There is an old joke about Martha Stewart making the best water by carefully selecting the finest hydrogen and oxygen atoms to combine into H2O. While you can’t actually make water, you can select the best electricity for your car, heat pump, or even blow dryer by living in the right place — and you do live in the right place. Electrification of our energy-hungry lifestyles can greatly reduce our emissions of climate-changing gasses, especially when the power we use is generated by renewable sources.
Let’s look at a breakdown of electric vehicle energy and resource use. Making a car takes a lot of energy and materials, whether it is gas-powered or electric. Manufacturing an electric vehicle takes more energy, because making the big battery uses more energy and materials than making a gas tank — but you just make the battery once. And while electric cars take more energy to build, they take much less energy to operate. After about 5,000 miles a small EV starts to have less of an impact on the environment than a gas-powered vehicle. From that point on, your EV is always putting out less, or almost no, climate-warming gasses. Bigger vehicles with bigger batteries take more energy to manufacture. If the manufacturing process relies more on coal-fired power plants, the total manufacturing energy input will be higher. And mining lithium has a lot of energy inputs and environmental impacts. But once the battery is made, the source of the electricity to charge it is more important.
Hydroelectricity, the dominant source in the Pacific Northwest, is carbon-free. Of course dams have their own environmental problems. We get our power by killing salmon, not by burning coal or natural gas like they do in much of the country. But even if the electricity used to charge a car comes from burning coal, driving an electric car still has less impact than driving a gasoline car because 90% of the energy in the gasoline you put in your tank goes out the tailpipe as waste heat — only 10% is used to move the car. An electric car has the exact opposite energy balance — 90% is used to move the car. Burning coal in a power plant is more efficient than burning gasoline in a car; about a third of the energy in the coal is turned into electricity. So about a quarter of the power in coal turns into motion for your vehicle in a coal-generated-electricity area. Not great, but better than the 10% we get out of burning gasoline in a vehicle directly.
But let’s head back to the Northwest. When we don’t have enough hydro power, wind and solar often shift into gear, leaving us with a 90% to 100% green electricity grid. And while our electrical grid has been green for a long time, the rest of the country is rushing to join us. About 96% of new generating capacity in the U.S. last year was renewable, and the grid is getting greener, fast. Coal plants are shutting down, and few natural gas peak generating plants are being built.
Of course not driving at all has the least climate impact, and if you drive very little — say 1,000 miles per year — getting a new electric car will take years to start benefiting the environment. But given that 12,000 miles per year is about the average, the switch to an electric vehicle, especially in our hydro power–rich area, will cut your personal footprint quite a bit. If you are an average driver, it will be a matter of months before the impact is felt. And the elephant — okay, maybe the dead dinosaur — in the room is that gas-powered cars require the continued mining of petroleum. At 20 miles per gallon, the average vehicle will use 80,000 pounds of gasoline over its lifetime — drilled, transported, and refined, all with huge environmental impacts, and then 90% wasted.
On a side note, the most energy-intensive vehicle is a hybrid because it needs both a gas and electric engine. Many plug-in hybrid drivers don’t achieve the advertised mileage because they forget to plug in, and instead just lug around a bunch of heavy, dead batteries. If you are unable or unwilling to deal with the occasional minor inconvenience of charging on long trips, keep one gasoline car and have the other family vehicle be an all-electric unit. As part of an all-electric family, I find that the 20-minute stops for charging on a longer trip leave me more refreshed (and easier to relate to) when I get to my destination. The 250-mile-plus range of most electric vehicles will cover 90% or more of your driving at one fourth the cost of gasoline and, especially in the Northwest, with almost no emissions.
