• cogman@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    1 year ago

    While the emission cost of an EV indeed about 30% lower (data for Germany, probably worse in the US)

    I’ve never seen this number. The numbers I’ve seen generally paint EV emissions as fairly low with most of them occurring at manufacturing (see, https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html ).

    Which state you live in has a huge impact on EV emissions. For my state (Idaho), emissions are hyper low due to the amount of hydro power.

    Even then, emissions are tricky to exactly calculate. The majority of EV manufacturing emissions comes from the battery manufacturing process. And, it seems pretty likely that EV batteries will see a second life after their first life in the EV. Batteries are too valuable to just throw away. We aren’t seeing a ton of that ATM primarily because most of the current generation of EVs are still on the road!

    Now, I have seen some pretty bad numbers usually from fossil fuel powered publications against EVs. Usually they’ll take the absolute worst case scenarios for an EV “Imagine all your power is coming from coal that’s being transmitted 6000 miles and from 1000 year old plants with 5% efficiency. See, EVs are just as dirty as ICE!” Those articles universally ignore the fact that we have a mixed generation grid with renewables growing rapidly.