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EVs really are cleaner than petrol cars – analyst report
10/4/2024
As electric vehicles (EVs) become a bigger part of the global car fleet, a contrarian view seems to surface every few months questioning whether EVs really are that clean. A new report by BloombergNEF (BNEF) claims the answer is a resounding ‘yes’.
According to BNEF, in all analysed cases, EVs have lower lifecycle emissions than petrol (gas) cars. Just how much lower depends on how far they are driven, and the cleanliness of the grid where they charge.
At the beginning of their lives, battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) are emissions-intensive, due in large part to their battery-manufacturing needs. But once on the road, internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles quickly speed past BEVs – in terms of CO2 emissions, at least – because of the high volume of emissions that gas-powered cars emit.
To determine the breakeven point, BNEF looked at five different regions: the US, China, Germany, the UK and Japan. In any of these markets, the lifecycle CO2 emissions of a medium-sized BEV manufactured today and driven for 250,000 km (155,000 miles) would be 27–71% lower than those of equivalent ICE vehicles.
A driver in the US would reach the breakeven point at 41,000 km – or around two years of driving, assuming an average annual distance travelled of around 19,000 km. In China, meanwhile, the breakeven distance would be at 118,000 km, or after roughly 10 years, due to the region’s fossil-fuel-heavy grid.
With zero-emission generation on the rise worldwide that breakeven point could come a lot sooner by the end of the decade, the report finds.
Across the five markets surveyed, the report predicts that the lifecycle breakeven point will range between one and four years for a BEV manufactured in 2030. A driver in the US will only need to travel about 21,000 km, or around a year’s worth of driving, for a BEV to be cleaner than an ICE vehicle. Drivers in China would still need longer than drivers in other areas surveyed, taking them 53,000 km – or slightly over four years – to reach the breakeven point.
BNEF’s analysis assumes an average emissions intensity for each region per year. But in reality, EV charging emissions intensity will vary depending on the regional energy mix – and even the time of day charging takes place.
For instance, an EV driver in California who charges during daytime hours will produce half as many grammes of CO2/kWh as a driver who charges at night. The gap between daytime and nighttime charging is expected to grow even wider by the end of the decade.
Utilities currently offer tariffs to encourage overnight charging, but in the future they may get a better ‘green bang for their buck’ by incentivising charging at peak renewable hours, BNEF notes.
Improvements to the EV manufacturing process could make EVs even greener. Recycling batteries could help reduce the lifecycle emissions of new EVs, while on-shoring or near-shoring the full battery manufacturing process – which laws like the US’ Inflation Reduction Act have encouraged – could reduce emissions associated with global transport, the report concludes.
