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Comment by LawTalkingGuy | Hacker News Reader

It seems the right thing to look at is how much energy was saved/added/shifted and from what sources.

Less gasoline is good unless the alternative is coal-fired electricity.

This. We bought a small EV a little over a year ago, and I expect our personal gasoline reduction is close to 50% -- easily more than half our trips are now in the EV. However, the grid in our area is primarily coal-based, so I'm aware we're just shifting. I've begun my own solar charging project to address that, but its expensive and will take multiple years to get ROI, and is clearly not for everyone. My thesis is diversification -- having 100% of the average family's transportation needs dependent on gasoline creates (or creates potential for) lots of problems. Frankly the infrastructure is not there (in my area) for everyone to go 100% EV, but I'm in favor of experimentation and diversification.

You are shifting the reduced amount of energy that your car consumes. So even with a coal-based grid, it is a net-positive. The MPGe rating is a great indication of this.

If you took the gasoline that powers one car and put it in a power plant that powered EVs, you could power maybe 4 or 5 EVs with that gasoline. So even that is a net positive.

Why? Because converting gasoline to electricity in a large-scale plant is far more efficient than converting gasoline to motion in little engines scattered about in the environment. Once the power is available as electricity, the downstream losses are really quite small (10%? 5%?) compared to the downstream losses for gasoline - 85% just in the car itself, and that's not even including delivering the gasoline to the gas station or the energy required to pump it into the car etc.

Even with a pure coal fired grid, an EV only produces as much carbon as an ICEV getting 40mpg. Most grids are much cleaner and there are only a couple of such fully coal powered grids in the US. In the last few years, the percent of coal use in the US electric grid has fallen from about 40% to 18% and it is predicted to continue falling.

Take a look at this map showing the carbon output of an EV in various districts measured in equivalent MPG. https://blog.ucsusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Microsoft...

If we want to prevent a future of EVs being powered by fossil fuels, we need to start building nuclear powerplants like right this instant. This will be tough considering even the most forward thinking state, California, has hardly an interest in nuclear power. The federal government had to bail out diablo canyon before the state was going to let it die like they let san onofre die to replace it with a natural gas plant that produces less power.

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