3 ms·

I don't even where to begin with an "analysis" like this. First, your units are wrong. You've confused power with energy. The US consumes around 4,000 terawatt

I don't even where to begin with an "analysis" like this. First, your units are wrong. You've confused power with energy. The US consumes around 4,000 terawatt hours of electrical energy per year. That is 4,000,000 gigawatt hours. The rest of this calculation, like the original claim, is complete nonsense. EVs will easily double or triple electrical energy consumption.

Robotbeat 4y ago
Nope, I used correct units. 4TWh/year (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect... not 4000TWh) is a unit of power (energy per unit time) and is about 475GW average. Hour and year are both units of time so those units cancel out with a unitless factor of 8760 (roughly, as there are leap years, etc). I didn’t make mistakes in my calculation (except using 575GW in my calculation instead of 475GW), EVs won’t require drastically more power on average (again, gasoline displacement requires about 30% more electricity, as I showed).
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  I think what you’re discounting is the effort it would take to increase energy output in Europe (my original statement) by 50%. It’s not happening. Energy production is flat or down for the past 30 years. Flat or down. Europe will not build nuclear power plants so there is no hope of meeting the energy needs of a fully electric car population.
  - Robotbeat 4y ago
    If Europe refuses to build anything, then yeah, I agree with you. But that’s true in general. Their old stuff will eventually collapse if they lose entirely the ability to build new, and this is irrespective of electric cars. But there’s tons of historical precedent for scaling up electricity production. Nuclear, of course, but solar and wind are new additional options that are even faster to install (with large scale battery helping back nuclear, wind, and solar, due to the scale up of battery manufacturing capacity for electric cars). (Solar is a challenge for Northern Europe, which is worse than 90% of the world’s population when it comes to solar power.)
  - Timon3 4y ago
    > Energy production is flat or down for the past 30 years. Flat or down. This is a lie. Energy production in the past fifteen years has been flat or down (makes sense given the war), but the previous fifteen years had been a steady climb: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_production,_consumption_and_market_overview https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Robotbeat 4y ago

Nope, I used correct units. 4TWh/year (https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-electricity.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect... not 4000TWh) is a unit of power (energy per unit time) and is about 475GW average. Hour and year are both units of time so those units cancel out with a unitless factor of 8760 (roughly, as there are leap years, etc). I didn’t make mistakes in my calculation (except using 575GW in my calculation instead of 475GW), EVs won’t require drastically more power on average (again, gasoline displacement requires about 30% more electricity, as I showed).

geraldwhen 4y ago
I think what you’re discounting is the effort it would take to increase energy output in Europe (my original statement) by 50%. It’s not happening. Energy production is flat or down for the past 30 years. Flat or down. Europe will not build nuclear power plants so there is no hope of meeting the energy needs of a fully electric car population.
- Robotbeat 4y ago
  If Europe refuses to build anything, then yeah, I agree with you. But that’s true in general. Their old stuff will eventually collapse if they lose entirely the ability to build new, and this is irrespective of electric cars. But there’s tons of historical precedent for scaling up electricity production. Nuclear, of course, but solar and wind are new additional options that are even faster to install (with large scale battery helping back nuclear, wind, and solar, due to the scale up of battery manufacturing capacity for electric cars). (Solar is a challenge for Northern Europe, which is worse than 90% of the world’s population when it comes to solar power.)
- Timon3 4y ago
  > Energy production is flat or down for the past 30 years. Flat or down. This is a lie. Energy production in the past fifteen years has been flat or down (makes sense given the war), but the previous fifteen years had been a steady climb: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Electricity_production,_consumption_and_market_overview https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...