Are electric cars that much friendlier to ecology than gas cars?

Question

With the added problems of battery disposal and the increased demand on electrical power plants to supply electricity to charge some proposed electric car models, is the net advantage to the environment still that significant?

Answer 1

Good question, but the answer may surprise you. About half our electricity comes from coal, and about 3% from oil. All the other electricity sources are cleaner to the air. (See the chart in my sources.)
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The coal plants are baseload plants - they run all the time, because it takes too long to start and stop them. When additional plants - the 'peak' plants are brought on line, these are not coal burning plants. So adding load to the grid doesn't increase coal burning.
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But the story is even better than this. Did you know that electricity goes to waste at night? It's those coal burners and other baseload plants, the ones that are hard to shut off. It's estimated that at least a few million electric cars can charge at night, just on the wasted electricity - which would cause no increase in pollution at all.
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But how about when EVERYBODY is driving electric, and we have to build more powerplants? What happens to pollution then? Pollution will still be much lower, for several reasons:

-Future powerplants will be of the cleaner and more efficient variety. Even if more coal plants are built, new designs are up to 85% efficient (greater efficiency means more energy comes from lass fuel, and so less pollution is made.)

-Lets talk more about efficiency. Your gasoline engine is only 25% efficient, at best (and in city driving, even less so.) Contrast this to a 95% efficient electric motor.

-Distributing energy by wire to electric cars is 95% efficient - this is far more efficient than sending fuel by truck to thousands of gas stations (and making more pollution in the process.)

-Large amounts of electricity is used in the refining of gasoline. Some of this electricity will simply be shifted to directly powering electric cars.
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Here's the best part. The efficiency argument can be proven by simply looking at fuel prices. Gasoline costs us about 10 to 15 cents per mile, depending on gas prices. What does electricity cost? Off -peak electricity (you can get these prices by asking for split rates from your utility) costs as little as 3 to 10 cents per kilowatt-hour. A typical electric car gets about 4 miles per KWH. So electricity costs about a penny per mile. Much, much cheaper than gasoline, and the reason is efficiency.
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Greater efficiency means more miles on less fuel, and much less pollution, no matter what gets burned at the powerplant.
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Batteries: it's true that lead-acid and nickel-based batteries contain toxic substances. But what about new battery designs, based on Lithium-Ion chemistries? In these batteries, the lithium is stored in salt form, which poses no hazard (it's like the sodium in table salt - sodium is dangerous, but in salt form it's harmless.) The EPA doesn't consider Li-Ion batteries to be a hazard (see sources.)
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Li-IOn batteries are used in the new Phoenix EV. This car will go 250 miles per charge, goes 95mph, carries five passengers and cargo, and can be charged in ten minutes. Goes on sale this year:
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http://phoenixmotorcars.com/models/fleet.html
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Answer 2

A good question. In large part, the answer would depend on what kind of battery is used. However, there are a couple of advantages even in this regard. Even if a used-up battery is a potential pollutant, we'll be able to reprocess much of the material (recycling)--and at lest we can work on ways of disposing what can't be recycled.

Once its burned, however, gas is just that--gas loose in the atmosphere.

BTW--while electric cars are potentially a major part of the solution to environmental problems, ultimately its just as important that the electricity used to charge them up is generated by some means other than coal or oil fired generators. Otherwise, we're just rearranging the existing problem, not fixing it.

Answer 3

That is indeed a very complicated question. I think manufacturers will working on recycling batteries, after all approximately 95% of the lead-acid batteries in cars are recycled and has been one of the most succesuful recycling programs for a very long time.

Back to your question on electric cars, electric powerplants do have spare electric capacity in the nite time so a nite time charge is more efficient than the day time. Also it depends on the source of electricity. If the source of electricity is coal, then we are just adding in essentially the same amount of greehouse gases. If the source can be from an alternate such as windpower or solar then we would be benifitting. Personally I support green power in paying a little extra on my bill and purchasing wind power.

Answer 4

What are your pollutants. I don't think u know and CO2 is not a pollutant. Many years ago my teacher taught about plants and photosynthesis . The plants take in CO2 and keeps the C and gives us back the O2 . The plants need CO2 as much as we need oxygen. we Carnot live here if the plants don't make it. The CO2 accelerates the growth of the plants. The plants have done this foe millions of years. Where do u think our original fossil fuel came from ? The plant recycle system has worked fine . So what u think u can replace it with ?

Answer 5

Not really, since even if we reduce our dependence on foreign oil, there's still the issue of waste. Also, today's cars don't give out that much pollution, and the people with the old cars that give off a lot of pollution usually can't afford a newer car, so what makes you think they'll be able to buy the new electric cars? It might decrease pollution but add waste from the car batteries.

Answer 6

I don't think so. We would need clean electric generation to make them so. Hydroelectric, wind, solar. Even nuclear would be better from a global warming perspective. Of course we already have all those things, but they just are not abundant enough to meet our insatiable appetite for energy.

Answer 7

You must weigh in this factor.
They have to help us reduce our dependence
on Middle east oil.

Answer 8

what is the source of the electricity? if fossil fuel, no real change, if renewable energy source, it's great