

Interestingly, as an aside the hydroelectric plant *inside* Snoqualmie falls represented the longest run of A/C power in the world, when completed in 1899, to provide power directly to Tacoma. (the owners of the Snoqualmie plant is PSE today).

Popping on this thread belatedly to applaud Catalina Vel-DuRay and MrSteve007's super-informative and reasoned comments @10 and @13.

And thanks, Catalina, for the additional perspective @11. Electric cars are an improvement over internal-combustion engine cars, but they don't let us off the hook from pursuing the really big improvement, offering viable transit and urban planning alternatives to SOV (single-occupant vehicle) travel.