nuclear energy has been largely phased down for political reasons and CO2 emissions are still on a level where EVs might not be much cleaner in comparison, see https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
I’ve been having this discussion for a decade. The “do you know where the electricity comes from” group gets a little quieter every year.
What’s really critical is getting the EV market jumpstarted.
Controlling the emissions at several thousand power plants vs a billion cars is orders of magnitude easier.
A coal powered EV has roughly equivalent emissions to a gasoline car, and a natgas powered EV has roughly 2/3 the emissions of a gasoline car.
So a German EV would have roughly 0.35 + 0.15x2/3 + 0.5x0 = 0.45 the emissions of an EV.
And you cherry picked one of the higher polluting countries.
Can you cite this? Thank you
Germany is showing 543 gCO₂eq/kWh. A gallon of gasoline is 8887 grams/gallon. Add 40% to account for refining & transporting the gas to the gas station.
A Tesla at 5 miles/kWh emits 109 g/mile.
A Camry at 30 mpg emits 415 g/mile.
That doesn’t seem right, gas is 20-30% lighter than water and water is only 8lbs~=3600 grams.
Burn 1g of coal, to make it easy:
C + O₂ → CO₂
So burning 1g of carbon produces 3.67g of CO₂.
https://blog.ucsusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Microsoft...
this is a tool that UCS makes available to give you a mpg equivalent for a particular EV in a particular zip code based on the same data. https://evtool.ucsusa.org/
So those numbers are significantly out of date.
It’s just so wildly more efficient in operation.
Can you elaborate?
- lots of energy lost to heat
- aggregate efficiency lost to going to refueling stations
- decreased efficiency over the life span of the vehicle
EV cars have a few key efficiencies
- able to regenerate power on braking (a HUGE amount, and also why hybrid cars last so long)
- longer lifespan of vehicle and drive train (EVs are significantly more reliable, and the lack of moving parts means that wear takes quite a lot longer). an example of this in practice is the significantly better reliability of hybrid cars, which reduce hours on the ICE engine with batteries to great benefit
and we haven't even unlocked all of the benefits, battery density, and recycling stories available for EVs that will propel them further.
The key deficiencies for EVs right now are
- cost - this has been going down over time, EVs are still firmly in the luxury segment, although we will likely see a new sub-$25k EV with reasonable mileage by the end of the decade
- battery pollution - mining the batteries is bad, there is no way around it. battery recycling is a new technology and will be crucial for EVs in the future, both for cost reasons, but also pollution
- tire pollution - the heavy weight of EVs leads to high particulate matter of rubber, but this is also something that is being actively worked on. It also increases load wear, but new battery tech will help mitigate this.
- power grid - high ev saturation will overload the powergrid, although this is greatly mitigated by solar banking and low peak charging. This might be one of the hardest things to overcome, as it requires significant public spending, but it's not hopeless at all.
No matter which way you look at it, EVs are the future, but there are still lots of issues to be worked on.
The other thing we've still haven't had enough time to fully discover is how much individual cells wear out and the big picture of the economics of swapping out only the individual cell that's bad. There's already been some practical work doing that, I'm just not aware of any longitudinal studies about it.
Right now, 2023 Chevy Bolt are being sold in the US for $26.5k msrp, with $7.5k off EV credit, and a 259 mile range.
Isn't the power grid a bunch of wires in the air or on the ground that can span thousands of miles?
Compare that to oil wells, supertankers, refineries, fuel trucks and gas stations, it seems to be relatively benign infrastructure.
also, I think with distributed pv solar and wind, the power grid will become more distributed. And I think fair time-of-use might solve problems too.
EV's also have some other side benefits, like less noise (noise pollution is a real thing) and less air pollution (tires and asphalt are also a large part of car related air pollution).
Anecdotally whenever I return home from time out in rural Australia, it takes me a while to adjust to the air pollution while near roads, and we have some of the cleanest air of any city.
Not everywhere is doing well at the second part of the problem, but Germany's grid is already at 30% renewables, and has time to transform toward renewables while we attempt to electrify the vehicles.
You can also shortcut the process if you own a house, by putting solar on your roof and charging from that. Places like California and South Australia have immense deployments of rooftop solar generation that have rocketed the states toward their renewables goals. South Australia generates over 70% of it's power from renewables. It went from 1% renewable to 70%+ in just 15 years.