this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2024
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xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas (xkcd.com)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that's the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Someone has to build quite a few more power stations though. Assuming you're talking about swapping a large fraction of the car fleet to EV, not just a few here and there. That's a substantial increase in total electricity demand. Enough to radically impact the load on the grid.

And if you end up burning natual gas / coal to meet the marginal increase in demand - as would seem fairly likely - then much of the thermal conversion losses you're saving in the higehr efficieny motor just get shifted to the furnace in the power station and transmission/distribution system; so that can erode some of the efficiency benefits.

I guess you could require for every new EV that they also install roftop solar PV and basically buy a spare battery of near same capacity as the car. that might push the up front and periodic replacement cost a bit though - quite nice for the running costs i guess.

Another good alternative is to try to convince people to get together and share their electric motors in things callled trains and do as many trips in those as possible - that's not too popular with most people unless the road congestion is really bad. Something to do with sharing being communism i think,

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

And if you end up burning natual gas / coal to meet the marginal increase in demand - as would seem fairly likely - then much of the thermal conversion losses you're saving in the higehr efficieny motor just get shifted to the furnace in the power station and transmission/distribution system; so that can erode some of the efficiency benefits.

  1. liquid fuels still have to get from the ground -> refinery -> distribution -> gas station -> vehicle so there is transmission cost and loss there
  2. "we can't immediately solve all of the problems so let's not do it" is a pretty bad take. Incremental progress is better than waiting for perfect which basically means never doing it.

Another good alternative is to try to convince people to get together and share their electric motors in things callled trains and do as many trips in those as possible - that's not too popular with most people unless the road congestion is really bad. Something to do with sharing being communism i think,

I 100% agree everywhere it's practical. Still, people are going to have to get to train stations somehow. Multi-modal transit could somewhat cover that, but some people would still practically have to drive. Convincing those people to only drive to the nearest station and not all the way to their destination is another challenge to solve.