> Where I live, if I were to use an EV charged on the grid, I would actually be _increasing_ my emissions over a reasonably fuel efficient gas powered ICE.
Given how efficient even something like a coal power plant is compared to vehicle engine (with a transmission, and stopping and going at traffic lights every so often), this is incredibly unlikely bordering on impossible in realistic conditions.
From the US Department of Energy. You can get emissions numbers per Kw for each location. You can get miles per KW for most EVs. From that you can calculate emissions per mile for an EV. Which is a number you can get for most standard gas engines. Then you can compare.
But actually, I probably should have said "highly efficient ICE or hybrid" rather than reasonably efficient. It's been a while since I ran those numbers and the piece of info my brain stored was "Don't get an EV until I can charge it from solar". Either way, my overall point stands - EVs don't actually lead to the major emissions cuts advertised in most real world scenarios.
I just did the math on my EV history (~3.5mi/kWh) and compared to the EPA emissions for my region, Texas. That came out to ~0.122kg/mi of CO2 emissions. If I'm reading this other EIA chart, there's 8.1kg of CO2 per gallon of finished motor gasoline. So for a 30mpg car, that's .27kg/mi of CO2 emissions. So I would need to get on average at least 66mpg to match the CO2 emissions from my EV in Texas.
How many crossovers do you see on the market get >66mpg?
Also, this is entirely ignoring the transmission factors, this is purely a gallon of gas on its own being burned compared to the production at the plant. In reality you'd need to add a significant amount more emissions to the gas as there's tons of trucks having to drive that fuel to local fuel stations all over the place, meanwhile transmission of the electrical energy is pretty darn efficient in comparison.
Given how efficient even something like a coal power plant is compared to vehicle engine (with a transmission, and stopping and going at traffic lights every so often), this is incredibly unlikely bordering on impossible in realistic conditions.
Where are you getting those numbers?