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Comment by giardia | Hacker News Reader

The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal. [edit: 60% is fossil fuel generated, ~20% is coal]

Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs, and America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up.

I don't want anyone to get the impression that EVs are bad, but people act like they're saving the world by buying a Tesla. It's not that simple. This is a very, very difficult problem and every solution has trade-offs.

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Also, America is not well situated for public transport since we built out instead of up. That's a very difficult issue.

It's currently economically unsustainable. We will need to densify and abandon non-viable area, get rid of minimum parking, and reduce lanes of roads.

Every state/local already continually asks for federal handouts to maintain their overbuilt 8 lane roads. The fact that people still want to add lanes to roads is mind boggling.

Coal provided 23% of US electricity generation in 2021, 20% in 2022, and is forecast to fall to 19% in 2023. The US now burns less than half of the coal it did in 2007.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184333/coal-energy-consu...

Oops, mixed up coal and total fossil fuel for energy generation which is a big difference.

On US average grid EVs get 93mpg equivalent. On the dirtiest (most carbon intense) grid in the US that figure is 42, the cleanest 256. Of course for EVs those numbers will get better each year.

https://blog.ucsusa.org/dave-reichmuth/plug-in-or-gas-up-why...

Coal is under 20% now in the US and dropping: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=48896

Even if you still run off coal you are decoupling energy source from the vehicle allowing the vehicle to run off any source that currently makes the most sense. You can't run a gas car off coal but you can run an electric.

Power plants are more efficient than small combustion engines as well as having more sophisticated emission controls with no concerns for weight or size with a full time staff to maintain them.

The grid needs to increase 30% to support all cars, it only took 40 years for it to increase 5X from 1960 to 2000, about 4% per year, so less than 10 years to support all cars, easily doable.

> The Economist wrote a few months back that an EV in Japan actually produces more carbon per mile than an ICE because almost all of their energy comes from coal plants. I'm not sure if America has a radically different coal plant design which produces less carbon somehow, but ~60% of electricity in America comes from coal.

It is easier to upgrade a (comparative) small number of power plants than it is to make everyone's ICE engine more efficient.

> Additionally, it's going to be a massive effort to upgrade our grid (not just generation) to handle all these EVs.

The amount of work needed to upgrade our grid to handle the increased usage of air conditioning due to global warming is greater than the work needed to support EVs.

I don't believe that it's true a fully coal powered EV produces more carbon per mile due to how inefficient combustion engines are

I'll be honest, I haven't bothered to double check it, but it may be that coal is just that dirty.

I would certainly believe that the smog/pollutants from coal outweigh the benefits, but acording to this [1] Reuters article reviewing this question:

> Even in the worst case scenario where an EV is charged only from a coal-fired grid, it would generate an extra 4.1 million grams of carbon a year while a comparable gasoline car would produce over 4.6 million grams, the Reuters analysis showed.

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