Electric vehicles can’t go too far in reducing our use of fossil fuel

News: The Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in fuelling the price of crude oil. It has triggered renewed calls for the use of electric vehicles (EVs) to lower the human dependence on fossil fuels which pollute the environment.

Concept of Electric Vehicles

The Electric vehicles don’t run on fossil fuels like petrol, diesel or CNG. They run on the electricity.

What are the issues in reduction of fossil fuel dependence by the Electric Vehicles (EVs) Technology?

EVs are also powered by fossil-fuel based electricity: The electricity is generated from various sources like coal, natural gas, water flows, nuclear fission, solar energy and wind etc. At present, majority of electricity is produced using fossil fuels, like coal and natural gas. For e.g., 61.4% of our electricity was drawn from fossil fuel sources (the share of coal in total electricity is 54%) in 202-21.

Restriction of Renewable Energy: The wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.

Inadequate affordable batteries: A large number of affordable batteries are need to store energy to power a city for few days, for example, more than 14 million batteries would be needed so that Tokyo can have enough power for three days if wind and solar power could not be produced in those 3 days

The electricity accounts for only part of the total global energy consumption: i.e., only 18%:  Most energy produced is consumed in the production of four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics and ammonia. They are heavily dependent on the combustion of fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels are even required to generate renewable power: for example, if wind power is to supply 25% of global demand for electricity by 2030, it would require around 400 million tonnes of steel. The production of the steel used in wind power requires combustion of fossil fuels.  e

Fossil fuels are even required to produce electric car: A typical lithium car battery require lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper, graphite, steel, aluminium, and plastics. A massive expansion in EV requires the massive extraction of these metals and, in turn, mean massive use of fossil fuels for their production.

Way Ahead

In India, the proportion of installed capacity that depends on wind and the sun to produce power has gone up, and now amounts to a little over one-fifth of our overall capacity, against 8% in 2014-15.

To conclude, moving the world away from fossil fuels is not just complicated, it’s complex. As David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth, people are “mesmerized by the threat” of climate change “without ever perceiving it clearly”.

Source: The post is based on an article “Electric vehicles can’t go too far in reducing our use of fossil fuel” published in the Live Mint on 16^th March 2022.