Motors Are electric cars really that enviromentally friendly?

Right wasn't sure if this should have gone in general or serious, but lately theres been alot of talk on here about electric cars and how they're enviromentally friendly and people in general seem in support of them. I've got nothing against them I feel they have there place but to me there is more viable and better technologys but they are not widely avaliable or all that enviromentally friendly at present but in the future should be (hydrogen).

But what I really want to get at is what evidence is there that electric cars are more enviromentally friendly as when I've looked, I've found very few arguments or information. When I think about it I can't see them being much more if at all as electricity must come from somewhere usually power stations burning fossil fuels and the more you put on the road the more power stations you will need to have to meet demand. Which meerly moves the CO2 emissions from cars to new or expanded power plants. Plus the damage the mining and creating of the batteries must create as usually there made of toxic substances that themselves damage the enviroment.

Now I haven't read this anywhere its just what I assume so I'm wondering if anyone has any evidence or reports or reviews I can have a look at or even if other people want to know this information as well.

 

I've been wondering this exact same thing for a long time now.

I mean. Say 70% of the country goes electric. That's going to put massive strain on the existing power stations, and demand may well exceed supply - New power stations, probably coal? I expect they'd use the same amount of fossil fuel, and probably not be far behind in terms of pollution. That said, maintaining a pollution control on a power station has to be easier than every car on the road, but hey.

There's nuclear, of course, but that has its own drawbacks. Danger of failure, for one, and what the devil do you do with the waste when you eventually get it?

Where do you put them? Who wants to live next to one? Not many people.

I don't know enough about the environmentally friendly alternatives to suggest what I'd prefer to see, but hey. Hydrogen sounds fun.

 

they have to be way more efficient in towns and cities, a car had to idle an electric just stops and doesnt need as much power at low speeds as far as i know.

engines are very ineffecient they make too much heat etc they have a very low power yield for the amount of energy they use but electric motors are very efficent.

 

I'm not concerned about electric making up a massive amount of the total car population, that'll take many years to happen tbh.

What I want to know is how much damage we do to the environment when we mine for the rare elements needed for batteries? What'll happen to the cost of said material when we ramp up electric car production? Will we start having trouble with escalating prices for phones?

 

I read an article some months ago in the FT about some issues around lithium in economic quantities being quite difficult to come accross, the implication being that lithium would become the new oil were electric cars to take off tomorrow using the tech we currently have available.


As far as generating the power its more efficient to do it in a dedicated device all at once in a few places than to spread it among millions of very inefficient devices.

 

Diesel engines often achieve greater fuel efficiency than petrol (gasoline) engines. Diesel engines have energy efficiency of 45% and petrol engines of 30%.
thats on wikipeadia

i cant find anywhere to find efficiency on electric motors but its usually 80 or 90% i think.

so even just burning the petrol to make electricity would be more enviromentally efficient

its just a toss up. with the increasing effecncy in batteries and possible recycling i wouldnt say it will be much of a worry, less than petrol running out anyway

 

I don't see why we don't just put nuclear power stations on a couple of Islands off the coast of north Scotland, were there is hardly any population to squared mile. This would solve Scotlands power issues, Wales could probaly do the same, and England/North Ireland could make do with a few of them and lots of wind farms etc.

The earth isn't as crowed as everyone makes out, you just have to look at how big the US is in relation to it's population, and then how small the UK or Japan is to theirs, to see there is plenty of room. Why not just build a nuclear waste site in te middle of a dessert, there could be a small army base on site, and the single site, could probaly hold all the waste we need to get rid off, as being in a dessert there is not going to be much of a space restriction.

 

No-one wants a nuclear power station near them - even though the chances of an accident are absolutely tiny, you just don't want it on your doorstep. Personally I wouldn't mind, but 99.99% of people aren't interested.

It's all well and good saying we should put them out in the middle of nowhere, but the loss of energy in the wiring needed (not to mention the fantastic expense) makes it totally impractical to stick them out of the way.

 

I wouldn't mind a nuclear power station relatively near to where I live. The eyesore factor would be the only issue with me. I am a firm believer the nuclear power is currently the best solution to producing the massive amounts electricity society needs cleanly. I think the benefits far outweigh the (often somewhat tenuous) drawbacks.

However, even as things stand (with most of our electricity being generated from fossil fuels), electric cars are still far cleaner.
This is simply because power stations/electric motors are far more efficient at generating motive power from fossil fuels than small petrol/diesel engines.

I also happen to think the modern airships are very very safe and would be a cool way of travelling across the Atlantic, but the public psyche is a strange and often irrational thing

 

See I don't mind nuclear power and the new proposed Hartlepool station aint exactly on my doorstop but certainly less than 10 miles as the crow flies up the coast and across the Tees, but I wouldnt mind it at all.

It's certainly one way of generating lots of electricity with few carbon emissions there's only the prohibitive cost of producing a plant which is the downside along with the extra cost of the electricity produced because of this. Theres also the factor that Uranium aint exactly popping out of the ground and its very scarce with limited resources that wont last much longer.

