Eli5 if electric vehicles are better for the environment than fossil fuel, why isn’t there any emphasis on heating homes with electricity rather gas or oil?
In: Physics
Electric vehicles aren’t just better for the environment, they’re way more fuel efficient.
When your cars using fuel, the primary byproduct is thermal energy. But your car doesn’t want thermal energy, it wants kinetic energy. So with fossil fuels, a lot of your engine is designed around turning that thermal energy into kinetic energy, and a lot of efficiency is lost.
With an electric car, the energy is applied much more directly.
In a furnace, you have the opposite effect. You want the thermal energy, so there’s no conversion. Since electricity itself doesn’t produce my thermal energy, it’s heating a coil to a temperature and then using constant energy to maintain that temperature.
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