Just how green is an electric car?
To answer the question we need to look at the 3 areas that contribute to the environmental impact of the car.
1) Manufacturing
2) Driving
3) End of life
Manufacturing
An electric car has one big component which makes it less carbon friendly to manufacture than ICE (Internal Combustion cars), the battery. Not only is there significant energy used in the manufacturing of the battery, but also a comparatively large amount of lithium and other materials which have questionable mining practices.
Quite how much worse an electric car is in terms of emissions associated with manufacturing is a source of much debate, but various sources say between 2 and 8 times.
In all these cases however, we must say that different size vehicles have different results, ie to produce a small ICE car is clearly not comparable with a top of the range Tesla.
So EVs are currently less green to manufacture than ICEs, but I do expect things to improve with development of the industry.
Driving
EVs by their definition have zero tail pipe emissions which means they produce no pollution locally as they are used. This however does not mean that there is not pollution in the creation of that electricity.
If the electricity were to be generated in India, from heavy coal for example the release of carbon in the generation of electricity could be higher than that from driving an economical ICE vehicle. However, in the UK the source of energy mix, ie the amount of renewables in the grid mean that driving an EV is significantly greener than driving and ICE vehicle. This is because the generation means is less polluting when centralised in a power station, and the EV vehicle is much more efficient in operation than an ICE vehicle. In addition the UK is embracing more wind and solar all the time, which will greatly reduce further the amount of emissions in generating electricity needed for driving.
We should also remember that moving the pollution away from cities and from ground level has a large effect on local air quality and therefore health, and this is probably the short term most dramatic gain from EVs.
Since most of a vehicles emissions come during the lifetime of driving, rather than manufacture, the EV therefore wins its green credentials, as somewhere between 20,000 – 50,000 miles into its lifetime is has a lower carbon footprint than the ICE vehicle, and then every mile of from that reduction in CO2 for the EV grows.
End of Life
This is probably more of an unknown. Lead Acid batteries as found as the normal battery in ICE vehicles can be recycled, but recycling Lithium Iron batteries found in EVs is quite a challenge, and expensive to do. None the less, 95% of the material can be recycled and I do expect this amount to grow and a large recycling business to be formed as the vehicles reach the critical ages, of perhaps 10 – 15 years. In addition depleted batteries can be used for other applications, like storing renewable energy. So here the ICE vehicle wins at the moment, but I do expect the market for correct recycling to pick upas the industry develops further.
So in summary, EVs are greener than ICE vehicles over their lifetime, but it is not as straightforward a question as you might think.
