This "Ha-ha, surprise, EVs are worse" game has been around for years.
Bruce, Lee, and some of the other old-timers here may remember the
mid-90s report attributed to a once-respectable university
(Carnegie-Mellon maybe?).
It was a great hue and cry about how the GM Impact / EV1 batteries
would destroy the world with lead emissions worse than leaded
gasoline's.
They
sort of "forgot" to account for recycling of lead batteries. Oops!
That's an anti-EV salvo that stands out in my mind, but I'm sure it
wasn't the first.
Hint : check the researchers' funding, folks. We think of universities
as dedicated to unbiased research and scientific method, but those
days
are pretty much gone. Today many are nonprofit in legal terms only.
They're now businesses, and proud of it, run by well-paid presidents
recruited from business and by boards of wealthy business people. Not
many of them would have an aversion to accepting money with greasy
petro-fingerprints on it.
The real picture of transportation energy use is complex. Because
there
are so many numbers involved, it's almost trivial to pick only the
data
which lead to your pre-selected conclusion.
Energy gets used in all kinds of places delivering fuel to an ICEV.
These
include locating, drilling, and preparing the well; pumping the crude;
getting it to the refinery; refining it; transporting the refined
product to filling stations; operating the filling stations, and on
and
on. You could even reasonably count the energy use in the petroleum
company's offices, the vehicles the wellhead workers drive. I'm sure
you can think of others.
And of course energy to run EVs comes from all kinds of places, not
just coal. In fact, you can run an EV entirely on zero-carbon energy
harvested from PV modules on your roof. Try that with an ICEV.
Chip Gribben wrote a response to this argument many years ago. It's a
well researched and unbiased picture showing that because of the US's
energy mixture that emphasizes coal power plants, EVs actually can be
(in a worst case analysis) blamed for increased output of SO2 and
particulates vs ICEVs.
However, their related HC, CO, and NoX output is dramatically lower.
Where the power comes from matters. For example, in France, where most
electrcity is nuclear, EVs blitz ICEVs for emissions - 99% less HC,
99%
less CO, 91% less NoX, 58% less SO2, and 59% less particulates.
http://www.evdl.org/docs/powerplant.pdf
Better yet, as powerplants are upgraded, and as more renewable energy
comes online from PV and wind, the entire EV fleet gets cleaner.
Meanwhile, as more tar sands oil gets used for ICEVs, the entire ICEV
fleet gets dirtier.
These bogus poison-pen-PR analyses do enormous damage partly because
the media are so quick to latch onto them. They LOVE to "prove" that
the status quo is the very best of all worlds, and that new ideas are
all bunk.
That's
not just because media owners are stolid, top-one-percent
establishment
types (though they are, by and large). It's also because reporters are
balloon-poppers by nature. They pounce on something like this and come
up gleefully waving it in the air. By the time it's debunked by more
sober sources 3 weeks later, they've moved on to the next big
conflagration.
David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA
EVDL Administrator
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