From shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels to hurricanes, droughts, and heat waves, climate change is happening right before our eyes. Yet many of us are still not aware of its effects.
If global temperatures rise by 2 degrees, more than 70% of Earth’s coastlines will experience sea-level rises greater than 0.66 feet (0.2 meters), resulting in more coastal flooding, beach erosion, salinization of water supplies, and other impacts on ecological systems and people’s lives.
According to scientific research, the main cause of climate change is the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced that 14% of total CO2 released in the atmosphere is produced by transportational vehicles, even without considering vehicle manufacturing.
Cars account for around 72% of total CO2 emissions, followed by planes with 10%. Considering that environmentally friendly cars such as electric vehicles (EVs) don’t emit CO2, having more of them on roads would seem to improve smart mobility and help us fight climate change.
But even though electric transportation is promoted as a way to reverse climate change and car manufacturers invest big money in electrifying their vehicles, a question still lingers: Are electric vehicles really green?
How green is electric transportation, anyway?
Are electric vehicles truly better for the environment? The short answer: Absolutely not. There are three stages in every vehicle’s life span: manufacturing, utilization, and recycling. During each stage, GHG is emitted. The phases have their official names: Cradle-to-Gate (CtG), Well-to-Wheel (WtW) and Grave-to-Cradle (GtC), respectively. For better understanding, see Image 1 below.
Is the process of manufacturing EVs zero emission?
The process of manufacturing cars starts with the raw materials being extracted, refined, transported, and put together. This process is the same for both EVs and internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV).
Nevertheless, EV production is less green than ICEV production. This isn’t that surprising if we consider that all EVs have large batteries, and the process of producing them is harmful to the environment. Batteries are made up of rare elements like cobalt, lithium, nickel, and graphite that only exist beneath the surface and can only be extracted by very pollutant mining processes. It’s at least encouraging that batteries can be recycled.
For comparison purposes, I have chosen two cars from the same manufacturer with similar dimensions and power: VW Golf 1.4 TSI and VW ID.3 Long Range. The image below shows GHG emissions for the CtG stage for both ICEV and EV. As you can see, EVs emit way more GHG than ICEVs during production, mainly because of an EV’s large batteries.
Why the Tank-to-Wheel stage is not enough
EV manufacturers advertise that their vehicles don’t pollute. EVs release previously stored energy electrochemically without any kind of combustion, so no fuel is being burned during their utilization. That’s the clear win for electric transportation. It’s also an advantage that EVs don’t emit GHG in places where people live, but that’s just thanks to the Tank-to-Wheel stage from Image 1.
What about the GHG emissions during electricity production?
If the energy source to power EVs doesn’t come from wind turbines, solar panels, hydroelectric, or even nuclear, then GHG emissions will be as high as ICEV in total. For more details, see Image 3 below, which compares GHG emissions if all the electricity is made by burning coal. Under the assumption that vehicles pass 20K kilometers every year, EV will start to be greener than ICEV after almost 11 years, or more than 200K kilometers! That doesn’t sound promising.
From the previous example, it’s obvious that making electricity by burning coal will not help EVs become more popular.
However, numerous developed countries have invested in building power plants that make energy out of renewable resources.
With that in mind, let’s presume we can use only clean sources of energy to power EVs. This is when the answer to “Are electric vehicles really green?” starts to shift to the positive. Image 4 below shows a GHG emission comparison between EVs and ICEVs if all the electricity is gathered by solar panels. It’s a completely different story. EVs will become greener after 50K kilometers, or only 2.5 years.
Solar power plants to the rescue
I mention solar power plants for a good reason. They produce clean energy; it’s renewable, and most importantly, it’s the cheapest energy source! I am grateful to have the opportunity to lead two projects for a global leader in smart solar PV systems technology and strategic services.
HTEC has been collaborating with this company for five years now. We are building a mobile app that enables field workers to wirelessly configure solar trackers and monitor parameters in the field for safe and efficient setup and operation.
During the testing phase, the application has already been shown to increase the efficiency of field workers, allowing them to do their work faster and with less effort. And we are just at the beginning of our partnership.
In Serbia, two-thirds of electricity is made by burning fossil fuels and the rest is hydroelectric. There are many abandoned fields and enough sunny days so that proper solar power plants can be built. HTEC has in-house domain knowledge in this field, which we can use to start changing our local environment.
At HTEC, we are on a mission to leverage our deep tech knowledge and expertise to spark innovation in electric transportation and build a greener future in our country and across industries globally. I am proud to be part of it.
The climobil app was used as the data source for generating graphs.
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