- This comment thread is about overhead electric powered trucks. Battery manufacture emissions are irrelevant.
- The article claims a lifetime of 10 years and an annual mileage of 15000km. Those are drastically low for a truck in Germany, and that means it's an inaccurate calculation to spread the manufacturing emissions over the driven distance.
There were a couple more, but without seeing the source study I can't comment on them.
> The article claims a lifetime of 10 years and an annual mileage of 15000km. Those are drastically low for a truck in Germany, and that means it's an inaccurate calculation to spread the manufacturing emissions over the driven distance.
Since there are no battery-associated emissions for these vehicles in the first place, that objection is moot, isn't it?
On the other hand, surely building all this infrastructure will result in CO2 emissions.
In any event, electricity in Germany is far from CO2 neutral, so the claim of "drastic reduction in CO2" with these vehicles just doesn't fly.
My earlier comment was a specific criticism of how the linked study doesn't apply to this thread. This claim you've just made, however, is different and broader - and disclaimed in an article here [1], and discussed on HN here [2]. I could get into a demonstrative calculation of how a solely coal-powered electric car is still better than the US-average ICE car in terms of CO2-per-km, but that's been done before [3].
[1] https://innovationorigins.com/no-diesel-is-not-better-for-th...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19795481
[3] http://www.umich.edu/~umtriswt/PDF/SWT-2017-18_Abstract_Engl...
There are some numbers in there that I agree would be fair to use in favor of the EV, but on the whole this is cherrypicking in favor of the EV.
In particular, just because Tesla uses renewables (for which they likely got a nice tax break and/or subsidy) to produce some batteries, we should all be using their numbers to represent the CO2 emissions for batteries? First of all, Tesla may have the single biggest battery factory, but they're not the biggest producers, or at least they won't be:
https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/companies/catl-cars-germa...
The amount of cars they are able to produce is also very small, though in terms of demand for EVs, they certainly have a big market share. This is unlikely to stay true if EVs really go mainstream in Germany, because the EU will likely be favoring European carmakers with subsidies.
> I could get into a demonstrative calculation of how a solely coal-powered electric car is still better than the US-average ICE car in terms of CO2-per-km, but that's been done before
What does the "average ICE car" have to do with anything? EVs aren't "average cars" and even Diesels aren't "average cars" in the US. To quote that abstract:
"The calculated fuel-economy-equivalent values for individual countries vary greatly, depending on the mix of fuels used to generate electricity within each country. [...] The corresponding value for the United States is 55.4 MPGghg (4.2 L/100 km)"
You can certainly get a Diesel that beats 55MPG. It just won't be as fancy as a Tesla.
Unless you can provide some source that is comparing overhead-electric-powered trucks to diesel-powered-trucks, it's all academic and off-topic anyway. I am just using the sources that are available (those that compare battery electric cars to ICE cars) to show that your claim (electricity in Germany isn't CO2 neutral, so it can't be claimed that electric vehicles will reduce CO2) is not correct.
And a good third comes from renewables without having any meaningful hydropower opportunities [0].
> Combined with the total stop of nuclear energy, and the unsolved problem of storing/distributing renewable energy
There are still 7 reactors running [1] just like on-going research into nuclear fusion [2]. Both are far more difficult problems to solve than electricity storage, which has comparatively research potential versus nuclear fission projects which have the actual unsolved problem of where to "finally" store that waste for decades and centuries.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Kernreaktoren_in_Deu...
Nuclear waste storage is a solved problem, just not the "indefinitely" part. That part can be put off for a long time.
By contrast, if you want to replace coal/nuclear with renewable energy, you need to solve the storage/distribution problem first.
The best studies will be completely open about their assumptions, data sources, approximations, and uncertainties. They generally report (and I find similar conclusions in my research) that in most places where people are buying EVs, given the uncertainties in our supply chain models, they are at par with hybrid gasoline or natural gas cars. And it is difficult to construct consistent scenarios where the electricity grid does not get cleaner over the lifetime of an EV built today and used for 15 years.
A good starting point when exploring these calculations is the GREET model: https://greet.es.anl.gov/.
The study cites its sources and means of calculation and therefore is falsifiable. If there was anything obviously wrong with it, I'm sure it would've been proven wrong by the many people who don't like the conclusion.
> ... in most places where people are buying EVs...
That's irrelevant to my point. These "electric highways" are being built in Germany, so the German energy mix counts, not that of other places.
https://insideevs.com/features/347409/german-study-diesels-c...
"even if it were charged 100% from coal, an EV would still be cleaner than the average ICE vehicle"
...where the "average ICE vehicle" is a car running on 30 mpg of gasoline. However, the point of the study isn't to compare average cars in the gasoline-hungry US. The point is to show which new cars would perform the best in terms of achieving the CO2 goals set by the EU for the car industry. This is important, because it has implications on future taxes and subsidies of car purchases. People focus on the "EV vs. Diesel" part, but the actual recommendation of the study is neither EV nor Diesel, but gas-powered vehicles.
Now indeed if we pick the slightly different numbers that this EV proponent would like us to pick, we may arrive here:
"The Fraunhofer Institute reported in March that EVs typically produce “28 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than a luxury-class diesel, up to 42 percent less than a small car petrol engine.”
The catch with these numbers? They only count for the smallest batteries (200km range). The study also has a graph that shows that at 500km, the advantage is down to 5% and at 650km, it flips in favor of the Diesel.
Has anything been debunked here? Not really, it just shows that different numbers mean different things.
However, so far the "Energiewende" has been a total failure in terms of reducing CO2, despite Germany having a huge amount of renewables and extremely high electricity costs. If Germany had any obvious alternatives to coal, they would've long done something about it.
As it stands and into the foreseeable future, without technological breakthroughs, the idea that electric vehicles could significantly reduce CO2 emissions doesn't stand scrutiny.
Nevertheless, Germany has already decided to exit nuclear altogether.
I may be wrong I heard about that a while ago.
Yeah... no. Half of the German electricity is coal-based, so electric vehicles in Germany are worse in terms of CO2 emissions than Diesel-based vehicles:
https://news.slashdot.org/story/19/04/27/1842245/electric-ve...
Combined with the total stop of nuclear energy and the unsolved problem of storing/distributing renewable energy, it's going to stay that way for a while.