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Originally Posted by Hersbird
What about the manufacturing of the solar panels?
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What about it?
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Plus irregardless of where exactly the power for an EV comes from, it needs to be considered as taking from the average of where electricity comes from. Sort of if it wasn't used by the car it could have been used elsewhere.
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Why? If I am installing solar panels simply to charge my EV (which would be the case, since with a power bill that runs about $40/month it wouldn't be economical otherwise), then that's solar generation that wouldn't exist if I didn't get the EV, so it wouldn't be used elsewhere.
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So it is accurate to say electric cars are really powered by coal, and if everybody had one it would be even worse.
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Nope, or at least only if your state or country is stupid enough to produce the added generation by burning more coal. Even in that case, it would still be somewhat better, since the coal mine->powerplant->grid->car path is more efficient than the oil well->refinery->gas station->IC engine path. If you care to do a little searching (this is old news) you can find more detailed computations, but the bottom line seems to be that a completely coal-powered EV is about equivalent to a Prius.
Now consider two facts. First, there is no place in the country that gets all its electricity from coal. The national average is about 40% (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_po..._Type_crop.png ) and can be under 20% in the Northeast & West Coast.
Second, we know perfectly well how to generate as much electricity as we need without burning a single lump of coal - all that's needed is the wil to do so. But we can't really run all our gas engines on anything but gas.