How clean are EVs?

Declaring guilt, I bought a large van for $800 (it was about 20 years old) and over time spent about $10,000 for fuel.

 

i have done

 

Wow ! ! Our new 34 EV miles Minivan will do over 30mpg - even after the ev range switches to charge sustain mode. Things are definitely getting better.
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what is $800. in todays dollars? we must be talking 1930's or so

 

1958 Herman delivery van, steel body, on Ford 600 truck frame. With oak stringers - those were the days!

Its smallish 6 cylinder motor would push its non-aerodynamic shape, at modest highway speeds, on 11 miles per gallon.

For NY State Throughway I ran only 4 wheels (otherwise double in rear) to save on tolls. That covered my NY fuel expenses

 

i suppose there was the obligatory mattress in back

 

Folding sofa/bed. I did interior conversions myself and a good job I may say. External decorations by artistically inclined friends.

Which would appropriately lead to the gif of Lurch shaking his head, but I've already sent that to PriusChat.

 

Very informative video. I just wonder how Prius Prime on solar would compete against Tesla on solar??? Considering it took Testa 3 years to beat regular Prius if Prime driver only rarely use gas, it may take much longer than the life of a car. I consider the life of a car to be somewhere around 10-12 years max but often much shorter for different reasons no matter what car I drive.

 

Thanks for return to topic.

 

probably depends on your driving habits, but yeah, if you only toot around 20-40 miles a day depending on charging opportunities, no contest

 

Yap, I would think if one drives Prime without plugging or drive regularly far beyond its EV ranges, it would be no better than regular Prius. But for many of PRIME owners, who regularly drive less than EV range at a time, it will be better than Tesla. And 40 miles a day is 14,600 miles per year, that's just about average driving miles for most Americans, isn't it?

 

i do believe. that's the missing link

 

The video was a nice and understandable overview, but there simplification deviates a bit from the studies I've seen on electric vs gas vehicles. Specifically, this study on gas vs electric vehicles: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1530-9290.2012.00532.x

Short Answer: As long as your grid isn't significantly coal-powered, EVs will be better for the climate change than the gas vehicles.

Long Answer: If you don't wallow in scientific articles like I do, the meat of this study is really this part of the chart on global warming potential (GWP) (i.e. climate change):

I've included some text to make the acronym jargon more understandable, but the result is that EVs have lower life cycle greenhouse gas emissions than gas/diesel cars in all situations except when powered by coal.

That being said, the fact that EVs do worse for mineral depletion and the various toxicities/eutrophication is a bit concerning, but often these choices aren't universally better or worse, but tradeoffs between which impacts you are more worried about.

 

There is a couple of issues I see with that study, but first a question. Is there a grid in Europe that is 100% coal powered? There isn't in the US. The paper looks at a 100% coal grid, 100% natural gas one, and one that is an average mix of sources in Europe. Since there is no outlet that is actually supplied by the average US grid mix, I assume the same is true for the last. Which likely means these are all hypotheticals.

Not that it makes the data useless, but it hints that results may not actually reflect the impact in reality. Using a grid average lessens the work load, but only applies if plug in cars are evenly spread across the US or Europe. They aren't in the US, most of the cars here are in areas which have cleaner grids. Even on the most coal intensive grid, the average EV emits as much CO2 during use as a gasoline car that gets around 40mpg. That's better than most ICE cars sold here, but may not be for Europe.

The issues are that they use 150k km for car lifespan, that is a little over 93k miles, and the end of life for the battery is assumed to be disposal or recycling. The lifespan may be what car manufacturers use, but they want to sell more cars. Those not surpassing that number, including EVs, didn't because of accidents or other damage. Then batteries no longer good for cars still have uses as stand by power supplies, or time shifting functions. Toyota is already using old hybrid batteries for the latter at dealers in Japan.

 

There are a couple of more recent European studies that conclude essentially the same as the Hawkins study. One is a report from the European Environmental Agency ( https://www.eea.europa.eu/publications/electric-vehicles-from-life-cycle/at_download/file - used in part the Hawkins study), and an open-access paper ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.12825 ), which is a prospective study through year 2050.

