It drives me absolutely crazy when I am accused of polluting the air for driving an electric car. They accuse me of polluting the air even more than if I drove a regular car. I scratch my head and wonder where are they getting their information? The argument goes somewhat like this; electric cars run off electricity and electricity comes from coal, so when I drive an electric car I am in essence driving a coal-fueled vehicle. In fact I keep running into more and more incorrect information like this about electric cars as range extended electric vehicles like the Volt, which I have, and pure electric vehicles like the Leaf begin their entry into the marketplace.
I have found that trying to convince people who electric vehicles are better through argument doesn’t always work. However, informing people who have been misinformed about plug-in cars and letting the information sink in on its own sometimes helps. I know that providing information tends to get the far right mantra that Obama is shoving electric vehicles down the throats of ordinary Americans to stop. I am an ordinary American and I jumped at the chance to have one of these vehicles. No one had to push me at all. There is a genuine curiosity about these vehicles shared by nearly all Americans, so most people are quite receptive and welcome to information, especially if it surrounds my personal experience. If you just give those willing to listen the facts, they tend to stop and listen.
Here are the tools that I use to talk to people who come at me with the accusation that electric cars are really coal-powered cars.
Pie Chart of the USA’s fuel distribution for electricity generation (2009).
The US power grid is made up of a lot of different fuels and renewables. The grid’s fuel distribution is as follows according to the Energy Information Agency for 2009:
1% is from Petroleum
4% is from Wind, Solar, Geothermal and other renewables
7% is from conventional Hydroelectric dams
20% comes from Nuclear
23% is from Natural Gas
45% comes from Coal.
54% of the grid is clean energy.
I am saying 54% is clean while including Natural Gas because Natural Gas, even though it produces CO2 it does so in far lower quantities than coal or oil and it has nearly no other contaminants such as particulate matter, VOCs, mercury, leads, etc. that come from coal and oil electric generation. Oil has similar problems to coal only its pollutants are split, releasing heavy particulates and other toxic pollutants at the refining process and then VOCs, NOx, and other pollutants again during combustion. This holds true with the use of oil in vehicles as well. The 1% of oil powered electric power plants are well over 40 years old, built before the oil crisis of the 1970s and are either ready to be decommissioned or are being decommissioned. Oil electric production in the US has dropped by nearly 50% in the last 5 years as plants are either removed from service or converted to other fuels.
31% of the grid is air pollution free.
Nuclear, traditional hydroelectric dams and other renewables produce electricity without emitting air pollution. Wind is the fastest growing sector of the power grid.
Electric vehicles pollute less than gasoline cars even when their energy comes from the combustion of coal since both the coal power plant and the electric vehicle are built on an efficiency model that by far out perform petroleum in terms of energy per volume of fuel. Gasoline is energy dense, however, the refining process to get us gasoline is highly energy intensive. Coal, on the other hand, is typically burned relatively unrefined. Electric companies are highly regulated monopolies that typically operate under government regulated pricing. Electric companies can expand their margins by improving efficiency. Power plants make more money when they are more efficient, therefore power plant operators try to wring every ounce of efficiency out of their plants to maximize their profit. It is, however, the efficiency of electric cars that reduces the pollution per mile to below that of its internal combustion counter part. An electric motor is typically upwards of 85% efficient in its use of electricity, while an internal combustion engine is somewhere around 17% efficient.
Oil currently produces more CO2 than coal and is projected to do so well into the future. (EIA)
NRDC did a study of electric car charging habits of electric car users like me. Most of us do all our charging at night when there is massive amounts of unused capacity at the power plants. Power plants are built for the time when the most users use the most electricity. In the middle of the night there are very few people using electricity. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory figured this out also and crunched the numbers. They found that the nation’s existing electric power grid could fuel as many as 180 million electric cars without us needing to build a single new electric power plant. It makes sense to me. I am watching TV, getting ready for bed, asleep, waking up, exercising, eating breakfast and getting ready for work for more than 8 hours a night. That is the time I am going to use to charge my car. According to NOVA’s “Making Stuff” a portion of the fuel burned at power plants at night goes to making electricity that is unused. By charging at night we are using some of the pollution that goes for naught and not polluting during the day, which we would with petroleum.
As much as I have finalized the arguments to debunk that electric cars are cars whose tail pipe are the smoke stacks at a coal power plant, there is a new aspect to electric power generation and sale that change plug-in cars that makes them much cleaner NOW!!! My Chevy Volt is for the most part an electric vehicle for me. I go out of my way to try to not use gasoline. The only times that I have truly used gasoline is when bringing it back from the dealer who was far away from my home, where I used 1.3 gallons of gas, and driving to visit family in Wisconsin. I used 73 gallons of gasoline to do that, the Volt is a vehicle that goes around 36 miles on a charge and then switches over to run on gasoline, which allows it to go an unlimited number of miles as long as you have access to gasoline. At about 76 gallons in 11 months is pretty good. If I hadn’t taken the vehicle to show family, I would have used around 2 gallons in 11 months, which is to say that I normally used the vehicle like it is an electric vehicle only. Because I use the vehicle as an electric vehicle I was conscious about the source of my electricity. My vehicle, when using electricity was largely a coal powered vehicle that is until I received in the mail from my power company information about a program that they were running called “Green Power.” I was intrigued. In the Green Power program my power company would purchase an equal amount of electricity of what I used in wind, solar or bio-gas. I could have all or a part of my electricity switched over to Green Power. For me it was a no-brainer, I wanted 100% of my electricity to be green. I would have to pay $0.015 per kilowatt more, but to go green, it wouldn’t be that much of a sacrifice. It turns out that for me, with an electric vehicle plugged in it was costing about $8 more a month. (I have a very energy-efficient home) Dominion claims that on average it cost customers about $15 per month more to purchase their power through the Green Power Program. So, at this point not only is my car 100% green when I am using electric power, but so is my house. I am very happy with that. But don’t stop reading, there is more.
Dominion is not the only electric utility company that has programs like this. In fact there are green programs in nearly every state of the United States of America. Here is a list of the programs around the country compiled by the US Department of Energy’s office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE), Green Power Markets. This means that everyone who has an electric car can unplug it from a coal power plant, or nuclear, or oil, or anything that you don’t want to support, and get your power from green, renewable sources.
In the end electric vehicles by themselves are a big plus on the side of reducing pollution, and depending on where you get your electricity, an electric vehicle can be anywhere from a vehicle that just pollutes less to one that is truly a zero emission vehicle. All in all the argument that electric vehicles are merely coal powered cars with their tail pipe at the power plant can’t hold up under a clearer understanding of where and how we get our electricity.
reckonrecon 
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