Clean car, what about the battery?
Electric vehicles can be less pure than they seem
Inside the millions of clean electric cars rolling on to the world’s roads in the next few years will be a dirty battery. Every major carmaker has plans for electric vehicles to cut greenhouse gas emissions, yet their manufacturers are, by and large, making lithium-ion batteries in places with highly polluting power grids.
As battery making capacity grows, most supply will come from places like China, Thailand, Germany and Poland that rely on non-renewable electricity sources such as coal.
“We’re facing a bow wave of additional CO2 emissions,” says Andreas Radics, a managing partner at Munich-based automotive consultancy Berylls Strategy Advisers.
The findings show that while electric cars are emission-free on the road, they still discharge a lot of the CO that conventional cars do. 2Just
to build each car battery would emit up to 74 per cent more C02 than producing an efficient conventional car if it’s made in a factory powered by fossil fuels in a place like Germany, according to Berylls.
“It will come down to where is the battery made, how is it made, and even where do we get our electric power from,” says Henrik Fisker, chief executive and chairman of Fisker Inc, a California-based developer of electric vehicles.
For perspective, the average German car owner could drive a petrol-fuelled vehicle for three-and-ahalf years, or more than 50,000km, before a Nissan Leaf with a 30 kWh battery would beat it on CO2 emissions in a coal-heavy country, Berylls’ estimates show.
And that’s one of the smallest batteries on the market.
With heavy batteries, an electric car’s carbon footprint can grow quite large even beyond the showroom, depending on how it is charged. Driving in France, which relies heavily on nuclear power, will spit out a lot less CO2 than Germany, where 40 per cent of the grid uses coal.
“It’s not a great change to move from diesel to German coal power,” says NorthVolt chief executive Peter Carlsson, a former Tesla manager who is trying to build a ¤4 billion ($7b) battery plant in Sweden that would run on hydro power. “Electric cars will be better in every way, but of course, when batteries are made in a coal-based electricity system it will take longer” to surpass diesel engines, he says.
To be sure, other studies show that even in coal-dominant Poland, using an electric car would emit 25 per cent less CO2 than a diesel car, according to Transport & Environment Brussels, a body that lobbies the European Union for sustainable environmental policy.
The benefit of driving battery cars in cities will be immediate. “In downtown Oslo, Stockholm, Beijing or Paris, the most immediate consideration is to improve air quality and the quality of life for the people who live there,” says Christoph Stuermer, global lead analyst for PricewaterhouseCoopers Autofacts.
But electric cars aren’t as clean as they could be. Just switching to renewable energy for manufacturing would slash emissions by 65 per cent, according to Transport & Environment. Some manufacturers have heeded calls to produce batteries in a more sustainable way, using renewable energy for manufacturing.
“The topic of CO2 lifetime evaluations is starting to get more traction,” says Radics at Berylls. “Carmakers need to be transparent in this discussion to avoid unsettling buyers.”
It will come down to where is the battery made, how is it made . . .
Henrik Fisker, Fisker Inc