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A segment on Canada's CBC Radio show "The Current" takes a closer look at the use of electric cars and their actual impact on the earth.
Citing programs that offer incentives to anyone who wants to ditch a gas-powered car for an electric one in Canada, the report says that if everyone switched to the "greener" electric cars, the overall emissions might not be any less than what they are now.
The disconnect lies where the power that fuels electric cars comes from. Electric charging stations are not always green themselves, according to the report, depending on which part of Canada they're in.
The solution, according to a study mentioned in the CBC report, is to create electricity from greener sources like solar and wind power. And that's possible, according to the study, which concluded Canada's entire electric grid could be fully powered by renewable energy sources by 2035.
On Monday, engineer Hans Baumann presented detailed facts to dispute the claim that electric cars are more green and better for the environment than those powered by gas — and also that fueling electric cars is lighter on drivers' wallets.
"While the CO2 and other gas exhaust is about even between that of a power plant or the gas driven car, the overall heat getting wasted in the air is almost twice as high for the electric driven car than for the fuel powered vehicle," Baumann writes. "Remember — any energy not used mechanically, automatically converts into heat going into the atmosphere.
"Even the claim by our government, that electric cars are cheaper to operate than gasoline driven ones, is flawed. Using the overly optimistic assumption that gas and electric versions are equally efficient, then we have to assume that the fuel for the electric car is equal to 1 gallon of gasoline, that is 31,641 Kcal. (Kilocalories) worth of energy.
"These Kilocalories convert to 34 Kw/h of electricity. Taken the U.S. average price of $0.1258 per Kw/h (it will cost $17.5 in New England), it will cost the average consumer $4.27 to fill up his battery. Compare that to only $3 or less for one gallon of gasoline."
However, many observers say electric cars do have a lot of potential to be gentler on the earth's environment.
What is surprising is to see it in the media. Electric car proponents, the gov't officials they have been able to buy, and a gullible public have merely ignored this information that has been available for many decades. It is subsidies in some form or another that have allowed electric car use to appear cheaper/more efficient when observed without end-to-end considerations.
Credible (i.e., not associated with politically active interest groups) end-to-end analyses that consider ALL of the costs of operating electric vehicles (to include power generation and transmission, procurement, maintenance, replacement, and disposal/reclamation of energy storage devices, numerous energy losses in the end-to-end system, additional support infrastructure requirements, etc., etc.) have consistently shown that not only is it not cheaper but that it is a less efficient use of available power.
And, as the article points out, it is only greener if "green power" generation becomes economically feasible on a national scale. Today, it is not, nor will it be without the expenditure of huge amounts of resources to make it so.