EVs are not worse for the environment than IC engine based cars.
I mean, the statement is so obviously wrong, that if you had studied high school physics, you would pause after saying it and wonder "hmm, then has everything I've learnt in physics always been a lie?"
IC engines are terrible when it comes to efficiency. An IC engine loses most of the chemical energy in its fuel (petrol/diesel) as heat. Only about 20% of the chemical energy in fuel gets converted to the mechanical energy of motion in a car.
If you were to replace a petrol car with an electric car of the same size, and power it exclusively from a coal plant, the net carbon emission would immediately drop by 33%. This includes T&D losses, charging losses, and what not.
IC engines are also inefficient because they are puny. The turbine in a power plant is massive, and it isn't sitting around idling or waiting for the right RPM to hit for it to deliver maximum efficiency.
Think about it. A small petrol car costs ₹8.5/km or more to run in India. The same car, in electric form, costs ₹0.85/km to run. If EVs weren't massively more energy efficient, how would that be possible?
Eliminating the carbon emissions in electricity consumption is easy. If you run an EV 2500km/month, you can stick a 4KWhr panel on your rooftop for about 10% the cost of your EV, and now your net emissions are zero. To offset the emissions of a dino juice burner, you need to plant many trees and nurture them to full size. Most of us in urban areas don't even have the space to do that.
Now coming to the assertion that EVs consume a lot more energy to make, and therefore their "lifetime" carbon footprint is higher than IC cars. EVs in India cost 50% more than comparable IC cars. And 50% additional material and energy is roughly required to make them. That's it.
On in use, an EV's "fuel" comes over wires. But an IC car's dino juice must be pumped out of the earth, transported in ships, refined, then transported in trucks to the fuel station. It leaks and evaporates into the environment at each stage, before being turned into CO2 and CO and dumped into the atmosphere. The lifetime consumption of energy in just keeping an IC car fueled is more than the energy consumed to make an EV car.
Sure, EV batteries are toxic. But so are the lead acid batteries powering your inverter, or the batteries in your phone, laptop or TV remote. And they are all recyclable. You are required to recycle them by law. We can recover all the material in a battery, and this technology is only getting better. So all those metals are only mined once, and then they live on and on in our batteries.
The trick here is that the materials used in batteries are precious. They are expensive. As long as they are expensive there is value in recovering them. As long as they are toxic the government will force the manufactures to recycle them at end of life.
All cars are bad. Private transport is worse than public transport. But public transport will never be viable for a lot of use cases, especially in rural and remote areas. Transportation is the single biggest cause of carbon emissions. Electrifying rail, bus, ferry, truck, and cars and bikes, is the only way forward.
I mean, the statement is so obviously wrong, that if you had studied high school physics, you would pause after saying it and wonder "hmm, then has everything I've learnt in physics always been a lie?"
IC engines are terrible when it comes to efficiency. An IC engine loses most of the chemical energy in its fuel (petrol/diesel) as heat. Only about 20% of the chemical energy in fuel gets converted to the mechanical energy of motion in a car.
If you were to replace a petrol car with an electric car of the same size, and power it exclusively from a coal plant, the net carbon emission would immediately drop by 33%. This includes T&D losses, charging losses, and what not.
IC engines are also inefficient because they are puny. The turbine in a power plant is massive, and it isn't sitting around idling or waiting for the right RPM to hit for it to deliver maximum efficiency.
Think about it. A small petrol car costs ₹8.5/km or more to run in India. The same car, in electric form, costs ₹0.85/km to run. If EVs weren't massively more energy efficient, how would that be possible?
Eliminating the carbon emissions in electricity consumption is easy. If you run an EV 2500km/month, you can stick a 4KWhr panel on your rooftop for about 10% the cost of your EV, and now your net emissions are zero. To offset the emissions of a dino juice burner, you need to plant many trees and nurture them to full size. Most of us in urban areas don't even have the space to do that.
Now coming to the assertion that EVs consume a lot more energy to make, and therefore their "lifetime" carbon footprint is higher than IC cars. EVs in India cost 50% more than comparable IC cars. And 50% additional material and energy is roughly required to make them. That's it.
On in use, an EV's "fuel" comes over wires. But an IC car's dino juice must be pumped out of the earth, transported in ships, refined, then transported in trucks to the fuel station. It leaks and evaporates into the environment at each stage, before being turned into CO2 and CO and dumped into the atmosphere. The lifetime consumption of energy in just keeping an IC car fueled is more than the energy consumed to make an EV car.
Sure, EV batteries are toxic. But so are the lead acid batteries powering your inverter, or the batteries in your phone, laptop or TV remote. And they are all recyclable. You are required to recycle them by law. We can recover all the material in a battery, and this technology is only getting better. So all those metals are only mined once, and then they live on and on in our batteries.
The trick here is that the materials used in batteries are precious. They are expensive. As long as they are expensive there is value in recovering them. As long as they are toxic the government will force the manufactures to recycle them at end of life.
All cars are bad. Private transport is worse than public transport. But public transport will never be viable for a lot of use cases, especially in rural and remote areas. Transportation is the single biggest cause of carbon emissions. Electrifying rail, bus, ferry, truck, and cars and bikes, is the only way forward.