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Comment by a3n | Hacker News Reader

There's also that you have to burn fuel in the tank trucks to get the fuel to the consumer.

Centralized generation is vaguely like dependency injection, or loosely coupled modularity in general, you can put what you want into it.

My only concern with electric vehicles is battery end of life. What do I the consumer do? Will I be able to sell my 25 year old EV? Have we gotten far enough to see what that end looks like?

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You use/lose some of the energy in transport, either way. I forget exactly, but high voltage power lines lose something like 1% of their energy every...100 miles?

Another way to look at it would be: How much electricity would it take an electric truck to deliver that gasoline?

By that argument, you lose energy when gasoline evaporates during transportation. In both cases (electricity and gasoline) loss is marginal and can be mitigated by striking a balance between centralization and transport/power line distance.

I wouldn't call it marginal (it's about 7% for the eletrical grid). See https://www.nema.org/Products/Documents/TDEnergyEff.pdf

Merely refining oil into gasoline already has an efficiency of less than 90%.

Marginal doesn't necessarily mean small, but that it's proportional to the overall cost. In economics your fixed costs (eg the cost of building and equipping a factory or an oil field or whatever) go down as a percentage of unit price as you produce more goods, whereas your marginal costs are a function of production (eg transmission losses, taxes, raw materials, labor-per-piece).

> By that argument, you lose energy when gasoline evaporates during transportation.

Please show me where gasoline is being shipped in open vessels for that argument to hold water. Oil tankers? Sealed. Tanker trucks? Sealed. Your car's gas tank? Sealed.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/high-tech-fuel-tanks

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