As long as coal keeps generating the lion’s share of electricity in Australia, the environmental benefits of driving plug-in, electric cars will be in question.
There are only a few hundred registered fully electric vehicles on the road, and many are run by enthusiasts who connect them to homes powered by renewable energy.
But if masses of new electric cars end up forming a significant portion of the nation’s vehicle fleet in the next decade, they will simply exchange the carbon dioxide coming from a tailpipe for the CO2 flowing from coal-fired power plants.
”In terms of carbon dioxide emissions, there’s a lot of misinformation put out on both sides of the story,” says Dr Phillip Paevere, an electric vehicle expert at the CSIRO. ”The truth of the matter is, from the research we have done at CSIRO and other studies around the world, … if you replace highly efficient internal combustion vehicles with inefficient electric vehicles, given the [electricity] grid mixture in Australia, then you’re probably no better off.
”Of course, Australia’s vehicle fleet is not all highly efficient though.”
With the nation slated to get one fifth of its power from renewable energy by 2020, the equation will start to shift in time for a large-scale electric vehicle roll-out, however.
”As the grid mixture changes, the net benefits of electric vehicles in terms of carbon emissions keep rising,” he says.
”Changing the grid mixture is by far the biggest net CO2 benefit you can get. It is the key thing.”
There are few real incentives to drive an electric car in Australia and, given the relatively high price of the few available vehicles, more economical ways of making a bigger difference to greenhouse gas emissions. The most intelligent environmental choice at the moment might be to buy a highly fuel-efficient or hybrid vehicle for less cash, and invest the balance in buying 100 per cent green power or installing a rooftop solar panel system.
Even in some places overseas, where there are generous government incentives, the results have not yet matched the hype.
In Spain, the government planned to subsidise the purchase of electric cars by up to 20 per cent or €6000, and the stated aim was to have 2000 electric cars on the road by the end of last year. But just 16 cars were registered. This still represented a 16-fold increase on the year before, when only one electric car was driving Spanish roads.
In most cases, a vehicle’s fuel use still accounts for most of the greenhouse gases it produces.
But, depending on how often and how far a car is driven during its lifespan, the ”embodied” emissions used to fabricate the metal, plastic and rubber used to build a vehicle can be responsible for more emissions than the carbon dioxide coming out of its tailpipe.
A full life-cycle analysis would include the emissions caused during the mining process, and the electricity used to smelt metals.
Measuring this is highly complex. ”It’s an extremely difficult thing to do because it involves sharing … commercial information from so many sources,” Paevere says.
”It’s a component-based supply chain with many different manufacturers. There are no agreed measurement standards. It requires an agreed approach to be developed before you can start doing it accurately and the comparisons can be made.”
