this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Like I say, there's no way those wind turbines cost anywhere like as much co2 to build and maintain as those oil rigs, oil tankers and oil refineries. Not even close. Not even comparable. This has to be US data from some state with no solar or something. Graph is screwy.
i'm confused. you say "those wind turbines" but we're talking about loads, not generators. on average, the world has less than 15% of its energy needs met by renewables.
incidentally, the us has the second most intstalled solar capacity of any single country, about 2/3rds that of europe.
wind turbines seem to average at 10kg CO~2~eq/MWh over their lifetime, but since they are not "plannable" power you always need something else to meet demand. if that something else is a gas peaker plant (490kg CO~2~eq/MWh), you're screwed emissions wise.
Edit: Here's a chart of the total CO~2~eq for the different regions of the world. using the 2021 EU number of 235g/kWh, 26 tonnes of total charging emissions would require you to fully charge a 2021 polestar 2 standard range 26 000 000g ÷ 235g ÷ 64kWh ≈ 1728 times, which would give the car a lifetime of between four and sixteen years, depending on your driving style (lower end you charge it every day, which is not realistic, higher end you charge once or twice a week). if we use the 2021 world average of 369g, that gives us 1101 full charges, or 3-10 years depending on driving style.
A small point Re the EU average, you're including a bunch of countries that don't have as much wind power as the UK, and there's a world of difference between peak CO2 for peak electricity at teatime and early evening and CO2 for charging the car overnight when the electricity is cheapest exactly because it's greenest and there's so much wind power overnight (in the UK).
From your Forbes article:
So I don't see how the carbon cost of generating that electricity can be so much higher than the carbon cost of petrol which is surely even higher than natural gas which doesn't require refineries, when it's actually about 2% as much over the lifetime of the equipment.
Like I said, graph is screwy. Someone in the fossil fuel industry doesn't want you to think that electric is greener. It's a lie. It's FUD. Stop parroting it.
your first paragraph makes no sense. yes the eu includes more countries than the uk. it's a connected market.
these stats are by polestar and rivian, as it says in the thing. if you have better sources, give them to me.
check my followup post.
The UK isn't even in the EU, and different countries certainly have different energy mixes anyway.
I literally quoted your own sources! I followed the links and I read them. Didn't you? I quoted them back to you. What a weird comment.
there's a huge mass of cables connecting the uk to the eu. energy you use is never "from" a single source, it's from wherever it's generated, which means it's from the eu grid. i don't even know why the uk is in this conversation?
i did. i used the actual numbers presented by the sources though, rather than the predictions.