How green is your electric vehicle really?

“Lucien Mathieu of Transport and Environment, a European NGO, says that even the biggest EVs have lower lifetime carbon emissions than the average conventional car. That is true even in places with plenty of coal-fired electricity, such as China.”

Fossil fuels are also a limited resources and have the ability to become depleted. Renewables might have a temporal limitation. Infrastructural changes, such as sending excess solar electricity to cloudy locations can offset this via HVAC or HVDC lines.

Since fossil fuels are a limited resource, they should be saved and used when renewables can not. This also improves national security and pushes fossil fuels to be better rationed.

The middle east is also a big investor in solar. Just like a drug dealer, when you consume your own product this reduces ability to sell and make more money. By offsetting fossil fuel for creating electricity with solar, they can make more money by selling oil they normally would be burning.

Wouldn't it also be a better use of energy to charge EVs at night instead of having always on street lamps spending millions to shoot photons into space in order to offset the low user consumption during the time period?

But I guess the EV platform forced their hand and they had to make it a big truck, like all the other Hummers.

Lets' tackle it:

- Lithium and nickel scarcities. Yes production for that stuff is increasing a lot and it's putting a strain on how fast that can be ramped up. However, there's no shortage of either element on this planet. These are not rare earth minerals. Lithium is extremely common on this planet. Refining capability is the bottleneck; we need more of that. That's why Tesla is building a lithium refining plant in Texas. Also, sodium ion batteries are now a thing (no lithium, nickel, or cobalt) and lfp batteries are also a thing (little/no nickel, or cobalt) and already very widely used. In short, there are scaling challenges but they are not and never will be show stoppers. At best, the exponential growth curve might suffer a short term slightly less exponential but still exponential trend. Non issue. Battery production volume growth is not slowing down but speeding up for the foreseeable future. Multiple tens of twh per year very soon.

- Cars are heavy. Yes, the US has had a long and odd relationship with pointlessly big vehicles that predates EVs on the road. And in fairness, they can be fun. I have driven a mustang and I loved it. The noise. The smell. The ridiculousness of it. This was the ice version. Cars don't have to be heavy though. There are plenty of very small and cheap EVs already. Basically glorified golf carts. Very popular in Asia and also starting to show up in European cities. Even the US has some ground roots movement of people using actual golf carts in local communities. Why not? They are cheap, silent, and they work. Why burn gallons of expensive gas when you can do you coffee run in a golf cart? Cars don't have to be big. That's just the local obsession with all things large.

- Cars need to be charged. Very true. This takes energy. Very true. This comes from the grid and strains the grid and boo hoo all the coal. Very much not true. Car batteries are perfect for soaking up excess renewable power and moderating the grid. They can also deliver power back to the grid. A lot of fast chargers are powered by renewables. A lot of EV owners invest in solar panels on their roofs. You could say EV adoption is speeding up conversion of grids to rely more on renewables and less on coal. Hence coal plants are shutting down and gas plants are increasingly relegated to peaker plant role (which makes them relatively unattractive as an investment). Also, the amount of power needed correlates to the amount of miles driven, not the amount of cars or the sizes of their batteries. And of course, using gas or diesel to drive the same amount of miles is not sustainable. Even when you do power them with dirty coal plants, EVs still emit a lot less because they are just more efficient. So, the more EVs we have the less emissions. The more stress we put on the grid, the faster the rollout of renewables progresses.

What's going to happen in the US (and everywhere else) is the influx of cheap, small, mass produced cars. Not in a decade. Next year. China, Vietnam, Korea, etc. they are all starting to get to some very serious production volumes. Import regulations are slowing that down in both the US and Europe. But these small, reasonable cars are coming. Millions of them. It will drive cost and prices down and efficiencies up. My guess is the local car industry will adapt (or disappear). A repeat of the influx of cheap Japanese imports in the eighties in the worst case. However there are a lot of positive things happening: lots of investments in local production capacity, massive employment opportunities all over, cities that are getting cleaner, etc. Even Toyota now has a small electrical car that is apparently popular in Japan. Look! No hydrogen needed after all! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMMq3j8zbjk

Must be a slow news day.

The carbon economics of EVs were and still are based on older EU solar production that relied on natural gas for energy. Nobody has done the recalc.

There's hardly a net benefit now.