Indians Need to Stop Believing That Electric Vehicles Will Solve Our Pollution Woes

You know when you truly believe in something all your life but later, turns out to be less than the truth? That is exactly what this story is about. As a young hippie at heart, I spend a lot of time preaching about the benefits of electric mobility and debate against the existence of gas guzzlers. And here’s how understanding one element of the entire production chain changed my outlook.

For India, additional challenges include the much higher cost of battery production due to dependency on imports. For electric cars, batteries can make up about 40% of the total car’s cost, so it’s easy to imagine how it can single-handedly drive up costs. For a price sensitive market like India, mass adoption of EVs will only come in when they are cheaper, which, at this moment, can only be achieved via heavy government subsidies.

Electric vehicles pay themselves off over time, thanks to the fuel-cost savings. Electricity will always be cheaper than fuel, and that makes all the difference. Automobile charging usually takes place in two formats – fast-charging at dedicated stations and slow DC charging at home. No matter which you choose, your vehicle will not contribute to the pollution, which is essential for developing countries like India which is house to seven of the top ten most polluted cities in the world.

So where exactly is the problem? The electricity production process.

For India, most of its electricity is generated via coal combustion, gas and nuclear power, all of which are extremely polluting in nature. The three of them combined are responsible for about 80% of the total energy production in India. For a population as big as ours, multiplied with the over 1,000 kWh energy consumption per capita, it’s easy to understand how much total pollution is being generated to produce electricity.

The law of conservation of energy states that energy can neither be generated nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another. That is the key to understand this issue. We can either produce electricity from these conventional sources or move to renewable energy sources like solar or wind energy. Once that is deployed at a large scale is when we can expect our electricity to be truly eco-friendly, and thus, our electric cars to be truly green. Without that, our cars will technically still be polluting, just not directly.

India’s electricity production is primarily undertaken at power plants which are away from urban areas and tier-1 cities. With the onslaught of electric vehicles likely to begin from cities, this shift will practically just transfer the vehicular pollution away from cities to these production plants. Agreed, it will reduce the pressure of pollution from cities, but on a macro level, the pollutants being produced around the country don’t really go down.

There are only a handful of countries that majorly rely on renewable sources for their energy needs. What Tesla has been able to achieve with its battery production facility in Nevada is particularly notable. With the Gigafactory 1, Tesla has been able to produce batteries worth 20GWh (annualized) solely through solar. This has not only made their cars, production and the SuperCharger network net-zero energy, but has brought down their cost of procuring batteries down to a rate that the competition can not match. This solves two problems at once, while ensuring that Teslas don’t add up to the pollution at any stage of production.

India’s next steps include infusing INR 10,000 cr to facilitate the infrastructure and subsidies needed for electric vehicles, along with a huge battery production gigafactory to push the industry forward. Eventually, our focus should shift towards cleaner sources of energy production to match our growing needs for energy without having to invest in higher capacity power plants.

Pollution is an unavoidable evil which all developing countries have to go through. Realistically, we could be a decade away from being an entirely sustainable country. In the meanwhile, we need to foster the steps that bring us closer to that day. Energy is just another resource essential for humans to strive, and no level or recycling or clean production will be able to match the savings compared to those of not consuming that resource in the first place. We are headed in the right direction, but are now approaching the bumpy stretch.

With inputs from Bhushan Trivedi, Founder, Piconergy

Source: in.mashable