Electric cars really are a greener option

than fossil fuel vehicles

By Adam Vaughan

Electric cars are already greener than their fossil fuel counterparts in almost every part
of the world today, according to researchers. They say electric vehicles are “a no-regret
choice” even in places where power grids haven’t gone fully green.

Some previous comparisons have suggested petrol and diesel cars produce lower net
carbon emissions over their lifetime than battery-powered vehicles. Yet these analyses
have often compared only two models of car. Instead, Florian Knobloch at Radboud
University in the Netherlands and his colleagues looked at the average emissions across
many classes of car to get a clearer global picture.

The researchers looked at the projected carbon emissions generated on average over a
car’s lifetime, including during its production, while it is being driven and when it is
destroyed, for all the conventional and electric cars sold in 59 regions across the world
in 2015. These represent 95 per cent of the world’s current road traffic.

They found that electric vehicles already have lower net carbon emissions in 53 of those
59 regions. Only in areas containing countries that use coal heavily, such as India and
Poland, were electric vehicle emissions worse than those of conventional petrol and
diesel cars.

The same was true for heat pumps, greener alternatives to domestic gas boilers that use
electricity to generate heat. These are seen as a key way to decarbonise heating.

 Average emissions

Combined with data on the sources that provided electricity to those regions in 2015,
they found that the average electric vehicle is greener than the average new petrol car if
the power grid emits less than 1100 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour.

Many countries’ electricity supplies have seen huge growth in renewable energy sources
in the past five years, and so Knobloch says electric cars are likely to be even better now.
For example, the UK’s average carbon intensity for electricity
– the carbon emissions per unit of electricity generated – was 215 grams of CO2 per
kilowatt hour last year, down from 443g CO2/kWh in 2015.

The researchers project that the gap between fossil fuel and electric vehicles will only
grow bigger as power grids get greener. By 2030, they expect the average carbon
intensity of electric vehicles to be 20 per cent lower than in 2015, and 30 per cent lower
by 2050.
The implications for governments are clear, says Knobloch. “There is no need to wait.
There’s a net benefit from electrification even given all the uncertainties and variations.
Don’t be confused by all those different results out there. It’s a no-regret choice already.”

We don’t yet have clear data on the exact amount of CO2 emissions generated by the
production of batteries for electric cars. However, Knobloch says they found that “even
if you consider much higher or low emission for batteries, our results still hold”.

Mike Berners-Lee at Lancaster University in the UK says despite the carbon benefits of
current electric cars, we will still need to drive less and buy cars with smaller engines to
tackle climate change.

“But electric cars do offer a carbon intensity reduction compared to petrol cars in all but
the most carbon-intense electricity grids,” says Berners-Lee.

How Green Are Electric Vehicles?

In short: Very green. But plug-in cars still have environmental effects. Here’s a guide to the main
issues and how they might be addressed

The New York Times

By Hiroko Tabuchi and Brad Plumer
Around the world, governments and automakers are promoting electric vehicles as a key
technology to curb oil use and fight climate change. General Motors has said it aims to
stop selling new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks by 2035 and will pivot to battery-
powered models. This week, Volvo said it would move even faster and introduce an all-
electric lineup by 2030.

But as electric cars and trucks go mainstream, they have faced a persistent question: Are
they really as green as advertised?

While experts broadly agree that plug-in vehicles are a more climate-friendly option than
traditional vehicles, they can still have their own environmental impacts, depending on
how they’re charged up and manufactured. Here’s a guide to some of the biggest worries
— and how they might be addressed.

It matters how the electricity is made

Broadly speaking, most electric cars sold today tend to produce significantly fewer planet-
warming emissions than most cars fueled with gasoline. But a lot depends on how much
coal is being burned to charge up those plug-in vehicles. And electric grids still need to get
much, much cleaner before electric vehicles are truly emissions free.
One way to compare the climate impacts of different vehicle models is with this interactive
online tool by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who tried to
incorporate all the relevant factors: the emissions involved in manufacturing the cars and
in producing gasoline and diesel fuel, how much gasoline conventional cars burn, and
where the electricity to charge electric vehicles comes from.

If you assume electric vehicles are drawing their power from the average grid in the
United States, which typically includes a mix of fossil fuel and renewable power plants,
then they’re almost always much greener than conventional cars. Even though electric
vehicles are more emissions-intensive ( phát thải) to make because of their batteries, their
electric motors are more efficient than traditional internal combustion engines that burn
fossil fuels.

An all-electric Chevrolet Bolt, for instance, can be expected to produce 189 grams of
carbon dioxide for every mile driven over its lifetime, on average. By contrast, a new
gasoline-fueled Toyota Camry is estimated to produce 385 grams of carbon dioxide per
mile. A new Ford F-150 pickup truck, which is even less fuel-efficient, produces 636
grams of carbon dioxide per mile.

