Imagine a thousand cars running on the OMR in Chennai. At any given time, the average age of the car would be close to 24 months. Now imagine the amount of exhaust gas all of them produce. That is enough to trouble an important organ in our body called lungs. Now, imagine the same amount of gas being exhausted, along with the debris on the streets, throughout the day. Are we not living in a scary world?
One of the important developments in the recent past is the advent of electrical vehicles. Or to put it in simple way, cars that can run on batteries. Just like our mobile phone. The user could plug the car for charging before going to sleep and the next morning, the car would be fully charged. Imagine a thousand such cars on the streets. No exhaust gas. No pollution. Lungs would get enough oxygen supply. No green house gas emitted. Wow! Is it not the way we should progress?
Well, not quite! Now, let us look at the broader picture. Electricity cannot be stored. It has be produced and consumed (or wasted) at the same time. In Chennai, if one uses electricity to charge an electric car, it means that the power plant has to produce more electricity. In NTPC (National thermal power corporation), producing more power means, burning more coal. Burning more coal means more pollution, more carbon and sulphur emission into the atmosphere.
So, it really boils down to the difference between the amount of petrol we burn in conventional cars and the amount of additional coal burnt for an electric car. In any case, the atmosphere is polluted. Hence the notion of electric cars being environment friendly is only a myth.
To protect the environment, instead of investing money in latest technology cars the government should invest money in generating clean energy, especially from Sun, Water and Wind.
Until then, even electric cars pollute!
2 comments:
The notion of electric cars being clean is not entirely a myth. Yes, they are a myth if they derive their entire energy by burning coal. In this case, you are merely shifting the pollution to some other place.
But there are certain differences:
1. More and more such cars now have technology to generate electricity from the motion of the car. This means that energy utilization efficiency increases.
2. When large amount of electricity is produced in a single place like a power plant, it is easier to infuse cleaner technologies like Clean coal technology rather than while burning petrol in individual vehicles.
3. Of course, the ultimate solution is move to cleaner power generation methods like Solar.
nice thought :-)
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