I know industrialization was fast but was it really that fast?
EDIT: they answered somewhere else, they mean every decade from 1940 to 1970. Which seems about correct, and also not particularly relevant.
This will make it an competive advantage for car makers to switch over early.
Look at how much batteries have fallen in price in the past 10 years: https://www.statista.com/chart/23807/lithium-ion-battery-pri...
https://www.businessinsider.com/electric-vehicles-prices-exp...
Surely you don't expect to have enough energy production tomorrow to cover all 240M owners?
We can get there in 12 years + the 10-15 after that'll clear out all the ICE vehicles to cover all 240M.
Most electricity growth happening in the west is variable renewable energy like wind and solar. That is not firm capacity and electrifying sectors like transport and heat will double, triple or quadruple electrical energy consumption.
Now, consider average wind speeds in a year like 2015 where for around six months, average wind speeds across north america were well below seasonal averages.
Electrification needs 50% more electricity? Complete nonsense.
It takes about 10kWh to displace one gallon of gasoline (gasoline car gets around 30-40mpg, an electric car like a Model 3 gets 4miles per kWh). The US currently consumes about 575 GW electricity on average over a year. The US consumes about 369 million gallons of gasoline per day, which works out to about 154GW steady state average electricity. Increase that by, say, 10-20% to account for distribution and charging (not counting the fact that this is offset by electricity being delivered by wires and not by fuel trucks which need fuel themselves), and we’re at 32% of US electricity to displace all the gasoline we consume. Gasoline accounts for most transport fuel (diesel is about 128 million gallons per day in the US), so yeah, I’d say I’m pretty close to 50% of current electricity.
Battery-electric vehicles are better able to flexibly adjust use of electricity during time of day than other large electric loads like air conditioning (which tend to be used en masse at the same time of day with little flexibility) that drove much of the growth in electricity demand when we were doubling electricity production every decade, so I’d say we’re pretty well off overall.
So what’s the need for histrionics about “complete nonsense”?
The rest of this calculation, like the original claim, is complete nonsense. EVs will easily double or triple electrical energy consumption.
I didn’t make mistakes in my calculation (except using 575GW in my calculation instead of 475GW), EVs won’t require drastically more power on average (again, gasoline displacement requires about 30% more electricity, as I showed).
Europe will not build nuclear power plants so there is no hope of meeting the energy needs of a fully electric car population.
But there’s tons of historical precedent for scaling up electricity production. Nuclear, of course, but solar and wind are new additional options that are even faster to install (with large scale battery helping back nuclear, wind, and solar, due to the scale up of battery manufacturing capacity for electric cars). (Solar is a challenge for Northern Europe, which is worse than 90% of the world’s population when it comes to solar power.)
This is a lie. Energy production in the past fifteen years has been flat or down (makes sense given the war), but the previous fifteen years had been a steady climb: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
Look at 10 years ago in the UK - in 2012 solar generation amounted to 750 MW, at the end of 2020 it was 13.5 GW
If there are no deadlines, this will never get done