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Comment by goodcanadian | Hacker News Reader

I am replying more to the line you quoted than to you, but even when the electricity is generated by fossil fuels, it is still generally more efficient than burning it in your car. The reason being that the power plant is always operating near peak efficiency (often over 50%) whereas the car engine rarely runs at peak efficiency (often under 30% on average), especially when in stop and go traffic. The electric car also benefits over time from improvements in the power plant mix. While you may be technically correct that no country yet has a plausible concrete plan to get to 0% fossil fuels in electric generation, most countries seem to be aiming to greatly increase their percentage of renewable generation.

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A couple more advantages for the power plant:

• The power plant doesn't have to move. You can attach all kinds of stuff to it to capture its emissions and do something with them other than discharge them into the atmosphere.

You are much more limited when it comes to doing that for a car engine. You have weight, volume, size, and power constraints on car attachments that you do not have on power plant attachments.

• You can build power plants far away from high population areas. This doesn't help with emissions like CO2 that are harmful no matter where they are emitted, but for various noxious emissions that harm people who breath them it matters.

Car engines emit their noxious emissions in the cities in the midst of large populations.

And to further add, electrified energy end use cases can benefit from the decreasing costs of solar and wind as prices drop and deployment increases overtime. An ICE vehicle can not get any cleaner or more efficient after it rolls off the lot!

yep having a centralized pollution source is much more controllable and optimizable, a breakthrough in emission filtering techology and in a short time span it can be effectively implemented vs decades long new cars renewal cycle... although replacing a tiny percentage of roofs with solar tiles would make for a robust and smooth transition in sunny countries at least..

It is a fair point to make a comparison to the pollution generated from cars vs fossil fueled power plants and try to determine which one is the worst. Cars has catalytic converters, filters, and where I live a 10% minimum ethanol for gas and 26% for bio-diesel in diesel. Compared to the oil power plants that exist a few towns away and I don't know how well the number stacks up.

As an percentage of the full energy grid, I suspect the electric car is better than nothing in this country. If someone is interested in number crunching it would make for an interesting read to see how much the actual difference is for a new electric car compared to a new IC car, especially in other countries like Germany that have close to 100% wind capacity in optimal conditions but on average still burn a lot of fossil fuel.

It is not really a fair point to make, as it is really easy to search for numbers on this.

https://www.energycouncil.com.au/analysis/evs-are-they-reall...

Added to this is the fact it is certainly easier to clean up a small number of dirty power plants, than millions of portable ones.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=power+plant+efficiency+vs+car

In the article, the efficiency section give numbers for how effective the car is to extract energy from gasoline vs extracting energy from the electrical grid. They also give the efficiency of "fossil fuel power plant", but not oil specific.

IC car = 15-30%

Fossil fuel power plant = 50%

Electric car = output of power plant * 0.77

Taking the average we get: 22.5 for IC car, 38% for the electric car. A 15.5% more energy.

I have no idea if those numbers are correct because the website you linked does not straight up comparison between the oil being burned in a power plant and the oil being burned in a car, in order to travel a certain distance.

As a strategy for combating global warming, IC to EV has several numbers to consider. The benefit in the power grid which depend on the country in question. The growth rate of cars. One should also make a comparison to do a similar transition with the power grid itself. And finally the required reduction in emissions to prevent global warming.

My own conclusion is that we need to do both. Doing just IC to EV without removing fossil fuels from the power grid won't be enough. EV will make the car more efficient and allow for more cars on the same amount of emissions, but its an incremental improvement rather than a full stop in terms of emissions.

> The reason being that the power plant is always operating near peak efficiency (often over 50%)

You make it sound that transporting energy incurs no loss.

I did oversimplify to be sure, but . . .

I suspect, though I don't know for sure, that the losses are significantly less than what is incurred in refining and transporting gasoline/petrol.

Your statement makes me wonder - how much does petroleum actually cost? I mean if we could somehow ignore the rent, royalties, and direct taxes, what is the true cost of a gallon of gasoline in terms of capital, goods, and labor? Or is this too variable depending on source of petroleum, refinery, and so on? If so, what is the low end and what is the high end?

Break even on crude oil varies by field and country, but it ranges from the 10/bbl (Saudi) to 150+/bbl (tar sands).

Transport costs are going to vary depending on the mode and distance — pipelines are cheap, ships less so but work long distance, and rail is more expensive, and trucking/flying it is even more.

Refinery costs are going to vary depending on the quality of the input, what’s the output mix, how much cracking is required, and the amount of impurities like sulphur.

So, huge variation all across the board. Best places to get real numbers would be to look at the numbers for publicly traded oil Companies that do the full stack.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission#Lo...

Looks to be on the order of a few percent on national scale.

Gasoline also has to be transported to fuel stations.

There are also losses in charging the batteries.

One way to evaluate this is to consider MPGe costs, which calculate the number of miles a vehicle can drive for the same price as an average gallon of gas. My Tesla M3 gets between 100 and 140 measured in all kinds of driving (with 147 the EPA measurement.) A BMW 325i gets 21/32 MPG. This comparison is nice because it includes a lot of these hidden costs like battery and delivery and electrical transmission losses. Obviously it doesn’t include implicit and explicit subsidies.

OK, if we're into that: producing a litre of petrol takes and additional litre of raw oil burned up at the refinery.

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