In Build Your Own Electric Vehicle, I wrote that:
Maintaining stringent toxic air pollution emission levels along with conforming to increasingly higher average miles per gallon levels is not gonna do it with an internal comubstion enginge. It’s just based on the fact that an ICE is only 20-25% efficient to begin with versus about 90-95% efficiency on electric AC and DC motors.
Electric vehicles generate no emissions whatsoever and reduce our reliance on imported oils or oil at all. Also, until we get to a really large amount of electric cars (hundreds of thousands to millions), they don’t even impact emissions from power plants.
According to Science Daily and Treehuuger.com, there was a study by Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy that finally said duh, if the U.S. wants to significantly reduce its oil consumption, it should prioritize the fast adoption of electric cars over ” the proposed national renewable portfolio standard”.
This makes a lot of sense, as a renewable portfolio standard would mostly have an impact on electricity production and not liquid fuels, but what the study fails to mention is that we’ll need both approaches to truly start moving towards greener transportation.
The people from Rice University further stated that
In fact, mandating that 30 percent of all vehicles be electric by 2050 would both reduce U.S. oil use by 2.5 million barrels a day beyond the 3 million barrels-per-day savings already expected from new corporate average fuel efficiency standards, and also cut emissions by 7 percent, while the proposed national renewable portfolio standard (RPS) would cut them by only 4 percent over the same time.”
