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Some Electric Car Drivers Might Spew More CO2 Than Diesel Cars, New Research Shows (bloomberg.com)
bricko shares a report from Bloomberg with the caption, "Making batteries is a mess": Beneath the hoods of millions of the clean electric cars rolling onto the world's roads in the next few years will be a dirty battery. Every major carmaker has plans for electric vehicles to cut greenhouse gas emissions, yet their manufacturers are, by and large, making lithium-ion batteries in places with some of the most polluting grids in the world. By 2021, capacity will exist to build batteries for more than 10 million cars running on 60 kilowatt-hour packs, according to data of Bloomberg NEF. Most supply will come from places like China, Thailand, Germany and Poland that rely on non-renewable sources like coal for electricity.
An electric vehicle in Germany would take more than 10 years to break even with an efficient combustion engine's emissions. "We're facing a bow wave of additional CO2 emissions," said Andreas Radics, a managing partner at Munich-based automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors, which argues that for now, drivers in Germany or Poland may still be better off with an efficient diesel engine. The findings, among the more bearish ones around, show that while electric cars are emission-free on the road, they still discharge a lot of the carbon-dioxide that conventional cars do. Just to build each car battery -- weighing upwards of 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) in size for sport-utility vehicles -- would emit up to 74 percent more C02 than producing an efficient conventional car if it's made in a factory powered by fossil fuels in a place like Germany, according to Berylls' findings. Yet regulators haven't set out clear guidelines on acceptable carbon emissions over the life cycle of electric cars, even as the likes of China, France and the U.K. move toward outright bans of combustion engines. It all has to do with manufacturing. According to estimates of Mercedes-Benz's electric-drive system integration department, manufacturing an electric car pumps out "significantly" more climate-warming gases than a conventional car, which releases only 20 percent of its lifetime CO2 at this stage. "Just switching to renewable energy for manufacturing would slash emissions by 65 percent, according to Transport & Environment," reports Bloomberg. "In Norway, where hydro-electric energy powers practically the entire grid, the Berylls study showed electric cars generate nearly 60 percent less CO2 over their lifetime, compared with even the most efficient fuel-powered vehicles."
An electric vehicle in Germany would take more than 10 years to break even with an efficient combustion engine's emissions. "We're facing a bow wave of additional CO2 emissions," said Andreas Radics, a managing partner at Munich-based automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisors, which argues that for now, drivers in Germany or Poland may still be better off with an efficient diesel engine. The findings, among the more bearish ones around, show that while electric cars are emission-free on the road, they still discharge a lot of the carbon-dioxide that conventional cars do. Just to build each car battery -- weighing upwards of 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) in size for sport-utility vehicles -- would emit up to 74 percent more C02 than producing an efficient conventional car if it's made in a factory powered by fossil fuels in a place like Germany, according to Berylls' findings. Yet regulators haven't set out clear guidelines on acceptable carbon emissions over the life cycle of electric cars, even as the likes of China, France and the U.K. move toward outright bans of combustion engines. It all has to do with manufacturing. According to estimates of Mercedes-Benz's electric-drive system integration department, manufacturing an electric car pumps out "significantly" more climate-warming gases than a conventional car, which releases only 20 percent of its lifetime CO2 at this stage. "Just switching to renewable energy for manufacturing would slash emissions by 65 percent, according to Transport & Environment," reports Bloomberg. "In Norway, where hydro-electric energy powers practically the entire grid, the Berylls study showed electric cars generate nearly 60 percent less CO2 over their lifetime, compared with even the most efficient fuel-powered vehicles."
Hasn't it been known for some time that most CO2 is produced during a vehical's manufacturing rather than during use, and the most low carbon approach is to keep trying the same vehicle for as long as possible rather than buying a new electric car.
For a diesel Volvo vs a Tesla model S, assuming the average 2015 power mix in Europe the break even point is about 28.000Km.
I did take some big shortcuts tho. I compared 100kwh worth of Panasonic LiPo batteries + power to the diesel fuel needed to drive the volvo the same distance using Tesla Model S power usage figures.
There are way to slew this in one or the other direction - for instance I did also add CO2 Equivalent for refining the diesel.
Considering where Berylls Strategy Advisors is located and the fact that the German car companies still have no mass-market ready electric car my guess is that this is fake news and can be disregarded.
No, you're right, I didn't. It does reflect what the Union of Concerned Scientist's calculator shows; in certain areas, an EV currently is not much cleaner than a Prius. In lots of other areas, however, they are quite a lot cleaner.
https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-v...
So an EV is not as clean as riding a bike, but if you are going to be driving a car in an area with a reasonably clean grid and want to get the most efficient car you can, you should get an EV.
This is false. Germany still runs majority of its nuclear plants. Less than half was closed after Fukushima (8/17). The current plan is to phase them out as their useful life span ends, and not upgrade/build new ones. This phase out is ongoing and is being constantly postponed at this point as reality of having no chance of meeting CO2 targets with all the coal fired plants they have to run to compensate is starting to dawn on non-crazy parts of environmentalist movement.
The problem is that those closed plants alone accounted for a sizeable chunk of energy, so Germany went from net exporter to net importer overnight, while having to fire up all of its mothballed coal plants, and import from Poland which built up a lot of coal power near German border with correct expectations that Germany will need it.
Thing is though, coal power is still a lot cleaner than gasoline/diesel automotive ICE in almost every metric. A LOT cleaner. Even in just the CO2 aspects, without getting into the whole "particulates, NOx, etc" brouhaha, which is close to zero on modern coal fired plant, but significant and emitted at surface level by automotive ICEs. Which is still one of the major causes of harm to humans in more congested areas that has nothing to do with global warming.
