Will there not be just as much of a carbon footprint from mining materials to make batteries for all the new electric cars?
And all the precious metals that go into making electronics to make that car operate?
Plus the power generation associated with charging everyone’s vehicle.
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No one actually know. Some studies say a electric car will be greener after few years some studies say that even a 1959 impala is greener in the long run. It all depends who pays for the study
Question to add on to OP’s: Is manufacturing one electric car really that more carbon intensive than one gas car? To me it seems like all the complex machining processes involved with making engines would leave a larger carbon footprint than the processes involved with EV batteries.
Depends on what’s powering ur grid. Doesn’t matter if you stop burning gasoline if you just swap it for coal
The batteries are an interesting question, I think it pays off as the time goes on.
Altough, after that it’s definitely much more green. The nuclear power plants are way more efficient than the engines that works with gasoline, therefore they release less carbon dioxide/1 unit of power.
The more you go with your electric car, the more carbon dioxide you save from the planet than if you would have driven the same distances with a normal car.
> Plus the power generation associated with charging everyone’s vehicle.
Turning fossil fuels into energy at a power plant is a _lot_ more efficient than distributing gasoline to individual cars and having every car convert it into energy through a combustion engine. Power plants can be a lot more sophisticated, take advantage of economies of scale, and implement features that just aren’t practical to include in cars.
For a simple example, even if you made a power plant that was simply a giant car engine burning gasoline, you could use its heat exhaust as the energy input to a separate steam engine, capturing much of the energy a car would just lose to the surrounding air. But you would never put a second engine into a car just to capture the extra energy, and if you did, manufacturing and maintaining that engine would offset a lot of the savings. For a power plant, though, it’s a no-brainer, and for reasons like this even a ‘dirty’ power plant generating electricity can be 3x as energy-efficient as a gasoline-powered car.
That’s obviously before you get into the ability of electrical systems to gradually make more and more use of geothermal energy, wind energy, solar energy, and so on. Then you get into the other benefits, like more centralized pollution (so the power plant can have efficient pollution-capturing or filtering systems it wouldn’t be practical to attach to every single car separately), less waste material and waste production associated with maintenance, etc.
The electricity is produced by fossil fuel. Also the batteries are generally full of lithium which is very messy to mine. They must be replaced at some point with more batteries
The bigger issue is the electric grid in your home and your town can’t handle even 5 percent of cars going electric.
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There have been studies about this. The idea is that it takes about four years worth of carbon dioxide emissions from a traditional gas-powered car to mine the stuff to make one electric vehicle. So the upfront cost is maybe higher, but it pays itself off as long as you keep driving it beyond that four year mark.
Also technology will improve to make batteries more efficient, require fewer resources, etc.
With regard to electric cars, one of the issues I foresee in the future is with the batteries. Although electric cars are cleaner to run than ICE, when we all convert to hybrid and full electric cars in the future we’re quickly going to have millions of lithium batteries to dispose of and these could be around for many years after the car if not recycled properly.
I doubt the electric really is that much better for the environment over its entire lifespan of the car.
The ICE needs materials that have to be mined too. Steel isn’t really better than copper, silicon and lithium.
But the power generation alone is a huge game changer. Even if you’d fuel it 100% from coal powerplants you’d save CO² because a modern powerplant has roughly 40% efficiency (transport, battery, E-motor reduce that by 10% giving a total of 36%) and a ICE has less than 20% efficiency. And you can obviously get it from renewable sources too.
The main issue is that combustion loses efficiency when running in the wrong operation point. A powerplant will always run at it’s optimum RPM
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