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Comment by therealpygon | Hacker News Reader

Did you really think 10-20% loss would erase 50-60% more efficiency when you asked that question? Did you also ask the same question about gasoline energy efficiency and whether it included the significantly higher amount of energy required to move that oil/gasoline all over, multiple times, before it ends up in a tank?

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You’re missing a state of change. California uses coal, natural gas, and nuclear primarily. Nuclear efficiency is low at 33%. Best case you‘re charging your car from a new natural gas plant that is a combined cycle design which can potentially have up to 60% efficacy.

So 60% efficiency, minus 9.2% transmission loss, Minus charging losses and then electric motor efficiency loses… verses directly consuming fuel and putting the power to the wheels.

Electric cars are much less efficient if you consider the entire stream. If you want to use the argument that the gasoline needs to be refined and transported. Well so does natural gas. Or coal, or nuclear fuel rods, or bio mass, etc etc.

I’m not saying electric cars aren’t good. But we should really force people to charge them with solar if we want peak efficiency to save the planet.

Generating plant efficiency source - https://www.pcienergysolutions.com/2023/04/17/power-plant-ef...

Electrical distribution loss in California 9.2% source - https://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how...

you forgot to calculate how much of cost of nuclear energy(sic) is going towards removing all CO2, NOx it is generating....

so if you are calculating efficiency of one power plant calculate this into price of another power plant too.

we can build utility PV + 12 hour battery with LCOE lower than nuclear... PV + battery price is for already deployed system. nuclear price is prediction of price of new plant...

Nuclear is dead in the water. And it is not pacific ocean water.

I’m not missing anything. You’re being extremely selective in your argument by excluding all of the processes that extracted, transported, and converted, transported again, and again, and then again before ending up in a tank, and ignoring all those same processes required and used recursively for each of those processes, including the coal, natural gas, etc burned to power all those processes, etc etc to the same level of insane detail that you want to pick electric apart.

But then, starting from the position that 10% loss on a 60% directly efficient ‘fuel’ is worse than a minimum 83% loss of efficiency on another fuel isn’t much of a genuine position in the first place.

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