By: Zoe Crimmel
Photo by Andersen EV on Unsplash
Though EV vehicles may seem completely clean of greenhouse gasses because nothing is coming out the back, they pollute in other ways. All the electricity used to charge electric vehicles comes from the power grid. In the United States in 2023 only about 21% of energy in the power grid came from renewable energy sources. So the fumes might not be coming from under the hood and out the back, it is coming from the towers that produce the electricity the car fuels every time it gets plugged in. Now this may seem like a tiny price to pay for a “cleaner” car. There is a study that shows over 40% of the carbon production is from energy generation. Now that may not mean that the vehicle you are plugging in is not taking from the 21% of energy that is coming from renewable resources, it just means that your car sees electricity as electricity and it isn’t picking and choosing the more “eco-friendly” energy it simply is taking what it is being given.
Now there are ways to make sure that the energy your car is using from your home is from renewable resources. Installing solar panels on your house and using the power generated to charge your car is one way, or wind turbines are an option too. However, those public chargers at the local shopping mall give no guarantees that the electricity being used is sustainably generated.
So we have established that the greenhouse gasses that EV vehicles use may not come out of the back as exhaust but from the factories that produce electricity. We also need to be mindful of how these companies can falsely say that they are eco-efficient when they may not be. It is our job as consumers to research where our electricity is coming from to make sure we are using the most eco-efficient options that are available to us. By doing this we can give ourselves peace of mind that we are doing our part in the world to help emissions from being put into the air even if we have an EV vehicle.
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