4 ms·

US Produced about 4.8 Billion Metric Tons of CO2 in 2024 ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/ https://www.statist

US Produced about 4.8 Billion Metric Tons of CO2 in 2024 ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide... ) The savings is minuscule. But important nonetheless. It just goes on to show how much more solar is required.

bawolff 1y ago
Given that solar power is 4% of electricity generation, a 15% increase is like 0.5% percentage points in total. Roughly 30% of co2 is from electricity generation, the numbers all seem to make sense. If you replace 0.5% of things that emit carbon with non-carbon sources it reduces carbon emissions by 0.5%.
Cheezmeister 1y ago
I mean it's five basis points, it ain't nothin. Put another way, if I could grease the right palms to shave commensurate minuscule savings off of the budget of ICE, it'd pay off my mortgage. Twentyfold. Back to greenhouse gases, I'm no climatologist, but isn't it plausible the difference could, for instance, make or break one catastrophic wildfire across the western seaboard of North America? Beware of statistic thinking in a stochastic world.
- hawk_ 1y ago
  Fifty basis points.
ViewTrick1002 1y ago
This falls for the ”fallacy” of primary energy. We need vastly less total primary energy to run a 90-95% efficient BEV compared to a 20-30% efficient ICE. That is excluding the entire very inefficient supply chain to refine and transport the fuel to the ICE.
- ben_w 1y ago
  > We need vastly less total primary energy to run a 90-95% efficient BEV compared to a 20-30% thermally ICE. While true, that requires actually transitioning to BEVs, which in turn requires having enough batteries to transition to BEVs. Doing that in the USA is (~290M vehicles, say 60kWh each, ~= 17.4TWh) more than enough to provide the entire USA with several days worth of backup storage, even if the place somehow got a continent-wide version of a Dunkelflaute that wasn't merely "20% normal output" but "actually no output". I am hopeful this will happen, but last I checked, it was further away than the PV itself is, what with the batteries needing replacement every few thousand cycles but the PV mostly lasting 25-35 years no problem.
  - ViewTrick1002 1y ago
    For the net zero scenarios by the IEA one of the areas that is ahead of the curve is batteries. The global battery manufacturing capacity reached 3 TWh in 2024. With say an average lifetime of 15 years getting a bit over 1 TWh of new batteries per year for the car fleet seems easily feasible. Then please give us a source for regarding your continental dunkelflate doomsday scenario so we can make sure is a plausible scenario, and not made up scary numbers. Of course ignoring that you assume that we need to charge every single car to 100% every day.
    - ben_w 1y ago
      > The global battery manufacturing capacity reached 3 TWh in 2024. OK, that's better than I thought, I was led to believe it was 1 TWh in 2024. > With say an average lifetime of 15 years getting a bit over 1 TWh of new batteries per year for the car fleet seems easily feasible. I think that's optimistic; none of my (non-car) batteries have maintained significant capacity for that long. I think grid use will look more like phone or laptop use than like car use, with daily full cycles? > Then please give us a source for regarding your continental dunkelflate doomsday scenario so we can make sure is a plausible scenario, and not made up scary numbers. I think you're misunderstanding me on this. I'm saying it's good enough even for a very weird and unusual condition far in excess of the normal talking points. > Of course ignoring that you assume that we need to charge every single car to 100% every day. No? I'm saying I expect an average car to get a 60kWh battery pack, and that there are 290 million vehicles in the USA, and that this makes a combined manufacturing requirement of sustaining a capacity of multiply-those-numbers-together storage. This says nothing about how often that storage will normally get charged, and instead I was saying how long this could power the USA for if discharged in a very weird condition. Actual power consumption of those vehicles is tiny, something like 80% of mean consumption (in places where shaded parking isn't the norm) could be supplied by requiring their surfaces to be covered in PV.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
burnt-resistor 1y ago
Gigatonnes for short, as used in climate sciences.

bawolff 1y ago

Given that solar power is 4% of electricity generation, a 15% increase is like 0.5% percentage points in total. Roughly 30% of co2 is from electricity generation, the numbers all seem to make sense. If you replace 0.5% of things that emit carbon with non-carbon sources it reduces carbon emissions by 0.5%.

Cheezmeister 1y ago

I mean it's five basis points, it ain't nothin. Put another way, if I could grease the right palms to shave commensurate minuscule savings off of the budget of ICE, it'd pay off my mortgage. Twentyfold. Back to greenhouse gases, I'm no climatologist, but isn't it plausible the difference could, for instance, make or break one catastrophic wildfire across the western seaboard of North America? Beware of statistic thinking in a stochastic world.

hawk_ 1y ago
Fifty basis points.

ViewTrick1002 1y ago

This falls for the ”fallacy” of primary energy. We need vastly less total primary energy to run a 90-95% efficient BEV compared to a 20-30% efficient ICE. That is excluding the entire very inefficient supply chain to refine and transport the fuel to the ICE.

ben_w 1y ago
> We need vastly less total primary energy to run a 90-95% efficient BEV compared to a 20-30% thermally ICE. While true, that requires actually transitioning to BEVs, which in turn requires having enough batteries to transition to BEVs. Doing that in the USA is (~290M vehicles, say 60kWh each, ~= 17.4TWh) more than enough to provide the entire USA with several days worth of backup storage, even if the place somehow got a continent-wide version of a Dunkelflaute that wasn't merely "20% normal output" but "actually no output". I am hopeful this will happen, but last I checked, it was further away than the PV itself is, what with the batteries needing replacement every few thousand cycles but the PV mostly lasting 25-35 years no problem.
- ViewTrick1002 1y ago
  For the net zero scenarios by the IEA one of the areas that is ahead of the curve is batteries. The global battery manufacturing capacity reached 3 TWh in 2024. With say an average lifetime of 15 years getting a bit over 1 TWh of new batteries per year for the car fleet seems easily feasible. Then please give us a source for regarding your continental dunkelflate doomsday scenario so we can make sure is a plausible scenario, and not made up scary numbers. Of course ignoring that you assume that we need to charge every single car to 100% every day.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > The global battery manufacturing capacity reached 3 TWh in 2024. OK, that's better than I thought, I was led to believe it was 1 TWh in 2024. > With say an average lifetime of 15 years getting a bit over 1 TWh of new batteries per year for the car fleet seems easily feasible. I think that's optimistic; none of my (non-car) batteries have maintained significant capacity for that long. I think grid use will look more like phone or laptop use than like car use, with daily full cycles? > Then please give us a source for regarding your continental dunkelflate doomsday scenario so we can make sure is a plausible scenario, and not made up scary numbers. I think you're misunderstanding me on this. I'm saying it's good enough even for a very weird and unusual condition far in excess of the normal talking points. > Of course ignoring that you assume that we need to charge every single car to 100% every day. No? I'm saying I expect an average car to get a 60kWh battery pack, and that there are 290 million vehicles in the USA, and that this makes a combined manufacturing requirement of sustaining a capacity of multiply-those-numbers-together storage. This says nothing about how often that storage will normally get charged, and instead I was saying how long this could power the USA for if discharged in a very weird condition. Actual power consumption of those vehicles is tiny, something like 80% of mean consumption (in places where shaded parking isn't the norm) could be supplied by requiring their surfaces to be covered in PV.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

burnt-resistor 1y ago

Gigatonnes for short, as used in climate sciences.