[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_automobiles
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/325733/why-can-f...
That results in nice small, but not too small, numbers for most current cars, around 50 pico hectares for a Humvee in the city to around 4 pico hectares for a Prius on the highway.
It looks like electrical equipment of that scale tends to confined to substations, power plants, and other controlled areas.
When it comes to robustness, you often see power after a hurricane supplied by gasoline powered generators, with the gasoline supplied by any means necessary. (When the last hurricane hit here, gasoline was available for quite a long time before the grid was repaired.)
This is something often overlooked when comparing fossil to electric fuels, on any average car you can "charge" enough fuel for 600miles in 10min whereas on an electric you need to charge for 75min to be able to make 350miles and that's if you have a supercharge station available.
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-enough-lithium-in-the-world-t...
Even if we can't get Cobalt to 0% (and there is plenty of research into other battery composites happening right now), the problems with Cobalt seem less to do with scarcity and a lot more to do with geopolitics (Cobalt is primarily sourced today as byproduct extracts of mines for minerals such as nickel in countries like Columbia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo). There's even indications that cobalt could be recycled from existing battery composites (as we do today already for lithium), but no economic incentive to do such because it isn't scarce enough to try.
Transportation of (flammable) liquids require either vehicles (and hence roads or rails if you go inland) down to the last mile. Electricity requires a wire, which is far less costly to build.
Also if you consider the logistics of bringing energy to different places of a building, wires are much easier to lay down than pipes.
Have you tried?
The marginal cost of driving an existing truck 10 mile down an existing road is negligible. Getting electricity to a place that is even half a mile from the nearest place that currently has electricity can be incredibly expensive and time consuming. Even just applying for the right permits and getting the go ahead from the local power company to start pricing out the job can take months.
Of course non-existent wire vs existing road is not competitive.
If both exist, electricity wins. If neither exists, electricity wins. And electricity has that added advantage that you can buy an equipment that will produce it in place without consuming additional resources.
The only case where fuel is competitive is when roads exist, electricity distribution doesn't, and diesel generators are installed.
Are you sure? I'm not. Especially not when we're talking the sort of electrical infrastructure that can support charging multiple electric cars and trucks (although there's no point in having an electric car if there aren't any roads).
Obviously electricity is the right long term answer and where we should be going, but I doubt it is the cheapest immediate solution in many parts of the world.
Wires never blow a tire, head gasket, or transmission - and in fact they cannot even crash into and kill people on the highway. They're just long pieces of copper or steel tied to a tower. How convenient!
If you instead compare the fixed costs, as you seem wont to do, you'll find that HV (500 kV) transmission lines and towers capable of carrying several gigawatts [1] continuously have substantially lower initial and lifetime costs per Joule-kilometre than oil pipelines, rail, trucks, tankers, or anything else that has to move oil. [2]
[1] https://www.power-technology.com/features/featurethe-worlds-...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2014/04/26/pick-your...
Compare like with like please.
I guess that's a valid point, but mailing DVDs still lost out to streaming, same as trucking and piping gas will lose to wiring.
A cube 3 meters on a side can also contain almost 160,000 meters squared of solar cell wafers, given a common wafer thickness of around 170 micrometers.
Assuming around ten square meters per car, that could keep nearly 16,000 cars on the road for decades.
edit - to take this further, a standard shipping container could contain enough wafers for nearly 20,000 cars and in 2012, according to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 254,639,386 registered vehicles in the US.
So that comes to under 14,000 shipping containers full of wafers, which could fit in one single ship delivery, for all of the vehicles in the USA.
> So that comes to under 14,000 shipping containers full of wafers, which could fit in one single ship delivery, for all of the vehicles in the USA.
Taking the thickness of 170 micrometers and extrapolating this measure of a solar waffer to the needs of US cars is just ... unreal. The OP came up with a serious relation. How many containers would be needed when you measue the thickness of handable solar cells, like 3mm?
edit - Also, 170 micrometers is positively beefy compared to what is coming down the line. 1 micrometer thick flexible cells have already been developed - https://www.upi.com/Science_News/2016/06/20/New-flexible-sol... -
I understand this to mean “cheaper to transport at scale”. You need to truck gasoline to a gas station every time. Once cables are laid, electricity transport is practically free.
Given we need to transport electricity for a bunch of other things, this delta is small.
It's big relative to the electric fleet size when the fleet is small, but it's tiny when the electric fleet is a substantial fraction of the car fleet.
Hmm, not sure about that "much easier to transport" part. A cube 3 meters on a side can contain enough gasoline to power the average car for its entire lifespan. The gasoline is a liquid, it is relatively easy to move it between containers. Any technology that is capable of moving macroscopic amounts of matter is capable of moving gasoline. You can haul it on a bicycle, you can haul it on an airplane. To transport electricity you need to make sure there are power lines and batteries arranged in a certain way.