Electric cars are the future. Is producing electricity to charge them cleaner than gasoline?

I presume it is since the big push is for electric vehicles.

My brother-in-law is a pretty big believer in the future of electric vehicles. He has tested a Tesla(he does not own one) and was apparently really impressed.

I live in Michigan and Joe Biden has been here almost more than any other state, mainly to push the car companies to make electric vehicles.

Is it cleaner to produce this amount of electricity than it is to have cars and other vehicles running on gasoline?

Also, if our electrical grid is pressed right now…how will it handle us all charging our cars regularly?

Definitely electric cars are cleaner to operate. First of all, a fair bit of the U.S. electric power grid is powered by non-fossil sources - hydro, nuclear, and some wind and solar.

Second, electric cars are much more efficient at turning energy into motion. A gallon of gas contains as much energy as 33.7 kWh of electricity. A Tesla model 3 uses 26 kWh to go 100 miles, for an equivalent efficiency of about 130 miles per gallon of gas. Some EVs are less than half that efficient (Ford Lightning, for example), but that still puts them way above gas vehicles.

There are grid capacity issues, however. At the local level, very few people will be able to put level 2 or 3 chargers in their homes, or not have homes at all. Many neighborhoods will not be able to sustain an electric car charging at the same time in every home. Some houses are already maxxed out in electrical service.

Also, if every passenger car were electric, you’d need about 30% more electrical generating capability on the grid. We are currently going in the other direction, shutting down coal and nuclear plants with nothing to replace them, banning or limiting fracking and shutting down pipelines.

IMO, electric cars won’t scale unless we follow Europe and China and start getting serious about building new nuclear power plants.

I have read that, even if the electric car were charged with electricity generated only from coal-fired power plants, it would still be cleaner and possibly more efficient than an internal combustion engine (ICE) powered car, because a large power plant can be made more efficient and less polluting than a small local engine.

And that’s the worst case. Cleaner sources of electricity would lead to cleaner cars. Sixty percent of Ontario’s baseline electricity generation is nuclear, and most of the rest is hydro-electric, with wind, natural gas, and solar filling in the corners — NO coal — so electric cars here are much cleaner in operation than ICE cars.

Also note - coal is pure carbon, essentially - so coal plants turn carbon into carbon dioxide. Natural gas however is essentially methane - one carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms. So burning natural gas is making two water molecules for each CO2 molecule - hence, burning less carbon to get the same energy by comparison. Plus, natural gas is a lot easier to move and handle.

The grid currently has a lot of extra power plants to provide capacity during peak - when everyone is cooking dinner, for example. If people start charging a lot of cars overnight, this existing capacity can run for longer, thus paying back the infrastructure costs faster.

I charge my Tesla 3 starting at 1AM for example. It may or may not be using more power than I might use peak during a hot summer evening when the AC, stove, and hot water heater might all be going at once. But yes, if everyone charged at 40A or higher overnight, there’s a good chance the feed system somewhere in the neighbourhood would hit capacity. And, there’s already been a big long thread about apartments and on-street parking and how charging could possibly handled there. (Hint - with difficulty)

(The guy down the street has a Model X - it looks like he has 200A house service and can charge up to 100A. Not something every house can do…)

I wanted to upgrade from a 100A service to a 200A one, and the power company said it would be $30K to $65K just for their end of the work. And the distribution tranformers in the neighborhood can’t come close to handling 200A draws from more than a fraction of houses, so after a few houses upgrade they won’t allow any more.

This is probably the case at many points on the grid. The amount of upgrading required to support a nation of electric cars should not be underestimated.

Yes. Electric cars take more energy to manufacture, so there’s a crossover point where the more polluting manufacturing is offset by less polluting operation. Under the current US average power mix, that crossover point is around 7000-11000 miles of use. Even in the worst case scenario, all coal, the crossover point is still under 30,000 miles. Gasoline is very much a carbon releasing fuel, and you get efficiencies of scale from large scale energy generation operations, and electric cars are more efficient at turning energy (in whatever form generates the electricity) into motion.

As our grid gets greener (which is almost certain to happen), then the fleet of electric cars are even better.

The “grid” isn’t really as pressed as you think it is. Also I put grid in quotes because there’s more than one, and there are also local issues that are different from grid-wide issues.

There are three grids in the U.S., the Eastern, Western, and Texas (because Texas is, well, Texas…). The Eastern grid is fine except for the northeast part of it, which is always a bit overloaded, at least in the summer during the day. Similarly, the western grid is mostly fine except for southern California, where it is also overloaded in the summer. And Texas is usually just great unless it gets record-breaking cold weather that it wasn’t designed to handle, in which case it goes to hell in a handbasket. But loading-wise, under normal weather, it’s usually fine.

