Are Electric Cars Really Good For The Environment? | Why It Matters 4 | Full Episode

this could be singapore in 2014 if all goes according to the government's master plan no more vehicles that run solely on petrol or diesel in this exciting future carbon dioxide emissions coming from vehicles might be cut by almost half so we're trying to get there but this is where we are at now vehicles and public transport are the second largest contributor to co2 emissions in singapore only about five percent of our cars today are powered by cleaner energy what will it take to get to our 2040 [Music] goal okay so if i want to buy a green car what are my options i am at a car showroom not to buy a car but to find out what the green options are mao hybrid is using this 48v battery to assist you with the stop start function whereas the full hybrid cars the battery pack itself can power the entire car like conventional cars hybrid cars have combustion engines powered by petrol but they have batteries which store excess energy generated when the car needs to stop with the engine running the next karma about the sea however is rather different oh hey hey is this moving oh wow there's no engine this will be the full electric vehicle that's nothing when the customers come here do they ask for hybrid option or electric option so usually they will ask what we have in our lineup but when they hear the price usually they'll be scared off on average hybrid cars cost 10 percent more than conventional cars electric cars are even more expensive on average they could retail for 25 percent more than conventional cars hi this tesla for example retails at 220 000 singapore dollars oh wow very simple why are the green cards cost so much more than our conventional cars these technologies are still quite new they are not producing as many as conventional models so the cost per unit is still high [Music] i've never been in an electric car so i'm taking this baby for a spin it's so quiet yes are all electric cars like this yes oh okay electric cars are far cleaner than the hybrids they simply run on electricity so the power is very linear there's no gears to change instead of pumping fuel you charge a battery so while driving the car there are no fumes and zero co2 emissions so how is it is it comfortable yeah it's super comfortable super fun to drive which is why the government is giving out incentives to offset the higher price tag electric as well as hybrid cars for personal use already get up to 20 000 singapore dollars in rebates these rebates are given based on co2 emissions and energy consumption and on top of that from 2021 onwards the authorities will give up to 20 000 singapore dollar rebate on additional registration fee for electric car buyers the additional registration fee is the tax you pay when you register a vehicle the new incentive coupled with existing rebates could slash the cost of an electric car by around 25 which means the tesla was driving would cost fifty thousand dollars less sales of green cars have been on the rise still they account for only five percent of the nearly one million cars in singapore would completely replacing the rest in 20 years be too ambitious the power train and the stability of professor subat maisalka has been researching green technologies for many years i'm visiting him at the future mobility solutions lab for some answers so the goal for 2040 is to ban all cars that only use fossil fuels is that a very far-fetched goal because at the moment only about five percent of car owners own hybrid or 100 electric vehicle right you know so there are multiple reasons for that so the first reason is there aren't enough makers of electric vehicles that have released evs into the market but if you look at the news every vehicle maker has announced that they will move to 100 electric offerings sometime in the 2020s so with the technology being ready the more important box that needs to get ticked is the cost every forecast says that by over the next three to five years the battery costs are going to be dropping so rapidly that the cost of a fully electric vehicle would be the same as the cost of an internal combustion engine car probably by 2025 so if you have cost parity the reason to not owning an electric car is availability of the charging infrastructure can i charge my car in every mall i go it's a question of demand picking up and the charging points becoming ubiquitous it sounds to me that demand for electricity will go up does that mean now prices of electricity will go up actually it won't we are in a situation where we can easily accommodate a lot more evs plus we're adding solar panels but we need to watch a couple of factors i think it is important to understand that evs are carbon neutral if the supply of electricity is coming from renewables the car itself is emission free but getting the electricity may not that's correct in places like singapore electricity is being generated by natural gas so it is still better to drive an ev than to drive a petrol based vehicle because switching to an ev can reduce our emissions by up to 50 percent still when it comes to reducing our carbon emissions nothing quite beats public transport and the plan to phase out engines that run only on fossil fuel will also extend to our buses this bus is one of the 10 new electric buses that joined our fleet in april this bus is no regular bus can you hear that you can't right because there's no engine it's an electric bus foreign foreign is okay okay so this is the charging port actually yeah so once you open it right it's like a hand phone actually just plug in play and here we go how long does it take for the buses batteries to be