How Green Are Electric Cars? Depends on Where You Plug In

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/automobiles/how-green-are-electric-cars-depends-on-where-you-plug-in.html?ref=science

by nsns • 14 years ago

3 3 14 years ago

DiabloD3• 14 years ago

This is a largely FUD story. Scaremongering people over if their electricity is green, so they should buy a gas guzzling turd burner or not is insane.

Electric cars come first, then green electricity to go with it. And guess what? We're in orbit around a gravity fed fusion reactor, it produces more power per second than the entire human race has used in our entire existence.

To quote Neil Tyson: the tax dollar? NASA's budget doesn't even get into the ink. And what Neil doesn't mention? Green energy research and deployment doesn't get into the ink either.

mchannon• 14 years ago

It's nice to see some numbers behind this problem, but there is a significant flaw in the logic behind their numbers: it assumes fungibility of electricity sources by ownership, rather than by location.

For instance, Las Vegas' power utility may rely heavily on its coal and natural gas holdings, but the hydro plant at Hoover Dam, within its service area, isn't counted toward its greenhouse gas footprint; that credit goes to southern California.

Pristine-looking Utah, on the other hand, gets 74% of its capacity from 8 coal-fired locations, but since these aren't owned by the local utility, they get counted against customer utilities in places like Nevada and Arizona.

Maybe it's fair this way. If my utility puts clean energy into the grid in faraway lands, but the bulk of the electromotive force charging my EV is coming from the smoke-belching plant next door that's owned by some out-of-state conglomerate, how guilty or smug should I feel?

Moving the pollution out of the city and into the boonies also has its benefits, even if it's an even amount of pollution for the trade.

A final point that EV apologists (I'm one) almost never put out there: oil refineries use prodigious amounts of electricity too. So while you can argue that an EV is only moving the tailpipe, you need to also observe that a gas-powered vehicle similarly moves some of its tailpipe to the same place (the power plant smokestack).

jzoidberg• 14 years ago

This is a very static analysis. It takes the current spread of power generation emissions and applies it to the future electricity load of EV's. This is fundamentally flawed reasoning.

EV's will constitute a significant new load on the grid and we will have to build modern power plants to supply the extra load. New power plants produce significantly fewer emissions.

How Green Are Electric Cars? Depends on Where You Plug In

Related Stories