Green cars: would you buy one?
A few days ago I received an email from someone who questioned the validity of the GreenWise Green Car Guide.
The i-MiEV has zero tailpipe emissions, but what about its embedded carbon?
“To be a useful guide to how green a car is, shouldn’t the specs include the carbon emissions of the likely electrical generation AND the embedded carbon in the manufacture of the vehicle and the sources of the component materials (including batteries)? Without that information how does one decide whether such cars are any greener than conventional cars, over their lifetime?” our critic wrote.
He was making an important point. There is real debate at the moment about how green electric and hybrid vehicles are versus conventional cars.
So are EVs and hybrid vehicles really better for the environment than conventional petrol engine vehicles?
Clearly zero or very low tailpipe emissions are going to be better in terms of air quality and carbon emissions on our roads than conventional vehicles with petrol engines.
What about the battery?
From the battery point of view, the argument for EVs is harder to make. Most EV rechargeable batteries are lithium-ion batteries, which require the rare commodity lithium to be extracted from the earth. There are also legitimate concerns around disposal of such batteries at end of life. EV batteries are not only carbon intensive to produce, they need to be replaced after just a few years.
All the same, a study published by Research Institute Empa found even with the battery taken into account a petrol-powered car would need to achieve 70 miles per gallon to be as green as an EV.
What about the embedded carbon of the car itself?
It is true to say the automobile industry still has a long way to go before it is completely transparent about the embedded carbon of its vehicles. Lifecycle assessments are far from routine, but automakers are starting to address this part of their operation. According to the Guardian, Jaguar Land Rover is going to be assessing the lifecycle emissions – which includes production – on all its new models.
What about charging?
My thoughts on this are that we in at the transition stage of our move to a low carbon economy with new advancements being made all time. For example, just last week GreenWise reported on Green Motion launching the first charging points in the UK connected to renewable energy.
Would it not be reckless for us to wait to address the tailpipe emissions of vehicles until such point as we’ve weaned ourselves off fossil fuels?
Neither should we forget issues of energy security: oil is running out and is a volatile commodity and the cost of it is rising; electric cars may be more expensive to buy but they are much cheaper to run.
What is your view on electric cars? Do you think they are greener than conventional cars? Would you be convinced enough to buy one?
Since writing this blog, a new series of books on electric cars, The Electric Car Guides, has been published. I have not read them yet, so can’t comment on the content, but the press release says the series “covers everything from general overview to specific guides on individual models” and also claims to look at the environmental benefits of electric cars. Michael Boxwell is the author and is described as a “long-term electric car owner”. They are published by Greenstream Publishing.
I am the author of the Electric Car Guide series of books and I spent around three years researching the subject.
I have visited car factories in Europe and Asia, visited hydro-electric power stations in India, seen low carbon schemes in Sweden, talked to power companies in the UK, France and the United States and met people from battery companies and the oil industry in order to establish the true carbon footprint of electric cars.
I also own and use electric cars myself and have done for the past five years and run one of the largest electric car clubs in the world.
It is important that the source of the electricity is taken into account when looking into the environmental impact of using an electric vehicle, but are you also aware that this is also the case with petrol?
The published emissions figures for petrol cars is exactly that – the emissions from the car itself. It does not take into account extracting the oil from the ground, getting it to an oil refinery, making it into petrol, transporting it to a service station and pumping it into the fuel tank of your car. Add all those figures into the equation and the figures look very different indeed.
Oil Refineries in this country generate their own electricity, but they also use 10% of the power from all the other power stations in the country. They are the single largest consumers of electricity in this country. Whilst oil refineries make lots of other products other than petrol, the high demand for petrol means that there is a lot more energy intensive processing on the oil to make the light grade petroleum from heavy oils (a process called cracking) in order to reach demand.
If there was a widespread switch from petrol cars to electric cars, the corresponding drop in electricity demand from oil refineries would actually offset a lot of the electricity usage.
Putting that aside for a moment, if we look at the environmental impact of one family using one electric car, this is what we see in terms of environmental impact:
If you plug in your electric car into your home and charge it up during peak electricity use periods, and your house is powered exclusively from a coal fired power station, and that coal fired power station is using dirty coal that has been imported from half way around the world, then your carbon footprint of using your electric car is around 15% less than using a comparable sized petrol car – taking into account the fuel usage alone.
If you plug your electric car into your home and charge it up at night – between midnight and 7am, then your carbon footprint is somewhere between one third and one half of a comparable sized petrol car.
If you want to see the carbon footprint of the UK electricity grid right this moment in time, visit http://www.owningelectriccar.com/national-grid-electric.html . You will not only see what the carbon footprint is per kilowatt of electricity, but you’ll also see what the mix is between the different types of power station and what the carbon impact of charging up an electric car is compared to the equivalent carbon footprint of small petrol and diesel powered cars.
Now lets look at the lithium production, use and recycling. Extracting any raw materials from the surface of the earth causes a certain amount of environmental damage. Just ask the American Government about the environmental damage caused by BP in the Gulf of Mexico last year, if you want confirmation of that. Lithium is actually one of the simplest and easiest raw materials to extract. It takes place in huge dried salt lakes, often hundreds of miles from civilisation, where nothing can live. They are some of the poorest places on earth. Mining for lithium brings employment and the chance of prosperity to these people.
Lithium is not the principle component of an electric car battery. Iron is. Take a modern electric car like the Nissan LEAF, and the 24kWh battery pack contains only 6kg of lithium. So not a huge amount of lithium is required to produce an electric car.
At present, only 50% of the lithium found in a battery can be recycled. By 2014, it is widely expected that around 98% of lithium found in a battery will be recyclable. Recycled lithium is already used to make new batteries.
According to European battery manufacturer SAFT, approximately 18kg of CO2 is emitted in the raw materials and production of a 1kWh lithium electric car battery. By 2015, they believe this will be halved. On a car such as the Nissan LEAF, where the battery is expected to last around 100,000 miles, that equates to around 3g/CO2 for every kilometre driven.
Although a lot of these tests have been theoretical, they have been backed up with real world driving tests, where I have driven two electric cars and two combustion engine cars over the same route and measured their environmental efficiency at the end of the journey. In real world driving conditions, electric cars are slightly better than the theory says they will be when driving in built up areas, whilst they perform as expected on the open road.
You know Louise, I actually posted about this recently on my blog. This post has really given me lots of food for thought, I think you make many very interesting points. In fact, I just wish I had seen it earlier, prior to writing my own article. Many thanks
, cars2scrap
Interesting new research published by the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership on this subject – see http://www.greenwisebusiness.co.uk/news/ev-production-not-so-green-2401.aspx