Thursday, April 19, 2007

How much cleaner is an electric car?

How much cleaner is it to drive an electric car than a gas powered car? That is an important question to ask, since the main reason I started driving electric was to reduce the amount of greenhouse gas production my commute was responsible for producing. How much cleaner an electric car is than a gasoline powered car is highly dependent on how clean the electricity is to produce. This EPA chart shows that using the average "cleanliness" of electricity in the US, electric powered vehicles are about 47% cleaner than gas powered vehicles. However, the State of Washington (where I live) has some of the cleanest electricity in the country because of our reliance on hydropower. So, plugging in the #'s to this EPA "Electricity Cleanliness Calculator" I found that electricity in the Tacoma area code, 98407, is about 2-3 times cleaner than the national average. This means that overall driving an electric car is somewhere between 90 and 120% cleaner than a gasoline powered car. To put this in perspective I can drive my car roughly 300 miles and pollute less than a gas powered car pollutes in 30 miles. Cool!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you get solar on your house, it is even better.

Anonymous said...

When you consider how dirty as ICE (gas) car is, you need to factor in all the pollution that comes with finding, extracting, refining and transporting the gas before it ever even touches a car. the oil industry is, ironically, one of the biggest consumers (polluters) of its own product. This is a factor for coal powered electricity plants too, but generally to a much smaller degree since there is less processing and bulk moves of the matterial.