That.... That is not an "only". Switzerland's total consumption is 58.46 billion kWh [1]. "Only" 17% increase is another 9 billion kWh. That's the equivalent of Estonia
[1] https://www.worlddata.info/europe/switzerland/energy-consump...
It is an actual engineering challenge because it's not just Switzerland that will increase its power demands.
Total energy consumption of EU is on the order of thousands of petajoules: "Final energy consumption in the EU in 2020 amounted to 37 086 PJ" [1]
"Not an egineering challenge" is in reality "we need to increase energy supply by 6 thousand petajoules which amounts to sum total of all renewable energy currently available in the EU" (renewables account for 17% of EU's energy production). Plus add all the infrastructure needed to distribute it to charging stations.
Not a challenge at all.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
By the way you are mixing everything. I talk about private transport and you give me the figure for total energy consumption... Total energy consumption is not going to increase!!! The petrol burnt in an engine is already counted. Because of all the loss due to the pathetic yield of IEC engines, your are not going to increase the total energy consumption but decrease it when you will electrify transport.
For Switzerland electrification of all private transport represent the addition of 2 nuclear reactors, so no nothing to write home about regarding sizing of the grid.
So? Why can't you make the next logical step? If it's a 17% increase for Switzerland, then it will be at in the same ballpark much for all other countries, won't it? Then an increase for Germany will be probably as much as two Switzerlands etc.
> By the way you are mixing everything. I talk about private transport and you give me the figure for total energy consumption.
I'm not. I'm just pointing the flaws in the insistence that "it's not even an engineering challenge"
> For Switzerland electrification of all private transport represent the addition of 2 nuclear reactors
Ah yes. It's just such an easy not an egineering challenge to do.
That's yearly production. Solar has very poor seasonality, wind is not that bad is still nowhere close to nuclear/gas, therefore capacity-wise these numbers are the floor, not the ceiling.
To add on top of that Europe is migrating from nuclear in generation altogether :)
All these discussions (not just on HN, but in political contexts etc.) lack so much of long term vision and planning.
With solar in particular, due to high seasonality we effectively have 3 solutions and none of them make much sense:
1. Install huge-ass batteries to hold "summer" energy for "winter". LCOE goes down the drain.
2. Install "winter" season capacity. In the summer you have overproduction, that in the long term noone wants to buy, because everyone is on solar. LCOE goes down the drain.
3. Install gas plant along solar for "winter" backup. Unit cost skyrockets due to low utilization, LCOE goes down the drain. You save some GHG per unit when "summer" generation is covered by PVs.
This is not accounting that with non-dispatchable solar cost of balancing for the grid also goes up. It's not really long term planning per se. Renewables are expensive, period. There is almost zero actual political discussion on cheap energy vs renewable energy. If anything, this discussion is consciously dishonest: marginal cost of energy for producers is most often given as the true cost of renewables.
And then we have efficiency. Wind energy is especially sensitive to location. As the best spots are gobbled up first (duh) the marginal efficiency of wind generation declines, which is to be expected. However, various analysts like Lazard give LCOE numbers based on existing averages, which cannot - by definition - be sustained.