Where in Europe is electric car a good idea?

Electric vehicles can be charged overnight and at off-peak times, so it's reasonable to assume they use a higher-than-average share of low-carbon energy.

For example, around 50% of the UK's electricity production is from low-carbon sources (renewables and nuclear). But a much higher percentage of off-peak power is low-carbon. After midnight, close to 100% of the grid is low-carbon because the gas turbines spin down while the wind turbines and nuclear reactors keep running. EVs and smart chargers/smart grids will help us make better use of clean off-peak power!

Also, grids will continue to get cleaner over time. An EV purchased today will have lower and lower emissions as it ages, but a combustion vehicle will only get worse!

A huge benefit of electric cars is removing pollution from cities; this seems to be forgotten.

Surely if the pollution is killing thousands of people a year this is an issue.

Even if the CO2 balance would be a close call right now - one needs to take into respect that over the lifetime of an electric car, the electricity production in most places is going to have a much reduced carbon footprint. And of course, electric cars don't produce local pollution and create much less noise. Finally, electrical cars are an important step in producing batteries cheap enough for energy storage applications.

This article is total nonsense. No data sources provided, claims 78g/Km CO₂ for Norway with 98% renewable energy. Also completely ignores energy use for production of fossile fuels and apparently uses the circulating wild guesses for CO₂ emissions during battery production (which Elon Musk has commented on...).

France electricity is mostly (72%) from nuclear power. Aka the most under-appreciated clean energy that everybody is panicky about and wants to get rid of. Which means, unless you have a luxury of having tons of hydropower or something, nuclear is probably the best way to lower carbon footprint. Of course, this is also the least discussed way.

English isn't my first language, but this title doesn't sound right. Not sure if it's incorrect but it just doesn't taste right.

I'd say "where [..] are electric cars a good idea" or "where [..] is an electric car a good idea". Am I crazy?

(This OT grammar nazi question was triggered by the author pushing his grammar book right at the page top)

I'm a bit tired of all these CO2 comparisons regarding electric vehicles. If we put the CO2 emissions aside, there are so many other benefits moving to EV's. Especially reduced local pollution in cities such as NOx, VOC and particulate emissions. Even if we just look at noise and easy maintenance, electric cars are clear winners. All this focus on CO2 just leads to a lot of inaccurate napkin calculations on one part of the issue, taking focus away from the bigger picture.

That being said, for cities, cars in general are problematic since the consume so much space. I'd say electric bicycles and public transportation is the way to go for cities.

Oversimplified. Electric car can act as storage for renewable energy. Moreover charging happens at night when a lot of countries experience oversupply of energy (e.g. in Poland electricity is cheaper during night hours).

Zero tailpipe emissions is worth far more than you are internalizing.

CO2 is not the only pollutant that matters. NOx and sulfur emissions are arguably worse in term of quality of life in cities.

The numbers seem off.

A Nissan LEAF - which is not particularly efficient - uses 175Wh/km and burning coal for electricity produces ~1000g CO2/kWh, so even after factoring in grid losses(8%) and charging losses(another 8%) the number is still 204g/km.

That's approximately how much a similarly sized car emits in dense urban traffic(assuming 7,5l/100km).

EVs are a good idea everywhere.

Even if the power they use is dirty now, upgrading the power sources that feed the grid is a lot easier than upgrading millions upon millions of cars. It is for many reasons a much easier problem to solve.

Not to forget that petrol is fueling terrorism. And oil tankers on the oceans are an additional source of massive pollution.

The problem is that you're assuming that the makeup of electricity production in Europe is a constant, which is strange, because it's probably easier to build low-carbon electricity infrastructure than replace tens of millions of gasoline cars. But the fuel used for gasoline cars is constant, whereas an arbitrary percentage of electricity production can be simply replaced by renewables. Similarly, the CO2 output of car manufacturing itself is variable, dependent on the choice of electricity production method. Of course, a dramatic increase in car production translates to a dramatic increase in resource usage, but cars are not particularly durable commodities, usually lasting only about 15 years or so.

A bigger problem is that the Baltic states (worst electricity prospects in this study) don't have a whole ton of renewable energy potential. It's dark, not (that) windy, not mountainous or volcanic...

