Climate change, carbon footprints and sustainable energy are terms you will hear everywhere you go these days, and with good reason. While we all need to be doing our bit to help protect the planet and safeguard the natural world, practical changes can be harder to stick to. One of the major reasons for this is mankind’s reliance on the internal combustion engine — something which has fueled industrialization on a mass scale for more than 150 years.
While we owe much to this incredibly versatile and powerful invention, we also need to adapt to the times and find new ways to move goods and people from A to B. This is where the electric engine comes in, particularly when you consider that it should be more economical and eco-friendly than its petrol-powered counterparts.
What does the global landscape look like at present?
In 2022 annual electric vehicle sales topped 10 million units for the first time in history. This is a dramatic upswing when you consider that it represents a 54% increase on the sales from the year before. This puts the total number of electric vehicles sold in history at 29 million — petrol sales may well be in the billions, but the rate of increase of EV sales is impressive.
Governments and investors around the world are putting pressure on manufacturers to reduce their carbon emissions in an effort to slow the rate of climate change. This is something that benefits us all which is why many governments are offering financial incentives to go electric. These can be delivered in the form of subsidies on electric charging rates, grants for exchanging petrol and diesel cars for electric vehicles and subsidized road tax for those driving lower emission vehicles.
Which countries are furthest ahead in the switch to electric?
Norway by far and away leads the way when it comes to the sale of all-electric vehicles with 80% of all vehicles sold in 2022 being EVs. This is followed by other Nordic countries such as Iceland (41% of all sales being electric) and Sweden (32% of all sales being electric). The Netherlands has achieved nearly a quarter of all vehicles sales (24%) making the switch to electric. But while all of this is impressive, it’s China (22%) where the real shift seems to be coming.
China is investing heavily in solar farms to generate all the extra electricity needed, putting it far ahead in this regard when compared to western nations who are lagging in terms of infrastructure. You only have to look at the 5-year extension to the sale of petrol cars announced by Sunak in the UK to see that the West is struggling to meet its targets.
What are the criticisms of shifting to electric vehicles?
One of the major driving factors for moving to electric vehicles may be reducing vehicle emissions, but one of the main criticisms of this from the skeptics is how the extra electricity will be generated. It’s easy to oversimplify things and assume that because no noticeable carbon is being given out at the point of consumption that the new approach is therefore far greener, but life is more complicated than that. The different carbon payloads that arise during manufacturing, the carbon impact of new infrastructure and the lifetime of the vehicles all need to be factored into the equation.
Another example is the move from paper comms to electronic messaging and searching. The fact there is no paper involved in the latter doesn’t automatically make it greener. If you do a mass email of a sales letter, upload photos to the cloud, or even google something like best online casinos, you’re burning electricity. The key point is how green is the manner in which that electricity is generated.
Solar farms, wind power and tidal power (as well as variants like hydroelectric dams offshore wind farms) need to be increasingly built at scale. This will enable countries which are switching to a greater proportion of EVs to increasingly use green and renewable sources of energy to power them. Simply building more and more coal-fired power stations only switches the carbon output of petrol vehicles for the background carbon load of electric cars powered by burning coal.
Is it all about the environment?
Americans in particular has expressed a desire to become energy independent, something which is understandable from their point of view when you consider the reliance on Middle East oil. Political tension and an over-reliance on certain regions of the world that unfortunately tend to be volatile in nature are other key drivers for the switch to electric. While it might not be a purely green-motivated shift, if it results in a better outcome for the planet as a whole then it will be a price worth paying.