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It seems with electric cars there is always another compaint. First came the long tail pipe argument, I think even the most ardent of naysayers have realised that that one is bullshit.

Then the batteries were going to be scattered about the countryside. Except most of them are still in cars, the demand for batteries from crashed damaged cars is high and the life even in early models appears to exceed expectations.

The reality is that Tesla has replaced the Ferrari as the car to aspire to. Nissan have even started producing their e-power cars who's main advantage is that they drive like an electric car (using a petrol engine as generator). Electric cars are going to be a thing, the only limit it battery tech and to my mind that only changes the eventual market share, if some of the battery tech pans out it could be close to 100%. I'm expecting more 60% or so, battery tech will be good enough for most people.

Here in the UK (and I believe most of Europe), they’re planning to ban sales of new ICE cars in I believe 2030. As such, 100% uptake (or close enough, perhaps there will some exceptions for specialised use cases) is almost guaranteed.

I'm in the UK too. I think the 2030 date is unrealistic. I'm pro-electric cars but we're still a long way away from it being the only option. At the very least we need widespread on street charging for the half of people who don't have the option to charge at home. Rapid charging is ok but not suitable for exclusive use.

builtInThe70's apartment building. I can't convince the management body to take this seriously.

I don't want to install chargers everywhere. I just want a thought out plan.

IE have a planned build for the electric backbone sometime in the future, and each owner can build their part and be connected when they wish.

> At the very least we need widespread on street charging for the half of people who don't have the option to charge at home.

Where I live there is already a pilot scheme in operation that implements this. It does need to be rolled out more widely, but I think the technology is relatively simple, so it might well be doable. 8 years to roll it out doesn't sound ridiculous (although we probably ought to get a move on). Also, remember that 2030 is only the date for halting new car sales. Most cars will still be ICE for at least 5 years after that.

In Europe. the greens are only talking about it, but no concrete law was proposed or even planned afaik. But VW did talk about no longer selling ICE cars in 2035 [1]. But as always, 2030 is long ways off and there is probably a lot of marketing in it, let's see how it plays out.

[1] https://carthrust.com/2021/06/28/vw-says-no-to-ice-powered-c...

The problem with electric cars is that they're still cars. Cars are inherently way less efficient than trains, or even buses. In practice, trains take less than 1/7th the power that cars do to transport passengers - and that's before we get into the land-subsidies (parking, giant roads) that cars need in order to be financially competitive.

But even when cars are necessary, they tend to be massively overengineered - does every car need to be 1) a five-seater, 2) 500KM range (300mile range), and 3) capable of driving at 110KM/hr (70miles/hr)?

Every one of those requirements basically doubles the cost and halves the efficiency.

>First came the long tail pipe argument, I think even the most ardent of naysayers have realised that that one is bullshit.

I wish. Obviously it is bullshit, but it's a goddamn zombie argument that just won't die.

I've never heard of this. What's the long tail pipe argument?

edit: I see. I definitely have heard this, just not called as such https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_tailpipe

Yes, I get it. But on the other hand I tend to think that the reality of getting people to use public transport and cycling en masse is comically naive.

You can see how defensive people get about the marginal adjustments that swapping from a ICE to an electric car would mean. Basically just that journeys of several hundred miles become slightly more painful, oh and if we're being fussy it's not clear how towing would work with an electric car yet (the impact on range rather than their ability to do it is the issue).

> But even when cars are necessary, they tend to be massively overengineered - does every car need to be 1) a five-seater, 2) 500KM range (300mile range), and 3) capable of driving at 110KM/hr (70miles/hr)?

I'm with you on this but it's slightly worse than you say. Most of the popular electric cars are large sedan / SUV sized rather than small city cars and hatchbacks. Cars like the VW E-up and the Honda E are exceptions. Admittedly they still have 4/5 seats but the market demand is a problem for anything less (people are irrationally attached to the ability to transport 4+ people, even if they never actually do it).