fully charged from zero percent tokyo is 2.06 hours an electric single decker bus needs an estimated 330 kilowatt hours of energy in a day which is the daily energy consumption of about 23 5 room hdb flats if our entire fleet of almost 6 000 buses is electrified an estimated 2 gigawatt hours of energy is needed per day that's enough to power around a fifth of the homes in singapore imagine all that electricity that needs to be generated 95 of singapore's electricity is generated from natural gas while natural gas emit less co2 than coal or petroleum there is still significant carbon emissions i wonder is there a cleaner way to power our vehicles i'm not going to get executed right since the 18th century fossil fuels have been propelling our cars powering up our businesses and lighting up our homes today coal petroleum and gas provide for about 80 percent of our energy needs and we're paying the price singapore has an ambitious goal to phase out vehicles powered solely by fossil fuels by 2040. what we are seeing here is a lexus hybrid but even green cars have their drawbacks hybrid cars while cleaner than conventional cars still rely on a combustion engine for power and therefore still have tailpipe emissions harmful to our health and to the environment electric cars have zero tail pipe emissions but require an infrastructure of charging ports and like any electrical devices they take a far longer time to recharge compared to refueling conventional cars at a petrol station three two enter one hydrogen it's literally rocket fuel nasa has been using liquid hydrogen to propel its rockets and to my surprise creating this fuel is no rocket science it starts with the chemical formula we all know h2o okay professor what do we have here we are talking about the production of hydrogen that comes from the electrolysis of water and it just requires such a simple setup yes that's right so each rod just goes there so what's going to happen i'm not going to get executed right no no no let's just touch the water okay here goes nothing electrolysis is the process of breaking down water into oxygen and hydrogen by passing an electric current through it i see some bubbles over there and just like that i created an alternative fuel that is hydrogen gas exactly the bubbles on the left rod are oxygen the o in h2o and on the right we have hydrogen the h but wait a minute am i not using electricity here to create hydrogen one is hydrogen fuel you have a hydrogen it's a basically a versatile energy carrier in most of the countries they're producing hydrogen through a process called steam reforming you take natural gas introduce high temperature steam to eat you can crack the bond we're in carbon and hydrogen you make hydrogen at the same time you're also emitting carbon dioxide which is not environmentally acceptable so now we are moving in a different direction now what we are looking for is the green hydrogen okay so this is where the water splitting comes into the picture and green hydrogen is the reason why i'm on a boat today to get to one of singapore's outlying islands i'm on my way to samakaw island most people know it as the landfill island but apparently there are many other projects on the island as well it's a research project run by french energy company mg in collaboration with nanyang technological university one of the aims is to make hydrogen purely from renewable energy this is a hydrogen refilling station okay so you've got hydrogen stored inside which is generated by water and renewable power coming from solar panels and wind turbine here the electricity used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen comes from renewable sources this patch of solar panels alone can generate enough electricity for 50 hdb flats but in this case part of it is used to power up this van it looks nothing like the futuristic sleek vehicles i've imagined but it runs on hydrogen it produces only water and heat as byproducts so right now the hydrogen is just being pumped inside the car yes wow and it takes the same time to refill your your car it's about five minutes five minutes from from an empty tank yeah exactly yeah so it's much shorter compared to electricity can i say that this car is 100 carbon neutral yeah we can say that as long as the uh the hydrogen we put into the car is generated with renewable energy electricity and water generated on site i see there's no carbon emission welcome oh thank you wow so am i moving wow that's it wow yeah are we able to drive this in singapore on the main lane this one no unfortunately not the driving is just limited to the to the island to the side for r d purposes this hydrogen station at samakaw island is only a pilot project it may take longer than 20 years for hydrogen cars to appear on our roads in singapore but there is a country that's making hydrogen power transport a reality japan this is the fuel cell stack where all the magic happens i'm visiting a country that's making hydrogen powered transport a reality japan hi joshua how are you welcome to japan in a way hey martial thanks so much for inviting me on this virtual tour uh can you please tell me are korean cars very popular in japan cleaner cars are already a culture in japan and today i'm really excited because i'm gonna check out the new generation of green cars [Music] marcio edagi is an automotive journalist and tv host so i thought he would be the perfect person to review the toyota mirai one of just three hydrogen cars that people can buy now in the global marketplace it's a beautiful car and one of the cleanest car in the planet this is the fuel cell stack where all the magic happens let's go for a ride [Music] i drove a hybrid before