Electric vehicles can be charged overnight and at off-peak times, so it's reasonable to assume they use a higher-than-average share of low-carbon energy.
For example, around 50% of the UK's electricity production is from low-carbon sources (renewables and nuclear). But a much higher percentage of off-peak power is low-carbon. After midnight, close to 100% of the grid is low-carbon because the gas turbines spin down while the wind turbines and nuclear reactors keep running. EVs and smart chargers/smart grids will help us make better use of clean off-peak power!
Also, grids will continue to get cleaner over time. An EV purchased today will have lower and lower emissions as it ages, but a combustion vehicle will only get worse!
This. It isn't clear how these CO2/km numbers were derived. Are they a function of average energy generation source mixes or are they taking into consideration when EVs are charged. Average would be more correct for Bitcoin mining.
PGE has an EV rate plan [1] which charges a lot less during off peak (midnight to 6am) than during the day.
Bitcoin miners would also use electricity at low peak times, unless the cost of hardware dominates the cost of electricity. In practice the mining operations seem to be concentrated near hydro plants in China, where there is an oversupply of carbon neutral electric power.
Exactly. The company I work for is currently developing a smart charging service that deliberately delays charging until rates are lowest and electricity generation is cleanest. One of our primary objectives is to reduce gas peaker usage and shift load to renewables. It also results in payouts for the EV owners of course.
If I had an electric car, I'd charge it overnight. I don't get different pricing at different times. There has been talk of introducing that for decades now (in Germany), but I'm not sure it is coming soon, nor that I'd like it. Probably, it would become just more expensive when I need it most, without being able to change my usage patterns much.
In Germany you can request an off-peak meter in addition to your normal power meter. Alternatively, you can get a power meter that is able to count two tariffs in one device.
There is no "talk of introducing this for decades" since it exists since decades.
In the UK off peak tariffs are available. It's a bit of a pain because it requires two meters but if someone was installing an electric charging point I imagine many would add an economy 7 (the name of the off peak tariff) meter at the same time.
Ok, it may require changing to a two rate meter then :)
Never actually used an economy 7 tariff myself so I don't know the details but the point is most houses in the UK aren't equipped to have one. However a home-owner choosing to install a charging point for an electric vehicle will probably switch to a suitable metering setup for economy 7 whilst they're at it.
also: energy on the grid can and will be optimized (we see that trend in germany, however it begins really slowly), however forcing car owners to use the new diesel/gasoline car techology will probably not happen.
in the long term the ev will be better anyway.
Apparently not. I was under the impression that winds, being powered by temperature differences and energy input into the weather system from the sun, would calm at night.
Apparently the wind producers don't experience anything like that.
yes but for non trivial us of ev's you have to upgrade the grid and domestic supply which is not going to be cheap and don't for get that a lot of uk housing stock (flats older houses) does not have of street parking
It's not forgotten by the authorities! In the SF Bay Area the local air quality council subsidizes electric car chargers. EVs reduce the total pollution and moves what's left out of the prone-to-atmospheric-inversions Bay Area.
In Amsterdam, the city creates an electric car parking spot (with charger) near your house if you get an electric car. This is effectively a private parking spot if you're the only electric car owner in the street, and that's incredibly valuable in a city where parking spots are hard to find.
Amsterdam is really charging ahead with environmental & climate change issues. I'm still glad I live in GLD and only work there, but it's leading the way in the Netherlands on multiple fronts. Really inspiring.
It's great for early adopters. Eventually, as everybody switches to electric, the advantage will disappear, but by then, everybody has switched to electric, so that's all good.
And by then there will be a market for commercial charging stations, if they are necessary.
Isn't ozone worse than traditional pollution and the main byproduct of electrical cars? So unless we go into a draconian charge laws, will cause more harm in this regard.
As my mother pointed out, going electric is removing money from the pockets of the Saudi so-called 'royal family', thereby reducing their capacity to buy bombs and weapons from Western arms companies.
