But the maximum potential for offshore wind production is more than 120,000 gigawatts, or 11 times projected global electricity demand in 2040..
I think we should work from the bottom up to turn this case around. Incentivize gas stations to install rapid chargers, which will help to shift car buyers' mindsets. IIRC, gas stations make very little margin on gas anyways.
In an EV future, gas stations are (mostly) a relic (IMHO). Think of the real estate cost savings, the reduction in truck traffic to deliver fuel, etc!
This isn’t economically practical unless you have subsidized charging. It’s significantly cheaper to charge my car at home than it is to use some random public charger.
With only a 150mi range EV, a 15-20 min fast charge would be enough to comfortably do the return trip that same day without range anxiety.
Existing gas stations (or parking lots) could serve that use case, which is fairly common in the US, where mid distance trips are almost completely car based.
Today, they could charge the same or lower price/mile-of-range as gasoline and make a large margin, since electricity is less than half the price of gasoline per mile (at retail prices, there's an even bigger difference with wholesale prices).
You could comfortably do that entire trip on a single charge with existing EVs. Volkswagen is about to release their ID.3, which which has 3 variants ranging from 205-340 miles of range. In a year or two, the range anxiety "problem" with EVs will simply be a noop as EVs will have longer range than most ICE vehicles.
Disclaimer: I own a Model 3 AWD LR and am a big fan, but also own a 2011 Ford Fiesta
Because they are cheaper. And many will by high mileage EVs on the used market. A 200mi EV will have a lower usable range later in it's life, but otherwise work great. For example, I can imagine buying a used Chevy bolt for my kids to use around town 8 years from now.
But on the price you make a good point. That will come down over time as more and more companies make good EVs.
A Volt is a PHEV, which is an ICE+EV, with the associated complexity and wear.
Pure EVs, however have far fewer parts to replace, and put very little wear on those parts. Most of the wearing parts are pretty generic, like tires and brake pads (the latter being replace rarely). AC induction motors also have a very long lifetime.
The most specialized part on an EV that wears the fastest, the battery, is reusable/replaceable.
Already today, there are people taking battery packs from totaled Teslas and installing them in classic cars like the VW bus. There is a shop in southern CA replacing drivetrains in classic cars w/ EV drivetrains [1]. So I can totally see replacement batteries being produced by aftermarket manufacturers for existing EVs in a number of years. Of course the vehicle manufacturers themselves probably won't supply those replacements, but cars aren't mobile phones, and I bet that right-to-repair will resonate with people a lot more with EVs.
At home, I charge using power from Exelon's nuclear fleet at 1-6 cents/kwh (Time of Use plan). I want to stress: most people will plug in every time they arrive at home and charge at home. You will leave your house every day with a full charge by doing so. Supercharging costs me ~30 cents/kwh, so $10-15 for an 80% charge. Regardless, the costs are so low I don't care either way, I come out ahead versus gasoline (previously $40-60 per fill up) no matter how I charge. I literally don't even think about it when Tesla dings my credit card for Supercharging. It is annoying to use a J1772 public charger (install adapter, swipe Chargepoint card, troubleshoot why the station isn't providing current), so I avoid using those whenever possible.
In the US, you are never more than 150 miles from a Tesla Supercharger, and of course the network will continue to grow over time: https://supercharge.info/map
I'm conveniently ignoring any practicality of adequate electricity supply to the petrol station in my sweeping generalisation. :)
Eventually of course that margin will decline as the stations become more common, but stations could also reduce their costs and peak dependence on the grid by using solar plus storage.
I enjoy never going to a gas station as an EV owner. It's unlikely I would ever charge at one. I would rather go somewhere I can grab real food while my vehicle charges, or a good cup of coffee, anything but a glorified vending machine that is most gas stations. I could be wrong, and if you can make a business out of it, more power to you.
A model are the gas station restaurants of the deep south USA:
https://www.southernliving.com/travel/gas-station-restaurant...
Outside of the deep South and freeway rest areas in the US, nobody thinks of a gas station as a place you'd want to get food, because people think (perhaps correctly) that gasoline is toxic. Electricity isn't perceived the same way.
Mid to high end hotels and resorts have already installed chargers due to their clientele increasingly driving Teslas. This idea is to work from the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum.
If the profit margin is really only a few cents a gallon, it seems like there should be a big incentive to simply charge an extra $0.05 a gallon.
I've also noticed some stations charge way more for regular, but the same for premium... They just don't have as large a spread, which would in courage people to buy premium.
This is an Oregon, too, where there is a unusual situation for gasoline since people aren't allowed to pump their own and it has resulted, for some reason, in significantly fewer filling stations.
Probably a bit of both. Gas is often more expensive in more well off areas, which also usually have fewer gas stations in general, and the rents those stations pay are probably a bit higher too. It's also more near airports, because demand is high for rental car returns.
But part of the higher price is a function of your willingness to drive to a poorer or less convenient part of town to fill cheaper gas in your car. As a younger person on a limited budget I would do that frequently.
