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Comment by monero-xmr | Hacker News Reader

Where I live the electricity is primarily generated by fossil fuels. The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!).

Wouldn’t gas cars just eliminate the middleman of fossil fuels -> power plant -> car? Like we did before EVs?

I would love nuclear power but it doesn’t appear to be happening

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EVs emit less carbon even when powered by a fossil fuel dominated grid. The power plant is more efficient than your car, and often uses LNG rather than petrol or diesel, and there are still some renewables in almost any grid. In addition, air pollution close to where you live will be lower. In addition, the grid can be decarbonised over time and your car will become greener as it does.

The convenience to me of being able to refuel anywhere quickly, plus the dubious carbon savings, plus the immediate discount on the car purchase (without any subsidies), makes it a moral purchase rather than a practical one. I am not very impressed by the benefits.

I like how EVs accelerate faster. Otherwise it would make my life way more inconvenient, which I surmise is a major blocker for most potential EV purchasers

I guess it depends on your driving habits and homecharging situation, but after a year with my EV, I wouldn't go back if God came down and personally told me that every EV resulted in a baby seal being clubbed. Among the many advantages, never having to go to a gas station is so much better.

Why is going to a gas station difficult? I’m far more concerned about needing to charge in a pinch than needing to find a gas station

It's not difficult, but it's something extra. Now I just plug my car in the garage and it's always charged. Plus it drives so so much better (constant torque at any speed feels amazing, you can control the car very precisely), and doesn't stink and make noise.

I wouldn't go back either, even with the occasional 20-minute charge break on a very long trip.

If you can charge at home overnight, then your "tank" is full every morning. The logistics are a bit more complicated for long distance road trips though.

There are no gas stations on my route. I'd need to specifically drive to one.

And the one closest to my commute has a massive queue _every_ time.

I just rather drive home, plug in and the battery will be at 80-100% next morning, depending on how much I drove that day.

You must be the rare person with no gas stations near your entire commute!

That's what I get for living in a small town :)

The gas stations are on the main road that passes through the town, I don't use it for my commute, I literally have to go out of my way to hit a gas station - which is owned by my uncle (small town, I know)

Yeah that was my experience (not the seal clubbing) with my Model X in Europe in 2019. Great for the daily commute, never had to hit a gas station but on longer trips it's more planning. Sales of Teslas definitely increased faster than the charging network expanded, so while I never had to wait in 2019, the situation was different in 2022. Now I'm back at 13mpg and similar bhp. Still have good memories of the Tesla but in the states distances are longer and I just can't haul an RV with an EV. Even small trailers have quite the range impact.

Being able to charge nightly (when needed) at home has been a game changer for us. No more waiting in line at Costco or "we need to fill up the car before X". Car is always fully charged.

Plus for us at least, because we have a very low KwH _night_ rate, our EV is 10x cheaper to run than our ICE. It's a significant difference.

And that's not counting the environmental concerns.

Multi-day trips are another story. But we take very few of those.

Does this factor in the environmental impact of the battery lifecycle in those EVs?

Usually, yes. The break even point depends on how clean your energy source is but 15-40k km is about where they even out even considering batteries. Remember if you live somewhere like Norway or Scotland where it’s dark for 6 months, it’s also very very bright for the other 6 months.

While a power plant is more efficient than my car, transmission reduces that efficiency sigificantly (I think here in the UK transmission accounts for 40%-50% of usage, although I may be misremembering).

Does that affect the calculation at all?

EDIT: I was totally wrong - it's more like 7%. Still interested whether that affects the calculation, although it's much less likely to!

Wikipedia says 7.7% distribution loss.

That is a lot lower than I remember! I'll try and find my source for that.

EDIT: I can't find that source, and I found a load of sources around 7%. Thanks for the correction.

You might be recalling that 40-60% of the fossil fuel is wasted as heat when generating the electricity, before transmission.

Since cars are more like 80% waste heat, it still works out better to generate the electricity and feed it to EVs.

And when burned in bigger plants the waste heat can be used to heat up homes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating

All of this is true, but it's not the main reason why EVs have taken off. Electricity generation is very flexible. You can use coal, gas, oil, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, and so on. Every country has something.

However, not every country has oil or gas. In fact, only a minority does. China is investing in EVs to avoid being dependent on energy imports. Many other countries are following. Russia and the US being laggards in EV adoption isn't really surprising.

Do you know whether the transmission costs of electricity are higher than that of transporting gas or lng, and whether that's a factor here?

Electric engines are 90-95 efficient in converting power to motion.

Even the very best experimental gasoline engines in Toyota's labs are around 30-35% efficient.

Even if all gasoline and diesel was used in massive generator units to produce electricity, EVs would still be better for the environment and the total gasoline/diesel usage would go down.

But the power plant has only slightly higher efficiency off the fossil fuels it burns. So you need to use the ev to store excess grid solar generated during the day to truly get an advantage

Look up "district heating". The power plant can capture the waste heat and use it for something useful.

Your car just radiates it wherever, benefiting no-one (except during winter)

At least the power plant is burning that fuel and spewing garbage into the air in a place that isn't your home. And power plants capture more of that pollution than cars do, not to mention that many of them burn cleaner fuel than gasoline or diesel.

And most people tend to keep their cars for 10+ years. The power grid is changing all the time, and it's likely in the time that you own your EV, the sources it gets powered from will become cleaner.

It's also easier to regulate a few dozen power plants to become more efficient and force them to capture more pollution vs. doing that to 100 million cars on the road after the fact.

Gas car ≠ EV charged by fossil fuels.

As of 2018, 94% of the US population lived in an area where charging an EV would emit less than a >50mpg car. In terms of electricity grid regions, an EV has lower emissions than a 50 mpg gasoline vehicle in 85% of them. [1] Yes, most of the US is still powered by fossil fuels, but ICE tailpipe emissions are very different than power plant emissions.

As for why switching to EVs is preferred to sticking with gas cars, aside from climate change, tailpipe emissions from ICE vehicles cause ∼200,000 early deaths to occur in the U.S. each year [2] (old data, but average MPG of vehicles in the US has barely changed, though particulate matter is better filtered, though there are more vehicles and annual vehicle miles traveled in the US has increased. Hard to pin an exact number without newer research, but without any doubt many thousands are dying from the pollution.)

As far as climate change goes, over a quarter comes from transportation in the US [3]. EVs alone won't take that to single numbers, but halving transportation emissions would still be significant progress.

As far as

> The light is weak for many months of the year, and wind power is apparently way too expensive if they remove the subsidies (weird!)

Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion or 7.1 percent of global GDP in 2022 [4]. 70% of energy subsidies go towards fossil fuels (admittedly not the case in the US though.) [5] But subsidies aside, solar and wind is very price competitive with gas (and often far cheaper than coal) [6].

There's also $24.662 trillion in externalities for energy and transport (equivalent to 28.7% of global GDP) [7]. So sticking with ICE cars and fossil fuels is unlikely to be a smart decision from a financial perspective.

1. https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/2020-05/evs-clean...

2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13522...

3. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

4. https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

5. https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-do-government-subsi...

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source

7. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221462962...

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