Electric cars: Brand new, but the paint is already coming off

October 20, 2009 | Tom Slater

The fully electric car — the kind you never have to fill up with gas — was supposed to be (and is still believed by many to be) a major coup for automotive carbon reduction. No fossil fuels burnt, no emissions, right? Wrong. According to a new report released yesterday, electric vehicles will still be shackled to fossil fuels, only slightly less than their gas-powered competitors. Sure, you might be plugging your car into a benign-looking wall socket at the end of the day, but the power it delivers comes from the same old sources, largely coal.

“For electric vehicles to become a major green alternative, the power fuel mix has to move away from coal, or cleaner coal technologies have to be developed,” says Jared Cohen, president of Carnegie Mellon University who helped author the National Research Council‘s report.

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Titled “Hidden Costs of Energy: Unpriced Consequences of Energy Production and Use,” the report emphasizes that half of the U.S.’s electrical generation comes from coal-fired plants. As a leading source of energy, coal is one of the worst when it comes to transmission — an overwhelming amount of power is lost simply transferring it from point A to point B. By the time it reaches your wall socket and EV engine, it’s no small wonder why the supposed cars of the future aren’t much cleaner or carbon-sparing than their ancestors.

There is also the manufacturing process to consider, the report says. The environmental cost of assembling a hybrid or electric vehicle can be up to 20 percent higher than for conventional vehicles. This cost is primarily in the batteries. Though advances are being made in this area by companies like A123Systems and Johnson Controls, making lithium-ion batteries is still extremely expensive, toxic and wasteful. On top of that, EV and battery makers alike are still very uncertain of the real-world replacement cycle for plug-in hybrid and electric car batteries. Knowing their longevity will be crucial in determining the lifetime environmental impact of these vehicles, but no one has put that fine a point on it yet.

The upshot of the National Research Council’s report is that truly clean, renewable sources of electricity will first need to be found before we can green the automotive industry. It goes as far as to say that if this doesn’t happen by 2030, production of EVs and hybrids — and their requisite battery packs — could be even more harmful to the environment than that of internal combustion vehicles. Seeing as how most major companies, Mitsubishi, GM and Nissan alike are planning to start selling their electric and hybrid-electric models by the end of next year, its unlikely that the reliable renewables problem will be solved first.

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