But that’s just an average. On the other hand, if the Bolt is charged up on a coal-heavy
grid, such as those currently found in the Midwest, it can actually be a bit worse for the
climate than a modern hybrid car like the Toyota Prius, which runs on gasoline but uses a
battery to bolster its mileage. (The coal-powered Bolt would still beat the Camry and the
F-150, however.)

“Coal tends to be the critical factor,” said Jeremy Michalek, a professor of engineering at
Carnegie Mellon University. “If you’ve got electric cars in Pittsburgh that are being
plugged in at night and leading nearby coal plants to burn more coal to charge them, then
the climate benefits won’t be as great, and you can even get more air pollution.”

The good news for electric vehicles is that most countries are now pushing to clean up
their electric grids. In the United States, utilities have retired hundreds of coal plants over
the last decade and shifted to a mix of lower-emissions natural gas, wind and solar power.
As a result, researchers have found, electric vehicles have generally gotten cleaner, too.
And they are likely to get cleaner still.

“The reason electric vehicles look like an appealing climate solution is that if we can make
our grids zero-carbon, then vehicle emissions drop way, way down,” said Jessika Trancik,
an associate professor of energy studies at M.I.T. “Whereas even the best hybrids that burn
gasoline will always have a baseline of emissions they can’t go below.”

Raw materials can be problematic

Like many other batteries, the lithium-ion cells ( pin liti có trọng lượng nhẹ, nhưng giữ
điện lâu hơn các loại pin khác) that power most electric vehicles rely on raw materials —
like cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements — that have been linked to grave
environmental and human rights concerns. Cobalt has been especially problematic.

Mining cobalt produces hazardous tailings and slags (solid waste, waste rocks or materials
not being processed in the mining) that can leach into the environment, and studies have
found high exposure in nearby communities, especially among children, to cobalt and
other metals. Extracting the metals from their ores also requires a process called smelting,
which can emit sulfur oxide and other harmful air pollution.

And as much as 70 percent of the world’s cobalt supply is mined in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, a substantial proportion in unregulated “artisanal” mines where
workers — including many children — dig the metal from the earth using only hand tools
at great risk to their health and safety, human rights groups warn.

The world’s lithium is either mined in Australia or from salt flats in the Andean regions of
Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, operations that use large amounts of groundwater to pump
out the brines ( nước mặn) , drawing down the water available to Indigenous farmers and
herders. The water required for producing batteries has meant that manufacturing electric
vehicles is about 50 percent more water intensive than traditional internal combustion
engines. Deposits of rare earths, concentrated in China, often contain radioactive
substances that can emit radioactive water and dust.

Focusing first on cobalt, automakers and other manufacturers have committed to

eliminating “artisanal” cobalt from their supply chains, and have also said they will
develop batteries that decrease, or do away with, cobalt altogether. But that technology is
still in development, and the prevalence of these mines means these commitments “aren’t
realistic,” said Mickaël Daudin of Pact, a nonprofit organization that works with mining
communities in Africa.

Instead, Mr. Daudin said, manufacturers need to work with these mines to lessen their
environmental footprint and make sure miners are working in safe conditions. If
companies acted responsibly, the rise of electric vehicles would be a great opportunity for
countries like Congo, he said. But if they don’t, “they will put the environment, and many,
many miners’ lives at risk.”

Recycling could be better

As earlier generations of electric vehicles start to reach the end of their lives, preventing a
pileup of spent batteries looms as a challenge.

Most of today’s electric vehicles use lithium-ion batteries, which can store more energy in
the same space than older, more commonly-used lead-acid battery technology. But while
99 percent of lead-acid batteries are recycled in the United States, estimated recycling rates
for lithium-ion batteries are about 5 percent.
Experts point out that spent batteries contain valuable metals and other materials that can
be recovered and reused. Depending on the process used, battery recycling can also use
large amounts of water, or emit air pollutants.

“The percentage of lithium batteries being recycled is very low, but with time and
innovation, that’s going to increase,” said Radenka Maric, a professor at the University of
Connecticut’s Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

A different, promising approach to tackling used electric vehicle batteries is finding them a
second life in storage and other applications. “For cars, when the battery goes below say
80 percent of its capacity, the range is reduced,” said Amol Phadke, a senior scientist at the
Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. “But that’s not
a constraint for stationary storage.”

Various automakers, including Nissan and BMW, have piloted the use of old electric
vehicle batteries for grid storage. General Motors has said it designed its battery packs
with second-life use in mind. But there are challenges: Reusing lithium-ion batteries
requires extensive testing and upgrades to make sure they perform reliably.

If done properly, though, used car batteries could continue to be used for a decade or more
as backup storage for solar power, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology found in a study last year.