The death toll in Yemen is allegedly 10000 and every motorist with an old fashioned car is currently funding that, albeit by proxy.
Yes. There are huge political implications to the energy transition. Less nat gas dependence is going to be the next step after electricity generation is clean, and that's going to hit some petrostates very hard. Places like Qatar and Russia are definitely already making plans.
That's correct. In normal conditions, the vast majority of tire particles are very large and stick to the road where they are eventually washed away by rain. Not small enough to hang in the air and end up in our lungs.
Aerosolized tire particulates are mostly a problem in tunnels, where they keep getting thrown up into the air by passing vehicles and recirculating.
Yes, and the problem has become a lot worse since the introduction of diesel pump injectors. Previously, diesel particulates were mostly caught in the lungs and could be coughed up, but now they hit the bloodstream.
Breaking with regen makes EV use the physical breaks less often as compared to combustion engine vehicles. Using breaks also emits particulates although I am not sure how it compares to the volumes of particulate emissions by combustion engines and tires abrasion.
My anecdotal experience having done some work in the automotive sector is that the volume is probably less but brake dust is much nastier and something you do not want to be breathing. At least it doesn't have asbestos in it anymore.
> Electric cars do not remove pollution - they are not trees. They merely pollute at a greatly reduced rate.
You seem to be oblivious to the fact that electric cars are replacing cars powered by an internal combustion engine.
If you replace an IC engine with an electric motor then that source of pollution is removed, don't you agree?
Furthermore, electric cars typically get their power from the national power grid, which generates power in a much more efficient way than your typical IC engine.
On top of that, nowadays any power grid is being supplied by sources other fossil fuels. This shift away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy sources is being spearheaded by the European Union and reflected by their national action plans. This already resulted in some EU member-states breaking green energy records such as:
* covering around 35% of their national power generation from renewable sources
They move the pollution from a tailpipe feet away from people to a large smoke stack specially optimized to lower the effect on air quality in the immediate area.
Combustion is just one type of pollution that cars produce. And while relocating pollution is a tempting way to externalize the problem, it doesn't solve the underlying issue.
I don't know why you're stretching so hard to make it seem like moving pollution away from population centers isn't an excellent benefit and likely to reduce in many fewer deaths from direct exposure to pollution.
The comment above was referring to local pollution in cities (which directly kills thousands through diseases related to particulates in that pollution). Relocating that pollution does solve that problem.
(PH)EVs also produce much less particulate pollution from brake dust due to the use of regen to brake (which is why they can go several times the normal replacement interval for brake pads).
The creation of pollution is a separate problem from the location of that pollution. Yes, EVs don't magically prevent the creation of pollution, but they can severely limit the creation of pollution in population centers, where they have the most immediate effect.
I live in a city and am not dying, in fact the air quality is very good. Do people who can afford electric cars live in the same cities where pollution is so bad that people are dying from it? Why don't they move to where the air quality is better? (Why move from a problem when you can make the problem move from you, I guess?)
When the majority of pollution is coming from large trucks anyway, will swapping a few cars even matter?
Big city air can look great and still kill young children and old folks due to small particles. Most cities in Europe have terrible air thanks to the popularity of diesel autos, the low standards for pollution controls, and European governments being willing to ignore automakers who break the rules.
Do you have a source for most pollution coming from large trucks?
Simply from the weight they carry, the energy required for this. Supplying a large city is neither cheap nor easy, and requires dozens or hundreds of daily shipments from dozens or hundreds of logistics companies. The majority of these happen during off-peak hours, to reduce load on the highway network.
Lithium batteries still can't approach 10% of gasoline's energy density, so gasoline is mandatory for trucks, and will be until yet another new battery technology is not only discovered and brought to market, but mass-produced to the point that we have a battery-pollution problem.
> the low standards for pollution controls
Why don't they increase the standards? If people are dying there must be public outrage. Does Universal Healthcare cover pollution injuries?
