Use Locally - Issue 83 March 2020
Electric Vehicles:
ARE THEY SO GREEN? The car was designed to dissipate heat from an internal combustion engine running on fossil fuels. Made of metal construction with little insulation, certainly no double glazing with heating from the engine in the winter and air conditioning for the summer. Most will know this if you have ever sat in a car in the winter without the engine running; it soon gets cold. E-cars of any manufacture built this way are not electric vehicles (EV) but a car that has been electrified as a consequence of the manufacturer's supply chain being set up for this type of construction. Electric Vehicles on the other hand will eventually be constructed out of polymers, with insulation and most probably double glazed in order to keep the heat in in winter and cool in summer. This is because any heating or cooling drains the battery and reduces the available mileage. The new 'stress' now identified for drivers of electric cars is Range Anxiety, the stress of worrying about being able to get to the destination or home before the battery runs out. To avoid this stress the drivers 'top up' the battery at every opportunity and with as higher charge 42
current as possible, this is not conducive to extended battery life. Now, mobile phone users who do this soon start to notice that the usage per charge reduces electric cars are no different except that replacement batteries are very expensive around ÂŁ7000 -ÂŁ10,000, significantly reducing the second hand resale value. Electric cars are greener with no CO2 emissions... or are they? The assumption that electric cars do not produce CO2 whatsoever is just wrong. By 2030 European carmakers must have achieved average vehicle emissions of just 59 grams of CO2 per km, which corresponds to fuel consumption of 2.2 litres of diesel equivalent per 100 km (107 miles per gallon). This simply will not be possible, not withstanding the recent government announcement that the government intends to prohibit petrol and diesel sale from 2035. Currently electric cars emit a substantial amount of CO2 not from the car but from the gas/coal powered generating plant from which they are indirectly connected. Solar/wind power generation is only effective when the wind blows and the sun shines, coal or gas powered power
Use Locally - Partners with Invest Newark & Sherwood, the business arm of NSDC
