Clarkson and others always ask the question, ‘where does the electricity come from?’
There are other stats that say it’s only better after a certain amount of miles driven or that the Lithium quarries produce significant amount of pollution.
What and where do these claims come from, how true are they and how false are they?
In: Engineering
Even when charged by coal, the EVs are cleaner. Plus you can change the source of your electricity. You can’t do that with gasoline. It’s always oil.
The lithium is infinitely recyclable. Can’t recycle gasoline.
It’s not completely free of pollution but what it does produce is less and easier to manage.
Well…. Of course if you drive your electric car Zero miles and throw it away, you’ve produced more pollution than if you drove an ICE zero miles and throw it away, because of the toxic batteries….
But ultimately I think you should be thinking about TRADING kinds of pollution. Right now we have a global warming crisis because of Co2 and other green house gasses. Not to say that water and soil pollution isn’t serious, it is, but I think the seriousness of climate change is far greater than the kinds of pollution battery pollution creates.
On top of that, gas powered cars produce far more Co2 and greenhouse gasses than an electric vehicle mile for mile, even if the electricity came from a coal power plant in the US. When you have a power plant, it is going to burn things much more efficiently than an portable internal combustion engine. But since not ALL of our electricity is coming from coal, the electric car will win over a ICE car any day in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
EVs are greener. Not as greener as you might think because of the embodied carbon, but definitely greener. There definitely is a bit of a “payoff” point though where upfront an EV might be worse than a normal Prius hybrid, but the EV wins convincingly over typical ownership durations.
What this means in terms of climate change, not only do we need cars to switch over to EVs, but because EVs still mean a chunk of carbon, we still need fewer cars overall.
Electric cars absolutely have a carbon deficit vs. internal combustion engines when they roll out of the factory, entirely because of how much carbon is emitted as a result of the production and transportation of the batteries.
Past that point, EVs will have a break-even mileage, or a point at which they finally work off their initial carbon deficit vs combustion engines and start being better for the environment. However, the EV will more or less always be more efficient on a carbon emitted per mile driven standpoint because, even in the worst case scenario, carbon-based power plants (e.g. coal or natural gas) will be considerably more efficient than the engine in your car. How many miles it takes to get to the break-even point will be hyper-dependent on the local electricity sources. For modernized/Westernized nations, the break-even mileage is going to be between 20,000 and 50,000 miles, but for other countries the mileage will be considerably higher. This becomes a more serious problem for decarbonizing developing nations, as the break-even mileage would conceivably be higher than the designed lifetime of the vehicle.
Greener than what? Gas stations and quick oil change shops? I hope so!
EVs are designed to use less energy per mile, even ignoring the powertrain. So there are regenerative brakes, low rolling resistance tires, careful aerodynamics, etc. Even sporty EVs can be efficient.
Even if you are driving the least efficient EV and you charged from the dirtiest power plant, there is still the advantage that emissions are at the plant rather than on the street.
Cars aren’t green. However if your car is fuelled by petrol you are using fossil fuels to power it which is worse for the environment. Powering a car via electricity potentially could use wind hydro or other sources to produce that electricity. Mining lithium like most mining is bad for the environment, but mining lithium is a slightly less damaging resource to mine than most other items. The unusual item for lithium mining is it requires a significant amount of water which may have a big local impact.
Yes they’re cleaner. The thing about the comparisons of EV vs ICE is it’s never an apples to apples comparison. EV’s are calculated using all the emissions of their lifetime. For example, the coal for the power is factored, but the ICE is only factored in for the gasoline it burns. IT ignores refining, transport, drilling and so on. Gasoline refining is a very dirty process yet it’s ignored when trying to say EV’s are less green. If you do apples to apples, compare every step of getting an ICE to go vs an EV, than the EV wins by an absolute landslide. Even using the very dirtiest fuel possible for the EV.
So are EV’s greener? Yes, a lot greener.
This is a very complex topic and there have been some detailed articles written, but generally speaking an EV will generally produce less pollution during it’s life.
The pollution comes from two main places, the processes required to create the car and it’s constituent parts, and the pollution is generates through your usage of it. In general EV’s create more pollution during the production process than ICE (internal combustion engine) cars but significantly less during the life of the vehicle.