> European governments being willing to ignore automakers who break the rules.
Are people protesting or working to change their governmental leadership? Or are they content to see their loved ones perish? If diesel cars are such a problem, why not outlaw these? Then only outlaws will drive them.
Do you have a source for particulates killing children in cities?
> It found that heavy-duty vehicles tested in Germany and Finland emitted about 210mg NOx per kilometre driven, less than half the 500mg/km pumped out by modern diesel cars that meet the highest “Euro 6” standard. However, the buses and trucks have larger engines and burn more diesel per kilometre, meaning that cars produce 10 times more NOx per litre of fuel
That is atrocious - that a single car could pollute 4x more than a large truck or bus - and it's a side of the VW emissions scandal which never occurred to me.
How did independent emissions testing not catch this - or were OBDII outputs simply accepted as accurate? The Seattle region used to have mandatory emissions testing by an independent agency, where they probe the tailpipe. This was recently ended. Were VW cars programmed to fool this testing too?
NOx isn't the only pollutant involved in localized deaths from pollution, so it's very misleading to claim a car "pollutes 4x as much as a truck" based on NOx alone.
Also, what does this have to do with the VW scandal?
Your own article explains why the cars generate more NOx per mile. They are held to lower standards than the trucks and busses after those were "reigned in" in 2011. It's not some kind of defeat device, the cars are still within regulation
> Also, what does this have to do with the VW scandal?
The entire point of the VW scandal is that their cars pollute way more than they tested. Their diesels especially - the same diesels that have been popular in Europe for decades are the ones polluting the most. And their apparent low emissions was a passive way of fighting electric cars.
The cars aren't polluting because of defeat devices, they're polluting because the standards are lax.
And this is still all NOx emissions, not total emissions.
And this whole tangent really has nothing to do with the original point. If anything is emphasizes the benefits of moving pollution generation for cars to centralized points out of the hands of the manufacturers
> Lithium batteries still can't approach 10% of gasoline's energy density, so gasoline is mandatory for trucks, and will be until yet another new battery technology is not only discovered and brought to market, but mass-produced to the point that we have a battery-pollution problem.
Too bad that correct number to look at is entire power system energy density (engine+fuel+transmission). Electric engines are a lot lighter so batteries do not need to have same energy density.
> Why don't they increase the standards? If people are dying there must be public outrage.
Your expectation of public outrage happening doesn't mean it happens. Even if people are dying.
> Do you have a source for particulates killing children in cities?
It solves the problem of exposing hundreds of millions of people to multiple emission sources of highly deleterious fine particulates in their immediate vicinity, every single day. It's not rocket science, it's an obvious fact, and not a single person posting here can honestly claim not to understand it. Ignoring or downplaying it is a near criminal act of negligence.
> They move the pollution from a tailpipe feet away from people
You can't move non-existent pollution. It hasn't occurred yet, so there's no "movement". Electric cars create pollution displaced from the location the car is used in.
Electric cars can be (and are) charged with power generated with low pollution methods (solar, wind, water turbine...), while a gasoline, or worse, diesel powered car, will always pollute. Additionally, e-cars are more power efficient, even after subtracting line and charging heat losses.
Coal burning power plants are a problem on their own (e.g. high mercury emissions), so those should be shut down entirely IMO, and not be used to cover e-car power demands. They are problematic anyway because they can not change their output much, making them inflexible for modern requirements.
I making the pedantic point that saying "electric cars move the pollution" is technically inaccurate. It is better to say "electric cars pollute in places physically displaced from where they are used".
Any normal reading of English would understand a world before electric cars, and a world after electric cars, as having moved pollution. We're talking at a higher level of abstraction, where the mover is a change in the mix of polluters.
