Electric vehicles may not go far enough in reducing our use of fossil fuels

Expressionism, defined by Steven Rhodes in his book Economist’s view of the world As “the tendency of many people to support (or oppose) all environmental initiatives in order to reflect their values” has been demonstrated. People who already own EVs are talking about how they are not affected by rising fuel prices and are doing their bit for the environment at the same time. Individuals in the business have also used this opportunity to talk about the investment potential of companies making EVs and the other inputs that go into manufacturing them.

Electric vehicles do not run on fossil fuels like petrol, diesel or CNG for that matter. Therefore, a first-order analysis suggests that every new EV means less fossil fuels are being burned and this bodes well for the global cause of climate action.

Of course, EVs are powered by electricity, which is primarily generated from coal, natural gas, water flow, nuclear fission, solar power and wind. Of this, coal and natural gas are fossil fuels. So, while more people driving EVs sounds like a good thing, if the electricity used to drive these vehicles is generated from fossil fuels, we are taking the problem elsewhere.

In the Indian case, in 2010-11, 65% of our electricity generation capacity was dependent on fossil fuels. It declined to 61.4% in 2020-21. Furthermore, in 2010-11, the coal-dependent country had 54% of its production capacity. It came down to 53% in 2020-21. Overall, coal-fired power capacity increased from 93,918 MW to 202,675 MW. Obviously, now more coal is being burned to produce electricity. In fact, half of the electricity worldwide is still generated by burning coal and natural gas.

Furthermore, in the case of India, the proportion of installed capacity dependent on wind and sun to generate electricity has increased, and now accounts for a little more than a fifth of our total capacity, from 8% in 2014-15.

However, as Bill Gates wrote in How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: “The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, and we don’t have cheap batteries that can store city-sized energy for long periods of time.” – Sufficient.” Suppose because of a storm, the city of Tokyo has no access to electricity produced from renewable sources such as wind and sun for three days. To deal with such a potential situation, renewable energy has to be stored in batteries for use when needed. Gates estimates that more than 14 million batteries will be needed to have enough power for three days in Tokyo. And “that’s more storage capacity than the world could have in a decade.”

Furthermore, as Václav Smil writes in How the World Really Works, it is worth remembering that electricity accounts for only 18% of global energy consumption. In fact, most of the energy produced is consumed by what Smile calls the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics and ammonia. As he writes: “In 2019, the world consumed about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, 370 million tons of plastic and 150 million tons of ammonia, and they are not easily replaced by other materials—of course. Not in the near future or globally.” The mass production of these four pillars “relies heavily on the combustion of fossil fuels.”

Interestingly, the world also needs fossil fuels to generate renewable energy. In his second book Numbers Don’t Lie, Smil wrote that if wind power were to supply 25% of the global electricity demand by 2030, it would require about 400 million tons of steel. To make it, more than 600 million tonnes of fossil fuel would be needed, equivalent to coal.

Or take an electric car. In How the World Really Works, Smil writes that a typical lithium car battery weighs 450 kg. It contains “about 11 kilograms of lithium, about 14 kilograms of cobalt, 27 kilograms of nickel, more than 40 kilograms of copper, and 50 kilograms of graphite—as well as about 181 kilograms of steel, aluminum, and plastics.”

Data from Statista.com shows that before the pandemic, around 74.9 million cars were sold in 2019. If electric cars are to become the order of the day, we are seeing numbers like these. This would mean that the extraction of all the metals used to make car batteries would require massive expansion. And that would mean massive use of fossil fuels. As Smil puts it: “It’s one thing to generate readily increasing forecasts of future electric vehicle ownership; it’s quite another to supply these new materials on a global scale on a large scale.”

To conclude, moving the world away from fossil fuels isn’t complicated, it’s complicated. Of course, when an issue like this goes to the mass market, complexity goes out the window and people want to show that they are concerned about the global warming crisis.

As David Wallace-Wells writes in The Unhabitable Earth, people are “fascinated by the threat” of climate change “without clearly understanding it”.

Vivek Kaul is the author of ‘Bad Money’,