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
The dirtiest power grid (at least in the US) is about as clean as a gas car. Most grids are cleaner. Others, like WA where I live, are very clean (we have a lot of hydro power). I even have solar panels
And grids are getting cleaner and cleaner all the time, while gas cars only get minor efficiency gains.
Plus even if you’re burning gas and coal for electricity it’s still more efficient to do so I’m a single large plant away from the populace than in thousands of small engines running all around us.
First, you’re not at all wrong, that’s an important thing to note. A lot of people just think “electric car good” and stop thinking, it’s good that you’re wondering past that.
There are three parts to the answer. The first is, even when power comes ultimately from coal or natural gas, it’s still generally better than just burning gas on the road and releasing the emissions directly into the air. Maybe not much better, but better. On top of that, there are better power sources like wind, hydro, or solar, and you’re getting some power from that, so even if coal were no better than gasoline, you’re still using less of it than you’d be doing in an internal combustion machine.
The second is that the cars themselves are more efficient. Gasoline cars have to be running the entire time they’re on, you can’t just easily start and stop them at lights. Electric cars use their power much more efficiently. It will use up less total power on most trips, which means less energy gets used.
And lastly, this is one step in the process. Not every step is going to be, “and the problem is solved”. If we did get most or all of the electricity in the world from clean sources, but still had gasoline cars, that would be a big problem. As we switch to electric cars, at least we’ll be in a position where, once our power grid is clean, it’ll mean that both problems get solved.
But good of you to question it! Good of you to wonder. The people who solve problems are the ones who never stop thinking and just accept “well this is prolly taken care of”.
I won’t comment on the emissions aspect, because many people have already done so excellently. (The et emissions are always lower basically.) As for other tradeoffs, the mining process for the heavy metals in the batteries is pretty destructive, although that is not to say that it is, as a whole, worse than the gasoline life cycle (oil -> refinery -> gas distribution network -> cars -> atmosphere). Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or nitrogen (ammonia) powered vehicles use less heavy metals than a battery powered car. Another con is that while exhaust is lower, pollutants from tires and brake pads is not, and congestion is still bad. Regardless of what makes a car go, that method of transport will always have stuff that makes it less ideal to mass transit options. If only the US had the infrastructure 🙁
Tldr, yes they will help. The generator that provides electricity is a lot more efficient than that engine in a car.
The best way I’ve heard it described is: **using a battery decouples the energy a car uses from the production of that energy.**
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.
Switching to cars that run on batteries means we can power cars in any manner we can use to generate energy.
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