Even if the CO2 balance would be a close call right now - one needs to take into respect that over the lifetime of an electric car, the electricity production in most places is going to have a much reduced carbon footprint. And of course, electric cars don't produce local pollution and create much less noise. Finally, electrical cars are an important step in producing batteries cheap enough for energy storage applications.
Indeed. When everyone has a combustion engine, the problem is completely decentralised and hard to solve. When everyone has an electric engine, the problem is centralised (the power plants).
On the other hand, cars have a much shorter lifespan than power plants. The average age of a European car is 10 years. What's the average age of a power plant?
Furthermore, adding more EVs on the roads means more EVs on home charging stations at night and when parked at work during the day. In turn this means more opportunities to develop large scale demand side management for the power grid and therefore make it easier / cheaper to integrate a larger fraction of cheap and low carbon but intermittent renewable energies such as wind and solar.
This article is total nonsense. No data sources provided, claims 78g/Km CO₂ for Norway with 98% renewable energy. Also completely ignores energy use for production of fossile fuels and apparently uses the circulating wild guesses for CO₂ emissions during battery production (which Elon Musk has commented on...).
Without commenting on the figures of this article, generally EV CO2e footprint is manufacturing-heavy -> total lifecycle per-km footprint is still substantial without any emissions from charging energy.
> total lifecycle per-km footprint is still substantial without any emissions from charging energy.
The "total lifecycle CO₂-per-Km footprint" is a pointless and deliberately misleading figure when its basis of calculation is (almost completely) independent of the distance driven, but it suggests that driving the vehicle is subject to a high amount of emissions per Km. The opposite is true: EV lifecycle CO₂/Km becomes lower the more you drive.
Besides, deliberately including highly speculative CO₂ amounts from vehicle production and refuelling should be done in all cases: how much CO₂ is emitted by ships and satellite launches used in detection of crude oil reserves?
Vehicle wear and retirement is closely related to total distance driven, so when looking at EVs in the aggregate, a per-km perspective works fairly well.
I believe that the article is demonstrating some point, and this point is obvious. It's not a scientific article, and even though author does not provide information about data source that doesn't mean that there is no data source.
France electricity is mostly (72%) from nuclear power. Aka the most under-appreciated clean energy that everybody is panicky about and wants to get rid of. Which means, unless you have a luxury of having tons of hydropower or something, nuclear is probably the best way to lower carbon footprint. Of course, this is also the least discussed way.
I am one of the "panicky" ones and I want to explain my point of view.
When I was a kid, living in the equivalent of Kentucky, a nuclear accident in the equivalent of the Bahamas made it so we couldn't eat wild berries from the woods anymore.
Now a middle aged man over 30 years later, sheep from my home area still measure levels of radioactivity too high for human consumption.
That's why I feel most options are better than nuclear power, for any purpose except perhaps space probes.
If you look at the seriousness the human race dedicated to creating safe nuclear energy, it looks almost comical:we settled on the first technology we found(pressured water reactors), because it fitted best for the requirents of the Navy at the time, not because it offered the best safety for citizens, far from it.And than, in the name of safety, we created an environment that prevented from new designs to become commercialized.
Why wasn't it safe ? Because that type of reactors creates a lot of high pressure radioactive gassses , and in the case of an accident, those gases spread far.
But we now have reactors types that (a) can't physically blow up , their temperature is limited, and (b) contain very little to no radioactive gasses , so even in the worst case scenario, we'll be just left with an enclosed pool of radioactive material, which is safe.
> "But we now have reactors types that (a) can't physically blow up , their temperature is limited, and (b) contain very little to no radioactive gasses , so even in the worst case scenario, we'll be just left with an enclosed pool of radioactive material, which is safe."
Interested in learning more about these reactor types. I hear different reactor names discussed, but I'm not sure what's right on the cutting edge.
It's practically impossible for any type or reactor to "blow up". Nuclear weapons are very different from reactors.
The most dangerous types of reactor is graphite moderated ones. (Because graphite burns lot more readily than water.) Practically all of the actually severe accidents happened with those. They have not been built since Chernobyl.