During production, it’s usually the batteries that are the bigger hitter, requiring some rare and harder to find metals. In the early days, the batteries would need a lot of these metals (cobalt and lithium for example) and there is controversy about ther workers conditions where these materials are mined. However modern EV’s are much better at this and the processes have improved significantly but they are still not perfect. The argument against EV’s here however seems to forget that a) we need all of these materials for all the other batteries that we need in modern life and the materials in EV’s can be recycled and b) many of these materials are needed in some form for ICE cars too, like cobalt which is used (and can’t be recycled) during the production of petrol and diesel.
Then we get through life pollution. with ICE cars, this typically refers to the emissions that come from the vehicle exhaust but really should include fuel production too. EV’s don’t have an exhaust but obviously the electricity must be generated somewhere. If your electricity comes from wind farms and solar panels then it will be very green. if it comes from coal and gas it will be a lot less green.
However there’s some important points to register here too. the pollution from an ICE car exhaust is created next to you. it surrounds us in our towns and gardens and schools. the pollution in electricity generation happens far away at the power station, where even with nasty coal, you get massive economies of scale in terms of kW per gram of CO2 (and other things) and they often have pollution controls in place.
Also, you often have an input into where your power comes from. my electricity company promises to only supply green energy for example, and this can and will change over time. Petrol and diesel will eventually be replaced by synthetic alternatives I imagine, but that’s a long way away from being available to the majority of the population. Electricity is.
At the end of the day, all forms of car propulsion are compromises. EV’s are better at some things, petrol cars are better at others. Petrol is massively energy dense for example, significantly more so than hydrogen and current battery tech, but it pollutes.
People get very religious about these kinds of things but it’s a car. choose something that works for you. EV’s work for me because most of my days end at home, I have off street parking and a home fast charger. I have a tariff that charges a lot less for electricity in the nmiddle of the night and thus a “fill up” for me is hugely cheaper than when I had a diesel. but YMMV.
This is a very complex thing to answer, but it is shortsighted to see things as they are now, versus as part of a larger system that will change over time.
For example, imagine if someone said, it’s dumb to be a doctor. If you go to medical school, then your life will be studying and working 16 hours a day, make no money, and up to your neck in debt. If that was all there was to it, it would be a terrible decision to be a doctor. But over time, things fall into place and it can wind up a financially rewarding and satisfying career. You don’t expect all of that to happen right away in year one.
It takes time to develop electric cars that can run well. It takes time to develop batteries that are cleaner. It takes time to improve the electricity infrastructure system to be cleaner. You can’t change everything to perfection in year one.
I did the rough math for my own car.
It certainly “costs more”, environmentally, to manufacture the electric car. Internal combustion cars are metal, plastic, glass, pretty basic stuff. Electric cars have more mined metal, more heavy metals for sure, and more complex chemistry going on in them.
However, thermodynamically, internal combustion engines ([Otto cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_cycle) engines) have limits to how much energy they can extract from the gasoline. The two big areas of inefficiency is that, if you compress the air/fuel mixture too much, it can autoignite because the air gets hot under compression (this is “knock”) and when you exhaust the hot air at the end of the cycle, you didn’t expand the cylinder to infinity, thus pulling all the heat out of the exhaust (in other words, the exhaust is still hot and carrying heat energy). They have to be small and powerful and not too heavy.
The generators used in combustion power plants ([Rankine cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rankine_cycle) engines) are designed differently and have different limits – for instance, you don’t exhaust the working fluid (steam), you circulate it in a loop, and can extract much more heat out of the steam because you have a whole power plant full of equiment to work with. We use this cycle in power plants *because* it’s more efficient and we’re not limited to size constraints.
So, roughly, power plants are approximately twice as efficient as internal combustion engines – this isn’t due to what they’re burning, but from how effectively they extract the power. In other words, if you took the gas out of your car and burned it in a power plant you’ll get roughly twice the amount of power out of the same gas.
So that’s something to keep in mind that often gets glossed over. Even with transmission losses and conversion between gasoline to steam to electricity to motive power, it would *still* be more efficient to burn the gasoline at a power plant to fuel your electic car, let alone how much better you can capture the greenhouse gasses and scrub the emissions.
All of that to say, I live in California, and roughly 50% of my power is from hydro, solar, and wind. And I think some nuclear? (I consider nuclear to be quite green). And gas can be quite expensive here, and electricity is… reasonable-ish.
Environmentally, my car “broke even” in about a year; cost-wise, it was more like 2.5-3 years before the cost savings of cheaper fuel outweighed the sticker-price premium for a more expensive car.
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