Electric vehicles have a high profile right now, with EVs featuring prominently in the Biden administration’s and Congress’s plans and also important new vehicle announcements from major automakers like Ford. But what are the climate benefits from switching from gasoline to electricity? While it’s obvious that a fully electric vehicle eliminates tailpipe emissions, people often wonder about the global warming emissions from generating the electricity to charge an EV. The latest data confirms that driving on electricity produces significantly fewer emissions than using gasoline.
Electricity power plant emissions data for 2019 was released earlier this year and I combined that data with the latest assessments of fuel emissions and vehicle efficiency. Based on where EVs have been sold to date, the average EV driving in the US produces global warming pollution equal to a gasoline vehicle that gets 93 miles per gallon (mpg) fuel economy. That’s significantly better than the most efficient gasoline car (59 mpg) and far cleaner than the average new gasoline car (31 mpg) or truck (23 mpg) sold in the US. And our estimate for EV emissions is about 15 percent lower than our estimate from just three years ago. Now 97 percent of people in the US live where driving an EV produces fewer emissions than using a 50 mpg gasoline car.
To compare the climate-changing emissions from electric vehicles to gasoline-powered cars, we analyzed all the emissions from fueling and driving both types of vehicles. For a gasoline car, that means looking at emissions from extracting crude oil from the ground, moving the oil to a refinery, making gasoline and transporting gasoline to filling stations, in addition to the tailpipe emissions from combusting the fuel in the engine.
For electric vehicles, the calculation includes both power plant emissions and emissions from the production of coal, natural gas and other fuels power plants use. Our analysis relies on emissions estimates for gasoline and fuels production from Argonne National Laboratory (using the GREET2020 model) and power plant emissions data released by the US EPA. The data, released in February 2021, tallied the emissions from US power plants during 2019.
Leave a Reply