Here in Bavaria, every single wild boar shot still has to be checked for radioactivity, quite a few have to be destroyed for too high radiation values. Equally, it is recommended not to eat too many mushrooms from the forest. All of this due to the Chernobyl accident more than 30 years ago.
I have very hard time believing anything harmful can get from Chernobyl to Bavaria and still be dangerous by now. I think it's just overreacting. There are millions of people living between Chernobyl and Bavaria, including cities such as Kyiv (3 mln people, less than 100km from Chernobyl), and there seems to be no sign of mass morbidity and mortality from any of radiation related causes. Makes it kinda hard to believe there is still danger in 1400km away.
The thing is that there are long living isotopes in the upper soil of the forests. As they are long living, they have not decayed yet enough and are not going to in the next decades. Something does not need to kill 80% of the population to be a significant health risk. With the isotopes relevant in Bavaria, they are only dangerous when eaten. So there is nothing dangerous about living in those regions. However mushrooms tend to aggregate the radioactive particles and so do the wild boar eating from the mushrooms. Not every animal is contaminated, but every single one has to be scanned for radiation, before they can be eaten, and quite a few have to be destroyed every year.
200 grams of mushrooms with 3,000 becquerel cesium-137 per kilogram corresponds to a load of 0.008 millisievert .
This corresponds to the radiation load on a flight from Frankfurt to Gran Canaria.
And:
If wild game or wild growing fungi are consumed in conventional quantities, the additional radiation load is comparatively low, but it is avoidable.
In other words, there is no danger to one's health - no more that one is exposed to by living regular life and being subject to various low-level radiation sources present in the environment. The regulations have very low acceptable level, just to be safe, but there is very little actual danger from the levels present right now.
From Wikipedia[1]:
For comparison, natural radiation levels inside the US capitol building are such that a human body would receive an additional dose rate of 0.85 mSv/a.
So, working in a granite building for about 4 days is as dangerous as eating a meal of "contaminated" mushrooms. Thousand of people do the former every day. Or about the same as one dental xray. I think my conclusion that it is done out of overabundance of caution still seems to be correct.
First of all, it makes a lot of difference, whether you are exposed to external radiation, or eating contaminated food. Especially if, as for Iodine, the elements are accumulated in certain organs. Not sure how much this is the case here.
Anyway, I have not claimed, that occasional eating of mushrooms is going to kill you. Still, the doses are high enough to warrant an official warning not too often to eat these mushrooms (you have a dental X-ray not every day either), and enough animals are contaminated high enough to be destroyed.
Overall, the life in Bavaria is not impacted by the radiation. But I find it startling, that over a thousand kilometers away from Chernobyl, the Bavarian landscape is contaminated and will be for decades. It shows me, that we do not want to risk a reoccurrence of such events.
This article: http://www.umweltinstitut.org/themen/radioaktivitaet/tschern...
claims, that the Bavarian soil used for agriculture tends to not transfer radioactive particles quickly into plants. It seems the soil was also deeply plowed to distribute the particles amongst a large volume of soil. The situation in forests is different, as the trees captured more particles than the open farmland, and the soil is not plowed, leading to still high particle concentrations in the top layer.
Bavaria had been contaminated the most, other parts of Germany have less residual radiation - the weather situation (wind, rain) created very inhomogeneous distribution back then. I found this map about the distribution: http://files.abovetopsecret.com/files/img/gz54e7a9f2.png
Well, these days when I see nuclear power discussed in the popular press, it's usually talking about how it's extremely expensive and also almost caused Toshiba's bankruptcy. Probably not what you had in mind.
Do you prefer spreading the pollution over the vast area around the thermal power plants? Because that's the current alternative in most of the countries. Nuclear waste is treated securely enough for now in Europe, and future may bring us scientific development to resolve this problem in future.
