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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, get all our energy from the power grid and then we'll get to start wars over coal, or natural gas, or thorium, or even sunshine.

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It's true, we still need energy to power them- but the greatest advantage of an electric car, in my mind, is fuel independence. You can power an electric car with a nuclear reactor, or a hydroelectric dam, or a wind farm. All the same to the car.

Hopefully, this will lead to a bit less violence over fuels.

That doesn't make it less likely for violence to break out; it makes it more likely. If Libya built tons of photovoltaic arrays and started selling power to the EU power grid, now any political instability in Libya will affect prices for coal, natural gas, petroleum, uranium, thorium, hydroelectric, and wind energy as well--since a boycott or sabotage in Libya would spike demand in every other fuel.

But perhaps more violence over resources like Lithium.

The power grid has coped with much bigger changes than the gradual switch to electric car will do. Just the advent of computers, big screen TVs, air conditioners, etc.. Had put a lot more load on the grid than EVs, especially since most will charge at night, off peak.

In other words: No, the scenario you describe won't happen.

I'm not sure the EV charging at night thing will continue forever; Germany has already had a Saturday where their solar panels covered 50% of their electricity needs for a few hours, so if they double or triple or quadruple their solar capacity, they may start finding they need EVs to soak up all the excess solar energy in the middle of bright days.

Solar panels seem to keep getting cheaper; distribution via the power grid does not. This may lead to property owners with enough land eventually finding an economic incentive to get most of their power from solar panels on their land instead of using the grid.

My point isn't that electric cars would shift a lot of energy consumption onto the grid. They will, but that isn't the problem. The problem is that there's nothing special about petroleum that leads us to start wars over it. The wars are over energy, and whatever energy source you use, politics and warfare will follow close behind.

I believe that is incorrect. There is something special about oil, and it is that you can't find it everywhere (at least not as cheaply as you can in Saudi Arabia and Iraq) and it is pretty much the only thing that we run our transportation sector on right now, so it is needed everywhere.

With electricity, it doesn't matter what the source is. If your electricity comes from wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, nuclear, whatever.. You can generate it where you are. Or you can use local coal/gas/biomass/biogas resources. But electric cars can be run on whatever, while gasoline cars can only run on oil (first generation biofuels used now are now very energy positive, if at all, so they don't count).

Petroleum is only difficult to come by at scale. Coal is perhaps more politically convenient since it seems to be physically present inside friendly first-world countries, but if you wanted to, for instance, move continental Europe to renewable energy, the best source, at scale, would be the Sahara Desert (lots of sunshine, virtually no usable or habitable land area), which happens to fall inside several less than stable countries, many of whom are culturally and geopolitically linked to the same old oil cartel.

Tapping into North-Africa's solar power would be a great way to do things, but if it's not possible, there are many other alternatives. Oil is not as easily replaceable.

Neither is power infrastructure, really. Even oil is fungible with alternatives, just not at scale. At scale, if a significant percentage of the world's energy supply comes out of North Africa and there are political difficulties there, then there's a large cost of switching to an alternative power source, large enough to lead to severe diplomatic or military action. And it would affect the whole world, since losing North Africa, or even a huge chunk of it, would spike demand for, say, thorium in continental Europe, which would raise energy costs worldwide.

That's true. I'm not saying there won't ever be any geopolitical problems wrt energy. Just that these tend to be easier to solve since with electricity you tend to get your power from a large portfolio of decentralized sources, including many that can be exploited locally pretty much anywhere in the world, while with oil, there are fewer sources and you can't really substitute as easily (right now transportation needs liquid fuels, so you could have all the wind power in the world and it won't help you).

I guess a good real-world example of what I'm saying is: Right now, we're not really seeing big crises and wars about electricity, and I expect that it will continue in a similar fashion in the future, with or without EVs on the grid.

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