Quote:
Originally Posted by Tony From West Oz  Producing electricity in coal burning power stations, for electric cars is significantly more polluting overall than using petroleum fuel directly in ICE powered vehicles. Yes, the "point of use of the power" has no pollution with EVs, but the planet suffers more from EVs powered by coal powered EVs than by ICE driven vehicles. |
Way OT I know, but there isn't a direct linear relationship between electricity
use and coal burnt. Huge amounts of power get dumped to ground overnight in baseload power stations because it takes hours to take a generator module down then reheat & synchronise it to the grid. So a heap of excess power is generated and dumped overnight.
2 corollaries to this are:
1. "Earth hour" does not reduce CO2 emissions by any amount despite the warm glow it gives the participants.
2. A significant number of plug-in hybrids can be recharged overnight without increasing CO2 emissions from power stations... they would just use up the excess off-peak electricity that gets wasted now... and the same amount of coal would still be burnt.
There would therefore be a nett benefit from replacing dino-fuelled cars with plugin hybrids.