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Comment by vorticalbox | Hacker News Reader

Moving to battery would increase demand for power, so unless we are charging all these new batteries with low or zero carbon would we not just end up with the same issue?

You're just moving the problem from the vehicles to the power generation

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No, even if you're charging your batteries with carbon-emitting power plants, those plants are much more efficient than the engine in a car or plane. Internal combustion engines are very impressive technology, but they are constrained by their form factor, and can't possibly extract as much energy from fuel as a large power plant.

In reality, almost every power grid in the world is already cleaner than an internal combustion engine, and rapidly becoming cleaner as more renewable energy is deployed.

Isn't this a better outcome ? Instead of having millions of mobile sources of emissions , you will have few thousand sources of emissions which could be regulated, monitored and modernized.

79% of new energy capacity added in 2022 was clean energy (solar, wind, storage), so yes we can expect that the increased demand for power will mostly be met with low carbon solutions.

Renewable energy is already cheaper to build than coal or gas plants in many places, and it will just continue to scale as the technology improves.

Last time I checked, solar and wind power were low-carbon.

I don't see the issue unless the fuel-powered cars are able to reduce carbon emissions at a faster pace than the energy grid can, which seems doubtful.

In the US on average an EV gets the equivalent of 91mpg. On the dirtiest local grid (MROE) it gets 42mpg, the cleanest (NYUP) is 247mpg. 42 isn't that great but for most driving habits it will eventually come out ahead in carbon emissions.

That's for cars, a plane's lifetime emissions are way more weighted towards fuel.

> so unless we are charging all these new batteries with low or zero carbon

It's not exactly science fiction.

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