On a more local level, you may have issues though, as many have mentioned upthread. A particular substation might be overloaded or your home’s service may not be adequate. But the power grids, for the most part, aren’t the issue, except in the northeast and southwest. Every other area of the country has plenty of power to spare, generally speaking.

A few strategically placed power plants in the northeast and southwest will solve that basic problem, though this is probably also going to require significant infrastructure costs for wiring and equipment that can handle the additional loads. So basically New York and southern California are screwed, but the rest of the U.S. doesn’t need to worry about its grids.

Meh. If you need a lot of power, your choice used to be coal plants or nukes. But then people started specifically focusing on coal plants, so the coal plants have been mostly switched to natural gas instead. Your current choice is really down to natural gas and its corresponding greenhouse gas emissions that destroy the atmosphere, or nuke plants which create nuclear fuel which poisons its part of the environment for tens of thousands of years and has no really good long-term storage solution.

It would be nice if the grid could get greener, but wind and solar don’t produce enough power and aren’t consistent, hydro destroys the environment and is mostly already loaded to capacity, and other sources like biomass, geothermal, wave energy, etc. just don’t produce enough power.

As much as I would like to see green energy, I don’t see this changing significantly within my lifetime. We’re stuck with producing just enough green energy to make environmentalists feel better while realistically being forced to choose which environmentally horrible solution we want for the bulk of our power.

May I have a quote on that ? As per my understanding, Nuclear Power in Europe is on the decline. For example , look at this chart :

The grids are hanging in there now, but what happens when you need an extra 1.4tWh to power the electric cars? There isn’t 30% of slack in current power generation.

Also, Biden is still threatening to shut down the line 5 pipeline, he’s curtailed fracking for more natural gas, New York shut down the Indian Point reactor and California is about to shut down Diablo Canyon, which provides 9% of California’s electricity. There are no planned replacements I kmow of.

Biden also says the grid will be completely renewable by 2050 which I think is flatly impossible. The longer they drift along in fantasy land shutting down fossil and nuclear without replacement, the worse it’s going to get. Europe is in even worse shape, and only Denmark and France seem to have woken up and are building more nuclear plants. Germany is screwed and will soon be under Russia’s thumb as they put their energy security in Russian hands, shutting down nuclear plants with 25 years of life still in them for Russian gas. Madness.

Again a quote on that please !!

If you look at the power generation trend for Germany, for 2020 to 2021, Coal has gone up from 21% to 27%, while Natural Gas (Russian gas) has gone up from 13% to 14%.

They have put their Energy Security in Coal !! Its hard for some people to accept that, but Energy security trumps climate change.

The answer is very nuanced, and I present some considerations.
Part 1 : Climate Change / CO2 Emissions Considerations :
a> An Electric Car if it is charged with Coal Power will take about 6 years to break even with a comparable gasoline car on CO2 emissions. It will take around 1 year to break even if you consider the “mixed fuel generation” (aka average fuel) of the grid and even lesser if you consider hydroelectric power
Cite : https://graphics.reuters.com/ELECTRIC-VEHICLES/EMISSIONS/rlgpdrmjmpo/chart.png
b> Power Generation is very nuanced. For example Wind Blows at night in the US in a narrow corridor around the middle of Texas. Most power demand however is in the middle of the day in summer. EVs can help by being charged at night.

Part 2 : Land, Water and Ecological Damage
a> If you think Fracking is bad, then you should look at Lithium production. Although most of the news will be hidden by China. EVs need metals like Lithium, which are produced at huge costs to the environment. Read more here : The spiralling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction | WIRED UK

b> Lithium batteries used in cars are recyclable - BUT are not. Another of the word games played to confuse consumers. The costs of recycling have kept recycling away and what happens to EV batteries after their life is over is kept under wraps. Most likely they are headed for the landfills.

You will find lots of PR material as to how Toyota or someone else used a lot of used Prius batteries to make a power bank, but these are all gimmicks. These gimmicks are there to avoid the costs of recycling these batteries.

c> Nuclear power is green - but mining the fuel is not. Because of the very secretive nature of nuclear fuel mining, the environmental costs are kept under wraps.
“For example, from 1944-1986 the United States extracted 4 million tons of Uranium ore from and left 500 abandoned mines in native Navajo territories. In that time the rates of lung cancer and other diseases effecting Navajo living near the mine rose drastically.” - The Health and Environmental Impact of Uranium Mining

Nuclear Energy power plants are usually bigger, and for each MW they generate - they put 2 MW or more into the water reservoir (same as coal plants). That effects ecology too and then there is the question of Nuclear Waste Disposal.

