EV 4 me
In my previous post I covered the viewpoint held by some that the expansion of EV’s is a negative in that instead of it attempting to change a flawed mentality of personal transportation over public transit, it simply offered a ‘feel good’ band-aid for consumers to fall back on and pretend their consumption made positive change.
Today I will be discussing the opposing viewpoint, perhaps it is that EV’s are a less impactful version of the reality we see today but one which can allow for effective and steady funding of more responsible and renewable sources of energy production on our power grids through small taxes levied on the sale of EV’s. In this and this excerpt from “Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave” the authors argue that the benefits between the increased increased efficiency of the car over its lifespan as well as the funding it provides clean energy vastly overshadows the negatives associated with its manufacturing and disposal.
Beginning with this excerpt we will first discuss the impact of the vehicle from its birth to its eventual retirement and all of its use in between. In broad strokes, the authors determine that despite the manufacturing processes encompassing an EV being slightly more environmentally impactful, when taking into account the entire lifespan of the vehicle it grossly outperforms the Internal Combustion vehicle, with an estimated 51–53% reduction of emissions over a lifespan. They further argue in this excerpt that almost exclusive of where you live, charging an EV (refueling) is less environmentally impactful than driving and refueling a 50MPG gasoline powered vehicle. To further explain that point, the impact of an EV’s recharge is dependent upon the method with which that portion of the electrical grid is obtaining power, and in recent years the authors argue that the majority of power stations have gotten significantly greener, many to the extent that utilizing them for vehicle power is cleaner than using gasoline.
The authors do have a few points to their argument that may prove troublesome, most notably they make numerous assumptions when calculating these figures that they present as fact in their writing. To name a few they assume a good portion of the batteries are fully recycled, nearly none of the batteries will be trashed entirely, the gasoline powered vehicles only last until 135,000 miles, and that the current rate of electric power growth on the grid will continue to grow at the same rate. While they seem confident in their estimates it is something worth considering as they could have significant impacts on the final values for environmental impact.
This argument helped me better understand the quantitative values associated with EV’s and Gas vehicles, when reading many other sources the arguments are often backed by broad statistics regarding expected lifespan of vehicles and tonnage of waste per year, but seeing a back to back comparison of EV to Gas waste per vehicle is very valuable to understand.