Not sure if this is the right place to post this, please move if it’s not the case.
A Facebook friend of mine posted a meme with a picture that had two panels in it. There were cars in each panel, one being being gas powered and one being electric. The picture has the gas run vehicle polluting the air, and the electric vehicle had a cord that ran to power plants that polluted the air, trying to illustrate that there’s little difference between the two.
I posted as a response: a revised picture I found with the panel that had the gas vehicle in it with a picture of a ship, (that’s polluting the air,) carrying gas overseas, along with oil refineries and the pollution of the truck that transports the oil. The second panel has a car plugged into a wind turbine and a solar powered panel.
Then he posted to me saying?
“Just as a “for the sake of asking” but what happens if/when wind turbines and solar arrays are offline due to inclement conditions? Aside from large capacity batteries (presumably to store the DC power) I’m not 100% sold on natural resources for electric power but at least open enough to discuss. And given how cold our area can be during winter (and for a good portion of the country as well) how efficient would the electric vehicle be of maintaining a charge in, say, late January/early February? I’m just wanting to have an open and friendly discussion”
I Don’t know anything about this stuff, other than a lot of people smarter than me think electric vehicles are ideal along with green energy.
The power generating and distribution is less polluting than individual cars, trucks & buses.
The renewables just make it that much cleaner. But they cannot be relied on 100% at this time. Please see Germany this year when winds were abnormally low.
Then you burn natural gas to generate the electricity now missing.
So you need to have wind, solar, batteries and Gas, Hydro or Nuke.
A certain percentage of all types of generators are offline at any time, the remainder pickup the slack. As non-fossil fuel generators increase in share, we will still have fuel based backups, but they are backups, not the primary source of electricity. Eventually, you could have >100% coverage in eco-friendly generation, so a certain amount being offline would not be a crisis.
Electric vehicles will be less efficient in cold weather. Gas vehicles are at best about 40% efficient, so how much worse are electrics likely to be?
Either way, he doesn’t have to be sold on eco friendly electric, the electric companies do. Even if we used coal to generate all of our electricity, we can tackle the environmental impact of 10,000 coal power plants a lot easier than 300,000,000 gas powered cars.
My sister has had an electric vehicle for commuting in the Buffalo, New York area for a number of years now, which definitely has cold temperatures in the winter. As it happens, she has the sort of electric vehicle with a small back-up tank of gasoline. When the battery power runs low gasoline is burned to generate electricity to drive the engine.
Most of the time she doesn’t need to use gas. Occasionally, in the coldest part of the winter, the gas burner kicks on. With her place of work now putting in parking spaces with chargers for electric vehicles that may no longer be the case going forward.
What folks said. But an anecdote: My sister lives in an area where almost all power is still produced by coal-fired plants. A friend has a Tesla, which she refers to as his “coal-powered car”. He is not pleased.
Here is another possibility. Before I moved to a condo, I lived in a house that had dual energy heating. This meant, among other things, a significant reduction in our electric rate. But one tradeoff was the power company got to turn off the electric heater and turn on the oil heating when they wanted to conserve. It was actually accomplished by a thermostat on the outside meter that switched when the temperature fell below -12 C (about 10 F). That switch also more than doubled the electricity cost. We learned not to use the clothes dryer during those times.
Nowadays with everything wireless (eventually the electric company put in a remote reading meter) the whole thing could be run from their offices. Similarly, if the electric company were so inclined they could install similarly equipped charging stations and turn them (or raise the rates) when the sun stopped shining and the wind stopped blowing.
And smart appliances could be made that continually monitor the rates and run selectively when electricity is cheap. Not everything could work that way, but home heating, refrigeration, and most chargers could.
Roughly 40% of the electricity generated in the US comes from clean sources. Nuclear, hydroelectric and renewables.
Of the remaining 60% of the grid powered by fossil fuels, they produce far less CO2 than an internal combustion engine.
Coal produces about 220 pounds of CO2 per million BTU produced
Natural gas produces about 120 pounds of CO2 per million BTU produced
About half of the nations coal plants (something like that) have switched to natural gas in the last two decades, in part due to lower emissions.
1 million BTU = 293 kwh
I’m not entirely sure of the rest of my math, but for an electric car, you get about 2-3 miles out of 1 kwh. So 1 million BTU = 293 kwh = 586-879 miles driven for 120-220 pounds of CO2 produced from a natural gas or coal plant respectively.
An internal combustion engine produces 20 pounds of CO2 per gallon burned. So you’d need to burn 6-11 gallons to produce 120-220 pounds of CO2 in an internal combustion engine. If you assume a car gets 30mpg, thats about a range of 180-330 miles for 120-220 pounds of CO2.
So even if your electric car is powered solely by coal, you’re still getting at least double the mileage per unit of CO2 produced. Closer to triple if its powered by a natural gas plant.