Electric cars are not inherently clean.

I had a particularly long underground journey today. This meant that I read one of those free newspapers until I couldn’t find a word left to read, so I solved a Sudoku puzzle. Good thing I had my pen with me. There was a small news bit that said that the conservative party (UK) was taking advantage of how bad labour looks like with respect to the environment by promising to get people to switch to electric cars if they win the elections. My question is how is that supposed to help the environment?

When it comes to cars two words make them sound really clean, electric and hydrogen. In both cases it is not necessarily true. Electric cars are clean on the spot, because they have no direct emissions. The electricity in them however was not. To produce this electricity some power plant must have generated some pollution, unless of course it was a renewable. If it was a coal power plant then we are better off leaving cars to burn their fuel.

The same thing applies for hydrogen. How you produce your hydrogen is really the key factor in determining how clean it is. Is it solar hydrogen, nice! Is it hydrogen produced through electrolysis where the current was supplied by a coal power plant, not nice! Simple.

So the next time someone promises you an electric or hydrogen fuelled car, please ask them where they intend to generate those from.

Sustainable Energy

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January 17th, 2009

5 responses

5 responses


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Jack

I would be interested in seeing some figures to back up such bold claims. Figures from an LCA of an electric car, a hydrogen car and a petrol car (including fuel production methods, as petrochemical production is hardly green) would be most good.

January 17, 2009 7:17 pm

admin

Me too, that is the main idea of the post. We need to look at numbers and where things are coming from, and not to simply accept that if a car is electric or hydrogen powered then it is clean.

The LCAs I would like to see however are not those of the cars, but those of the whole well-to-wheel chain, preferably they would be quite site specific and have somehow consistent boundaries so that comparing them would actually make sense.

January 17, 2009 7:39 pm

Harry

http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file31647.pdf

January 19, 2009 8:45 pm

admin

Quote from the document above:

“From the point of view of CO2 emissions, electric vehicles need to be evaluated on a life-cycle basis, as emissions depend entirely on the source of the electricity. For their introduction to significantly contribute to CO2 emissions reduction, a coherent strategy would have to be pursued in the electricity generation sector, with an increase of renewable or nuclear based power, or the generalisation of carbon capture and sequestration technology.”

January 19, 2009 9:08 pm

Harry

But still, the sentence “If it was a coal power plant then we are better off leaving cars to burn their fuel” is too bold, the quote above doesn’t make any conclusions like that.

January 24, 2009 9:48 am

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