In today’s part 2 of our ‘EV (electric vehicles) battery facts & figures series’, we want to clear up some misconceptions around carbon-neutrality in e-mobility and dive into easy and powerful ways to reduce the CO₂ footprint caused by e-mobility.

Ready? Here we go:

• Ever so often you read about e-mobility being carbon-neutral or having 0g/km CO₂ emissions – so why is that a misconception? Because there is and always will be some CO₂ emissions during the different stages of the electric vehicle life cycle.
• For one, you need to consider the initial production of the EV – the second biggest source of CO₂ emissions during the EV lifecycle. Here the energy intensive battery manufacturing alone accounts for up to 40% of the overall production emissions*¹.
• Charging the battery during EV operation is the single biggest leaver on the overall electric vehicle CO₂ footprint.
• In case of charging the battery with an electricity mix including significant amounts of non-renewable sources over a typical vehicle lifetime of 150,000 kilometers, the overall CO₂ emissions for the EV are actually not better than for the most efficient conventionally powered car*¹.
• But this does not mean that no one should drive an electric vehicle – not at all!
• There are easy ways to improve this CO₂ balance of the EV and to reduce the overall impact on the climate even further:
  • 1) EV drivers need to ensure that they only charge the battery with electricity generated from renewable energy sources by for example switching the contract for their energy provider at home.
  • 2) EV owners need to ensure that the battery has a second productive life once it is removed from the car after its first 7-8 years of productive use. By not immediately recycling the battery but giving it a second life, the “already spend” CO₂ emissions during battery manufacturing are shared over a significantly longer battery life hence the impact on CO₂ emissions on a per-kilometer basis for the EV is reduced by up to 22%*².

And this is what gets us at betteries excited and out of bed in the morning. In part 3 of the series, we will look at exciting and meaningful second life use cases for EV batteries. Stay tuned.

 x¹ – Effects of battery manufacturing on electric vehicle life-cycle greenhouse gas-emissions, icct, February 2018 (page 5, figure 1)

 x² – Same (page 10, table 3)