Why are electricity-powered vehicles considered "green" if most electricity is made by burning coal?

I will give you an option he said, "You die with a bullet or in your sleep." Not such a tough guy you think and take sleep option. That is your electric car. It seems just a little less deadly. I am waiting for the movie where they put the guy in the closed garage with the car running. The next day he is still alive because the car was electric and gives off no deadly fumes.

You can talk about production of electricity all you want. If you ask the poor sod in the garage if he thinks the electric car is "green" you will get a resounding, "YES!" He may even have had time, while lying there, expected to die, to consider that all of our current vehicles are run by gasoline. They not only pollute at the tailpipe, but at the refinery, with the delivery of crude to the refinery and the gasoline to the fueling station. They pollute when oil is produced at the well and they pollute when test wells are drilled in exploration. They even cause pollution when armies must be stationed overseas to protect this vital resource. It is vital because it holds a monopoly on our transportation. We have not explored alternative fuels with any conviction. When compared to this long pollution train the electric vehicle is clearly the clean air winner.

He might agree with you that electricity is not a power source. But that is it's advantage. There are many ways we can produce electricity. Some might think that in a country that today uses coal to provide 50% of its electricity, an electric car is 50% a coal car. But tomorrow, when that same country starts using renewables to provide electricity and coal is only used for 25% of the electricity the now old electric car becomes cleaner as well. Like a good wine, the electric vehicle gets better with age. Old gas cars, on the other hand may not die, they just pollute more than newer ones.

When our guy gets away he may wish for more freedom. With a new fondness for electric vehicles he can install a solar panel array and charge his electric vehicle from that. Independence is raised to 100% and pollution is reduced to zero. With the gasoline car there is never independence. You must always go back to the fueling station to get your "fix."

Lastly, he might consider the interesting differences between electricity from the grid and gasoline from a refiney. 70% of the refineries products are for transportation. Almost none of the electricity is for transportation. Someday maybe 30% of our cars will be electric. There will be incentives to charge them at night with cheaper rates. Coal fired power plants produce cheap power when they are big. When they are big, the more efficient design is to make them run continuously. They become what is called baseload plants. They are never turn off, turned down or backed off except for repairs. Trying to turn them on and off causes more damage and inefficiency.

So you can't have it both ways. Either the additional load of electric vehicles being charged at night will not come from coal fired plants but from more flexible designs and fuels OR the coal fired plants are there to support the already existing loads during the day. When they cannot be turned down at night the pollution is not attributable to any additional nighttime load like an electric vehicle.

To consider coal plants the bad boys for electric cars is like complaining that all people coming into a house cause dirty footprints when it was only one person who didn't take off their shoes. Ask the guy who survived the garage. He will tell you.

Electricity can be powered by any source of fuel so it should be the most viable. You can charge it in any way, therefore, since we don't know what source we want to use for next gen cars, we might as well use electricity because it can be powered by anything!!! Make a hydrogen fuel cell power plant, or a bio diesel plant, or some other cool new type of power plant that no one even knows about yet, and power your electric car from that! Electricity is freakin awesome like that.

Until we find a viable "green" power source electricity make a great alternative because the refueling system is already set up (if your house has active electrical outlets it is a potential refueling station), therefore there is no need to create an entirely new refueling infrastructure.

Not to mention it is much more affordable.

People do not have the whole picture to look at so they comment on a vignette. Let me explain how coal fired electric plants can be used to create energy for a green electric car.

At night the coal fired dynamo cannot be throttled back when consumption is low so they continue to feed coal to the generator in case there is a sudden demand. That means that they have to destroy the power that they made by shunting it to the earth, grounding it. To charge your EV at night and use that power rather than have it destroyed is green. Is it greener to use solar or wind or waves or geothermal? Of course. Is it wasteful to create power and than not use it? Absolutely. The power is there. It is green to use it rather than make it and then destroy it.

The EV is green because it creates no pollution to drive it. Any thing else that burns fuel is returning the carbon that is stored in the fuel as it is burned. Whether that fuel is natural gas or gasoline or diesel or bio diesel, anything that is burnt creates CO2, the greenhouse gas we are trying to cut back on.

Because a coal plant is still more efficient than a gas car engine, and the technology isn't tied to fossil fuels, it works with any kind of power generation. You're making an argument to move to greener power plants, not an argument against electric cars.

Oh, and nuclear *is* green.

Mike: "Theres a lot of reasurence on the greenie side of things but hybrids hurt the enviroment. You see these companies like honda and toyota, ect have told the public that these hybrid batteries can be recycled, guess what? They haven't developed the tecnology yet."

You have no idea what you're talking about. Nickel recycling is commonplace. You know, nickel? The stuff in NiMH batteries?

Lithium (next gen Li-ion batteries) is also perfectly doable on todays technology.

You can read an article about NiMH and Li-ion battery recycling here - http://www.osti.gov/bridge/servlets/purl/14070-HUP...

Firstly, not all electricity is from coal. In future we'll see more and more non-fossil fuel electricity in developed nations and possibly even carbon capture. Plus gas is cleaner than oil anyway.

Also electric cars are more efficient.

The Chevrolet Volt in electric mode gets 64km from 8.8kWh of electricity, ie just under 0.14kWh/km. A 2009 Ford Focus may use ~0.55-0.65kWh of chemical energy to go the same distance. (you can work this out from publically available figures on the internet)

Coal power stations typically emit something like 960g CO2/kWh or around there (newer ones emit less, older ones typically more)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal

You should probably add a bit for grid/battery inefficiencies.

CO2 emissions per km for the Chevrolet Volt, powered by coal, are therefore about 135g/km. Global average midsized car in 2003 was 198g, apparently.

http://earthtrends.wri.org/

Once you consider a future grid with significant renewable and nuclear generation (50%+), plus gas (20%+), the CO2 emissions skydive. An electric car in France emits something like 15g CO2/km for example; something that a pure combustion engine car will NEVER be able to manage!

if you live in the US, all power connected to the grid is transparent. You can claim that you live next to a dam or wind farm, that doesn't matter, electricity is fungible. This means everyone on the grid burns 50% coal to get their power. If you look at the power companies books, some of that energy from dams is sold 1000 miles away because those people will pay for the higher cost.

Until you are off grid making all your own power, that electric car pollutes exactly the same amount as a regular car and gets the same exact net thermodynamic efficiency as diesel/gasoline

Theres a lot of reasurence on the greenie side of things but hybrids hurt the enviroment. You see these companies like honda and toyota, ect have told the public that these hybrid batteries can be recycled, guess what? They haven't developed the tecnology yet. So these batteries will continue to hurt the eviroment until the tecnology is invented. It's kind of being played halfassed, now hydrogen has a lot more potential, but still comes with a crap load of limitations but electricity should be a secondary power for cars (car chargers, battery, ect) but for a primary something like natural gas or hydrogen. But these "hybrids" are bull ****.

That is the reason why we are trying to find other forms of energy production. Where I live 80% of our energy comes from hydroelectric power. There have also been two proposals put forward recently by different companies to install two massive wind farms around the province that will combine for a total energy output that can provide energy for over 300,000 homes. There are also new technologies such as wave farms, one was install recently in Europe but the finances stopped so it got dismantled, solar paint, etc...

You will confuse the poor dear greenies if you ask sensible questions! Shame on you. They do not care that ethanol uses more energy to make than it delivers as it is green in their view!

Because you can generate your own electricity using solar/wind to power your plugin hybrid.