But depending on how far away the cheaper gas is (meaning gas used to get there), and the value of your time spent getting there, you might be better off paying a bit more to fill up closer to where you live. That's what I do now, even though it's a $.20 more per gallon.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/26/773446805/gas-station-convert...
How rapidly is it, really?
Solar, wind, and geothermal currently supply 6% of global on-grid electricity consumption.
But on-grid electricity is only 20% of our energy consumption.
Every year, the rate of growth in coal and oil energy is greater than that of all solar deployment world-wide.
The rate of growth in natural gas energy consumption is greater than that of all wind deployment world-wide.
Let this sink in. The increase in the amount of fossil fuels that we burn, year, over-year, is greater than that of all existing solar and wind energy deployment.
Wind and solar deployment is growing fast. But you know what's growing an order of magnitude faster? Fossil fuel use.
My guess is that it won't even be 2% by 2040.
It heats the salt up to 1050 degrees where it is essentially a liquid and uses that to produce steam to turn a turbine.
It seems it will take decades before we have a pervasive enough grid, or effective charging techniques.
Wind and solar is only electricity. Electricity is 15-20 percent of our energy needs.
Wind and solar needs backup sources from either gas, coal, nuclear or oil because of the intermittency issue and low capacity factor.
Regardless of whether solar cells become cheaper, it makes energy more expensive as a whole because it makes the energy system more complex and as many might have learned in physics, starting up something take more energy than when it's up and running. This is true for coal plants too and with wind and solar being highly fluctuating and with highly fluctuating demands on the backup sources.
The use of fossil fuel is increasing not decreasing more than wind and solar.
You can't make either windmills or solar cells without fossil fuel.
Wind and solar is only 1% of the worlds energy not projected to be much more than 3-4% in 2040.
https://www.iea.org/weo/?fbclid=IwAR2LwDYcozvpGCOa3bIi2ieMbj...
In other words, fossil fuels aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Electricity currently supplies 20% of our energy needs.
Please outline how you are planning to, in the next 20-30 years, scale world-wide electricity production, as well as the capacity of the electrical grid by 5x.
Nobody has even the foggiest plan for how that is going to be done. I understand that it's easy to just shrug, and say: "Someone will figure it out". That isn't very comforting to me.
But your point is still valid, we certainly need to more than double grid capacity if we want to rely on electrification to avoid lifestyle changes.
We are not even close to having the battery technology that will work with most things we use fossil fuels for today let alone replace the other products that come from fossil fuels.
Fuel Cells are not even on the drawing board let alone at scale.
With regard to nuclear, it's expensive because it's being demonized which creates all sorts of extra requirements which is part of what make it more expensive. Furhtermore nuclear is calculated at actual cost neither wind or solar is.
It depends on how you look at it. Solar and wind energy is absolutely used for growing crops for example. Oil also, of course, for creating fertilizers.
> Wind and solar needs backup sources from either gas, coal, nuclear or oil because of the intermittency issue and low capacity factor.
Not really. Availability might be an issue for onshore wind but not for offshore. 200 meters up in the air, out in the North sea it blows a lot! In addition, hydro power can be used to balance out the supply.
One can always conjure some "perfect storm" scenario in which it isn't windy so no wind power, cloudy so no solar power and not enough water so no hydro power and ask what happens then? But what is the probability of such a situation ever occurring? If it is incredibly low, then I don't think it makes sense to consider it.
Modern offshore wind farms features huge wind turbines built dozens of kilometers out in the sea on spots chosen by computer simulations to have optimal wind conditions. They can reach up to 60% utilization meaning that 60% of the time they produce electricity at full capacity. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/09/04/5-stats-about-offs... Of course that is still lower than nuclear's 90% so what you do is that you build many wind farms. Especially if augmented with hydro power they can be a just as reliable electricity source as nuclear power.
This is extremely disingenious. A particular plant might have 90% availability, but collectively with a handful of plants hitting five-six nines should not be a problem. The crucial thing is that the performance of nuclear plants is uncorrelated: if one plant is not producing power, there are not many situations in which other plant aren't producing power either at the same time. On the other hand, with solar or wind, correlated performance is typical: winter tends to happen to the whole country at the same time, bad weather covers huge swaths of the country, etc. This might be worked around to some degree if your country is huge (like US), but if you're, say, Austria, your only option is nuclear or depending on the neighbors on the most crucial thing you need.
You say that a handful of nuclear plants can hit five nines of reliability. Sure, but then you must also consider a network of thousands of wind parks that can also hit five nines of reliability without breaking a sweat. Even assuming a high correlation in wind conditions.
You say that import is not an option because electricity is so critical. But then how come all the world's nuclear power is dependent on imports of uranium from Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia? Not to mention oil and food imports.
Is wind power the perfect energy source? No. Is it better than what we have? YES.
So yes its pretty disingenuous . Nuclear is a backup for wind and solar, not the other way around.
You can't take fossil fuels out and do the same.
Intermittency and capacity factor is always an issue also for offshore plus the actual loss of energy over large distances is a real issue too.