Curious: since EVs are only using stored energy which still comes mostly from fossil fuels (afaik), is there any research that would show their total environmental impact per driven mile? That is, if we're burning coal and transmitting resulting electricity, then storing it in batteries and transforming it to motion (with all the losses along the way), how much better off are we compared to the traditional fuel?
This is called the "Long tailpipe argument", if you want to look into it further.
My understanding is that EVs are still usually a net win because
1. Power plants can benefit from economies of scale that individual cars cannot, making a gas power plant powering EVs better than individual cars running on gas.
2. As others have said, it is easier to upgrade power plants than all cars on the road.
Economies of scale are largely negated by transmission losses. Both in getting the electricity to the charging point and in conversion to/from chemical energy in the battery. EVs cab be more efficient due to regeneration though.
Power plants are similar in terms of cost and time consuming to upgrade. There are around 30 million cars in the uk. Assuming an average electric car cost of £20,000 that equates to £600 billion and cars tend to be replaced every 15 years (average car age is 8 years). A powerplant costs about £2 for every Watt installed and the uk needs about 100GW or around £200 billion. A typical large scale nuclear or wind project can take 5 to 15 years to complete but on average a powerplant can last 50 years.
A better argument is that in some countries already a large proportion of electricity comes from renewable sources such as hydroelectric in Norway. Sadly this doesn't translate to the whole world: China is mostly powered by coal.
> Economies of scale are largely negated by transmission losses. Both in getting the electricity to the charging point and in conversion to/from chemical energy in the battery.
Well, gasoline also has "transmission losses": it takes energy to move large amounts of oil to refineries, then to fuel stations. Such energy is usually also fossil fuel based.
For cities with pollution issues, they can also help move pollutants away from population centers. While not a net win for the environment per se, it is a win on population health.
It's all based on MPGe: Miles per gallon equivalent. This is on the window sticker on every EV in the US.
I don't know how to do the exact conversion; but what I've read over the last few years is that in most places in the US, an EV is cleaner than a gasoline car. The only places where an EV "pollutes" about as much as a gas car are areas that highly depend on coal.
Granted, if you put solar panels on your roof to offset your usage, you're about as clean as you can get.
I don't have numbers, and it very much depends on which grid we are talking about.
It's likely that some of the electricity came from renewables and little from coal. Even if from oil, the big power plants are more efficient than your car's engine at converting oil to power. There are losses and I don't know how those compare.
Also the grid gets greener over time, whereas your car engine only gets less efficient over time.
There are plenty of studies on this from my quick Google searches, some better than others. Disregard the one funded by oil industry that assume without further comments that batteries are discarded after 150 000 km, that is not a good assumption to make.
My summary is that a big factor is the CO2 emissions of producing the battery pack which must then be offset. So it depends on size of battery pack, how the pack is used after the car is not used any longer, how much mileage you get out of the car, etc etc
E.g. a Tesla Model X will NOT be better than a tiny gasoline car (of course)
But TL;DR is EV wins for same class cars and for most power mixes, but not by a huge factor.
However, EV + solar/fusion/wind/batteries/.. is at least a possible path (if challenging) of preserving the current lifestylr. Burning fossil fuels is something we know we just have to stop doing 100% in some decades. So there really isn't much alternative to getting the adoption underway.
To those saying Norway has 98% hydro: Fine, but that doesn't change that the power would have been sold to Europe if we don't consume it here. Computing with the EU average mix seems more fair.
You are forgetting about people installing solar on their roof. That seems to be a popular thing with people that own electrical vehicles; especially in places with high grid cost. Basically, some of those house holds end up being net contributors to the grid rather than net consumers of dirty energy. You still have to factor in production cost of solar panels. But they tend to have lifespans measured in decades. The economics for this have been going from dubious to worth it with subsidies to now increasingly also without subsidies; depending on where you live.
Also, car to grid is becoming a thing where car batteries provide power back to the grid when they are not needed. This can add a lot of flexibility to the grid and better utilization of capacity. IMHO, deploying GwHs of battery capacity on the roads in the next few years is creating a massive opportunity for electricity companies to improve their economics and decrease their dependence on gas/coal.