You make it look like coal is the only alternative. Where is this coming from? Trump campaign train?
> Nuclear waste is treated securely enough for now in Europe, and future may bring us scientific development to resolve this problem in future.
No it's not. We have quite big problems with storage in Germany[1]. Other waste is stored next to the nuclear facilities who created it or on the road to and from La Hague where radioactivity is leaking into water and air[2,3].
Or hey, don't forget Sellafield where 2014 the employees have been asked to stay at home but everything is totally OK. Unfortunately nobody told that to the birds who were drinking contaminated water from open SFPs.
So they will get rid of all the waste that is currently lying in rusty containers all over the world? Or do we have enough to clean all of the waste that is being generated? Please provide sources since I know some countries who are struggling to find a hole deep enough to make it disappear.
E: how is the wikipedia artikel solving the problems we already have and which resulted from the current nuclear waste storage?! I've asked that above. This whole thread results from a quasi "roses and butterflies" comment.
Nuclear power is discussed a lot as a CO2 friendly option. The huge drawback is that we haven‘t found a way to deal with all the radioactive waste yet.
We never found a way to deal with the radioactive waste that coal plants emit into the air (look it up) or the millions of deaths that coal and petrol/diesel are responsible for, but we still use those.
Per Wiki:
> According to the World Health Organization in 2011, urban outdoor air pollution, from the burning of fossil fuels and biomass is estimated to cause 1.3 million deaths worldwide per year and indoor air pollution from biomass and fossil fuel burning is estimated to cause approximately 2 million premature deaths.[14] In 2013 a team of researchers estimated the number of premature deaths caused by particulate matter in outdoor air pollution as 2.1 million, occurring annually.[4][5]
> We never found a way to deal with the radioactive waste that coal plants emit into the air
Sure we did. We close them down where ever it's possible. Just like we should do and do with nuclear power plants.
> Nuclear is safer and better in every way even if you multiplied all the past disasters by ten. There really is no comparison.
What a brilliant argument you have there. Oh wait. No it's not. You actually did not bring anything up to counter the problem caused by nuclear plants: nuclear waste. Just some juicy whataboutism.
> its a political problem because humans have no sense of scale.
People have enough sense of scale to realize that the waste will be there forever and while some are safely away from it, others can watch your rusty barrels go to hell and pollute the environment. Funny because John Oliver had a piece about that just last week:
But if it turns out that we'll need an active (as in "needs manpower") care-taking of this waste for several thousands of years, we get into the compounded interests area.
Also, there's the immediate (last 50 years) issues such as barrels of waste being treated in silly manners; e.g. thrown into the ocean near the coast and shot to pieces by air-planes if they surface...
Politicians and corporations will do anything to save money, if they think they'll get away with it. That makes nuclear waste much more dangerous than it should be.
It's not a problem, we'll have clean fusion in 20 years :D /s
(1) We have to keep something dangerous deep underground in some remote places, and if something goes wrong, it may leak out and contaminate dozens of kilometers around the spot. Dozens of kilometers.
(2) Every coastal towns, cities, estuaries, and natural preserves will be wiped out within a thousand years. Across the globe. Including entire nations. (Well, to be fair, they will cease to be nations long before that.)
> A study in 2015 found that assuming cumulative fossil fuel emissions of 10 000 gigatonnes of carbon, the Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt completely over the following millennia, contributing 58 m to global sea-level rise, and 30 m within the first 1000 years.
Out of all wastes to be mismanaged, higher radiation would probably be the easiest to detect - simple detectors are widely available commercially.
Yes, we need ways to store, or recycle - there are ways to do that too - nuclear waste, but that doesn't seem to be an intractable problem, and I don't think this is the main hindrance to the wider spread of the nuclear energetic. Irrational fears of "radiation" and political issues seem to be more prominent there.
