What's making EVs dirtier than Diesel? | Akshay Singhal | TEDxGateway
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Worx8EcaH8U Video ID: Worx8EcaH8U ============================================================ [Music] for the first time we are seeing repercussions of climate change all around us with increasing heat during our summer months with increasing instances of floods and tsunamis and the unignorable smog across our cities no wonder these vehicles on the road have become that thorn in our eyes and while many of us are rushing towards electric vehicles a simple analysis of facts will make us realize that electric quakers are contributing more to carbon emissions than their diesel counterparts or as i like to call it they have a higher cost to climate i happened to travel to bangalore for the first time in 2016 and it was love at first sight the people the culture or the weather trump at all so much so that i moved to the city within the next few months as i started to live there i realized that what i'm liking in terms of bangalore's weather is a far degraded version of it from just a decade ago this made me really conscious about climate change and in order to reduce my carbon footprint i wanted to go electric for my first car being a material scientist i couldn't resist myself from going through a few research articles to earn some bragging rights in front of my friends by telling them that i'd be making so much savings in terms of carbon emissions as i went deep into it i was shocked to say the least let me show you what i found let me use these jars of coins and jars of coal to explain to you what i found let's say you and your friend both decide to buy new cars you being a climate conscious person like me decide to go for an electric one but your friend is still buying a diesel car one fine day you both turn up at a car dealership and realize the electric car costs significantly higher than the diesel variant but a sales person comes to your rescue and explains to you that while your friend will be burning a hole in his pocket refueling the car every time with diesel you will only add up marginal cost every time you recharge it as you both drive your vehicles for 50 000 kilometers your friend is adding significant cost and 100 000 and 150 000 kilometers but in all of that while you only add a marginal cost to your electric car so you're happy that while i'm incurring less cost i'm also saving the environment but are you really let's look at the climate cost of the ev as well similar to the financial cost an electric vehicle costs to the climate far higher than the diesel variant and this is because as you manufacture cars there are lot of carbon emissions related to the manufacturing process both cars lead to significant carbon emissions when they are manufactured but more so in the case of an electric vehicle because they require batteries to be manufactured as well and these batteries need rare earth minerals to be mined and then processed into them hence the cost to climate of an electric vehicle is much higher than its diesel counterpart but you would be like that's okay i can make up for this higher cost as i run my electric vehicle but what we miss out over here is the electricity that is being used to charge the electric vehicles is still coming from burning coal and gas in our thermal power plants so as you and your friend both run your cars you will definitely be emitting lesser as compared to your friend but the emissions are not insignificant as compared to the diesel car and when you both drive for 50 000 kilometers you would realize that the upfront cost to climate as well as the running cost of climate or both the vehicles you lose because you are emitting much more and it's only when you both drive 100 000 kilometers that both of your costs to climate match up and this is what we call as the green threshold it takes 100 000 kilometers for an electric vehicle to become greener as compared to the diesel variant we realize that log 9 the reason electric vehicles are not able to fulfill their promise of solving for the climate change is because of the batteries the current batteries are dirty to manufacture they have a short life span and they are very inefficient with this realization in 2017 we ventured out onto the journey of making better and better batteries by leveraging log9 competency of graphene nanotechnology and material science because with better batteries you can reduce the upfront cost to climate of manufacturing an electric vehicle at the same time better batteries enable us to increase the mix of renewable energy on our grids and hence we can cut down on the running cost to climate of an ev further more efficient batteries enable us to reduce the energy required of running the vehicle for every one kilometer so finally when you stack up the new running cost to climate of an ev with the upfront cost to climate you would realize that you're finally able to make a green impact as compared to a diesel car here i would like to bring out another important aspect there is a mad rush around the world to increase the range on our electric vehicles but as we go from a 200 kilometer range ev to a 300 kilometer range electric vehicle and then to a 400 kilometer range one we are back to square one the benefit that we have been able to achieve with more efficient batteries better batteries is all gone [Music] [Applause] [Music]