 

Its a model looking at various hypotheticals. The 100% coal v 100% natural gas scenarios are to show that there is some X% of coal that matches the life cycle GHG emissions of a gas or diesel car. If your local country/state electricity grid is greater than that % coal, than an EV is probably worse than gas or diesel car.

In Europe, high coal generation is mostly in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland, Czech Republic and Bulgaria: The EU got less electricity from coal than renewables in 2017 | Carbon Brief

In the U.S., its primarily certain midwest or plain states such as West Virginia, Kentucky and Wyoming: The U.S. States Most Dependent On Coal Power [Infographic]

Basically, if you support EVs, you need to be supporting programs to phase out coal (such as the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign).

 

some 50+ pages into the doc, the bar chart showing Coal Fired electricity being so high, fails to describe any type of emissions controls. Its height on the chart makes it look as though there were no emissions controls.. With the coal-fired electric being this High it would presumably be just blowing the ash right into the sky, which the EU hasn't done for ages. Also missing is any data on wind, nuke, geothernal & solar electric cleanliness. The report did do a fair job on battery recycling .... but that's fairly old news.
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One clarification. I believe it would be more accurate to say "...probably worse than the most efficient gas cars". At least in the USA, even on 100% coal the average EV beats the average gas car.

 

I should have stressed it more in my post, but the short life span they used for cars in those graphs is not reflective of the reality. The emission system warranty that covers hybrid batteries in CARB states is 150k miles, and many manufacturer power train warranties go to 100k miles. Cars in the US regularly exceed that without major repair work.

It is accepted that BEVs have higher production emissions than ICE cars, but the have lower in use emissions. Using a life span more reflective of reality, that in use emission difference lets the BEV beat the ICE car in life time emissions, in the US. Now in Europe, the typical gas car likely is more efficient than in the US. So the in use emissions may not be enough to make up for the higher production ones BEVs have.

I was anti-coal before being pro-EV. There are plenty of reasons to be against coal before GHG emissions comes up.

For GHG emissions, higher efficiency and CO2 sequestering are the only controls available. I don't think any commercial coal plants are using sequestering. Though the Audi pilot plants making methane and syn crude could be using a coal plant for a CO2 source. Did the paper specify what level of technology or age of the plants; newer coal would be more efficient.

 

(I agree with your lifespan comments*)

But another issue that most studies give ZERO weight to is that EVs move all their smog creating emissions out of dense cities. If, the CO2 and other emissions were the same for EVs and ICE cars it would still be advantageous to clean the air in cities for the vast majority of drivers...as well as pedestrians and other air breathers in cities.

* We don't yet really know what a 15 or 20 year old EV is going to look like for repair-ability. But we do know that the "average" age of cars on the road is 11+ years old. Assuming any value for the lifetime that is less than the average of 11 years is being dishonest. Assuming anything less than the real lifetimes is also dishonest. If the average age is 11, the actual lifespan for the 90th or 95th percentile has to be 15 or 20 years. Just from the math. Actual data like this has to exist for ICE cars. For example, in CA you have to get a smog check every couple of years where the car make, model, year and odometer are sent to the DMV...PHEV are now required to do this too. When an old car transitions from registered to not registered, they know about it. Technically, it doesn't really matter if it takes an EV in a coal grid state 10 or 15 years to "break even" on emissions compared to the best ICE car...the fact that it exceeds it at some point should be all it takes to claim superiority since EVs only get cleaner (due to the grid improving) and ICE cars only get dirtier due to oil requiring more and more exotic means to drill.

(Probably) most of us here don't keep cars longer than 10 years from when they were new ... but there are many people who buy and keep running 10+ year old cars for many years.

In 2018 (when the first large batch of EVs...the Model 3...become 10 years old what will the used market look like for them? Will they all get scrapped and recycled? Or will they be made into useful short range commuters cars that are easy to maintain and low cost per mile?

Mike