I'm a bit tired of all these CO2 comparisons regarding electric vehicles. If we put the CO2 emissions aside, there are so many other benefits moving to EV's. Especially reduced local pollution in cities such as NOx, VOC and particulate emissions. Even if we just look at noise and easy maintenance, electric cars are clear winners. All this focus on CO2 just leads to a lot of inaccurate napkin calculations on one part of the issue, taking focus away from the bigger picture.
That being said, for cities, cars in general are problematic since the consume so much space. I'd say electric bicycles and public transportation is the way to go for cities.
Oversimplified. Electric car can act as storage for renewable energy. Moreover charging happens at night when a lot of countries experience oversupply of energy (e.g. in Poland electricity is cheaper during night hours).
I agree that you can make significant savings with G12 tariff in which night usage is about 30% cheaper than during a day in comparison with fixed-price G11. But unless you have your own source of renewable energy your car will be charged with power from coal power plant. So maybe you can charge your car for less but you still use fossil fuel and it doesn't change much in amounts of emitted CO2.
And noise! Not so much from cars, which are reasonably quiet these days. But trucks and motorbikes, especially, can be appallingly loud and make our cities unpleasant places to be.
The greatest sound pollution from cars is the tires noise. At low speeds this is not noticable but the faster you go the worse it is, I believe engine noise is overtaken by tire noise somewhere above 30km/h.
This sound is spread 10km in each direction from a highway, the areas which are truly spared the noise of cars are hard to find these days.
With cars, at highway speeds, you're right - but engine noise is a much more significant factor for motorcycles (some of which are absurdly loud) and heavy trucks/buses.
In built-up cities, like London, these vehicles are usually traveling at relatively low speeds anyway, so it's really engine noise that is the problem.
A Nissan LEAF - which is not particularly efficient - uses 175Wh/km and burning coal for electricity produces ~1000g CO2/kWh, so even after factoring in grid losses(8%) and charging losses(another 8%) the number is still 204g/km.
That's approximately how much a similarly sized car emits in dense urban traffic(assuming 7,5l/100km).
Even if the power they use is dirty now, upgrading the power sources that feed the grid is a lot easier than upgrading millions upon millions of cars. It is for many reasons a much easier problem to solve.
The problem is that you're assuming that the makeup of electricity production in Europe is a constant, which is strange, because it's probably easier to build low-carbon electricity infrastructure than replace tens of millions of gasoline cars. But the fuel used for gasoline cars is constant, whereas an arbitrary percentage of electricity production can be simply replaced by renewables. Similarly, the CO2 output of car manufacturing itself is variable, dependent on the choice of electricity production method. Of course, a dramatic increase in car production translates to a dramatic increase in resource usage, but cars are not particularly durable commodities, usually lasting only about 15 years or so.
A bigger problem is that the Baltic states (worst electricity prospects in this study) don't have a whole ton of renewable energy potential. It's dark, not (that) windy, not mountainous or volcanic...
One thing I couldn't find in the vizzes is that Europe shares its energy grid for a large part. This means that a large portion of energy consumed in say Germany might well be produced by a nuclear plant in France. It's harder to reflect these flows and get data for it, but I assume it changes the picture.
To many people this map has little value because it includes nuclear power. The article explains that this is a problem too.
So why not try to create a map that takes the nuclear waste/accident problem into consideration.
For example France would look at lot worse since they are mostly run on nuclear power and the northern European countries would look more like an "environmentally friendly lighthouse". Which they are, mostly because some of them get to use easily exploitable geothermal energy.
It would also be great to get an insight in the source of your data you've based this map on.
One of the many things missed in this study is that the switch to EV is not "to reduce greenhouse effects", but to do that while keeping the car industry alive. It if were all about global warming, we could all switch to trains and bikes tomorrow; but fixing environmental problems without challenging established equilibria in terms of employment and economic output, that's the hard bit.
Wait, you can choose what kind of energy you are using. In Germany at least, you can choose a utilities company who gives you 100% renewable energy (at a slightly higher price).
