A lot of our energy expenditure is lifestyle satisfying. Asia and the better cities in Europe demonstrate you can build dense cities with excellent transit as an alternative to car dependency, but the US fairly universally rejects it from both sides - white flight to suburbs and their perpetual expansion and the inability to actually build dense and transit oriented housing, hell most places use zoning codes to actively prevent its development.
We could do a lot of good for the world just stopping our out of control need to drive cars everywhere and for everything, but the willpower is very much not there, largely because of corporate interference that bred this climate that transit is for poor people and to own a car is to "succeed" in life. Its such an awful, backwards culture perpetuated by the profit motive over possibly the survival of the society.
You are absolutely right, zero emission private aircraft would be much better. Let's build a world where everyone can have that if they want instead of placing nihilistic limits on things.
The Northeast US cities have the bones of urbanism still. Their grids were often laid before the car, so you have the narrow streets, housing without setbacks, capacity for mixed use and density to justify good transit infrastructure. The problem is outside New York the cities proper all depopulated - Baltimore and Philly peaked decades ago and have seen mostly population decline since mid last century. The problem is turning these places around requires a lot of investment to rebuild the decayed urbanism that is there and they both (the whole corridor) needs more transit that what it already has to support real urbanism growth when it starts up again.
These are places that have been systemically paracitized for a long time. Taxes are higher in Boston, Philly, NYC, Baltimore, etc than anywhere else in their respective states, and the actual cities are some of the only property tax revenue positive places anywhere - all that suburban sprawl is dependent on outside money to sustain all the roads and infrastructure in ways these cities are not. But that outside money often came from these cities, and we saw huge white flight last century as wealth fled to sprawling suburbs.
None of these places can really turn around the economic sackings they have endured on their own. Even NYC has huge budget problems supporting its metro. But good luck getting the broader fed to reinvest in cities in the 21st century... there are defense contractors pocketbooks to pad, companies to bailout, and techbros to give tax exemptions to.
I've seen this figure before. It ignores the efficiency of the generation of electric power to charge the EV.
A much more realistic figure is 2x.
To get to 2x, you'll need to assume the average BEV is substantially less efficient than a Tesla - that all gasoline is refined at the most efficient refinery - that all ICE cars get Prius mileage - that it takes 0 energy to extract and transmit / ship oil - and probably that the majority of your electricity is coming from coal.
That sounds well off.
How much energy is required to refine fuel suitable for use in an ICE vehicle? Gas and oil fired power plants use a far less refined fuel.
How much energy is required to get the fuel to the vehicle? Gas and oil plants are usually connected via high efficiency transport mechanisms like pipelines rather than ships or road transport.
Vehicle engines are only in the region of 20-35% thermal efficiency but the average across all gas fired plants in the uk is 50% and drops to 42% for oil fired.
I don’t know for sure but only 2x smells to me.
Solar => Grid => Car Battery is less than 10% lost usually. Obviously it can vary a lot - so can oil extraction, shipping and refining...
This means Solar => Grid => Car battery is >5x as efficient as Oil in ground => Pipes => Refinery => Pipes => Gas Station => Car.
Once the energy is in the car, we know the BEV is 5x more efficient.
We also know Solar => Car is SUBSTANTIALLY more efficient at transferring BTUs into the car than the gasoline infrastructure.
In reality, it's probably closer to 10x as efficient than 2x.
Given the reluctance to expand nuclear power, we're going to be charging EVs with fossil fuels for a long time.
Even if you never used wind, solar, nuclear, hydro, etc. then you’d still be ahead in the BEV case.
An oil power plant has around 42% thermal efficiency. A gas one 50%+ an ICE is only up to 35% but in the US it’s significantly lower on average.
Neither of which have tailpipe emissions in populated areas unlike ICE.
But we do also use wind, solar, nuclear etc as power sources for BEV.
Yes, but not by much.
A coal power plant averages 33% efficiency. Gas is 42%. Source: google
> Neither of which have tailpipe emissions in populated areas unlike ICE.
CO2 doesn't care where it's emitted.
> But we do also use wind, solar, nuclear etc as power sources for BEV.
And nowhere near the power needed if everyone switched to EVs.
This is pointless argument. We don't have enough EVs for everyone to switch to EVs.
It looks like the bottleneck will be EV production, not wind & solar adoption.
We only need to quadruple solar panels in the US to provide all electricity necessary for ALL cars to switch to EVs...
This looks like it'll happen within 10 years. We won't be 100% on EVs in 20 years.
Disease rates (e.g. asthma) in the population do though
>> And nowhere near the power needed if everyone switched to EVs
You’re saying that if demand for electricity goes up, it won’t be met? Why?
> You’re saying that if demand for electricity goes up, it won’t be met?
Yes.
> Why?
Because government does not price things based on supply&demand. Therefore, you get shortages (rolling blackouts).
Fortunately, that's not what we are doing. I just wish EV proponents would stop pretending it is.
Is there a term for a self-inflicted straw-man?
