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RE: Electric Cars: Are They Actually Cleaner?

in #technology • 8 years ago

The MIT link you provided only shows a marginal difference of C02 emissions between diesel and pure electric vehicles. And that chart is only for CO2 emissions if you want to charge/refuel your car and does not include how the car was made.

Electric cars are cleaner in the long run but the initial environmental impact is bigger with electric cars.

8 years ago in #technology by
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     8 years ago (edited) 

    http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-hy-ucs-electric-vehicles-emissions-study-20151110-story.html
    http://www.triplepundit.com/2011/06/full-life-cycle-assesment-electric-cars-compares-co2-impact-conventional-cars/
    https://ei.haas.berkeley.edu/research/papers/WP263.pdf

    Even factoring in manufacturing, that adds only an additional 3.8 tons of CO2. The electric car still results in less total pollution than an equivalent gas powered vehicle.

    Detractors of EVs point out that these cars won’t get 150,000 km out of a single battery pack and here, they may have a point. Lithium Ion batteries do degrade with age and with repeated recharging, so at some point, an EV might have to undergo battery replacement.

    When that happens, we would have to factor in further embedded CO2 for replacement battery production – that is, an additional 3.8 tonnes. But having said that, in an experiment carried out at MIT, an EV battery was subjected to 1,500 rapid charging and discharging cycles, and only lost 10% of total battery life.

    So, if we consider an EV can go 100 miles per charge, and can withstand 1,500 charge cycles – then that exceeds the mileage assumed in the LCA report. But for the sake of argument, if we concede the worst case scenario, and assume EVs may require a second battery pack, the lifetime CO2 increases to 22.8 tonnes – still better than the projection for a conventional car, if not by a huge margin.

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