Well I agree about public transport (and I happen to live in a country with decent public transport - I do less than 3000 km per year so buying EV makes no sense, I'm still driving a Fiat Punto made in 1995 and if not for my wife sentiment for the car we should probably just sell it and rent when needed ;) ).

When I was commuting 180km every day for a few months (lived in Lublin, worked in Warsaw temporarily) I realized I'm making the whole route using electricity (a trolley in Lublin, a train between the cities, a tram in Warsaw). And I was reading a book the whole time. It's the self-drivining car dream made true with 19th century technology :)

But US is fucked up culturally and infrastructurally when it comes to cars so the next best thing is making EVs cool.

100% isn't the goal.. yet. Nor is it practical for many countries. But, getting to 70-80% renewables with current technology is feasible and economic for nearly all countries. The balance to be provided by modern (natural) gas turbine generation.

There's no need to slow down getting to 70-80% renewables because we're unsure how to cover the last 20%. The latter is a problem for future decades.

>- you cannot have 100% renewable power grid because unpredictable production (you can, some countries do - for example Costarica and many countries are very close - for example Portugal and Norway - but it creates different problems than the traditional powerplants - but there are ways to solve this which are getting ever more economically viable - citing data from 10 years ago is about as sensible as citing CPU transitor counts from 1990s when talking about designing a new graphic card)

this one is very questionable though and only very specific countries with the right geography can cheaply attain 100% electricity from renewables. Two of the countries you mention are very fortunate to have almost endless possibilities for hydro and Portugal still at 50% gas/coal ?

the problems as i see it with renewables is climate change. wind patterns can change, places can become arid. We could even see catastrophies blocking out the sun for days, months or even years. So while renewables are cheap to build right now we shouldn't rely on them completely. We also need to solve the storage part that is major issue for solar and wind even though imo they should only be used for creating synthetic fuels

Traditional powerplants are big nation-scale projects measured in decades and cannot be moved mid-lifecycle - unlike solar panels. They are also strictly dependent on running water for cooling. In my country (Poland) there has been a week few years back where some powerplants had to shut down because nearby rivers were too low and the water temperature was too high to cool down the powerplants (you cannot heat the water to 60 C cause the river life will die, so the workable temperatures are surprisingly low).

If you care about mobility and adjusting to climate change - you should bet on solar more than on anything else.

There are problems with renewables, but there are also many solutions, and the criticism usually assumes we change nothing else in our energy grid.

For example it's true that renewables are less predictable than traditional powerplants. Which increases costs of energy because we need to keep some overcapacity in production, consumption and transfer capabilities for balancing purposes and that's expansive.

But - grid-scale batteries solve a lot of these problems, and they aren't just a cost - they are earning money even in traditional grids by outcompeting peak powerplants without any subsidies. In fact people are afraid of how fast they are "destroying the market" for peaker plants and there are propositions to regulate this against the grid-scale batteries :) Batteries do the equivalent of high frequency trading on energy market and peaker plants have like 15 minutes latency vs batteries sub-second latency - you can imagine how it works out in practice. The Tesla battery in Australia already paid off the investment costs.

Another way is to produce synthethic fuel with cheap solar power when it's not used and then run the generators on that. Basically make methane tanks our batteries. There are promising technologies doing that, for example Terraform Industries.

Supposedly they can produce natural gas that is cheaper than the peak prices EU paid at the start of the russian invasion of Ukraine.

Another way is to simply build a lot more and to use smart pricing to encourage people to use the energy during the peak production. For most people it's perfectly fine to charge their cars at parkings near their office, it's just an organizational problem. Heating houses in the winter can also be done during the day - most houses in Central Europe can stay comfortably hot for longer than a day during the winter.

