"I’ve written before about the insanity of the “Net-Zero By 2050” push in a post called “Bright Green Impossibilities“.
Today I thought I’d talk about a different impossibility, that of changing all of our land-based transportation (light vehicles, plus our buses and heavy trucks) to being battery powered.
Here’s how I went about it. I use the computer language R for my calculations.
The first function converts joules to watt-hours.
The next two convert gallons of diesel and gasoline to their energy content in kilowatt-hours.
The next function calculates the number of months until some date in the future.
And the final function converts terawatt-hours of electricity used in a year to the amount of gigawatts of generation needed.
It takes into account
• a peak factor to account for the fact
that peak usage needs to be covered
and is generally about twice average usage.
• a capacity factor to cover
downtimes for maintenance, and
• a transmission loss factor.
Then I got the figures for the number of miles driven and gallons of fuel used in the US in 2017 from the US Department of Transportation.
Now, it’s very likely that by 2050 many more miles will be driven … how many?
Well, this document says about 50% – 60% more miles, so I’ll use 40% as a conservative number.
With that in hand, here are my calculations.
We can’t just divide total miles driven by electric vehicle miles per kilowatt-hour, because we need to figure in the trucks and buses as well.
So the first part of my calculation is to figure out the difference between the energy used per mile for light cars and that used for trucks.
... Heavy trucks use about 3.9 times
the energy per mile as light cars.
We need to calculate the amount
of electricity we’ll need.
The wall-to-wheels efficiency
of light electric cars is about
2.5 miles per kilowatt-hour.
Note that this is less than the
battery-to-wheels efficiency
because of losses in the transformer
used to charge the battery and
the losses in the battery itself
in the form of heat.
> # electric vehicle miles per kilowatt-hour
From this point, we need to divide
the estimated miles driven in 2050
by the relevant miles per kilowatt-hour
to get the total power needed.
> # kwh needed, electric light vehicles
> # kwh needed, electric heavy vehicles
> # total terawatthours needed/yr
So we’ll need ~ 2,250 terawatt-hours
of electricity per year to move the people
and the goods around.
And how much new generation will this require?
Well, by comparison, the US currently uses
about 3,800 terawatt-hours per year,
so we’ll need a huge, unimaginable
60% increase … and that just for
electric cars and trucks and nothing more.
How much generating capacity will that take?
Here you go:
We’ll need an additional ~ 570 gigawatts
of generating capacity.
And how long do we have to do that?
The only currently available technology
capable of delivering that is nuclear.
And it takes about ten years
from conception to completion
for a nuclear power plant.
Figure 1. Timeline from feasibility studies
to actual startup for a new nuclear power plant.
to begin the power plants we need by 2050.
How many do we need?
To provide for an all-electric transportation fleet, starting tomorrow we’d have to build a new 2.7 GW nuclear power plant each and every month for the next 215 months …
and those are huge plants, 20% larger than the giant Diablo Canyon power plant in Californa that the eco-fools are planning to shut down.
( the idiots in charge want to shut down Diablo Canyon and require only electric cars to be sold in the state after 2035 )
Besides building 215 new giant nuclear power plants at the rate of one per month every month for the next 18 years starting this month,
we’d need to upsize our entire power grid by 60% from end to end,
all the way from the generators down to the transformers and the electric wires feeding your house.
I’m sorry, but doing all of that is politically, practically, logistically, and financially impossible.
And what will it accomplish?
... The entire US could go net-zero tomorrow, and even if we accept the alarmists’ hysterical figures, the temperature difference it would make in 2050 is too small to even be measured
… we’d be throwing trillions down a rathole and we’d get nothing in return.
Current costs of new nuclear power plants are on the order of $8 billion per GW, or
$21.6 billion per 2.7 GW power plant.
So 215 of them would cost about $4.6 trillion.
Cost of beefing up the electric grid?
I have no clue.
(but expect) greatly increased taxes and much higher energy prices"
FROM THE COMMENTS:
"Willis, you missed one big fuel user for transporting goods. 30-40% of the truck/trailers are refrigerated with diesel motors running the compressors. I have seen the trailers set for several days with the Diesel running to keep the cargo cold. How is that going to work with batteries?"
WE: "you’re right, I missed that entirely. A bit of research says the following: Refrigerated trailers use ~ 1 gallon of diesel per hour … and generally they run 24/7 … Half a million reefer trailers in the US. ... Electric is probably 3X as efficient, so that gives us ... an additional 15 GW of power plants needed … six more 2.5 GW nuclear plants"