I also agree with your points of mining Lithium and other highly toxic materials and tried to touch onto it with my first post. I mean is this talk of electric vehicles just people trying to look green or create themselves a market as the Chevvy Volt will be released soon along with Tesla vehicles.

 

£5000 of your shiny new electric "mow'ah"?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8001254.stm

The £500 million would be better spend on developing hydrogen fuel cells and technologies to generate hydrogen.

 

GM unvailed a new car recently, that had an electric motor and a petrol engine, a hybrid i here you say, well, no, the petrol engine doesn't drive the wheels in any manner, thus isn't a hybrid, and is a full electric car. Unfortunatley, i think GM missed the point of the Honda Clarity with it's own hydrogen fuel cell, as GM are hailing their new car as the future of motoring.

Sam

Edit: pistol_pete has linked the car i was refering too.

 

What power issues? We make more than enough power for ourselves, we're sending the stuff down south of the border. I'm no nimby, and would happily live in the same town as a nuclear power reactor, but the idea of just placing nuclear power stations "somewhere" up there in scotland where few people live won't just be objected to by the people in the area, but by most of scotland simply on the basis that we always seem to get picked on for all the undesirable stuff.

 

I've heard this argument a lot and it misses out a couple of important factors.

Free hydrogen is exceptionally rare, it's so light that it floats to the top of the atmosphere and gets "blown" away by the solar wind. The hydrogen that is on earth (and there's huge amounts of it) is all locked up in compounds, the most common one being water. To separate the hydrogen in water you need electricity and it's a very inefficient process. There are other ways of getting free hydrogen but they're all much more complex. Once you've got the hydrogen you need to store it, which is problematic since it seeps through just about any seal you can imagine. If you want to use it in a vehicle you almost certainly need to compress it which not only takes more energy but also makes it leak faster.

Once you have your hydrogen there are two main options for turning it into power for driving around, a fairly standard internal combustion engine and fuel cells. The internal combustion option is the most simple but has drawbacks, inefficiency being one and pollution being the other; the direct result of burning hydrogen with oxygen is water, pretty harmless, but when you burn it under high pressure in an internal combustion chamber with air you also get nitrous oxides which are a constituent part of smog and cause acid rain. Fuel cells are clean and efficient, the only product apart from the electricity is water, however, they use rare metals (platinum, rhodium and others) that are not only in short supply but also difficult and energy intensive to extract from their ores.

Hydrogen is not the silver bullet for the worlds energy problems that it is often purported to be.

While the effect of increasing use of electric cars would increase the demand for electricity overall it would also change the way that energy is used. One of the big problems with many of the renewable energy technologies that are being developed is that they do not provide energy all of the time which makes them unsuitable for providing the "base load" generating capacity. However, if you have huge numbers of battery electric vehicles connected to your grid they can be used to provide energy during high demand-low supply conditions. Over a whole country the energy storage capacity of electric vehicles (if they became much more common) would be huge.

I'm not suggesting that battery vehicles are the answer to everything, just that the problem is more complex than the way it is often portrayed.

Moriquendi

 

There's a metric called "well-to-wheel efficiency", which for petrol/diesel cars includes the drilling, pumping, refining, distributing and burning processes to get your car to go. An equivalent exists for electric cars, which assumes coal and CCGT electricity. On the scale, a Toyota Prius (hybrid electric and petrol) is significantly less efficient than a small car with an efficient engine. Fully electric vehicles are more efficient than petrol cars, even when you consider that power stations are only 50% efficient. As someone pointed out, electric motors are 80-90% efficient, and you get regenerative braking on top of that.

However, there isn't anywhere near enough lithium for everyone to have an electric car. Mining and refining lithium isn't very environmentally friendly either. Hydrogen-electric is a much better idea than rechargeable electric cars, but only if you can find an efficient, low-carbon way of producing hydrogen, and solve all the other problems Moriquendi talks about.

As we concluded in the other thread, a balance of many technologies would be best. Writing off the current electric cars is silly, as the research involved is still progressive and useful.

 

It's not the storage of the waste that is the biggest concern. The U.S. is(has been) in the process of building a disposal site in Yucca Mountain. But they are now holding off on using it because it's the transport of the waste to the storage facility that has people worried. Nobody wants a rail car or tractor trailer with radioactive material going through their town.

 

Top Gear says no

 

Technically Yucca Mountain is a REPOSITORY. It's a holding facility for something that cannot be 'disposed of' with any available technology. A walk in closet for old nuclear wastes. No effort is/was ever intended towards disposal.

 

I think that the new reactors that can run off of the waste from the old reactors and produce very little waste themselves are the way to go. They may not put out as much power but atleast we are recycling the old stuff.

 

The efficiency of electric cars is always going to be tied to the efficiency of the electrical source. While initially the energy might come from fossil fuels, bear in mind that as we steadily convert the power grid to more efficient or environmentally friendly generation, we'll automatically increase the efficiency of any electric cars. In the long term, this is much better than sticking with fossil fuel-based vehicles that are always going to have relatively low efficiencies.