There are a lot of things we could do, but people who don't want anything to change take 1 thing they don't like and assume everything else stays the same so that the change seem impossible.

sorry but your comment shows that you obviously haven't looked into this stuff and are just spewing whatever headlines you've read.

a week a few years back.. that doesn't sound too bad honestly and looks like something you can prepare for on future project. i know that Poland had just greenlit two huge nuclear power plants which i think it's a great idea, wish we would do the same in my country.

there's simply no such thing as a grid scale battery. it doesn't exist and never will work current technology. the batteries in Australia are not what you think they are, in reality they're there to fix another huge problem with renewables which is frequency leveling and NOT to provide power when there's no renewable energy for which it would be good for a whooping 8 minutes. So.. the only viable way is to go with what's called power2x where you can create hydrogen, ammonia or something else, this process however it's quite inefficient requiring you too install around 7 times the capacity you need, as well building new infrastructure and power plants to use these synthetic fuels, this might still be a bit cheaper than nuclear, but we actually don't know that yet.

it's also not a solution to just build insane overcapacity??? are you really suggesting we go several hours a day or even weeks without electricity?? i live in a country where we've give all in on wind and let me tell you.. it's freaking annoying to have to look up the current price to see if you should turn on the washing machine, charge your car etc. and it's simply not true that houses in central Europe can stay comfortably hot more than a day during winter.

to be honest you sound very out of touch, but i guess that's what happen when you make a good developer salary and live in a cheap country. if your house can really stay warm more than a day in winter and still have fresh air to breath you must live in a high tech mansion.

> lithium is more common than lead on Earth

Lithium isn't a rare earth mineral.

It was about cobalt before, now that batteries switched to LFP without cobalt the naysayers switched to complaining about lack of lithium :)

I'll note that neodymium is, and is used in very small amounts (much less even than lithium) in most EV electric motors (specifically, the reluctance types that are currently most popular). It's not essential, but it does increase range by a few percent.

Neodymium is also one of the most abundant REEs- there are basically two groups of REEs, some of which are rare and some of which are >10x more abundant. Neodymium is in the latter. It's also not that supply is restricted (eg, how it all comes from china)- the demand is so low that the cost means it is not mined even where it is easy to harvest. There are large mines in the US and elsewhere that are shut down because China just does it cheaper.

> - electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't)

So do hybrids. Burning fuel at power station isn't 2x as efficient as burning it in ICE engine; most of the savings come from not wasting power while braking

Burning fuel at a single power station that is reasonably distant from populated areas is far better from a health perspective than tens of thousands of small, poorly-regulated engines burning fuel within 10 yards of people's homes. I would take electric over ICE even if it were 1-to-1 on fuel consumption, just to feel like I can safely breath outside again.

As long as they're still cars, you should keep holding your breath. Tires and breaks still give off the polluting dust, not to mention the noise

Noise from electric cars is practically non-existent compared to cars (particularly trucks, SUVs, and motorcycles). I'm sure the pollution from tires and brakes isn't great, but that's like saying that if we cured cancer people would still die. Duh, but we should still cure cancer.

I agree with the general point, but the answer for livable cities still has to be fewer cars. Lower speed limits help a lot: there's a point around 30mph where the greatest source of noise goes from being the engine to the tires, so we have a lot of room to make cities better by getting people onto e-bikes or into smaller low-speed vehicles which use orders of magnitude less energy.

Regenerative breaking significantly decreases break pads use.

I love my Prius, but over my years of driving it my suspicion is that the regen braking contributes VERY little power to the battery, and I try to brake using regen as much as possible. I would guess that most Prius drivers (who drive the car like a normal car, which is even what Toyota says to do) get back a truly trivial amount of energy out of regen braking.

It wouldn't surprise me if full EV regen braking is much more efficient and useful, though.

It's optimal to coast if you can avoid regeneration, but if you must brake then you want as much of that to be regenerative as possible.

On both EVs and on hybrids.

EVs have more regenerative braking power and capacity though; my Prius fills up rapidly when descending a mountain.

I seem to recall estimates on various EV conversion forums that regen braking saves 5-10% range at best, and the more efficiently you drive normally, the less difference it makes.

Fwiw, my truck has an electric motor and battery, for extra torque only, not for any hybrid ability, but due to its regenerative braking ability I’m still on its original brake pads at 50k miles.

My EV reports 18 kWh/100km for driving and 4 kWh/100km gained from recuperation. That is significant.