(Of course, I know that you get the same electrons - electricity is fungible. But you do increase demand for renewable energy, and in the long term change the energy mix.)
This goes completely against another recent report that said even electric cars running on coal would still reduce CO2 emissions after about 3.5 years of average use, simply because the internal combustion engine is so woefully inefficient. (With green energy it was 2.5 years.)
I'm afraid I can't find a link to that article right now.
He admits the he neglected to include the carbon cost of constructing the internal combustion engine while including the carbon cost of building electric vehicles, so I would assume he's not been that thorough.
Also, pretty sure he is not considering the rapid increase in photovoltaic electricity production as the cost is dropping below that of coal, the current cheapest source of electricity.
EDIT: Also carbon capture at the powerplant is definitely easier than at the tail pipe.
I'd say a better title for this article/graph would be "How would electric cars affect CO2 output in European countries?" or something along that line.
There's far more to a specific car being a good idea considering the differences between EVs and ICEVs (but of course the needs vary inside countries as well). However, an electric car is much less attractive in a land of long distances where you often need to keep the batteries pre-heated to provide even reasonable range (and even keep your warranty!) – even if the country's electricity production is not dominated by fossil fuels.
EVs being popular have little to do if they are the best cars there – the gov subsidizes the hell out of them (compared to other cars that are highly taxed to pay for the welfare state) so much so, that a Model S retails there for about the same as a $25,000 Audi (US price).
(And why is Norway so rich to begin with, you don't need to wonder.)
Have to admit, I expected a slightly more general look at the situation here, not just the places where an electrical car does less harm to the environment than a normal one. For example, it might reduce CO2 emissions to have an electric car in London... but at the same time it may be better (and more convenient) to just not have a car there at all. Who cares how good it is for the environment it is if you can't find parking, traffic is a nightmare and there are many better options involving public transport?
Wow, we're still doing this? Is it 2000 yet? Please don't start with elaborate secondary effect models unless your model can accurately account for all CO2 emissions of a country per year. Until then, all I'm seeing is someone fudging numbers and components to include/exclude in search of a preconceived conclusion.
The first obvious failure is not accounting for the electricity that already goes into refining oil to gasoline and diesel. A comparison that stops at the exhaust pipe for ICEs is straining credibility.
It's not clear that this is the right way to judge "good idea". Specifically it's possible that oil saved from replacing ICEs will still be burned, in which case EVs strictly increase CO2 emissions due to their manufacturing being very CO2 intensive.
In the wider picture, EVs still have such big lifecycle CO2e footprints that we'll still have to drastically reduce private car use. Focusing on EV technology is a major distraction from recognizing this as a society.
It's quite annoying that he doesn't link to the data source used to create the map. It is hard to know if his data takes into account energy imports/exports or not. For example, Germany's domestic electricity production is largely based on coal and natural gas but it also imports a lot of electricity from the Nordic countries which is generated using clean hydro power.
This is skewed. My father has solar panels and an electric car. So its charged overnight by the battery at his home. This is how you should use electric cars: Start using solar panels. Its a logical combination. Electric cars accelerate decentralised energy plants (like local solar panels).
Are you only interested in the answer today, or what the answer will be for today's EVs when the grid is cleaner in 10 or 20 years? That's one of many interesting aspects that this study isn't looking at.
Oh for sure! I was looking mostly for current numbers but it's very important that we work to make the grid cleaner in order to make EVs make sense in the future.
For example, around 50% of the UK's electricity production is from low-carbon sources (renewables and nuclear). But a much higher percentage of off-peak power is low-carbon. After midnight, close to 100% of the grid is low-carbon because the gas turbines spin down while the wind turbines and nuclear reactors keep running. EVs and smart chargers/smart grids will help us make better use of clean off-peak power!
Also, grids will continue to get cleaner over time. An EV purchased today will have lower and lower emissions as it ages, but a combustion vehicle will only get worse!