Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-33869270-20180703224215/@comment-35745775-20180718205357

TorrelloRR3 wrote: Can anyone honestly say if electric cars, in general, are a valid, long term replacement for fossil fuel driven vehicles? I appreciate that they're much more efficient and reduce pollution in cities, but until electricity generation becomes fully renewable, they just move the pollution to the power stations.

And the batteries. These are made from limited resources, witch are hugely polluting to extract and process and then have they have a limited lifetime!

Yes they are/will be a viable alternative, but not for every application.

The pollution equation is indeed complex and varies hugely from country to country and region to country. Take a country like Norway, which to my knowledge has a very high percentage of renewable energy in its mix - here e-cars really make a significant net pollution reduction contribution. For other countries it is questionable whether burning gasoline in an ICE engine produces more pollution than producing electricity for e-cars from dirty old fossil fuel power station. Personally I think not, but clearly it varies a lot from region to region.

My guess would be that the efficiency of a modern petrol ICE >30%, whereas an old power station <20%. Efficiency of an e-car can easily be 80-90% or more. Maybe someone has better figures?