Welcome to the Hyperdrive daily briefing, decoding the revolution reshaping the auto world, from EVs to self-driving cars and beyond.
News Briefs
- Carmakers will lose about 3.9 million vehicles of production to chip shortage.
- Hyundai to invest $7.4 billion in EVs and other projects at U.S. sites.
- Three EV startups have lost more than $40 billion in market cap since SPAC deals.
EVs Are Green And Getting Greener
How green is your electric car?
I’ve heard this question a couple of times lately and the very premise of it made me scratch my head. EVs have no tailpipe emissions. Environmentalists have been bleating about electrification for two decades. Now that we’re on the cusp of the plug-in age, what’s the fuss?
The question came in two ways. First, someone among the Twitterati asked whether General Motors’ Hummer EV was really an environmental statement given that a large electric vehicle would use more power. The second was at a panel discussion on EVs at Detroit’s Automotive Press Association, at which someone asked if an EV powered in a coal-loving state like West Virginia is a carbon culprit.
As picayune as all of this seems, I decided to pull some data and see if there is such a thing as a dirty EV. And there is, sort of. Bear with me.
Argonne National Labs has built a very elaborate modeling spreadsheet called Greet. It’s massive. The simulator can take an electric vehicle’s miles-per-gallon equivalent, crunch its upstream emissions output based on its electricity use by region where the power was generated and then compute its carbon footprint. It even includes carbon emissions from the manufacturing process, which is worse for EVs than for conventional cars.
If you bought, say, a Jaguar I-Pace (which is less efficient than smaller plug-ins) and charged it just with electricity from West Virginia—where 92% of the power is generated in coal-fired plants—it would effectively create more carbon than a mid-sized gas-burning SUV, and by quite a bit. The gasoline SUV in Argonne’s model puffs out 469 grams of greenhouse gas per mile. The I-Pace would create 707 g/m while using Mountaineer State juice. Even the much more efficient Tesla Model Y or a Chevrolet Bolt would be close to a gas burner, generating a carbon footprint of 430 grams per mile and the Bolt 451 grams per mile of CO2.
But here’s the thing. That dirty, purely coal-charged EV exists more in theory than reality, according to Argonne. West Virginia power plants feed into a 13-state grid in which the electricity is directed by a regional transmission organization called PJM Interconnected. Residents draw power from plants in those states, which means the kilowatts supplied to someone in West Virginia could come from multiple sources besides coal. Since the state is a net exporter of power, there’s a good chance that the electricity is coal powered. But Argonne said EVs charged in the state are probably still cleaner than a conventional car.
For argument’s sake, I plugged in the numbers into Greet for the U.S. region that has, on average, the dirtiest electricity. That region is the Upper Plains states and Big Sky Country. When charged there, the Model Y had a footprint of 290 grams per mile and the Bolt had 303, still much cleaner than gasoline vehicles. The I-Pace was also cleaner, but only slightly at 429 grams per mile.
Looking ahead, EVs will only get cleaner, said Dan Sperling, director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, because America’s power generation gets cleaner all the time. PJM said its total power grid is only 19% coal driven. A decade ago it was about 50%.
“If you have the kind of coal mix we have today, EVs make a lot of sense today and make even more sense tomorrow,” Sperling said.
In other words, yes, your EV is green.
Before You Go
In an earnings season when most of the world's biggest automakers reported double-digit jumps in first quarter revenue, France's Renault is an outlier.
Revenue in Most Recent Quarter
Year-over-year change
Data: Company reports, Bloomberg
Renault saw revenue fall 1% in the quarter after losing almost $10 billion last year, due in part to high costs, limited geographic reach, and continuing fallout from the 2018 arrest in Japan of Carlos Ghosn, the fugitive former CEO. "The pandemic laid bare weaknesses stemming from its underutilized factories, labor strife, and meddling by its most powerful shareholder, the French government,” Bloomberg News’ Tara Patel reports.
The carmaker is largely dependent on the European market, where consumers have kept their spending in check. "It will be very challenging for Renault to properly turn around," said Charles Coldicott, an analyst at stock research house Redburn.
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May 14, 2021 at 05:54PM
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