Good. We need fewer car sales. We need more non-car infrastructure.
We don't need an "output equivalent to the energy stored in the fuel used by today's non EV cars". What we need is fewer cars and more people on public transports and bicycles wherever it makes sense.
Less car trips. The current price of gas is already pushing people to take their car less and prioritize cheaper modes of transportation.
Fulfill the remainder of the demand with electric.
Cheaper?. 100 miles on the train is more expensive [in the UK] than the fuel for the same trip. And that's before I put 4 people in the sodding car. Not to mention, my standard drive is barely serviced by public transport (requiring three changes and a significant detour). You can even amortise my car costs and I'm still way ahead in time, costs and convenience.
NB. I'd really like the railways and buses nationalised and heavily subsidised to support fixed costs based solely on bucketed crow flies distance, log scaled etc. But whilst they are the way they are - no way will I give up a car.
This didn't use to be the case. UK trains were privatised and their costs have gone way up in the past few years.
Regardless, the UK is irrelevant to this discussion as we're talking about the EU.
Are you saying we can never argue for more bicycle use because that's somehow ableist?
> Passenger car diesel engines have energy efficiency of up to 41% but more typically 30% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency#Statistics)
> Low-speed diesel engines (as used in ships and other applications where overall engine weight is relatively unimportant) can reach effective efficiencies of up to 55%. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine)
Not to mention that a very large percentage of electricity for charging of vehicles is not going to come from fossil fuels in the first place, especially whenever charging can be planned (which is most of the time in Europe).
> Not to mention that a very large percentage of electricity for charging of vehicles is not going to come from fossil fuels in the first place, especially whenever charging can be planned (which is most of the time in Europe).
That's not what my parent and I are talking about. But I second that. Except I live in France and we are starting to have electricity cuts because we can't maintain our nuclear plants properly. So we are in a little bit more trouble than you might think.
Well, for example transformers are ~98% efficient, AC lines lose around 7% per 1000 km. So with three transformers between you and the power plant and a ~300 km distance, you lose around 8% between the power plant and you.
> Because if it is another 50% you lost all interest (but you built a plant and a float of cars and batteries in the meantime).
No, not really. You're still not powering your cars purely from fossil fuels, so even 50% of losses would still be a win when it comes to minimizing fossil fuel emissions caused by road transportation. You'd only have to burn enough fossil fuels to cover whatever the non-fossil-fuel generators wouldn't be able to provide at any given time. But as I pointed out above, you almost certainly won't get 50% of losses.
> Except I live in France and we are starting to have electricity cuts because we can't maintain our nuclear plants properly. So we are in a little bit more trouble than you might think.
Nah, not really. France is in a great position to generate fairly substantial amounts of electricity from renewables with complementing the rest from nuclear power. Not to mention that I'd expect the EPR design to finally be sorted out after the initial units built. It's not like you'll need it tomorrow -- the transition to BEVs will take a considerable time. Even if sales of ICE cars actually stop in 2035, ICE vehicles won't disappear overnight. They'll only be gradually replaced for a decade or so.
I also think that a lot of steel+copper+lithium and others are not taken into the equation to replace cars and manufacture more plants. Steel particularly consumes a lot of energy to produce. Uranium shortages are going to become a thing too especially with new demand from China.
Also I disagree with your optimism on french nuclear and renewable, having worked there and having friends working in EDF and also following various debates, political decisions, and news flow, we went from quite optimistic a few years back to more and more pessimistic about the whole thing. Nobody seems to want a nuclear plant, or a solar/wind power field next to their home. And the competency for nuclear has retired or seems to be going to China or elsewhere for counseling now.
Not sure what "NE plants" are (I'd understand that NG would be natural gas) but the point was that whatever liquid hydrocarbons you can put into a car can be used even more efficiently in a large scale facility. And if you intend to operate such plants, you don't need to crack oil into gasoline for them, so they wouldn't be gasoline plants, even if they were oil-fired.
> Nobody seems to want a nuclear plant, or a solar/wind power field next to their home
I've had a solar plant next to my home for years and I've had zero problems with it. I wouldn't have a problem with a nuclear plant either. (With wind power it's a moot point since the place where I live has zero useful wind for any potential turbine installation.)
That's not how it works because it's assuming a point to point connection for your use case. In reality there is the grid, and from everything I know transmission losses from whichever source to your socket over that grid average out to 50% best case, to about only one third reaching the destination. The latter for instance for electrified rail.
I live (mostly) in Germany. But as I've said, when you zoom out and look into it, considering all that goes through and into it, it seems like it.
No matter where. ISTR tidbits from documentaries, many websites specializing in analysis, even wikipedia. Especially that rail thing, only one third from power plant reaching the locomotive is normal.
Let's put it this way: You have a model for your use case, a (mind) map. But the map is not the territory :-)
Link please. Because that would be a terrible performance figure for a high power system like that. Worst possible loss figures I've been able to find for our grid are 15% losses between the power plant and the plug, and that's including the losses in low-voltage distribution (400 V 50 Hz three-phase). Modern rail runs at 25 kV/50 Hz single-phase. 66% losses would be mind-boggling. As per [1], the expected losses for powering 25 kV rail are around 7% including conversion between transmission lines and the traction lines. So even including losses between the power plant and the conversion substation, they should definitely be significantly below 20%.
[1] https://vts.cd.cz/documents/168518/195369/3201.pdf/9a95e429-...
Mission impossible for now, because sleep is long overdue. Anyway, something anecdotical: At the times, when I looked into it about 2008, I discussed that with some people, some of them 'engineers', as in the people who actually drive the trains (both freight and passenger). They also confirmed that, they even learn that during training. Can 15kV at 16 2/3Hz produce such differences?
Whatever, as I said before, it isn't limited to rail, grids as they are now aren't as efficient as the models suggest. But I can't re-research this at the moment. I just know I didn't hallucinate that stuff, OK?
Of course you lose some charging and discharging the battery, in the charger itself and in transmission losses. But just eyeballing it it seems like the power plant should come out ahead as long as it isn't too far away.
But where is efficiency of electricity transmission, transformation, battery charging and battery discharging?
Also Latvia, Estonia and Malta. And Kentucky, West Virginia, Wyoming.
> The only exceptions are countries such as Poland, where the electricity network is still mostly based on coal-fired power generation.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electr...
You're mixing up power and energy there
Find sites, get permissions, build. That's a big race no matter the technology used by those power plants. I expect the 2035 limit to be relaxed or result in fewer car sales because we can't power them up.