Why your electric car is nowhere near as green as you think: the hidden eco-pitfalls of the NetZero cause’s pin-up

It’s the pinup of the Net Zero cause, set to decarbonise personal transportation and steer us all toward a glorious green future.

Under current government plans, electric will indeed be the only type of new car we will be allowed to buy after 2035. And even before that, in 2030, the sale of purely petrol or diesel cars will be banned, with hybrids as the only fuel. powered option available.

This week, Rishi Sunak announced that Tata Motors – owner of Jaguar Land Rover – will invest £4 billion in a new electric car battery plant in Somerset to power its incoming fleet of e-vehicles.

But is the electric car really as green as it seems?

Admittedly, pure electric cars don’t have tailpipes, so unlike petrol and diesel models, they don’t emit toxic gases while driving.

But that is far from making them zero-emission vehicles, as they are sometimes incorrectly called.

So where do they really score – and where do they fall – when it comes to their environmental credentials?

How power plant emissions are critical

An electric car is only as clean as the electricity used to charge it and in 2022 – the latest year for which official figures are available – Britain was still getting 40.3 per cent of its electricity from fossil fuels.

Another 10.6 percent came from “thermal renewables,” typically industrial power plants that burn wood chips harvested from forests, mostly in the US. of carbon dioxide.

In terms of true renewables — wind, solar and hydro — they accounted for only 30.4 percent of electricity generation. The government clearly has its work cut out to meet the 2035 deadline for eliminating fossil fuels from the national power grid as we are a long way from solving the problem of interruptions – what to do when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow.

All possible solutions – huge battery storage or hydrogen production – seem to be fantastically expensive. For now, driving an electric car simply displaces carbon emissions from roads to distant power plants.

More carbon is needed to make an EV. . .

Surprisingly, making an electric car usually entails 40 percent more CO2 emissions than producing a petrol or diesel car. This is because the vehicles’ batteries are composed of rare metals that must be laboriously extracted in large quantities.

Since production emissions make up a large portion of a vehicle’s “lifetime” emissions, electric cars look significantly less environmentally friendly than they appear at first glance.

Several attempts have been made to estimate the lifetime emissions of EVs and to answer the fundamental question: how far do you have to drive before it can be said that an EV really has less lifetime emissions than a petrol equivalent ?

The Argonne National Laboratory in the US estimates that an electric car in Norway – where 96 percent of electricity comes from renewable hydropower – would need to travel just 8,000 miles before it would break even. But in the US, where 60 percent of power generation is based on fossil fuels, that figure rises to 13,000 miles.

However, if all the electricity used to power a car comes from coal — China and Poland have large numbers of coal-fired power plants, for example — you’d have to drive 78,700 miles before your electric car’s carbon budget breaks even.

Things are confused by the fact that the production of some electric cars generates more carbon emissions than others.

A comparison between a Volvo Polestar electric and a diesel-powered Volvo XC40 concluded that making the former involved 24 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – ​​70 per cent more than the 14 tonnes of carbon dioxide required to produce the latter.

This meant that the carbon break-even point was usually around 48,500 miles.

But Volkswagen’s estimates for the carbon break-even point of its electric cars are even higher, with the figure for an e-Golf at 77,000 miles.

Due to their limited range on a full charge, most EVs are used as runabouts in towns and cities, so it will be a long time before they reach their ‘lifetime’ emissions milestone.

. . . they produce more particulate matter. . .

Carbon emissions are not everything, even though governments – along with environmental pressure groups such as Just Stop Oil – often behave as if they are.

A major pollution problem in cities is PM2.5s, particles less than 2.5 microns in diameter, which can penetrate deep into the lungs and have been linked to heart disease. The good news is that PM2.5 pollution has been reduced over the past half century thanks to fewer coal fires and cleaner cars.

But will electric cars help to further reduce PM2.5 pollution? There is little hope for that. A study by consultancy firm Emissions Analytics concludes that modern petrol engines are so efficient that they account for only a small fraction of total PM2.5 pollution – nearly 2,000 times as much comes from vehicle brakes and tyres.

Electric cars have regenerative braking, which works the motor in reverse and reduces the role of brake pads. But they are also heavier than petrol equivalents, which means more tire wear and more particulate matter emissions.

A 2020 paper by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development concluded that while lighter electric vehicles emit 11-13 percent less PM2.5s than their petrol equivalents, the situation is reversed when it comes to heavier cars. They emit 3 to 8 percent more PM2.5 than gasoline equivalents.

. . . and cause more potholes

According to a recent study based on data from the University of Leeds, a typical electric car puts 2.24 times as much pressure on the road surface as an equivalent petrol car.

While this may not matter much on highways, which are built with the heaviest trucks in mind, it matters a lot on secondary roads.

More stress means more potholes and more damage to bridges, culverts and other related structures. Not only does this have a financial price to pay — there are also CO2 emissions associated with the production of asphalt — not least because the tar used to bind stones together comes from oil wells.

The real price of rare metals in EV batteries

And then there is the issue of rare metal mining. A typical battery requires 8 kg of lithium, 35 kg of manganese and 6-12 kg of cobalt, all of which must be extracted.

Cobalt is of particular concern, as 60-70 percent of it comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

And 15 percent of the cobalt used in making batteries for electric cars is produced by as many as 200,000 so-called “artisan miners.” This may make them sound terribly middle class, but the truth is that they are basically casual workers with few rights and few safety laws to protect them.

To make matters worse, many of them are children.

In addition to the human cost, there are also environmental costs, although lax control standards in the DRC make the magnitude of this difficult to quantify.

So what’s the answer

If driven far enough, electric cars can help reduce CO2 emissions, although they often don’t. Lightly driven, city cars may be responsible for more carbon emissions than their gasoline equivalents. Even in the most favorable analysis, electric cars are nowhere near carbon neutral and won’t be until we have a fully carbon-free power grid, as well as low-carbon steel, plastics and mining industries – which is a long way off.

By 2035, if we all have to go electric when we buy a new car, there’s virtually no chance that an electric car will be a truly carbon-free form of transportation – but government policy continues to act as if it is.

n Ross Clark is the author of Not Zero: How An Irrational Target Will Impoverish You, Help China (En Won’t Even Save The Planet).