In a post elsewhere today, it was indicated that the Model S averaged 447 Wh/mi over a two year period including vampire losses.
Yes, that would be here:
Estimated gas savings - Page 3
He lives in Canada -- where they have really cold winters. His previous conventional gas car averaged 21 mph which is about 520g CO2 per mile.
For the best state, Vermont, CO2 emissions are 0.77 grams/kWh. For the worst state, Kentucky, CO2 emissions are 957 g/kWh. So emissions are going to range anywhere from 0.3 g/mi to 428 g/mi depending on the power company.
I'm going to guess that Kentucky is warmer in the winter on average than Toronto so it's not valid to take this one guy's experience and apply it to cars being driven by other people elsewhere. The CO2 grid number of 957g per kWh is somewhat higher than what EPA is using for fueleconomy.gov where a location of Lexington, Kentucky is estimated to emit 270g per mile for an S85 Model S. Of course, Tesla drivers might be more inclined to buy a Maserati than an average conventional car if they weren't buying an EV. Every model of Maserati is about twice the CO2 emissions of an S85 in Kentucky (or worse), according to fueleconomy.gov.
The purpose of my posts are to point out that there are emissions associated with electricity and that coal powered plants are the worst offenders, so if you are interested in reducing emissions, you might want to know what your power company is doing about it. In my case, I have a choice of the source of power generation, i.e. wind farms.
That's a good reason, but you are consistently ascribing the worst possible CO2 emissions scenarios to EVs.
The quote "You would produce less emissions driving a conventional car burning gas than driving an EV if electricity were generated by coal" is a summary of the report I posted earlier. I am not an expert, so I cannot validate that claim.
I believe that claim is not based on the emissions of driving the car. I think it is based on calculations that include the "CO2 debt" of manufacturing the car and amortizing that debt over some assumed number of miles in addition to actual driving emissions.
You are quoting that claim from the Climate Central report that you linked to earlier in this thread. As I pointed out, that report is deeply flawed and is unreliable. Did you follow my handy links to read the various ways in which that report is flawed? Such as apparently double-counting the CO2 emissions of manufacturing the battery pack by including it in the overall weight of the car from which they impute an assumed CO2 emitted per pound of vehicle weight? The battery pack on a Model S weighs at least 1,000 pounds....
And then they separately count the manufacturing CO2 of the battery pack and use an assumption that is 4.3 times the amount found by a careful Argonne National Laboratory study that sought to evaluate the large differences in CO2 emissions of manufacturing batteries by previous studies including the one relied upon by Climate Central.
Of the several major studies of battery manufacturing CO2 emissions, the Climate Central authors chose to use the study that showed the highest emissions without acknowledging the other studies or the fact that they showed far less battery manufacturing emissions. The conflicts between the studies were known to the Climate Central authors because it is clearly stated in the abstract of the study they chose to use but Climate Central somehow failed to pass that along in their main article or its footnotes.
The actual emissions for manufacturing future cells at the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada will be even lower due to increased efficiency (that's how they are reducing cell cost) and I believe there will also be a large solar panel array offsetting factory grid use.
Finally, the Climate Central report assumes the batteries are thrown away at the end of the amortized "miles driven" period. In reality, most owners will probably continue driving on the pack past that period (was it 100,000 miles?, I have to look it up again). Even if they got a replacement pack, their old pack is highly likely to continue being used for some purpose for several more years since it will still function well for other uses. Eventually, the ANL report states that it may be possible to cut the effective manufacturing CO2 emissions of the batteries by half by recycling them using known techniques. The potential for recycling is not included in the ANL study's primary CO2 result.