Bottom-line for me : At the Individual level, pick the car and energy source that is most economical.

Nuclear is definitely declining right now, because the lag time is long. But Denmark, which was famously anti-nuclear, has recently flipped and is now planning to build reactors. France’s anti-nuclear movement had achieved a promise that France would de-nuclearize, but France is now planning new reactors. Finland will have a new reactor coming online in 2022, France has one opening in 2023. The UK has two new reactors under construction.

Germany is the country shutting down nuclear, and bafflingly still plans to shut the rest of their running plants down, even though they have a power crisis and are becoming dependent on Russian gas through the Nordstream 2 pipeline. Their carbon footprint is going up as a result.

The fact is, Northern Europe is terrible for solar, and wind, as they just discovered, can vanish for weeks at a time. They’ll never get much past 25-35% wind and solar for solid technical reasons until the problem of long term storage is solved, if it ever is. This year is teaching them a lesson in the perils of magical thinking, and they are taking another hard look at nuclear power.

All this paints a rosy picture for the Nuclear Industry, but in reality it is not.

A striking example of that is France’s 1.65-GW Flamanville Nuclear Plant, which is years behind schedule, plagued by structural problems and well over budget at €12.4 billion. French Environment Minister Barbara Pompili has called the project “a mess.”

Like Flamanville, Hinkley is also behind schedule, with operator Electricité de France SA recently raising the project’s cost estimate by £500 million to between £22 billion and £23 billion, in 2015 currency, as a result of COVID-19.

Anyways, the bottomline is NOT good for Nuclear in Europe :

"Total nuclear generation capacity in the EU, U.K. and Switzerland amounts to more than 116 GW, according to the World Nuclear Association. This figure will fall over the coming years as countries shut reactors faster than new ones are built. "(Bolding mine)

yes, the guy down the street has 200A feed and can charge his EV at 100A (he has a standard Tesla charger, but I think the max is 80A continuous if it’s on a 100A breaker).

The point is, EV charging at home would happen mostly during the most off-peak hours in the middle of the night, when AC demand is least (if any) and other household uses are minimal. I popped my main breaker (100A) one hot night, charging at 40A. I set the charge current down to 26A and it’s never been a problem since. That’s more than enough to recharge overnight.

If the local distribution can handle everyone cooking and using AC at the same time then it should handle charging. The supplemental generating stations will just run longer, generating (sorry!) more profit.

Where there will be a problem, I think, will be places like apartment buildings. The total building feed was probably not sized to also charge a garage with a hundred cars in it. I’m not sure what the service for an individual apartment would be, but I suspect it’s not the same as 100A for a 2,000 sq ft house. Same with some older areas of towns, or areas where the typical stove is natural gas and the power service is therefore much less. Those are the areas where the grid will need upgrading.

The other thing we will need in future is for appliances to talk to each other - for example, your fridge and water heater should be able to coordinate with the AC and the EV charger, so that they all take turns running to minimize to maximum power draw. this would have obvious benefits in reducing peak or shifting demand times in places that are metered with costs based on peak demand. All our devices are still pretty dumb.

Another possibility is that people will install battery systems like the Tesla Powerwall, to charge when solar is available and use it to supplement peak demand. Supposedly some of the high-powered EV fast chargers are using this to minimized erratic heavy draw.

The other problem I think is that comparing battery assembly pollution costs to fuel pollution is not the complete picture. Combustion engines are constructed from cast and machined metal, which consumes a large amount of energy. They use oil lubricant, which has associated pollution issues, especially if burning in a failing engine. The extraction and refining of fuel has an additional carbon cost. Plus, when an EV is end-of-life, the special metals are still in the battery pack to be recovered, unlike a lifetime of carbon spewed into the atmosphere.

There is little doubt that the question is nuanced. Simplistic single figures don’t capture the problem or solution well.

There is little doubt that as electric cars begin to dominate the infrastructure will need to change around them. But it doesn’t need to change in a “more of the same” manner. A huge number of cars are used for daily commute. Driven at the start and end of the day. They can charge either at home or, for a huge number, at work. The peak times when cars are not charging is relatively limited, and so, done right, electric cars can provide a base load for many sources. This can be done to significantly remove the peak load issue.

Where I live, for many of us, an electric car is right now a very easy sell. I am about to put a significant amount of solar power on the roof, and likely a Tesla power wall incorporated into a virtual power network. The payback time on this makes it a clearly sensible thing to do. Add an electric car to the mix, and many days I can charge the car enough to cover the daily drive and run the house overnight with the battery, and charge in the day. I have the backup of grid power, and as my neighbours add much the same capacity to their houses we can avoid difficulties with grid infrastructure. Right now our issues with the grid are that too many people are installing solar power, and the local transformers are having issues taking the power back into the main grid. The more solar with batteries on houses the less of a problem this becomes. This is a work in progress, but at least for some of us, the numbers mostly work out.

