The Evidence Mounts that Electric Cars are Cleaner than Gasoline Vehicles, No Matter How you are Generating the Power to Charge Them.

Look Here: Even More Evidence That Electric Cars Could Save the Planet

Everyone's saying it: The future of driving is electric. The big-name car companies have plans to start giving Tesla some tough competition. Jaguar's I-Pace electric SUV will be on sale soon, and Porsche is teasing a new concept Mission E Cross Turismo, which looks like an SUV'd Panamera (in a good way).

From article, (“For the US overall, an electric vehicle is much cleaner than a gasoline vehicle, even when you take into account the emissions from natural gas, coal, or however else you’re generating the electricity,” says Dave Reichmuth, a senior engineer in the nonprofit's clean vehicles program. And as the electric grid moves away from dirty fuel sources, the gap is widening.   The UCS study looks beyond driving-related emissions to consider the entire supply chain that goes into making cars go. For the gas guys, that means all the emissions associated with extracting crude oil are included. For electrics, the UCS uses power plant emissions data from the EPA, and includes the environmental cost of mining coal, for example. Because different chunks of the country make power in different ways, the results vary by region.

researchers turned their calculations into a familiar format: miles per gallon. An electric car driver in renewable-happy California is doing as much damage to the environment as a gas car that gets 109 miles per gallon. In Texas, that number drops to 60 mpg. In the center of the country, around Illinois and Missouri, it’s just 39 mpg. Nationwide, under this system, electric cars produce the same emissions as cars that get 80 mpg—making them several times cleaner than the average economy of regular cars, which hovers around 28 mpg.

 In 2009, when the UCS started running these figures, an electric car in California would get only 78 mpg. In Kansas and Colorado, they’d be lucky to hit 35—now those areas have jumped to 46 mpg. Credit the increase to the country's shift away from coal, which in 2009 made half the nation's electricity, and now makes about a third, and toward renewables, which now account for 10 percent of electricity generation. “Even used EVs that are out there are getting cleaner over time, and that doesn’t happen with a gas car,” Reichmuth says.)

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