A million kg of greenhouse gas avoided by New Zealand EVs

A significant milestone will be set in New Zealand’s EV revolution this month.

The country’s EVs and plug-in hybrids combined will avoid discharging a million kilograms of greenhouse gas in November.

This estimate is from Flip the Fleet, a citizen science coalition of pure and plug-in hybrid electric vehicle owners that upload data from their vehicles to a communal database monthly.

The project estimates the amount of greenhouse gas that a conventional vehicle of the same size and power would have emitted over the same distance as each EV travelled.

“The data just received show that, on average, each low-emission vehicle avoided emitting the equivalent of 191kg of carbon dioxide in October,” Flip the Fleet co-founder Henrik Moller says.

“The Ministry of Transport’s estimates that there were 5341 electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids in New Zealand by the end of October. The electric fleet is growing at about 9% a month. So we reckon that from now on we’ll be saving more than a million kg of greenhouse gases each month,” Moller says.

“That’s a million small victories for our grandchildren.”

Moller, a University of Otago sustainability scientist, says with the present EV growth rate about 10 million kg of emissions a month could be eliminated by the middle of 2020.

Visit flipthefleet.org for more information.