> Burning fuel at power station isn't 2x as efficient as burning it in ICE engine

ICE engines are under 30% efficient (not counting the losses to accelerating/breaking and standing on idle in traffic jams), multi-stage turbines at powerplants are 50-60% efficient (but the 60% ones are rare).

> most of the savings come from not wasting power while braking

That doesn't check out for me. ICE engines are inefficient because much of the energy from the fuel is converted into heat rather than kinetic energy. Every ICE engine has a radiator whose sole purpose is to vent off waste heat from the engine. ICE engines don't even need a distinct heating element to keep the cabin warm, the waste heat from the engine is more heat than the cabin will ever need.

I don't know that much about how power stations work, but surely it is not this inefficient.

EDIT: Did a bit of reading on gas/coal power plants and it sounds like they are indeed very inefficient: as bad as 20 percent, as good as 60 percent: https://www.energy.gov/fecm/how-gas-turbine-power-plants-wor...

That is mildly horrifying.

Look up the Carnot cycle and its efficiency. This is theorized to be the best possible efficiency for a heat engine. All heat engines work by rejecting a large fraction of their input heat to an output heat sink. I've heard efficiencies in the 30-50% range for big coal and nuclear plants, much lower for smaller plants.

For specifity, ICE engines will look more like an Otto cycle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_cycle

> So do hybrids

No they don't. All the energy in a hybrid comes from an internal combustion engine which is generally less than 40%. Hybrids help by running the the ICE only when it would be efficient to do so but they can't help in constant speed highway driving.

Partially true. You can get away with a more efficient thermodynamic cycle on the ICE due to the more uniform load on the engine so they can be more efficient.

> All the energy in a hybrid comes from an internal combustion engine which is generally less than 40%.

Only if you define hybrid to exclude plug-in hybrids. Almost all my driving is on charge, with only longer trips 2 or 3 times a month relying on the ICE in my hybrid.

You are one of a small minority of people who plug their plug in hybrid in. Car leasing companies here in Norway lease a lot of plug in hybrids because the count as electric and so are cheaper to buy. They have statistics about the charging and say that hardly anyone does it, the use chose it simply because it was a cheaper vehicle.

One correction - a typical coal burning power plant is approximately 33% efficient at converting fuel to energy [https://www.energy.gov/fecm/transformative-power-systems], and combined cycled natural gas power plants are 45-57% efficient. [https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/natural-gas...]

Direct ICE vehicles are between 11-27% efficient. [https://sciendo.com/pdf/10.2478/rtuect-2020-0041]

So even a inefficient coal plant is about 50% more efficient than a very efficient normal ICE car, and combined cycle natural gas IS 2x more efficient than a very efficient normal ICE car - and about 5x more efficient than a non-efficient ICE car.

Lots of cross comparisons can be made, but on overage, even with transmission losses, charging losses, etc. it would be very unusual for an EV + power plant combo to be less efficient end to end than directly fueling a traditional ICE vehicle. If it was, it would likely just be a few percent.

CapEx is a real concern here of course, and logistics.

But opex and energy efficiency are solidly in the EV camp.

That's why I talked about hybrids - ICEs have slim efficiency area, add breaking lossess and you get to that number. But put it in a hybrid and you can run it at near-max efficiency most of the time and don't waste that much in breaking.

Hell, Formula engines get to 50% but those don't exactly need to care about emission equipment

>- electric cars are still burning fossil fuels cause powerplants burn fossil fuels (yeah, but electric cars go ~2 times further on 1 liter of fuel even if all our power came from fossil fuels which it doesn't)

No they don't. When you add the efficiency of the grid, the charging station, charging the battery and discharging the battery burning a lump of coal to power your Tesla has _no_ advantage over burning a bottle of petrol for your non SUV.

This is a lot like the meme that solar is cheap - the part that's always left out: "At noon".

Of course, on the other side, there's never any pollution involved bringing fuel to the gas pump.

Or to bring coal to the power plant.