It's also only looking at CO2, and ignoring the other pollution. Diesels put out a lot of harmful particulate matter right where people live and breathe.
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No, the only selling point for an EV is when it's energy use is cheaper than fossil fuels. There are entire sources of bio-diesel, and alcohol-blended gasoline that can reduce the input carbon value, but they still put out carbon. EV's do not put out carbon, so the more EV's there are replacing non-EV's, the less carbon there is being put out on a daily basis, but if the entire world switched to EV's overnight, the Energy capacity to charge the vehicles would increase carbon from having coal/natural gas/etc as energy generation sources in higher-cost energy markets, not just the battery production market.
A zero-carbon solution will likely not exist as long as Coal, Natural gas, and Nuclear remain as energy generators. While Coal and Natural gas actually emit carbon, there are also similar carbon costs in the construction and destruction of Nuclear plants, and Nuclear plants can't be recycled, they are just buried for future generations to unintentionally irradiate themselves with. Nuclear plants, like Coal and Natural gas, also use up fresh water supplies. Hydro-electric is effectively the only power generator that ticks all the boxes except one "environment impact", as they destroy fish habitat and typically put farmable land under water, never to be recovered. That's an easier pill to swallow than all other generation sources, including Solar, Wind and Geothermal. But Hydroelectric has a limited number of locations that it can be placed with low impacts to fish and freshwater sources.
Solar and Wind have the same carbon costs as all other energy generation sources, and in fact Solar has the exact same problem as EV batteries, they're being produced with dirty energy. Geothermal, like Nuclear, Natural gas and Coal, all consume fresh water supplies to create steam. Steam is a greenhouse gas too, but it's a recoverable one with weather.
The biggest advantage of electric cars is not the 3x efficiency, it's not the incredible acceleration, and it's only partly the lack of post-purchase carbon emissions. It's that everything is much more fungible. I do not delude myself that my electric car is not polluting, I get my power from the texas power grid, which is 34% natural gas and 30% coal . The 3x efficiency combined with getting 28% from less polluting sources is a big step forward, but ultimately just part of the solution.
The main advantage is that it is easier to pressure ERCOT to change their ways than it is to cause millions of texans to change their ways (and buy new vehicles, which itself is pretty nasty for the environment). If the major source of carbon emissions for electric cars is the manufacturers, we can get after them. These entities are capable of working with their governments to come up with a timeline, and a way of managing the expenses to make change happen. Joe Sixpack in his 1967 pickup is unreachable, possibly couldn't afford to fix it if he wanted to, and might not comply if he didn't.
As long as people are driving around with combustion engines, we can pass laws and scream and yell and nothing will change.
Buried superconducting conduits might make sense in some niches, but for the long haul stick to HVDC.
HVDC would survive solar storms by design too, not that retrofitting the existing grid to be solar storm immune would be all that costly ... but no one is doing it, because there is no profit motive to do so.
This is a terrible argument, and a poorly written article over on Bloomberg. The writer got themselves so flustered that they couldn't be bothered to proof-read, or make a coherent point that doesn't stretch credulity. I would call this, "panic journalism."
You can't do statistics this way because methods of generating power are shifting. Coal plants are dying off across the world. Part of the problem with this article, not to defend coal, is that there is no one way to measure coal emissions. It depends largely on when the power plants were constructed, what the local regulations are, and the size of the plant. You can't just run an average on it, and hope to be close to the truth of the matter. Even comparing Poland to Belarus is silly. And it gets sillier when you start talking about Germany and France.
But even that is mundane when you put it in the terms stated. Europe, as we all know is working hard to solve the power problem. They're doing it in ways that are a lot more radical than anything we've seen in the US. To start talking about carbon footprints, as they stand today, before the industry has even taken hold is throwing away the baby with the bathwater.
Of course, when it comes to panic journalism, that's kinda the point, so I can't fault them for that.
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I always found it fascinating that CO2 levels moving from 200ppm (0.0002) to 400ppm (0.0004), a change of 0.0002, is the cause of all this warming.
Yes, isn't it fascinating? The fact that small fractions of trace gasses can dominate the atmospheric infrared absorption was discovered by John Tyndall in 1859. https://earthobservatory.nasa....
We now know that this is because the tightly-bound diatomic molecules don't have vibrational modes in the infrared energy range, of course, but at the time, it was indeed quite fascinating that miniscule amounts of water and carbon dioxide could absorb more than the vastly larger concentration of oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere.
Tyndall was quite an amazing man. He's also the person credited with coming up with the first reasonable answer to the question "why is the sky blue"? https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/e...
(his answer was "scattering", which is right as far as it goes, but of course it took the mathematics of Rayleigh scattering fifty years later to understand the actual details.)
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Even in just the CO2 aspects, without getting into the whole "particulates, NOx, etc" brouhaha, which is close to zero on modern coal fired plant
Not sure where you get that idea, using 3mi/kWh and the average coal plant in my region I figured out that the NOx emissions from an EV running on coal are several times worse than the current EPA standard for passenger vehicles, about as dirty as the dieselgate VWs in fact. Particulates are harder as the PM2.5 and PM5 are going to be in places with low population densities which is probably an overall improvement for health. For CO2 it's close, a hybrid is cleaner than a 3mi/kWh EV when running on coal. But put a reasonable amount of renewables into the mix and use natural gas instead of coal and the EV wins by a large amount.
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