Energy & Environment

Enlarge Image Image Gallery

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

For cruising or commuting, an electric car or bike is the most energy-efficient, economical, reliable and fun transportation option. Electric vehicles (EVs) also are the cleanest vehicles on the road today: No smog-producing pollution pours from their tailpipes, qualifying them for zero-emission status.

A little sports car, like the Sunbeam pictured at left,
is a good candidate for an electric motor conversion.
(See "Go Electric" )

Large auto and oil companies say this claim is just smoke and mirrors, that EVs are just "emission-elsewhere" vehicles, and that pollution from the electric power plants that charge EVs offsets any gain in local air quality. But that's simply not true, say the California Air Quality Management Districts and the California Energy Commission. Their studies find coal-fired electric power plants operate at efficiencies three times that of cars with gasoline engines. Transportation via internal combustion engines that use gas and oil is responsible for more than 17 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions on the planet. In industrialized countries, cars spew 75 percent of carbon monoxide emissions, 48 percent of nitrogen oxide (smog) and 40 percent of hydrocarbon pollutants into the atmosphere. Mile for mile, electric vehicles travel with one-half the resource depletion and one-fifteenth the air pollution.

EVs are easily three to four times more efficient than internal combustion engines. While the major automotive and oil industries point out the limited amount of energy a battery pack contains relative to a tank of gasoline, they fail to address an ugly truth about internal combustion engine technology: The engine itself wastes an average of 60 percent of any fuel's energy, whether it's gasoline, diesel, alcohol, methane, compressed natural gas, propane, bio-fuel or hydrogen. Engines waste this energy as heat, vibration and exhaust. The silence of an electric vehicle is a mute testament to its efficiency.

ELECTRIC VEHICLE NUTS & BOLTS

EVs use electric motors instead of engines for propulsion, and use electricity from batteries instead of getting power from fossil fuels. Look under the hood of an EV and you'll find an electric motor about the size of a 5-gallon water bottle bolted to a standard transmission. The vehicle's accelerator pedal is linked to an electronic controller, and pressing the accelerator smoothly delivers power to the electric motor in proportion to the degree the pedal is pressed, the same as with a gas engine.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print