One thing I couldn't find in the vizzes is that Europe shares its energy grid for a large part. This means that a large portion of energy consumed in say Germany might well be produced by a nuclear plant in France. It's harder to reflect these flows and get data for it, but I assume it changes the picture.

To many people this map has little value because it includes nuclear power. The article explains that this is a problem too.

So why not try to create a map that takes the nuclear waste/accident problem into consideration.

For example France would look at lot worse since they are mostly run on nuclear power and the northern European countries would look more like an "environmentally friendly lighthouse". Which they are, mostly because some of them get to use easily exploitable geothermal energy.

It would also be great to get an insight in the source of your data you've based this map on.

“Countries where electricity is mainly generated from natural gas. Electric car carbon footprint is globally equal to diesel car or gasoline car”

Is this true? My understanding is that EV’s power by electricy generated from natural gas is better than gas powered cars.

This Scientific American article gives a lot of detail on where EV’s are better in the US

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/electric-cars-are...

One of the many things missed in this study is that the switch to EV is not "to reduce greenhouse effects", but to do that while keeping the car industry alive. It if were all about global warming, we could all switch to trains and bikes tomorrow; but fixing environmental problems without challenging established equilibria in terms of employment and economic output, that's the hard bit.

Everywhere, because oil is an ending resource. Electricity is already way more sustainable and cleaner, and this can only become even better soon.

Wait, you can choose what kind of energy you are using. In Germany at least, you can choose a utilities company who gives you 100% renewable energy (at a slightly higher price).

(Of course, I know that you get the same electrons - electricity is fungible. But you do increase demand for renewable energy, and in the long term change the energy mix.)

This goes completely against another recent report that said even electric cars running on coal would still reduce CO2 emissions after about 3.5 years of average use, simply because the internal combustion engine is so woefully inefficient. (With green energy it was 2.5 years.)

I'm afraid I can't find a link to that article right now.

The source seems to be here: http://euanmearns.com/co2-intensity-of-electric-cars/

It's unclear on a first skim whether the (constantly rising) energy costs of fossil fuel extraction are included.

I'd say a better title for this article/graph would be "How would electric cars affect CO2 output in European countries?" or something along that line.

There's far more to a specific car being a good idea considering the differences between EVs and ICEVs (but of course the needs vary inside countries as well). However, an electric car is much less attractive in a land of long distances where you often need to keep the batteries pre-heated to provide even reasonable range (and even keep your warranty!) – even if the country's electricity production is not dominated by fossil fuels.

Have to admit, I expected a slightly more general look at the situation here, not just the places where an electrical car does less harm to the environment than a normal one. For example, it might reduce CO2 emissions to have an electric car in London... but at the same time it may be better (and more convenient) to just not have a car there at all. Who cares how good it is for the environment it is if you can't find parking, traffic is a nightmare and there are many better options involving public transport?

Wow, we're still doing this? Is it 2000 yet? Please don't start with elaborate secondary effect models unless your model can accurately account for all CO2 emissions of a country per year. Until then, all I'm seeing is someone fudging numbers and components to include/exclude in search of a preconceived conclusion.

The first obvious failure is not accounting for the electricity that already goes into refining oil to gasoline and diesel. A comparison that stops at the exhaust pipe for ICEs is straining credibility.

It's not clear that this is the right way to judge "good idea". Specifically it's possible that oil saved from replacing ICEs will still be burned, in which case EVs strictly increase CO2 emissions due to their manufacturing being very CO2 intensive.

In the wider picture, EVs still have such big lifecycle CO2e footprints that we'll still have to drastically reduce private car use. Focusing on EV technology is a major distraction from recognizing this as a society.

It's quite annoying that he doesn't link to the data source used to create the map. It is hard to know if his data takes into account energy imports/exports or not. For example, Germany's domestic electricity production is largely based on coal and natural gas but it also imports a lot of electricity from the Nordic countries which is generated using clean hydro power.

This is skewed. My father has solar panels and an electric car. So its charged overnight by the battery at his home. This is how you should use electric cars: Start using solar panels. Its a logical combination. Electric cars accelerate decentralised energy plants (like local solar panels).

If you own an electric car in the UK you can choose an electricy supplier which provides 100% renewable electricity, e.g. https://bulb.co.uk

Has anyone done a similar study in the US? I'd love to learn if electric cars here are really helping the planet.

Norway

It's all in the subsidies.