and it feels pretty much the same it's very quiet inside it's super comfortable it's a very very easy to handle car the question is would i buy this car even though it's a no film mission it's a environmental friendly car here in japan we have only 120 feeding stations all over the country and to be honest i don't think that's enough imagine there are only about 120 hydrogen charging stations in a country of 126 million citizens price is another huge issue toyota mirai costs 100 000 singapore dollars that's considered very expensive in japan but hydrogen is not the only fuel the japanese are exploring in their quest to reduce co2 emissions at toyota they have also developed a different kind of hybrid car that uses electric power and sunshine it's also around half the price of the hydrogen car this car can be charged for free at any parking lot as long as it's sunny while one solar panel is not enough to generate enough electricity for a full charge it helps improve the mileage of an electric vehicle between charges currently these cars are available in japan and some european countries but have yet to reach singapore's shores i have learned that carbon neutral transportation may not be science fiction after all what will it take for singapore to achieve it to answer this question i went for a ride with the transport minister ong kang as he test drives an electric car an electric car we have a 20 40 target right yeah to to phase out uh cars that run solely on fossil fuels yeah but we're still allowing hybrids so it's a cleaner fewer but countries like uk or even the netherlands they have 20 35 or 20 30 targets to have no fossil fuel cars at all not even hybrids yeah so is it like a cop-out for us to allow hybrids i think partly because we have a coe system so we think in terms of 10 years you see for singapore even for people who like to change their car they have to sell to somebody who keep it for up to 10 years right so i think that two cycles of coe lifespan we will have a whole new generation of vehicles that run on cleaner energy including hybrid so i think it's still fairly fairly ambitious given our policy or coe even for electric vehicles what produces the electricity can still be fossil fuel based as a island state with very little sea territory and located in the equator with a lot of clouds we are actually alternate energy disadvantage it's not easy to generate or solar power and we don't have hydro so we are a bit disadvantaged how about hydrogen fuel cell vehicles right now there's none on our roads last year i went with president halima to germany and we visited some automobile producers they said that between battery and hydrogen the jury is still out so that's also one of the reason why we set a longer target because the jury is still what exactly is the technology that will evolve having said that when our own people look at hydrogen the infrastructure setup is even more expensive than battery charging but i think there is possibility of using hydrogen more for fleets and let's say you run buses or you run fleets that means you have a big yacht where all your vehicles come back every day for fuel recharge and that's when you can set up the infrastructure and it's worth it otherwise for vehicles like privately owned vehicles to have hydrogen it requires a very involved very heavy investment in infrastructure is it not as simple as converting like our petrol stations now to hydrogen fueling stations well that's expensive my own sense looking at the economics and the infrastructure probably electric vehicles is a better bet now why don't you drive an electric or a hybrid car why don't i like that car it's seven years old seven years ago we don't think about evs you see okay it's even more environmentally unfriendly when you're still working so well but of course in time when when i change the car i'll consider ev hopefully we have more charging points at that time today we have about 1 700 also charging points around the island which is so there is a plan that by 2030 we should have close to 30 000 charging points 28 000 but i don't think it will be 28 000 it should be far more by 2030 we should have a significant proliferation of charging points and that will make eb very viable i've discovered that there is no silver bullet when it comes to alternative fuels they all have pros and cons in the race for mass adoption the hybrid and electric car are currently the crowd favorites but the conventional hybrid may lose out as exhaust standards get more stringent solar energy is clean but for now solar panels can power a car on its own but solar electric hybrids may well overtake the market in the future with zero exhaust 2 hydrogen cars are playing catch-up but with only three car makers rolling up hydrogen models they look unlikely to win the race for now [Music] in singapore we are giving ourselves 20 years to achieve our goal of phasing out cars running solely on fossil fuels even then green cars are only as green as our energy source and until that can be fully renewable green cars are not truly carbon neutral but by switching to greener cars we will still be able to substantially cut down co2 emissions and that's why it matters [Music] [Music] you

Channel: CNA Insider

Views: 67,961

Rating: 4.8047137 out of 5

Keywords: Why It Matters, technology, car, combustion engine, petrol, diesel, electric car, hybrid car, Singapore, greenhouse gas, carbon footprint, carbon emission, green car, green rebate, green technology, hydrogen car, Toyota, Ong Ye Kung.carbon neutral, CO2 emission, CNA, CNA Insider, CNA documentary

Id: qdoEmebP-b0

Length: 23min 51sec (1431 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020