Today our lives are thought to be in danger due to global warming. Global warming is defined as a gradual increase in the overall temperature of the earth’s atmosphere caused by increased levels of carbon dioxide, chlorofluorocarbons, and other pollutants. Thought to be a big contribution to global warming are the emissions that come from the exhaust of our cars. Electric vehicles do not have tailpipes that exhaust fumes to pollute so they are the logically thought of the cleaner form of transportation.
Imagine if everyone suddenly had electric vehicles, would we be able to provide enough energy to power them all? If not how much more do we need to make it possible and will the way we produce the energy pollute just as much as the fossil fueled vehicles they replaced? Electric cars are common to see on the road and it is also common to find changing stations in parking lots. Since it has not been common until recently, electric cars feel like a new idea but they have been around since the 1800s. In 1832 Robert Anderson developed the first crude electric vehicle that is not practical.
William Morrison created the first successful electric vehicle in the U. S in 1890. Morrison’s design is what started the interest in electric cars. For the next twenty years the electric vehicle increases in demand. Many scientists even Thomas Edison work on improving the technology of the electric vehicle. With the electric vehicle gaining so much popularity and brilliant minds working on it why didn’t it keep rising from there? Henry Ford mass produced a gas powered car that was widely available and affordable known as the Model T.
The discovery of crude oil in Texas making gas station pop up across the U. S was the final blow that made electric cars disappear by the 1930s. For the next thirty years cheap gasoline and continued improvement in the internal combustion engine created little need for alternative fuel vehicles. However, in the 1960s gas prices soared creating interest in electric vehicles again. But again by 1980 interest in electric vehicles fades due to their performance in comparison to gasoline powered cars.
In 2000 the Toyota Prius, a hybrid car, is mass produced that instantly became popular and increase interest in electric vehicles. The popular electric vehicle company Tesla Motors began to engineer its cars in 2006 promising fast and luxurious electric cars. With Tesla Motors announcement other automakers increased work on their own electric vehicles. Starting in 2010 public charging stations were being built in the U. S along with mass producing plug-in hybrids. Recently the battery, the most expensive part, of the electric vehicle cost fell by half making electric vehicles more affordable.
Electric vehicles and gasoline vehicles are certainly different in their components. The biggest difference between gasoline and electric vehicles is the engine. Instead of an internal combustion engine the electric vehicle has an electric motor. Also instead of gasoline as fuel an electric vehicle uses batteries for energy. Finally, instead of injecting fuel into the motor the electric car has a motor controller that takes power from the batteries and delivers it to the motor. With different components the vehicles function differently.
The accelerator pedal in an electric vehicle is connected to a pair of potentiometers which provide the signal that tells the controller how much power it is supposed to deliver. The power delivered translates to the speed of the vehicle. Electric vehicles also gained popularity since it could help reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The U. S consumes 20 million barrels of oil products every day and of those 20 million, 9 million barrels are for gasoline. That means if every personal vehicle was a pure electric car, we would reduce oil consumption by about 45 percent.
Every car being electric also reduces carbon pollution. About 20 percent of carbon pollution comes from gasoline cars which would be a big reduction if they were off the road. A purely electric vehicle like the Tesla model S has 85 kilowatthours capacity that is good for 265-mile range. In the US there are 256 million cars so if they were all electric it would take about 23 billion kilowatthours to fully charge them all. Since the average miles driven in a year was reported to be 15,291 miles that means the car would have to be fully charged about 58 times in a year.
In a year the electric vehicles would use up a little over 1 trillion kilowatthours. The U. S produces about 4 trillion kilowatthours in a year which also happens to be about how much is consumed a year. There are 1 trillion kilowatthours the U. S would have to produce a year if every car was electric. So how much more pollution would come from producing another trillion kilowatthours? Well right now 37 percent of the U. S air pollution comes from producing 4 trillion kilowatthours of electricity.
From the total of about 7 billion metric tons of CO2 produced in the U. S, 2. 6 billion metric tons come from producing electricity. With the extra trillion kilowatthours that 2. 6 comes up to 3. 3 billion metric tons of CO2. In the grand scheme of the pollution spectrum that is not a lot since we got rid of the 20 percent CO2 pollution from the gasoline cars leaving a net of 6. 3 billion metric tons of CO2 pollution form the U. S. However, getting rid of gasoline vehicles would get rid of the nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbon they produce. All exhaust from internal combustion vehicles has been a heavy contributor to the smog in cities.
Pollution from electric vehicles is just CO2 so without hydrocarbons smog should go down. As far as the U. S goes it seems that it needs to produce 25 percent more electricity to be able to keep up a nation of pure electric vehicles. However, the increase in energy production would not increase the amount that the U. S pollutes. In an effort to reduce greenhouse gasses, pure electric vehicles do seem like a viable option. It would take a lot of man power to create the infrastructure but the end outweighs the means.
