Electric Cars : Are they **REALLY** environmentally friendly in India ?

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".

Restart, Renew and ReUse on Global hour day ?

After a long hiatus, I've found the time or more importantly the inclination to blog again.
What better way to start than to pen a few thoughts on Earth Hour Day ?

As I write this while sitting in a hotel room in the US, it is "TIME" in India. Time for people to switch off for an hour as a gesture to energy conservation. Pity is, it seems to be a very "high brow" campaign.

Not sure how many see this ?

Maybe we should do this on a working day when the schools are in and all the kids are told about this and then they can convince their parents, peers and the public ?

The important factor is to impress upon people and bring in peer pressure. Let me illustrate the point with an example.

In Inatech, I've seen on numerous occasions that systems (PCs) are left on, lights are left on etc while winding up for the day. All opportunities to drill down the message seems to have had very little long-lasting effect. Things simmer down for a while and then cropup again (epidemic mode ?).

As an experiment, we now have BIG laminated notices that are left on each desk when we find the PC left on. This notice remains up during the day just to let the neighbours know that somone has forgotten (again !) to turn off equipment.

It seems to work !

What can we do at a global level for this kind of peer pressure ?