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

There are some trade offs. Yes, electric vehicle owners are still getting that energy from somewhere. But there’s a few major benefits to having cars be part of the electric grid instead of hundreds of individual motors.

Even if an electricity producer is burning gasoline or diesel for power, it’s likely less polluting than individual engines. Controlling emissions and peak efficiency is easier for one purpose-built engine instead of having hundreds of smaller ones in various states of repair, idling, or running at inefficient rpm’s.

Additionally, it’s much quicker and more cost effective for grid-scale power-producing companies to pivot to renewables and wean themselves off of old, more polluting technologies. Household owners can get solar…but that’s the only viable option, and either expensive or not viable for many situations.