No, EVs are not Powered by Coal.
Vinod Khosla, Bill Gates and Bjorn Lomborg are wrong on EV emissions.
Author’s note: this article was edited on 4/20/16 to include the most recent energy mix data from ISO-NE.
In 2011, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla sat down with The Atlantic Monthly for an interview to discuss his new $1 billion fund targeting “long-shot ideas at saving the planet.” When it comes to fighting climate change, Khosla is a proponent of the “moonshot” concept (shared with his billionaire industry compatriot Bill Gates), driving humanity toward a clean energy future through technologies that promise to leapfrog natural gas, wind and solar to provide clean energy at a significantly lower cost than any of the alternatives, and thus satisfy the “Chindia” demand for cheap energy regardless of the cleanliness of that power.
In Gates’ and Khosla’s world, the burning of coal as an electricity source is an unavoidable reality, and they have been known to dismiss electric vehicles as simply increasing the amount of coal burnt to generate the electrons needed to charge their batteries, thus accelerating global warming. As Khosla famously likes to put it, “Electric cars are coal-powered cars.”
And what Vinod Khosla has laid down, Danish contrarian environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg has happily picked up. Since Khosla offered up that juicy characterization of EVs as being coal-powered to The Atlantic in 2011, Lomborg has repeatedly borrowed the quote in his own editorializing against EVs in major media around the world — including, most recently, in the UK’s Telegraph on April 9th of this year (“Don’t be fooled — Elon Musk’s electric cars aren’t about to save the planet”). This prompted Khosla to reinforce his now five-year-old assertion:
So five years later, Khosla remains wedded to the viewpoint. But is it fair to say that EVs are “powered by coal?” No, not really. Let me explain.
In 2014, almost 40% of the world’s electric vehicle production was sold into the United States (which purchased almost three times the volume of EVs as the next largest consumer, Japan). The overall contribution from coal has dropped in the U.S. in recent years to about a third of our generation mix, and Japan’s share from coal is even less than that.
Furthermore, if you break down EV purchases in the U.S. by state, you find that far and away the largest consumer of electric vehicles is, unsurprisingly, California — a state from which a paltry 1% of electricity generation comes from coal. And one out of every two EV sales in the United States happens in California.
The next largest consumer of EVs, Georgia, gets about 41% of its electricity from coal, a bit higher than the national average. However, expect that share to drop in the coming years as Georgia retires older coal plants. In fact, one of its most polluting coal plants, the 953 MW Hammond Steam Generating Station, produces power at a higher marginal cost than natural gas and renewables, and is under increasing pressure to shut down.
The number three consumer of EVs is New York, which gets about 4% of its electricity from coal. The next largest buyer of EVs is Oregon, which gets about 33% of its power from coal — but 43% of its energy from emissions-free hydroelectric facilities.
Of the 429,000 plug-in EVs registered in the United States by the end of 2014, almost 200,000 are in California. If you assume that the rest of the vehicles in the country outside of California are powered by 33% coal — a generous assumption — then on average EVs in the United States are powered only 18% from coal. Hardly qualifying them as being “coal-powered.”
Finally, about the Northeast, which Khosla said was “especially” powered by coal: ISO New England’s most recent Regional Electricity Outlook shows coal consumption for electricity generation dropping from 18% in 2000 down to just 4% in 2015.
In any event, even an 18% energy mix from coal doesn’t mean that we should expect that 18% of the electrons that enter EV batteries would be coal-generated. Coal generators are typically considered “baseload” generators, which output energy at a fairly constant rate around the clock. Nuclear, as well. Natural gas, on the other hand, is a go-to ramping resource — along with emissions-free pumped hydro.
So if you plug in your EV, your roughly 6 kilowatts of demand would happen at the margins — and would be met by power that’s delivered at the margins. Which is less coal and more natural gas, pumped hydro, and renewables.
What’s more, coal is continuing unabated a decades-old decline as a share of the country’s energy mix. Coal peaked at over 50% of our energy mix in the late 1980s and has fallen ever since — precipitously over the last decade. Cleaner-burning, cheaper natural gas, and renewables, are eating coal’s lunch. Fully two thirds of the generating capacity added in 2015 came from wind and solar, and virtually all the rest came from natural gas. Given that 60 percent of coal plants are over 40 years old, and that over 80 GW of coal generation is expected to be retired due to tighter EPA regulations, and the argument that in the U.S. — by far the world’s largest EV market — electric vehicles are “coal powered” is far from true today, and will be even less true with each passing year.
So what about China and India, the “Chindia” problem that appears to stand between worldwide adoption of EVs and stopping climate change? As it turns out, both countries are seeing the writing on the wall and have adopted dramatic goals for both renewable energy and electric vehicle adoption. In China’s case, they are quite literally choking on their own pollution, and while India has less to complain about, that’s only because their ambitions for economic growth are still ahead of them.
That said, it is telling that both of these countries are looking to the future and are making big bets on renewables and EVs — the very technologies that thinkers like Khosla, Gates and Lumborg believe will break their backs on the “Chindia” markets. Apparently the Chinese and the Indians haven’t bought into such a sense of limitation when it comes to EVs and renewables.
And in the end they, like us, can’t afford to wait to see what the Khosla/Gates moonshots can actually deliver when they return from outer space. In fact, those moonshots may find, on their return, that our problems were substantially solved using technologies and solutions that were already in hand, and just needed scale to make them economic.