I didn't follow this part, there’s an energy loss in the process of charging the battery and there’s a loss in the process of converting from dc battery to ac traction motor, but it’s well shy of 20%. The high amperage involved in both charging and discharging mean losses are low (because if they were high, you’d generate so much heat as to make the system unusable)
>> EVs powered by oil power plants is not a good use of energy
It’s a huge step forward from ICE. You’ve cut disease rates in the population by moving tail pipe emissions away from population centres. You’ve swapped a circa 30% efficient process for a circa 40%-60% efficient process. Not to mention the emissions benefits of LNG over Gasoline or diesel.
40-50% is a conservatively low number.
This is categorically false.
We already produce >10x as much wind energy alone that all BEVs in the US consume.
We already produce orders of magnitude more hydro electricity than we need for every passenger vehicle in the US to be a BEV.
Yet California urged customers to not charge their EVs during peak hours because there isn't enough electricity available. And EVs are still only a tiny percentage of cars.
> hydro
is a doomed power source, because rivers are drying up, suitable sites are rare, and no new ones will be built because of environmental concerns. Existing ones get blown up.
https://www.nps.gov/olym/learn/nature/dam-removal.htm
BTW, a lot of PNW hydro power gets sold to California, which still has to tell people not to charge their EVs.
If we’d built car-to-grid infrastructure, EVs would be helping load shift, and they’re already not hurting in most cases, because we’re mostly not charging during peak consumption hours.
You can play this game all day long, depending on which figure you want to land on. Efficiency is nice but the reason it hasn't mattered at all is that it is more about what is readily available and cheaply exploited.
> You can play this game all day long
And you should, to be serious about CO2 emissions reduction. Otherwise, we're all just fooling ourselves.
If the BEV is running with their 2kw heating turned up full blast in addition to running down the road, and there was a heat loss of around 2-5% while charging the car then We’re still at around 3x more efficient in the BEV vs the ICE.
Then there’s the electricity supply which ranges from 0 refinement loss and 50% thermal efficiency (natural gas fired power plant) to NaN% for nuclear, wind and solar.
A BEV charging right this minute in the UK is consuming energy originating from 25% gas, 25% nuclear, 25% wind, 5% solar (its 6:30pm).
It could be more than 5x when you compare with ICE fuel supply / refinement / storage / delivery.
Right. Now factor in the losses in thermodynamic electric power generation to fuel the EV.
> We’re still at around 3x more efficient in the BEV vs the ICE.
Don't neglect the losses from generating that electricity, which is about 70%.
What? There’s 70% loss in the process of generating electricity? Where does that occur?
Coal is circa 20% of the supply in the US. About the same as nuclear or renewables.
If there was a net energy gain going to EV, the adoption rates would be through the roof rather than ~1% we are seeing currently.
The consumer captures these purported gains, not the manufacturer.
For example UK is one of the richest countries in europe, it has the most expensive housing in europe and it has the worst insulation in europe.
Landlord has no reason to imprive insulation, the tenant pays for utilities
You lose more than that in refining oil to gasoline. And a lot more when factoring in extraction + transportation + point of sale.
Closing the loop makes solar => car even more efficient, not less.
Sure, if we want to be dumb and extract oil to power inefficient turbines to generate electricity this becomes a talking point. But not many people are building new oil power plants for a reason...
I wonder if you can have a community fridge with different sized compartments so you can pay for access to the amount of space you need; to me those is like using a launderette rather than paying for a washing machine.
Household appliances come much later after you’ve established a working economy and infrastructure.
Something makes me think when you're this poor - investing in better roads isn't viable.
For one, wouldn't rail be way more efficient?
There's plenty of renewable energy out there, we just can't capture it efficiently, store it very efficiently, or move it around very efficiently. As such as rely on power sources that provide output rates were good at capturing energy from: fossil fuels stored as energy, nuclear fission, solar (fusion, sort of, we're not that efficient at it), hydroelectric (kinetic/gravity, solar/nuclear from the sun), and geothermal (which is just partly just fission again).
A lot of stuff just dissipates into the environment and we only capture a small bit of it. With all that said I think humanity will always grow beyond its means in terms everyone having a desirable amount of energy and materials to meet a certain standard of living.
The US spends enough energy on transportation that the entire world could have refrigeration.
The US spends 28% of total energy consumption on transportation. 93.33 Quadrillion BTUs x .28 / 3142 (BTUs per kWh) / 365 (days per year) = 22.8B kWh per day.
BEV vehicles are 5x more efficient than ICE vehicles.
We could have the same standard of living and just not use gas-powered vehicles and save ~22.8B kWh per day.
If I'm doing my math right, that's more than enough energy for 3B households to have refrigeration.
The problem isn't that we don't have enough energy.
The problem is that most of the world is really poor.
In the simplest of terms - you can't get much cheaper energy at scale than $0.10 per kWh. A lot of households are living on $2 per day. They can maybe afford 5% for refrigeration - but a refrigerator only lasts 7 years or so and costs $200+. That's another $0.08 per day. That's pushing 10% for refrigeration. I don't think they can afford it.
And when you're that poor - you're probably not going to be able to get electricity reliably for $0.10 per kWh...
When you're that poor, $0.18 = close to half the calories you need for the day. I don't think you can just shift that to refrigeration. What are you going to refrigerate anyway?