India Aims To Make Every Car Electric By 2030 In Bid To Tackle Pollution (independent.co.uk)

India's energy minister has unveiled plans for every car sold in the country to be powered by electricity by the year 2030. "The move is intended to lower the cost of importing fuel and lower costs for running vehicles," reports The Independent. From the report: âoeWe are going to introduce electric vehicles in a very big way," coal and mines minister Piyush Goyal said at the Confederation of Indian Industry Annual Session 2017 in New Delhi. "We are going to make electric vehicles self-sufficient... The idea is that by 2030, not a single petrol or diesel car should be sold in the country." Mr Goyal said the electric car industry would need between two and three years of government assistance, but added that he expected the production of the vehicles to be "driven by demand and not subsidy" after that. "The cost of electric vehicles will start to pay for itself for consumers," he said according to the International Business Times. "We would love to see the electric vehicle industry run on its own," he added. An investigation by Greenpeace this year found that as many as 2.3 million deaths occur every year due to air pollution in the country. The report, entitled "Airpocalypse," claimed air pollution had become a "public health and economic crisis" for Indians. It said the number of deaths caused by air pollution was only "a fraction less" than the number of deaths from tobacco use, adding that 3 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was lost to the levels of toxic smog.

Comments

Electric cars are as clean as the electricity used

[MAXOMENOS]

Electric cars are fine and dandy, but we still need to produce electricity to power them. Where will that come from? Solar and wind would be the best source as they pollute the least; nuclear is a good option if you're using more modern plant designs. Natural gas might actually be worse in terms of CO2 emissions. Coal would be the worst case scenario; the smoke contains all sorts of pollutants not emitted by modern gasoline engines.

Re:Way to go, India!

[ShanghaiBill]

If only you were to put that much effort to provide running water, electricity and sanitation

Or maybe they could do more than one thing at a time, and try to solve problems in parallel. Just because someone in Uttar Pradesh doesn't have a flush toilet, doesn't mean that people in Mumbai should just accept suffocating air pollution for the next 13 years.

Re:Electric cars are as clean as the electricity u

[Robotbeat]

India has nuclear power, too. And electric cars (especially with large batteries) are good at smoothing over variable renewables since drivers can charge when power is cheapest (just like people fill up their cars where gas is cheapest).

And even coal (if burned far from the city and with good scrubbers) beats an asthma-inducing and smog-filled city. A coal power plant also can be run very efficiently. If you include the energy cost needed to refine gasoline, then a good, supercritical steam, multi-stage coal power plant charging an electric car may even have fewer CO2 emissions than a conventional gasoline powered vehicle.

But India is also close to the equator, which means more sunshine and less seasonal variation in sunlight (northern Germany and the UK are actually terrible for solar for this reason).