The Economist Oct 7th 2010

Electric cars

Highly charged motoring

Electric cars, though a welcome development, are neither as useful nor as green as their proponents claim

DESIGNED especially for city and suburban motoring, this handsome automobile is smooth, quiet and easy to drive, and being powered by electricity it can be charged up at home. Tempting? The sales pitch is not for one of the new electric cars from General Motors, Nissan or Renault, but for a 1905 Victoria Phaeton from Studebaker of South Bend, Indiana.

Electric cars have come and gone over the years. Usually an oil crisis has given them a boost; this time it is a combination of oil prices, fears about energy security and climate change.

A decade ago the Toyota Prius took hybrid cars into the mainstream. Two years ago Elon Musk's Tesla all-electric sports car made them sexy. Now the big car firms are pushing all-electric cars for the mass market. At the Paris Motor Show this week they unveiled electric vehicles of all shapes and sizes. Some go on sale in the next few months.

This represents a huge leap forward for the industry, but the showroom patter will be misleading, for two reasons. First, although electric cars are nippy, stylish and as easy to drive as conventional vehicles, electric motoring has some distinct disadvantages. Second, they are not really as green as their promoters claim.

ÓõíÝ÷åéá...

Financial Times April 27, 2009 7:58 pm

Electric car subsidies do not serve green goals

By Richard Pike

Hard facts and informed opinion have been the first casualties of the maelstrom of comment, debate and public relations generated by the government’s plan to provide a subsidy of up to £5,000 to buyers of electric cars.

Missing is an answer to the main question: is this a good way of spending public money to address climate change? The government argues that the move will encourage early adopters of the technology, helping electric car manufacturers achieve economies of scale. But, given that it would cost more than £150bn to subsidise Britain’s entire car fleet, are there more cost-effective means of meeting our commitment to reduce UK carbon dioxide emissions to a fifth of 1990 levels by 2050?

From a pure energy perspective, electric cars are slightly less good at turning fuel from a power station into movement than the average engine is at extracting energy from petrol or diesel. With a modern internal combustion engine, 32 per cent of the energy in petrol ultimately drives the pistons, while for diesel the figure is 45 per cent, giving an average for the UK’s 30m cars of 34 per cent.

Whatever fuel is used in power stations – gas, oil, coal, nuclear or biomass – just over two-fifths of the available energy is captured as electricity by linking the turbine to dynamo. But, because of electrical transmission losses over miles of cabling, only 36 per cent of the available energy ends up as useful power. In charging and discharging the lithium-ion battery of an electric car, a further seventh is lost, leaving about 31 per cent of the original fuel’s energy available to the motor.

We can, therefore, draw the intriguing conclusion that in the UK right now there are no compelling ­energy-saving reasons for moving to electric cars.

ÓõíÝ÷åéá...

Published on International Business Times (http://www.ibtimes.com)
Electric Vehicles Pollute More than Gas-Powered, Study Says
By Amir Khan | February 13 2012 1:49 PM

Electric cars, heralded as environmentally friendly, may cause more harm to the environment than their gasoline-burning counterparts, a new study found.

The study examined 34 major Chinese cities and found that electric cars caused 19 times more particulate matter pollution, which consists of acids, organic chemicals, metals, and dust, than gasoline cars.

An implicit assumption has been that air quality and health impacts are lower for electric vehicles than for conventional vehicles, Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and one of the study's co-authors, told Eurekale rt . Our findings challenge that by comparing what is emitted by vehicle use to what people are actually exposed to.

Electric vehicles in China outnumber conventional vehicles 2:1 and cause indirect pollution from the way the electricity that powers the cars is made. Eighty-five percent of electricity production in China comes from the burning of fossil fuels, and approximately 90 percent of that production is from coal, according to the study. The burning of coal causes a variety of heavy metals such as lead and mercury to be released into the environment as well as large amounts of carbon dioxide and toxins such as hydrogen cyanide.

The study emphasizes that electric vehicles are attractive if they are powered by a clean energy source, Cherry told Eurekalert.In China and elsewhere, it is important to focus on deploying electric vehicles in cities with cleaner electricity generation and focusing on improving emissions controls in higher polluting power sectors.

ÓõíÝ÷åéá...