Do electric cars emit no CO2?

Do electric cars emit no CO2?
Maybe (photo is for illustration purposes)
Toyota will soon release a plug-in hybrid Prius. The day before yesterday, Nissan announced the launch of a type of electric vehicle (hybrid) that uses the engine only as a generator.

Car) was also released.
It can be said that we are in the middle of moving forward from the era when hybrid cars were the norm.
Here I would like to write about an important fact that is rarely written in car magazines or on the Internet.
Most people may think that electric cars do not emit CO2, but that is not true. If you trace the charger back to your local power company, the electricity is generated by burning coal, gas, or oil. The only difference is that the car burns gasoline, or it burns gas all the way back to the power plant.
So are electric cars completely pointless?
So, I've summarized some of the things I've been talking about occasionally in my recent lectures.
Even if we make the same comparison between Japan and Europe,
The situation is completely different.
Prius and Leaf fuel economy

Even when making the same comparison, if you take these two cars to Europe and compare them, the situation is actually completely different.
First of all, the average car usage for an average Japanese household is 13km/L, with the average person driving XNUMXkm per year.
Primary energy consumption in this situation is approximately 27GJ.
My father currently drives the latest Prius, and its actual fuel economy is about 26km/L, which means that the annual primary energy consumption is about 13.5GJ.
Here, we performed calculations for the Nissan Leaf, a representative electric vehicle. Since it is meaningless to use the fuel efficiency figures shown in the catalog, we took the average from websites where Leaf owners have published their actual fuel efficiency figures.
The resulting annual primary energy consumption was a whopping 13.5GJ!
When I did the calculations, I was surprised to find that the environmental impact in terms of fuel efficiency of the Prius and the Leaf is exactly the same.
Also, when you consider the energy required to manufacture batteries, it's even possible that the Prius might be considered more eco-friendly.
However,
Does the industry need to take a bigger look at the situation?
For example, in Germany, about 3% of the fuel used by power plants comes from renewable energies such as wind and solar power.
In this case, the Prius runs on gasoline, just like in Japan, but in the case of the Leaf, 3% of the required energy is provided by renewable energy. Naturally, this translates into less CO2 emissions.
As a result, plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles are rapidly increasing in Europe at an even greater rate than in Japan.
In Japan, the spotlight is on the fierce competition between electric vehicles and fuel cell vehicles.
However, for now, fuel cell vehicles are still based on the premise that hydrogen will be produced by separating it from gas. In any case, it seems that we need to increase the use of renewable energy to realize the environmental benefits of these two methods.
But even if that isn't the case, there are some secondary benefits.
If an electric vehicle is fully charged, it can store enough electricity to power an average household for about three days. This is more than enough as a backup power source in the event of a disaster. In addition, if CO2 capture technology develops in the future, it will have the advantage of being easier to capture CO2 in one place.
However, I always think that it is a characteristic of Japan that industries move forward without considering such big picture issues.
As you can see, the cleanliness of electricity varies from country to country. There is a primary energy conversion factor that serves as a quantitative indicator of this.
Next time, I will explain the primary energy conversion coefficient in detail.

Fuel cell vehicles are now also based on the premise that hydrogen is produced by separating it from gas.
November 2016, 11 28:11am