It’s been over a month since my last I made my last blog post from Italy. Since coming back it’s taken a while to get used to the shock of going back to work.
Anyway, onto topic.
I’ve been thinking a lot about climate change because while I was in Italy it was unseasonably warm, there was very little snow in the mountains in Europe. There has been a general increase in concern about the environment & energy in parliament and then there’s the hype around global warming.
This got me thinking about electric cars, because many point the finger at petrol/diesel cars as being major polluters. And in some ways rightly so.
As a chemist by degree I know a lot about the nasty stuff that cars produce, and as a car driver I know why I think I need one.

First off lets take a few steps backwards and looks at the Greenhouse Effect:

The main greenhouse gas which we can control is Carbon Dioxide
However, I find that a lot of people don’t really know what it’s all about – in fact many intelligent people don’t know the difference between The Greenhouse Effect and Ozone Layer Depletion
Ozone Layer Depletion is entirely caused by humans by the use of fridges and aerosols which give off CFCs and others. It was particularly prevalent in the 70s-90s, but changes in coolants used mean that the ozone layer hole is no longer increasing and is actually healing itself back ie the hole is shrinking.
The Greenhouse effect occurs naturally without human intervention, but has been exaggerated by humans burning fossil fuels (coal, wood, petrol, gas etc.) producing Carbon Dioxide. This causes the planet to warm up rapidly over a period of time.
Note, there are other greenhouse gases but they are largely not human caused so largely out of our control.

Back to what I was trying to talk about
Electric Cars
Now, my normal comment on electric cars is that it’s just distributing the pollution elsewhere as in most countries the electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal etc.).

However, when I did a bit of research it appears that electric cars are significantly more efficient according to the stats than their petrol counterparts. On top of that, it’s said that it’s easier to maximise the efficiency of a power station than an internal combustion engine in a petrol car.
However, I’m still not convinced that:
a) The calculations are accurate
b) That all the inefficiencies are being taken into account

On my way back from italy I started planning on doing some real life calculations on how efficient electric cars are based on how much energy they really consume from the point of burning the fossil fuels vs petrol cars. I will need to either get some of the data online or find someone who owns an electric car to make it a reality. Should make for an interesting comparison, and either way I think it will be surprising to me.