You forgot to include the other liter of fuel spent extracting, refining, and shipping the first one. Hence 2x. Also coal has double the emissions of oil per kWh so on an energy basis it's 1/4th

Keep moving the goalposts bud.

OP made a blatantly false claim. She was wrong. That's it.

Pointing out you're equivocating lifecycle emissions with tailpipe in response to an assertion about energy is just pointing out you haven't reached the goalposts even after moving them.

A tesla 3 (top selling ev) uses about 170Wh/km. From a very low efficiency coal plant including transmission and charging losses (you don't get to double count discharge loss) this would be about 0.6kWh (thermal) or about 170g of CO2e. From a natgas plant it is 90g.

A CX-5 (top selling car) is a bit lighter and gets about 8L/100km. This is about 1 kWh or 2kWh including drilling/refining or roughly 250g of CO2e.

You could correctly argue that teslas are replacing smaller, lighter cars with bigger heavier ones, and that the smaller ones they displace have marginally lower CO2 emissions in spite of using double the energy because oil is lower CO2 than coal, but that's about as far as you can push it. If that was your argument then the solution is LEVs, transit, and bike lanes which is what the environmentalists you're straw manning want instead of most cars.

You're ignoring what it takes to bring the coal to the powerplant too.

OP was making the point that boiler to wheels efficiency of electrics is higher than ices. It isn't when you factor in all the conversion losses.

It's a really simple point that battery zealots fail to grasp.

> You're ignoring what it takes to bring the coal to the powerplant too.

908g/kWh is the mine to wall socket emissions figure I was using. Do you have a better supported one?

https://insideevs.com/news/347916/tesla-model-3-epa-energy-c...

In EPA tests the tesla from the wall uses about 260Wh/km. Real world reports say range is from 80% to 110% of claimed, so we'll bump it up to 300Wh/km

Our Mazda gets 8L/100km claimed (over 9 real world https://www.fuelly.com/car/mazda/cx-5) or 665Wh/km. A Civic is about the same real world if you wanted to compare that.

If we burn that exact same gasolene (probably the most energy intensive fuel to extract) in a 58% efficient CCGT and use the 6% transmission loss of the US grid we get 330Wh.

If you stop taking all of your rounding in the direction that favours the ICE you get around 240Wh for the EV vs 400Wh for the ICE. An Ioniq is slightly more efficient again.

Even a fully fossil fueled grid requires less energy for the most popular EV than the most popular ICE car no matter which way you slice it. As soon as you use gas or coal or relax the assumptions where you drive the EV hard with the heater on and the ICE carefully with both on the highway you get more than double per energy input.

Let's consider the numbers... A decent modern combined cycle gas turbine can achieve 60% efficiency, so let's take 50% to be conservative. Transmission losses are generally better than 15%, so that leaves a combined efficiency of 42.5%. A pessimistic charge/discharge efficiency for lithium ion would be 80% and I'd expect the charger to be 90% efficient, which gives us a total (pessimistic) efficiency of 31%.

An internal combustion engine has an optimistic efficiency of about 30%.

So, even if we ignore all the losses in fuel distribution for ICE cars and ignore regenerative effects in electric cars and the ability to incrementally decarbonise the grid, electric still has a slight advantage.

Those are incredibly pessimistic numbers for power plants and optimistic numbers for ICE. On average 5% of the electricity transmitted and distributed in the United States is wasted your other numbers are similarly inaccurate.

ICE engines are only ~30% efficient under optimal conditions, idling still consumes fuel and engines idle a lot in normal driving including coasting down a large hill, slowing down, stoplights etc. Similarly turning on and heavy acceleration etc is extremely inefficient. This is where the primary benefit comes for hybrid cars not regenerative breaking.

Also, comparing gasoline to electricity ignores all the energy required to make gasoline. Oil refineries both use serious amounts of energy and release massive quantities of CO2 directly.

Indeed, I merely wished to bound the problem.

You're missing the engine efficiency. Which is another ~90% efficiency process. That brings it down to be lower than an ice.