EVs Don’t Only Run On Electricity From Coal Power Plants

February 6th, 2018 by  

Some critics of electric vehicles try to claim that the electricity all EVs use comes from coal power plants, so they aren’t any better than gas-powered vehicles because they are also tied to a source of dirty electricity.

Most of the EVs in the US are in California, but California generates very little electricity from coal. In fact, California has about ten times more EVs than the state in second place, which is Georgia. (Georgia is one of the states with quite a bit of dirty coal electricity though.) The main source of electricity in California comes from natural gas plants, and this fossil fuel is not clean or renewable but it is cleaner than coal, and using it produces less harmful air pollution, “Reductions in these emissions translate into public health benefits, as these pollutants have been linked with problems such as asthma, bronchitis, lung cancer, and heart disease for hundreds of thousands of Americans.” So, most of the EVs in the US are not running on electricity generated by burning coal.

Renewables in CA generate about 25% of the state’s electricity at the moment, but there has been a mandate put in place to increase that amount to 50% by 2030. In about 12 years, at about half of the EVs in California could be running on electricity made from renewables.

The states of Washington and Oregon are also leaders in EV adoption and they too use very little coal for electricity production. In fact, they are leaders in renewable energy, mainly due to an abundance of hydroelectric resources. In the state of Oregon, about 70% of electricity generated there comes from renewable sources. Vermont has no coal-fired power plants, and has quite a bit of renewable electricity. It also is a leader among US states in solar power. States such as Kentucky and West Virginia do produce most of their electricity from coal, but they don’t have that many EVs. Kentucky may have as little as 1400 EVs; West Virginia has even less.

Not all US states are as green as Oregon, Washington, and Vermont, but utilities around the country are less likely to invest in new coal, “While coal still accounts for roughly a third of U.S. power generation, the industry is slowly contracting as plants retire and utilities replace them with natural gas and renewables.” The declining trend appears to be a long-term one, potentially ending in the total phase-out of coal-burning as a source of electricity generation. 

One utility in the US that delivers power to 5 million customers, American Electric Power, is investing about $4.5 billion in a single huge wind power project. This utility mostly relies on fossil fuels currently, but is going to reportedly invest even more in renewable energy. “The Wind Catcher project is expected to power millions of homes and businesses while saving customers across Oklahoma and the Gulf region billions of dollars. We see this investment in Oklahoma’s future as further evidence that wind is simply a better deal for customers than dirty fuels like coal and gas,” explained Al Armendariz, a director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

When the huge wind power project is completed and sending enormous amounts of electricity to AEP customers, if they  have EVs, they will be able to charge them with some of this electricity. Utilities, very obviously, are not ‘tree huggers’ or activitist organizations, yet they are investing more and more in renewable energy because it makes economic sense.

Additionally, EV critics appear to be unaware that coal is declining in use globally, or they are deliberately overlooking this fact. One of the CleanTechnica writers summarized the situation succinctly, “The total number of coal-fired power plants under development around the world plummeted in 2016, including a 48% decline in overall pre-construction activity, a 62% decline in new construction starts, and a massive 85% decline in new Chinese coal plant permits.“

So the EV critics who say EVs aren’t ‘green’ because they all run on electricity generated by coal are wrong. There are cases where EVs are running electricity made from renewable sources, and that will probably increasingly be the case.

Another fact they leave out is that some homeowners with solar power systems also have EVs and they charge them with their own clean, renewable electricity.

The percentage of people who are doing this today is very small, but it seems likely to grow as home solar PV systems continue to decrease in cost. EVs too are becoming more common and their prices are also trending downwards, while their driving ranges are increasing.

At this point, one might observe that the critics appear to be running out of their own fuel — misinformation.

Image Credit: Norsk Elbilforening, Wikipedia, CC BY 2.5