MONDAY, MAY 06, 2024
S. Ananthanarayanan
This has reference to the letter ‘Electric Vehicles and Pollution’ by R. Fernandes (Herald, February 16), which mentions whether electric vehicles are indeed pollution free. This is a voice raised while the rest of the country is eager to promote the manufacture and use of the EV. The government, in fact, under the National Mission for Electric Mobility, has formulated a Scheme known as Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of (Hybrid) & electric vehicles in India (FAME India). Questions, however, have been raised, now and in the past, of how wise it is to promote the EV in India.
While the electric car emits no direct greenhouse gases, the electric car can be only as green as the electricity that it consumes. In most countries, a good proportion of electricity is generated from hydroelectric, wind driven and nuclear sources of energy. In India, however, and Australia and Indonesia are similar, most of the electricity is generated in power plants fired with coal, petroleum or natural gas, the bulk being coal. And the coal in India is notoriously poor, emitting more pollutants, like SO2, in addition to CO2, for every calorie of heat, than better quality coal.
A report in 2015 carried a comparison of the economics of the EV, as shown in the figure.
Table 1 shows that with heavy coal dependence, poor quality of coal, transmission losses, etc, the net emissions when electric cars are used in India were over twice the emissions in European countries, Canada and Japan, over one and half times that in USA and even China. Table 2 displays this information in terms of the fuel efficiency of a petrol driven car, if it were to match the electric car. We can see that in the best cases (the lower part of the table), the electric car works like a petrol car that runs for over 17 km on a litre of petrol. The same electric cars in India, however, behave like petrol cars that burn a litre of petrol every 8.5 km. As many petrol cars in India do a lot better than that, it seemed that switching to electric cars would result in greater GHG emission!
This was the position in 2015. Has it changed since then? The Central Electricity Authority bulletin reports that generation from renewable sources in 2020 in India had risen to 93.69 billion units (CEA’s summaries). Although this is four times what it was in 2012, it is a small part of the total generation, which has also doubled, to 1,384 billion units. The comparison which was cited in 2015 would thus substantially hold and may hold for many years.
In April 2000, the journal, nature sustainability, had carried a review, covering 59 regions of the world, to verify if the use of electricity can better the use of fossil fuels in net emissions of greenhouse gasses, given the existing methods of generating electricity. The review did find that electricity was preferable in 53 of the 59 regions, which accounted for 95% of the world’s transport and heating demand. The troubling part of the finding is that among the six regions where this is not true, India figures as the leader.
The economics of EVs in India, unfortunately, do not appear to have been examined, and are not published. If EVs are not green in India, the right course is that they should not be permitted, leave alone encouraged. It is true that the future lies in the EV and the conventional car may become expensive where it is used. On the other hand, petrol may become cheaper, with less demand. In any case, it is in the interest of the world that India, and a few other places, do not switch to electric cars. The world could even support, if necessary, the conventional car in India, in world’s own interest.
[The writer may be contacted at [email protected]]
