A Chev Volt on electricity creates about 50g of Co2/km
Can you provide a source for that information please?
In Alberta and SK where fossil fuels are used to generate electricity, making the electricity to drive a Volt 1km creates 300 to 600g of Co2 - 2 to 4 times more than a Cruze. This is an often under considered fact when evaluating EVs -- particularly in areas that generate a lot of C02 when making electricity. ICE cars are cleaner.
This is an age old argument that many pull out of their hats when discussing the "negatives" of EV downstream emissions.
However, almost always, including here, all the other CO2 generating steps involved with gasoline are
conveniently omitted.
- That gasoline was produced (Yes, even in Canada) by heavy oil that likely came out of the ground on some other continent (IE, Sauda Arabia etc) and then was loaded on a supertanker which itself consumed between 200-300 TONS of heavy high-sulphur heavy fuel oil every day while it sails to a port on our continent to unload that oil.
- That oil is then (in the case of areas where pipelines, another hot button topic, don't exist) is loaded on either a train or a truck that transports it to a refinery. Trains burn hundreds of liters of fuel every hour, a truck will burn between 40-50L/hour.
- The oil is then refined into gasoline, a process that releases a lot of co2. It's actually quite amazing how much CO2 is emitted during the refinery process
- That finished gasoline is then loaded onto a truck again and then trucked to your local gas station and dumped in their tanks, burning at least 40L of diesel again for a local gas station up to many hundreds of litres of diesel for more distant gas stations. Yep, more CO2 in the transportation.
Now, many make the argument that in some areas of Canada and the USA we make our own oil, but they ignore the fact that we still import a lot regardless, and our own oil (oilsands) is hardly clean, and many of the same realities above still firmly exist.
When you face those realities suddenly the math that some use claiming "just using gasoline emits less CO2" are
completely out the window. With an EV, in an area where electricity is created via high Co2 emitting sources, the circle is complete in only one step -
generation, and if you want to nitpick, a little bit of loss in transmission an consumption. That's it. There are no supertankers, trucks, trains, refining, etc.
Yes, if they're burning coal, there's admittedly some transportation and such involved there as well, but it still pales in comparison to the realities behind gasoline when you actually start to dig deep into how it's produced.
With gas, people forget all the intermediate steps that happened between that oil coming out of the ground, and going into their tank, much the same as people who ***** about trucks but then think everything that they buy at various stores every day (groceries, etc etc etc) just falls out of the ceiling at night.
Do you just make S#!t up?
When it fits his argument, absolutely.
Hydrogen only solves the problem if it's made using solar/wind or hydro electricity.
I see you understand my argument above then, but I'm surprised you didn't use the same comparison when making your statements about gasoline, accordingly.
The Volt only uses more than a Prius when it is operating in combustion-engine mode in a specific set of circumstances - Volt's battery drained and at higher highway speed.
The design intent of the Volt has it operating electric-only with the combustion engine as a backup. A normal Prius can only operate electric-only in a very narrow set of circumstances. (low speed and very light load)
If you operate a Volt as per its design intent - as an EV with a combustion-engine backup for the long trips - see PrivatePilot's real world results, which a Prius cannot match.
EXACTLY. But Sunny doesn't want to admit this.
For those who didn't see it elsewhere, here was my January overall MPG figures in my Volt. And this was in
January, a month that was very cold and typically hard on EV's, the same as it is on an ICE vehicle. In the summer my numbers will probably show half the fuel consumption.
And yes, I have said it before, in some circumstances where you regularly drive outside the EV range of something like a Volt, yes, a traditional hybrid like the Prius DOES sometimes make more sense, but for those who use a Volt as designed, there's simply no comparison in the fuel economy figures that can be achieved.
And when it comes to pure EV's, with electricity being dirt cheap when compared to gasoline in this province, on a per KM operational cost, it's not even close.