Why is charging an electric car cheaper than filling a gasoline engine when electricity is mostly generated by burning fossil fuels?
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That really depends on where you live. In SC most of our power is either from water or nuclear, only a little bit still comes from coal.
In many areas electricity is generated by a variety of sources, with burning fossil fuels as just one of those means
Two reasons: firstly, electricity these days ISN’T mostly generated from fossil fuels, and even where it is, the most commonly used fuel is coal, which hasn’t generally been used to propel cars since the 19th century. Secondly, fossil fuel power plants are simply more thermally efficient (e.g. they get more “bang for the buck” from the fuel used) than the engines in cars.
Depends where you are from .
Scotland uses fully renewable energy. Wind farms and the likes.
A generating station, even if it does use fossil fuels, is much more efficient than your ICE car. And the EV motor is much more efficient at using that energy than an IC engine. Now add the fact that your energy is, if you’re in Europe or NA anyway, not all generated by burning fossil fuels.
First, electricity is generated in many different ways. In some areas, large amounts of electricity come from non-greenhouse-gas sources, such as nuclear, hydroelectric, solar and wind, and more.
Second, the way in which we harness the energy of burning fuel in an engine is very different to how we harness burning fuel in a power plant. Any power source will have an efficieny percentage of how much theoretical energy something produces, versus how much useful energy is created.
Specifically, when you burn fuel in a car, you are using the explosive (kinetic) force of the fuel to push pistons out. However, a large amount of the energy in the reaction is lost as heat energy that doesn’t have any practical use. Compared to an electric plant, we can capture extra heat and use that heat in sufficient quantities to spin a turbine to produce more electricity, increasing the overal efficiency.
Besides what’s already mentioned here, one aspect that’s often forgotten, is that producing gasoline *also* needs a lot of electricity. So in the end it’s not electricity vs. fossil, its instead electricity vs. electricity + fossil.
In the US, [40% of electrical generation](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php) comes from nuclear and renewables.
In Canada, it’s more like 80%. Though in my Canadian province of British Columbia, 91% of our power comes from [hydroelectric power](https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-british-columbia.html). In fact, we casually refer to our electrical power as “the hydro”.
1. Burning fossil fuels in a giant electrical-generation plant is more efficient than burning the same fossil fuel in an internal combustion (car) engine. When you burn gasoline in a car, only 20-25% of the fuel’s energy is actually available to move the car. When you burn fossil fuels in a generation plant with steam turbines, 40-60% of the fossil fuel’s energy can be converted to electricity. So **you have to burn twice as much fossil fuels in a car engine to get the same amount of usable energy**.
2. “Electricity mostly generated by burning fossil fuels” depends greatly on where you live. In many places that’s not true. In Canada, fossil fuels (oil+ coal + natural gas) provides only 16% of all electricity. In France it’s 8%. But again, even in a country getting 100% of electricity from fossil fuels, generating electricity from the fossil fuels then using electric cars would STILL use half as much fossil fuels vs burning them directly in vehicles. Any renewable energy the country has is just a bonus on top of this.
I’d imagine it’s also more costly to haul gas from A to B then to send lightning through wires to wherever. But that’s just a piece of it
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