If cars are plugged in at work parking stations they can actually join a virtual power network. Owner’s choice, but the possibility exists for virtual grids to run arbitrage on power from your car. Similarly at home. For many use cases there are novel and interesting solutions based on virtual grids that can ameliorate or even solve a lot of the power delivery and peak issues. This specifically helps enable solar and wind to work as, within limits, it can cover lulls in production. But it does change the operating fundamentals and economics of power generation.

If you insist that your car must always be at full charge and capable of undertaking a 400 mile journey at the drop of a hat, this isn’t for you. But this is not the vast majority of cars.

Nuclear is unlikely to be a useful saviour for energy on a global scale. There are a huge number of impediments that will limit its deployment, the most obvious being that it is very very hard to make money with it. The costs of building a plant, and the long term risk that goes with it means that it is going to be the province of sovereign governments, and not private industry. Also, there just isn’t the industrial capacity to manufacture that many plants. The lead times on tooling up are going to push any hope nuclear has out beyond any sensible planning horizon.

There are viable nuclear technologies that not only produce less waste, they can “burn” the fuel that is already “spent” and currently sitting in cooling ponds. The reason they didn’t become standard back in the 1960’s is because they produce weapons-grade material as a byproduct of energy production.

This is probably going to prevent it from ever being viable generally. There is ultimately an extreme tension between economic benefit and the far end of military and world conflict. The five nuclear powers are pretty unhappy at the few renegade countries that have created an even small nuclear weapons capability. Doing that still required state actor levels of capability, and is subject to international sanctions.
The idea that any commercial reactor could potentially be capable of generating huge amounts of easily recoverable weapons grade plutonium would keep the major powers awake all night. There might be stand-up arguments in the halls of power, but I’m going to bet that national security will always win. Serious strong arm politics and more serious sanctions would almost certainly be applied to any nation trying to go down this route. The situation with Iran at the moment would be trivial in comparison.

The previous issue about industrial capability remains. The actual nuclear reactor isn’t much different in cost to build. The existing industrial capacity to manufacture things like large scale components from specialised neutron tolerant metals limits the number of reactors that can be built even if the will exists.

What to do with the existing waste is a lingering and serious problem. The residual energy within it looks tempting, but in the current world, likely not realisable.

We are potentially on a path where the national security argument of preventing the construction of breeder reactors to prevent production of weapons-grade fissile material collides with the national security argument of having a climate we can continue to live in.

The future will be interesting, that is the only thing I know for sure. What sort of interesting occasionally keeps me up at night.

You and me both. :fearful:

The problem with solar is that usually, people work during the day so the car is not at home to be charged. If memory serves, a tesla 3 has a 55 or 75 kWh battery. A powerwall is 14kWh. Even accepting the car will not need to be completely refilled every night, most commutes are not that big, but some are. So to cover car charging and some household use will take 2 or 3 powerwalls.

Having the car contribute to the grid is also a useful concept. AFAIK, Teslas don’t have the electronics for that, but supposedly some other new vehicles do. (and such an update would probably be affordable). I recall an article about Australia where the thought was to install solar panels and Powerwall batteries in a city to essentially do that - thousands of installations in houses all over the city share power all over the local grid.

Look at how many gas stations there are in every corner of America, and consider we would need almost as many electric charging stations to replace them. Fewer stations because a lot of people would charge at home overnight, but more stations because each charge stop is longer than just the 5 minutes it takes now to fill a gas tank. When we get to that point, I suspect either there will be a different charge rate for power for charge stations, or else many will find battery supplements economical to limit peak usage. (Or… “It’s cheaper to charge here, but the charge power may go slower if too many people are plugged in at once.”)

But to get back to the OP’s question about pollution - like highway driving being more efficient than stop-and-go city driving, running a power plant full out at a constant speed is more efficient than stop-and-go. In good old days of carburetors, we would suggest that stepping on the accelerator flooded the engine with gas and some escaped partially burned (like those plumes of black diesel exhaust) but modern fuel injection limits that. Certainly, EV’s produce no “idling” pollution, and traffic jams produce large amounts of unnecessary exhaust. Not flooding the crowded downtown or main arteries with exhaust gases at street level has to have some value.

Even pollution from vapors and spills of gasoline can be a pollution problem - as some filling stations try to recapture the vapors coming out of tanks.