Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vlovich123 | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, fossil fuel power plants are more efficient than ICE, but not meaningfully more [1]

> The total WTW efficiency of gasoline ICEV ranges between 11-27 %,

> diesel ICEV ranges from 25 % to 37 %

> The EV fed by a natural gas power plant shows the highest WTW efficiency which ranges from 13 % to 31 %

> While the EV supplied by coal-fired and diesel power plants have approximately the same WTW efficiency ranging between 13 % to 27 % and 12 % to 25 %, respectively

So yes, EVs are slightly greener but the distinction isn't that big when you're talking about global warming (like 10-20% better). When powered by renewables/nuclear/hydro the efficiency is substantially better but even more important is that it's carbon free.

As for your bloomberg piece, it's an impressive piece of fiction. The scenario outlined of replacing ALL cars with EVs by 2030, doubling renewable capacity & replacing coal with natural gas still only has our carbon footprint reduced by 30%. But there's no way we're going to reach that. EVs represent ~1% of cars on the road in the US and politicians are talking about banning sales of new ICE vehicles only in 2035. That's a huge amount of cars on the road and it's likely that existing ICE vehicles will be maintained & there will be massive resistance to banning them outright. So maybe we might get to 100% EVs on the road by 2050. We're not replacing fossil fuels in our energy grid with renewables by then - it's just technically not possible.

[1] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020SJRUE..24..669A/abstra...

What matters is where the extra electricity comes from. It is a fair presumption that all the electricity produced is used. I'm not even considering peakers or load following generators; instead it is often about new sources: gas, wind, solar.

Add one car, and what sources over months provide that marginal increase in electricity consumption?

For example incorrect sibling comment:

> ~40% of electricity at this point is renewable

Wrong because the renewable sources are usually already used by existing electricity customers. E.g. in New Zealand at times if there is extra consumption on the network we sometimes start up our one coal station! The extra load uses coal as a source. Or if we have a dry year, our lakes provide less electricity so the extra load is often supplied by gas. We are installing new wind and solar but very slowly. I have a friend working to get a solar farm installed - but government red tape is causing problems (Labour not interested, and National seems uninterested) How can governments screw shit up so much!

I don’t know that it’s necessarily government red tape. Hooking up a variable power supplier like wind or solar is tricky and failure to do it correctly can take down the grid. Do you have specific examples of what “useless” red tape here looks like? I don’t believe Nee Zealand is unique here.

The marginal approach you propose is interesting but I don’t know that it’s all that helpful / informative. If more cars get plugged in that would be reflected in the total energy and the energy mix anyway. Who cares about attributing it to EVS directly. And yeah, we’re not installing solar / wind fast enough to keep up with getting ICE vehicles off the road as that’s an insane amount of new energy production the grid would have to support (and plenty of people charge overnight when solar is useless and the grid isn’t set up to use the cars as batteries). Nuclear is the only choice to scale up 0 carbon energy but renewable advocates seem to have a lot of resistance to acknowledging this fact. That’s why oil companies are so pro renewables - all the data shows fossil fuel use goes up even with increasing solar installations because they eat other energy sources (coal, bio, some hydro) but overall consumption of oil and gas keeps increasing because renewables can’t keep up with growth.

In this case it is regulations causing delay and costly workarounds. The purpose of the regulations is good, but the practical outcome of implementation and details of those regulations is bad.

Source: commercially sensitive private info.

I'm not a free market apologist. But government regs too often have undesirable and costly side effects. Good standards and good regulations are hard to make.

Also relevant to your point that EVs still create CO2: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2116632119 “We apply our estimates to an analysis of the Biden administration’s target of having electric vehicles make up 50% of new vehicle purchases by 2030. We find that, without significant and concurrent changes to the electricity sector far more substantial than those over the last decade, the increase in electricity emissions is likely to offset more than half the emission reductions from having fewer gasoline-powered vehicles.”

Don't forget there is infrastructure and losses due to heat between the power plant and the car charging port.

I believe that’s accounted for in these numbers, no? Wheel to wheel efficiency I believe is all losses between source and moving the car, although it’s unclear if WTW includes transportation costs for fuels (id imagine yes based on the name but would require further reading)

I did some more digging and the T & D is definitely captured in WTW. Thanks for saying it.

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