Electric Cars are not Necessarily Clean - Your Battery-Powered Vehicle is only as Green as your Electricity Supplier

Renewable Energy (Other Energy Resources) / Climate Change

Date posted: 05/12/16

David Biello opines that Tesla Motors has received more than 325,000 preorders for its new Model 3 electric car even though it will not be available for at least another year. That almost equals the 340,000 electric cars and plug-in hybrids now on American roads. Tesla has advertised its vehicles as having zero emissions, helping fuel the new sedan, but that is not necessarily true. Although the battery-powered car itself does not produce any emissions, the power plant that generates the electricity used to charge those batteries probably does. Low emissions, much less zero emissions, are only true in certain places where most of the electricity comes from a mix of low-carbon sources such as the sun (Not!), wind (Not!) or nuclear power plant (Yes!..the only base-load, zero emissions source available). Electric cars are great for eliminating oil from transportation, because very little U.S. electricity is generated by burning petroleum. But electric cars may or may not help the country combat climate change, and it all depends on where the electricity comes from....coal?....natural gas? Smokestacks, many attached to coal-fired power plants, are the single-largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S., at two billion metric tons of CO2 per year. That source would grow as electric cars demand more and more electricity, unless tighter pollution controls are placed on power plants or electric utilities shift to less polluting sources...such as nuclear power, but wind and solar are not scalable and both need an established power grid to support both, nuclear provides the power. The current shift back to SUVs that guzzle much more petroleum than other cars, prompted by low gasoline prices, is a worrisome sign for future climate change. Perhaps by the time electric cars are ubiquitous, pollution from generating electricity will be zero....because nuclear power will be gaining market share. But notice the elephant (nuclear) is not discussed in any detail.