Pollution Efficiency of Alternative Fuel Cars
Every now and then, when discussing EVs (electric vehicles) or other alternative fuel cars1, that offer basically zero pollution (in the form of green house gases and other poisonous gases) someone always raises the argument that these cars just “move the pollution upstream” to the electric power plants and you are still polluting just the same.
But this argument only works if the power production “upstream” really is polluting as much as an onboard gas engine – which really sounds weird to me, because as you increase the success of the engine – from something that had to be small enough to fit in a car to something that basically only had the limit of required to be cost effective – surely you can have large efficiency gains, even if burning the same fuel?
So here are some numbers:
- like the new “hydrogen powered” cars [↩]