batman wrote on 07/31/17 at 20:47:20:How much ,gas, oil, coal burning or radioactive waste are we ready to deal with to charge all these smog saving cars? these cars may do more harm to the planet than what your driving now .Converting AC to DC to charge batteries ,involves a 6-25% lose in power due to heat,what do you think we're really saving? And these cars (small) are costing $ 30,000 and up,and how long do the batteries last? What is the replacement cost when they gut your car to change them?(parts and labor)
I don't think anybody addressed this. What you're referring to is two things:
1. The resources needed to build the vehicle and 2. the wheel-to-wheel energy cost.
First, the resources needed to build the vehicle: I'm not sure why many people believe that building an electric car is any more damaging to the environment. It has many of the same processes and components of your average car. I suppose people imagine the battery as being extra-harmful to the environment... Well, we recycle lead-acid batteries at a rate of 98% in this country and the cobalt and lithium sulfide in lithium batteries is less poisonous yet more valuable, so it's not a stretch to imagine these batteries being recycled at a similar or higher rate.
And we should start seeing solid-state batteries popping up in the next decade or so which promise to be better in almost every way and contain no liquid.
An EV is about the same size and weight as an IC car... They're probably about equivalent in their resource consumption... I could be wrong. I had trouble finding any good publication that wasn't political.
The second thing you're referring to is know as "wheel-to-wheel" fuel cost. It is in this category where you are quite wrong about EV's taking anywhere near the energy to go a mile when compared to IC vehicles.
You mentioned losses in heat when converting from AC to DC. True enough. Also the energy could be generated by coal. True enough. So if we put 100 units of energy into a coal plant, we generate 40 (40%) units transfer 30 (75%) to our battery and end up with about 25(heat and lead-foot) units going into locomotion. So our back-of-the-napkin wheel-to-wheel efficiency for our EV is 25%
But lets do the same thing for an IC car. an IC engine is only about 20% efficient. Ouch. So IC already loses and we haven't even started with Wheel-to-wheel. We haven't extracted the oil, refined the gas (88% efficient), or transported it to a gas station. So yes, IC loses big on CO2 emissions. Add up the fact that power is increasingly generated by multiple methods and IC loses even more.
So no. saying that EVs are no cleaner than IC vehicles is generally not true. It you are told so you are either being lied to or the person doing the telling has not thought it through.
No, it's not the savior of the environment alone, but IC has about 100 years of massive R&D that EV does not. With increased market penetration, EV has a lot of room to grow while IC is pretty refined already. "Clean energy" (a silly term) is also creating more jobs each year since 2013 than coal and gas combined, so the sentiment of saving jobs by shunning EVs and clean energy is pretty silly.
We're in the early stages. If you want a torque monster and you want to be an early-adopter to some tech that has less of an impact on the environment and you can afford a new car, you can't do much better than buying an EV. If you don't want one, you're not a jerk because of it, but it is the future and it is "good" in the sense of our economy and environment. So cool it with the mis-information and do the math.
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