But in my area, the electricity is being generated by fossil fuel burning power plants, so the pollution is just at a different point. I don’t see any special reason to pat yourself too hard on the back over buying an electric vehicle.
How many people are oblivious to the fact that the energy of fossil fuel is converted to the electricity they use to charge their EV's battery?
This has already been answered, but I just wanted to drive it home a little further.
A medium-largish sized coal plant will burn through
$1 Million worth of coal a day. Forget regulation or whatever, the power companies have an
enormous incentive to make use of that fuel as efficiently as possible. Even a 1% efficiency improvement will save them $2.6 Million per year per plant. Car manufacturers have nowhere near the same incentive to be fuel efficient, and individual car owners have next to zero incentive to keep their engines in good repair. In a rough approximation, this is
why it's
so much cheaper to buy electricity for your electric car than it is to buy gas for your gas car, because that's simply the more efficient use of fuel. And by using
less fuel, electric cars thereby produce
less pollution, even assuming coal power.
Secondly, from an environmental perspective, it is far easier and cheaper to scrub the output of a few large power plants than it is to scrub the output of hundreds of thousands of cars. And just ensuring a full, clean burn (which again, power plants are incentivized to do much better than individual cars, see again fuel costs) goes a long way to reducing certain types of pollutants, like Carbon Monoxide.
Thirdly, a gas car is a gas car forever. An electric car is only as "dirty" as the power source is, which can change. People install solar panels on their house, coal plants get shut down in favor of cheaper wind turbines, etc.
So no it is not simply "pollution at a different point", and no, "they" are not the oblivious ones here.