If electric vehicles are the way to go to reduce emissions, wouldn’t charging them use up a lot of power, therefore still being costly and polluting? How does it work?

Question

I know very little about today’s climate actions despite routing for them, so I just want to take an opportunity to better understand them. How some things may just be temporary solutions or revolutionary ones.

I do not want climate change debates, I just want to know if powering electric cars has its trade offs or are really going to help.

In: Engineering

Answer 1

The best way I’ve heard it described is: **using a battery decouples the energy a car uses from the production of that energy.**

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A car that runs on gas can only be powered through gas. But, if cars use batteries, then we can do different things. To the car, it doesn’t matter how you powered the battery, as long as you charged it.

So we could use cleaner and cleaner energy sources in order to power the car.

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Switching to cars that run on batteries means we can power cars in any manner we can use to generate energy.