One of the questions I’m most frequently asked about electric vehicles (EV) is: “Are they really a cleaner option?” While it’s obvious that a fully-electric vehicle eliminates tailpipe emissions, people often wonder about the global warming emissions from generating the electricity to charge an EV. The latest data affirms that driving on electricity produces significantly fewer emissions than using gasoline and is getting better over time.
Electricity power plant emissions data for 2018 has just been released and we’ve crunched the latest numbers. Based on where EVs have been sold, driving the average EV produces global warming pollution equal to a gasoline vehicle that gets 88 miles per gallon (mpg) fuel economy. That’s significantly better than the most efficient gasoline car (58 mpg) and far cleaner than the average new gasoline car (31 mpg) or truck (21 mpg) sold in the US. And our estimate for EV emissions is almost 10 percent lower than our previous estimate two years ago. Now 94 percent of people in the US live where driving an EV produces less emissions than using a 50 mpg gasoline car.
This is a US article. They still burn a lot of coal to make electricity there. But also their petrol cars are less efficient than petrol cars in most of the rest of the world, a consequence of cheap fuel. And don’t forget their gallons are only 3.8 litres, so mpg figures make their cars look even more inefficient than they really are if compared to UK mpg figures.
We also have to be careful in comparing the “average EV” and the “average petrol car”. These are not similar vehicles, and is not a reasonable like-with-like comparison. It is not easy to say this EV is equivalent to that petrol car, as they will have some fundamentally different characteristics. But we have to do some kind of lining up like that if we are to make more nearly like-with-like comparisons. Because that is the fair comparison.
I don’t think it is any longer the case that EVs emit more carbon than equivalent petrol cars, at least not in places like the UK. It does depend upon the fuel mix of the electricity system and might be true in some remaining coal-dependent places, maybe Ukraine for example. But there are other important comparisons that we do need to make on a more nearly like-for-like basis.
They also refer to the “most efficient EV”. If that is anything like a G-Whizz, then that is nothing like any petrol car that is commonly seen.