# The case for Electric Cars: pollution?



## samwichse (Jan 28, 2012)

http://youtu.be/32UGD0fV45g


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## Caps18 (Jun 8, 2008)

Solar PV has minor production pollution that can be addressed easily at the point of production. Not sure about any installation or maintenance pollution.  Compared to every other option, it is 99.9% cleaner and better.


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## Moltenmetal (Mar 20, 2014)

Agree that the false claims are not in our interest. But 300 Wh/mile is a good round numbers figure commonly achieved in real world driving by Leafs, Volts and numerous conversions here. It's not fictional or exaggeratedly low. That's around your 18kWh/100 km figure. Charging is on the order of 90% efficient- measured, not guessed at. Grid losses vary greatly- you can't nail down one figure for fair comparison aside from an average.

Next you need to compare against a real alternative form of personal transportation. Comparisons to air conditioning or other electricity uses are meaningless. So let's take my Prius C as an example. I achieve a real- world fuel economy of 4.5 L/100km with that car- increasing to 5.5 or so in winter. Petroleum distribution is very energy efficient- but refining is not. It's tough to nail down exactly how much crude it takes to generate a gallon of gasoline because it depends on the whole product suite of the refinery- all aspects of which are highly integrated and hence impossible to meaningfully separate. But it's easy to look up how much CO2 is generated per litre burned.

The grid here in Ontario is only 40% fossil- all gas, no coal. The balance is nuclear, hydro and other renewables. Off peak, which would usually be one charge per day, is even higher % nuclear.

So: compare 40% of 18 kWh, plus 10% for charging losses, at say 35% thermo efficiency- round numbers about what, 18 kWh of source fossil energy to make electricity, versus say 44 kWh equivalent of gasoline to drive the Prius the same distance. Yeah, that's very back of the envelope, but the difference isn't a small one...

Even compared to the hybrid, which is best available alternative tech for low emission individual enclosed transport, the electric vehicle wins hands down on CO2 emissions, other toxic emissions like NOx and particulates, etc., assuming nuclear waste is stored safely. Is that a safe bet? Well, so far, the number of deaths attributable to nuclear waste in Ontario since the 1960s has been zero. Contrast that with deaths and disease directly attributable to air pollution- no contest. The cost of building and decommissioning nuclear is enormous though, and the insurance cost is mutualized across all taxpayers in the province. That alone is a massive subsidy if you think about it, though we haven't had to make a claim over the whole 50+ yr history of nuclear in the province.

The EV loses to an electric train, but per passenger it beats a diesel bus- probably loses to a diesel commuter train though.

Too much is made of embodied energy in my opinion- cars use far more energy in their lifetime than they take to make. These well or wall to wheels studies are very easily manipulated to tell whatever story the author wants to hear, merely by moving the system boundary of the analysis a bit. Idiots can convince themselves that the few kg of Ni in the Prius's NiMH pack makes the car higher in energy intensity than a HumV, which is wrong by at least half an order of magnitude, but that merely illustrates how useless these studies can be. Similarly, bullshit studies have shown that solar PV is a net energy consumer, whereas the authoritative studies give it a EROEI of at least five- nowhere nearly as good as digging up fossil carbon and dumping the effluent back to the atmosphere, but that's not a fair comparison.

What we need is a substantial carbon tax on the source fossil fuels. Then simple cost, capital and operating, would tell you the right thing to do. But until then, we have a distorted market, and fuels which get to dump their waste to the atmosphere free of charge are economically favoured.


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