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He was aware of the benefits of EVs though, from a later chapter > OK, the race is over, and I’ve announced two winners – public transport, and electric vehicl
by ZeroGravitas 3y ago
He was aware of the benefits of EVs though, from a later chapter
> OK, the race is over, and I’ve announced two winners – public transport, and electric vehicles.
He was also very positive about heat pumps.
https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_131.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c20/page_131.shtml
> You’ve shown that electric cars are more energy-efficient than
fossil cars. But are they better if our objective is to reduce CO2
emissions, and the electricity is still generated by fossil power-
stations?
> This is quite an easy calculation to do. Assume the electric vehicle’s
energy cost is 20 kWh(e) per 100 km. (I think 15 kWh(e) per 100 km is perfectly
possible, but let’s play sceptical in this calculation.) If grid electricity
has a carbon footprint of 500 g per kWh(e) then the effective emissions of
this vehicle are 100 g CO2 per km, which is as good as the best fossil cars
(figure 20.9). So I conclude that switching to electric cars is already a good
idea, even before we green our electricity supply.
- lostlogin 3y agoAnd that misses the petrol station thing. Stocking the station tanks (and that supply chain), staffing, etc, that doesn’t cost zero.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rcxdude 3y agoTrue, but neither does maintaining the grid
- smileysteve 3y agoMarginally and variable costs it does though. A 100% capacity charging station has few variable costs compared to gasoline delivery; the grid interconnect and charging cables are equivalent to filler and tank safety inspection, not daily or weekly deliveries of fuel by pipeline + truck.
- addicted 3y agoBut we’re already maintaining the grid. Growing it to handle the new workload would require a fraction greater maintenance workload which would be tiny in comparison to maintaining the entire parallel infrastructure needed to get oil from a Saudi Arabia desert to a car filling up at a gas station in the middle of Wichita.
- taylodl 3y agoRefining oil is a power-intensive process, requiring 5 kWH of energy per gallon of gas. This is why talks about EVs requiring so much more electrical power generation are vastly overblown - they don't account for the power consumed to pump, refine, transport, and distribute the petro products needed for ICE vehicles.
- conjecTech 3y agoI'm sure he was. It's easy for us to see 15 years later that the combination of EVs + solar/wind has a huge efficiency gain because you can get to avoid internal combustion altogether, but EVs were nascent enough in 2008 for that to not be as clear, so those assumptions didn't make it into his calculations.