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 average efficiency of cars on the road today is less than 20%. That means that less than 20% of the energy in a pound of fossil fuel is used to move the vehicle down the road, the rest is waste heat, mostly out the tailpipe.

Power plants that use fossil fuels are about 40 to 60% efficient (and higher) at converting the fuel into electricity.

When you account for the losses in transmitting the electricity via the power grid, the losses in the car charger, the losses in the motor controller, the losses in pulling electricity from the battery and the losses in the electric car’s motor… you still will move the electric car further down the road for each pound of fossil fuel burned in a power plant than the same pound burned in gas powered car.

Additionally, for each pound of fuel burned in a power plant there is significantly less greenhouse gasses produced, because the power plants have far better pollution controls than a gas powered car.

So the electric car, even if charged using a coal fired power plant, goes further per pound of fuel than the most efficient gas powered car available, AND each pound of fuel burned makes significantly less pollution.