Last Tuesday, the Northern Star reported about GE’s WattStation which would help provide a way to charge electric vehicles.

In the article, NIU Transportation Manager Bill Finucane said the problem of purchasing the vehicle is the infrastructure to fuel it. It is true that consumers will have to wait until the WattStation and technologies like it are available on the market, but there is another truth to the problem with the infrastructure in place to fuel it.

Electric cars are advertised on the premise that they have zero emissions, which is only true to an extent. In order for the cars to be fueled, they must be charged from a power source. For practical reasons let’s say you simply plug the car in to an outlet and from there it grabs energy from the power grid [transmission lines, transformers] which is generated by various sources. Amongst those sources are coal-fired plants, nuclear power plants, wind farms, etc.

So, if an electric car is being charged by a power grid with primarily a coal-fired plant source, the electric car indirectly emits what energy it used from the plant. So are electric cars truly more environmentally friendly than those that are gasoline-powered?

“Coal-plants are more efficient than the internal combustion engine,” said Don Zinger, associate professor of electrical engineering. “There’s a slight advantage to electric cars.”

Crap, he busted my hypothesis. My guess was that the amount of energy it takes to power an electric vehicle would be less efficient than a car that runs off gas. I thought since a significant amount of the power generated at a power plant is lost through the power grid, my hypothesis would hold up. Zinger changed my mind, though, and actually turned me into an electric car believer.

Zinger said that if more people owned electric cars and charged them overnight then it would help power plants run more efficiently. From a simplistic standpoint, it is the same energy-saving concept as keeping the air conditioning on automatic and letting it adjust versus turning it off and on. If the power plant keeps running, it can maintain its efficiency potential.

The reality is that electric cars are not going to be the majority of cars on the road any time soon, though.

I think we tend to focus on our cars because they are what we see and use everyday. Plus we have the power as consumers to determine which kinds to buy. But in order to make electric cars a permanent solution to not only global warming and other environmental hazards, but our dependency on foreign oil and the decreasing supply of it, we have to improve the sources for our power grid.

Wind and solar farms are some of the best alternatives with the least amount of environmental impact, but seeing as these take up large amounts of land, we could never fully rely them. Right now, nuclear power serves as our best option. In fact, a piece of uranium the same size as a piece of coal can produce about three million times as much energy. What people are always so concerned about, though, is the threat of its hazardous waste.

“We have been able to manage its waste so far,” Finucane said. “There’s never been in accident in the U.S. that I’m aware of.”

As a society, we tend to pay attention to what’s right in front of our face, but we need to consider everything that makes our society, our civilization, really, the way it is. And if we’re going to be driving electric-powered cars, then we need to have the most efficient power grid backing it.