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The land-use and EV vs ICE efficiency compound in: > ... you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on
by DamonHD 9mo ago
The land-use and EV vs ICE efficiency compound in:
> ... you could drive 70 times as many miles in a solar-powered electric car as you could in one running on biofuels from the same amount of land.
The article notes that the EVs have a lot of storage embedded, so the biofuels to EV problem might be considered mostly a transmission issue!
- jjk166 9mo agoEVs provide a lot of storage, but people tend to drive during the day and charge at night, so it might actually exacerbate the storage issue. Increasing access to charging stations usable during the day such as in employee parking lots helps, but short term storage is definitely going to need to increase.
- DamonHD 9mo agoI was being slightly tongue-in-cheek, but if we stopped fighting one another and built a planet-circling grid (I have ofc made a modest proposal for a US/Europe interconnector including wind generation along its route) then the issue would become transmission from where electricity is being generated to matching (EV) charging demand.
- jjk166 9mo agoI mean even then the world is pretty boned when the sun is over the Pacific https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2ACFBN3/pacific-ocean-satellite-image-of-the-earth-centred-on-the-pacific-ocean-with-hawaii-at-upper-centre-clouds-are-white-oceans-are-blue-and-land-is-g-2ACFBN3.jpg https://c7.alamy.com/comp/2ACFBN3/pacific-ocean-satellite-im... You could build some floating megastructures to hold a bunch of solar panels out in the ocean, but making batteries seems a little easier.
- DamonHD 9mo agoOr you could call them interconnectors strung with solar and wind generation. In any case, if PV is available from somewhere on the globe much of each 24h, and cars are plugged in to recharge then (typical UK cars are parked ~96% of the time), then it's mainly a transmission problem again, maybe?