China plans to ban sales of fossil fuel cars entirely
techcrunch.com
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points>10
EDIT 1: Thanks for all the enthusiastic replies telling me that power generation is better optimized. Yes, I already understand power plants are much more likely to be better optimized than car engines. That's why I asked "how much" instead of "whether". I'm wondering if the difference ends up being something like 10% (by whatever the suitable metric is) or 30% or 60%. Numbers and/or references from actual data would be appreciated.
EDIT 2: Note that we also need to consider the energy loss in transferring the electric power and charging up the battery; it's not just about power generation efficiency. I don't know if this is significant or not.
The remaining part is how much efficiency is lost in between (charging, transformers, etc.)... hopefully it's not a significant fraction of the difference?
Further, a few large plants can better filter particulates and other exhaust more efficiently than millions of smaller engines in every car.
But few grids are 100% fossil, and most importantly, most if not all grids are going to get significantly cleaner during the lifetime of the electric car. So electric cars are picking up any enhancements to the electricity production.
That aside, the fuels used in power plants aren't generally the same as those used in vehicles, are they?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/05/china-inves...
And it can be supplemented by solar panels which is decentralized.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/06/how-tesla-will-change-your-li...
Here's the money quote:
"2) Energy production is more efficient in a power plant than it is in a car engine. To use an example with an identical source fuel, burning natural gas in a power plant is about 60% efficient, meaning 40% of the energy of the fuel is lost in the energy production process. In a car, burning gas is less than 25% efficient, with the vast majority of the energy lost to heat. The larger more complex system at a power plant will always be far better at capturing waste heat than a tiny car engine. The increased efficiency means that even a car running purely on coal-generated electricity will emit carbon at the same rate as a gas car that gets 30 miles per gallon—which would be a significantly cleaner-than-average gas car."
Do we then also need to consider then the energy cost of transporting gasoline from refineries to gas stations?
So any threats of fossil car sales is about accelerating the switch and push car makers into quickly offering a wider variety of electric cars. As soon as electric cars cross 50% market share, combustion engine cars probably will become less desirable and difficult to sell. So a total ban should not matter too much then, the trick is getting to 50%.
From an individual perspective, maybe. From a city-planner perspective, the best way to reduce the environmental impact of cars is to deploy public transit. (And the Chinese know that: https://twitter.com/yicaichina/status/867494851511672832 )
The west had quite a bit of leverage over China at one point. No longer.
They're also ramping up nuclear power for similar reasons (http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-pro...)
If the market wanted to keep them around for a hundred years, until the oil runs out, would that be ok, given what we know about how damaging the emissions from cars are?
For the second question "And why do you think the market, guided by tax changes or not, should decide on how long we keep building combustion engine cars?" I would say because the market under a fossil-fuel tax will do a better job at optimizing for what ought to be the desired ultimate goal of fewer fossil-fuel emissions overall instead of simply meeting what is an unnecessary side-goal of no fossil-fuel-burning cars.
For the third question, "If the market wanted to keep them around for a hundred years, until the oil runs out, would that be ok, given what we know about how damaging the emissions from cars are?", I would say a large-enough fossil-fuel tax would cause humans to not use up the remaining oil as fast as these other schemes.
The more important question you comment skips over is: should people (poor or not) be commuting significant distances using fossil fuels in the first place? Such a tax on fossil-fuels will naturally cause employees & employers to be physically closer.