Almost daily, new electric vehicles are advertised and advertised as a climate protection solution. Buyers are being lured in by subsidies and every effort is being made to make this new generation of vehicles attractive to drivers. Meanwhile, fuel cars are being demonized for CO2 emissions. Back in September 2012, Walter Bolz, a former member of the Management Board of Energie-Control Austria, said: "The electric car has almost nothing to do with environmental friendliness." This statement deserves closer attention even today.
Here are some aspects:
The life cycle of a car is divided into five stages: extraction of raw materials, production, use of consumables, behavior in case of accidents, disposal and recycling. At all of these points, the EV, with one exception, performs significantly worse than the Euro 6 diesel engine. For example, fine dust emissions from an EV are higher due to tire or brake wear as they are directly related to weight.
An electric car is several hundred kilograms heavier than an ordinary car. Particularly problematic are the consequences in the event of a fire, for example in an accident with an electric vehicle, which has already been proven in numerous incidents. As a rule, special firms must be called in to extinguish and eliminate the consequences of a fire.
If we consider only the pure driving of an electric vehicle with a PRE-charged battery, then CO2 emissions are actually zero. But where does electricity come from and how environmentally friendly is it? First of all, one thing is clear - pure bio-electricity does not exist! Electricity from the grid, as a rule, must be generated exactly at the time of its consumption. The choice of power plant types is not arbitrary, but, in fact, depends on the demand and the production costs incurred.
Depending on the type of power plant, they range from 10 € / MWh for a nuclear power plant and up to 90 € / MWh for gas / oil power plants. This inevitably leads to the priority in the use of power plants. FIRST, wind / solar / biomass power plants are used in connection with procurement commitments. THEN, sequentially, depending on the price of production, - water, nuclear, coal, gas and oil until a balance between demand and production is achieved. This approach is practiced regardless of borders throughout the Western European power grid, with the bulk of electricity currently being generated by coal-fired power plants. Pure electricity from the sun, wind and biomass is virtually non-existent. Moreover, these types of electricity, by the way,extremely dubious in terms of their energy balance and resource use. And in fact, they are even less green than coal-fired power plants. The long list of “sins” of wind turbines includes dead birds, infrasound causing disease, destruction of the landscape, as well as complete inefficiency, since they are difficult to manufacture and do not really replace any power plant.
Photovoltaic systems are no better either. In addition, they are increasingly being placed in the fields, displacing the cultivation of cereals. And the apparently cheap nuclear energy does not include the costs of final storage and disaster risks at all. They are carried by society, i.e. our children and grandchildren.
But now let's look at the efficiency of an electric car in practical everyday life: a small electric car consumes about 17 kWh of electricity from its battery per 100 km. To charge the battery due to losses, 26 kWh of electricity is required. This means that a third is loss. Depending on how the power plants are used, the charging current is generated at best (!) In coal power plants. This translates into an estimated CO2 emissions of 263 g / km for a small electric vehicle, two and a half times that of a modern diesel car! A large electric vehicle even emits four times the CO2!
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Another serious problem with electric vehicles is the often inhuman and environmentally harmful mining of cobalt and lithium raw materials, as well as the highly problematic disposal of batteries. Tens of thousands of tons of cobalt, lithium and nickel are required to manufacture batteries and accumulators every year. The demand will grow in the future. The extraction of such raw materials is difficult and often does not take into account the issues of labor safety, human rights and exploitation of child labor. Lithium mining also consumes huge amounts of water. And this is already happening in arid regions, which then become deserts.
Conclusion: Who ever comes up with such a crazy idea to glorify electric vehicles as the ideal climate alternative? In fact, all this is a huge deception of humanity, which urgently needs to be revealed, the perpetrators should be punished and an end to it.