Re: Power required
Agreed,
“The energy capacity of EVs are known, their typical range is known, the energy delivery from chargers is known, the average annual mileage is known. You can use that for calculations.”
So why didn’t you do the calculation then?
90kWh buys you 200 miles range today, average 10k miles per year => 5MWh per vehicle. 40 million vehicles => 200 million MWh per year, 8000 hours per year => 25 GW on average. However, it really isn’t realistic that the charging demand is totally levelled across the day. *Let’s assume* that the peaking EV charging problems are mostly solved (unrealistic, but this is la la land), and just use the non-EV demand peak-to-average from Gridwatch, squeezes the demand into roughly 12 hours of the day, requires 50GW generating capacity.
His back-of-the-envelope was 80 GW required, whereas the estimate based on EV and Gridwatch hard data an is only 60% of that.
That’s a fair difference, but I’m not seeing how it affects his argument?
Whereas your argument does have some massive holes:
1) An ICE may be 25% efficient, but burning fossil fuel in a power plant is also only about 45% efficient. Taking into account 15% electricity transmission loss, and 10% battery charging loss, the truth is there isn’t much difference in fuel-to-wheel energy efficiency.
But the trade off was *never* about thermodynamic efficiency, that’s just rubbish.
2) Ironically, your statement “assuming that petroleum is extracted without using any energy” is the key one, both positive and negative. 30-40% of all the primary energy goes into refining it to petrol, and that’s bad. Whereas oil burning generators are more forgiving and can use a wider range.
But, the UK moved to gas from oil for generating, not for thermo efficiency reasons, but because it is dispatchable, ie spins up quickly in response to demand. In fact, you couldn’t have wind generation *at all* if we hadn’t done so. It would be simply impossible to run a Grid like that.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
