Generating power at a central power plant (which can happen to be solar/wind/other renewable method rather than coal) and using that energy to power cars is much more efficient than having thousands of miniature power plants burning gasoline/diesel carrying people around town.
Here's the thing: this is bullshit.
Did you know that only about a third of the electricity produced at an electrical plant ends up making it to our wall sockets? (And that's not even calculating the efficiency of the appliances that use that electricity!) Compare that to an internal combustion engine (~1/4 of the energy getting converted into a mechanical form) and we're not really looking at much of an efficiency gain.
Proponents of electrical vehicles have simply not done the math.
Well, electricity is certainly cheaper to charge a car battery than it is to buy gasoline to travel the same amount, and cheaper price for a commodity generally implies uses less energy. Does your gallon of gas take in to account the cost of driving it around the country instead of being transmitted over power lines? A quick google search found that there's only a 6-8% loss in power in transmitting the energy across the power grid, but only 30-40% of the energy contained in coal can be turned into electricity. That is more telling of coal power plants than the general principle of charging cars off the grid.
Here's the thing: this is bullshit.
Did you know that only about a third of the electricity produced at an electrical plant ends up making it to our wall sockets? (And that's not even calculating the efficiency of the appliances that use that electricity!) Compare that to an internal combustion engine (~1/4 of the energy getting converted into a mechanical form) and we're not really looking at much of an efficiency gain.
Proponents of electrical vehicles have simply not done the math.