I thought I'd write about what I believe is a urban myth.
I'm told time and again how Electric Cars in India are environmentally friendly as against the regular petrol / diesel and CNG cars. However, I think this is a myth - especially in a country like India where power generation is so very inefficient ?
It stands to simple reasoning that Electric cars run on "stored" energy (batteries) that has undergone 2 transformations and in that sense is already subjected to atleast 2 levels of efficiency (or should I say in-effieciency as it is less than 1) conversion ?
The first conversion is when Coal and other fossil fuels (notwithstanding hydro - but that is altogether a separate blog entry) is converted with LOW efficiency. Then there is approximately 40% transmission losses, it then goes to charge a battery with low energy transformation efficiency (heat loss etc). Finally, when one gets motion out of the motor, I'd hazard that we'd probably not even recover a tenth of input -> output energy efficiencies ?
In short, are electric cars really environmentally friendly ?
IMHO - Absolutely not.
I'm sure someone is going to argue that if coal were to be replaced by Hydro, Solar, Wind (and even Nuclear), then, automatically electric cars could be classified as environmentally friendly - but, even then, I'd retort (very easily proved) that given the energy shortage that India faces, having more motors to drive is clearly not going to be efficient ?
IMHO we should be using only ONE major criteria for environmental friendliness and that is "Energy efficiency".
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As we all know, the only electric car that is tooting around in India is Reva which has both positive and negatives…………the car is also credited to be the highest selling electric car in the world.
One of the reasons is that electric cars are not environmentally friendly mainly because all the discarded batteries will poison the soil and could even contaminate the water supply,another problem is the way we produce electricity which is responsible for a good percentage of pollution. Also battrey’s convert chemical energy and when discharged we recharge them by reversing the process quite a bit of energy is wasted both times...
Though people are interested in pollution control by opting it, most car buyers have shunned it and going for petrol and diesel cars since it is priced heavily. The another electric and environmentally-friendly car Bavina is set to launch this year and many other companies are in different stages of developing electric cars, a little reduction of price or abolition of excise duty on electric cars would surely encourage buyers to drive home electric cars.
It is twice as efficient as a petrol driven vehicle and has an operating cost as low as 40 paise / km. Low maintenance / easy serviceability, pollution free….it is also believed that rolling out of electric cars have addressed the global warming issue…..
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