“Battery electric vehicles are only as clean as the energy source used to generate the electricity that powers them,” if you ask Michael Sivak, the former director of Sustainable Worldwide Transportation at the University of Michigan.
That being the case, says Sivak, now the managing director of Sivak Applied Research, EVs in the United States are definitely getting greener.
Now, one can argue with a few of his assumptions – most notably his calculation that coal and oil emit a whopping 176 times the emissions hydro power does – but the simple truth is that, despite all Donald Trump’s talk of resurrecting the coal industry, Americans are using less fossilized plants than ever before.
Overall, coal now powers 28 per cent of the electricity generated in the US – right on the world average, by the way – down from 49 per cent in 2008. That is largely on the back on a few states making dramatic cuts, Sivak telling Green Car Congress that New York and Connecticut reduced their usage from 14 to one per cent; Delaware from 70 per cent to just five per cent; and Massachusetts now uses no coal where a decade ago 25 per cent of its electricity came from coal.
Of course, this being the era of Making America Great Again – and quite how mining coal is going to help the U.S. take on an increasingly high-tech China remains unexplained – a few states are using more coal than ever.
Wyoming used to source 94 per cent of its electricity from coal-fired plants; somehow it’s actually found a way to raise that figure to 96 per cent. West Virginia still uses coal for 92 per cent of its energy (though that is down from 98 per cent) while Kentucky gets 75 per cent of its electricity from coal (and thus do we find the rational behind Trump’s campaign promise).
That said, “The number of states that generated at least 75 per cent of electricity from coal,” says Sivak, “decreased from nine in 2008 to three in 2018.” One interesting anomaly is that Hawaii, a state vociferously promoting electric vehicles, gets 68 per cent of its electricity from oil, a hypocrisy only made somewhat palatable by the fact the entire state only has about half-a-million cars on the road.
For the record, we in Canada get about nine per cent of our energy from coal, substantially lower than the world average of 27.6 per cent. One last glaring anomaly in the war against tailpipe emissions is that three-quarters of the world’s coal is burnt in Asia, the great preponderance (51 per cent of the world’s consumption in fact) of that by China, the country, of course, credited with the planet’s most aggressive EV policy.