That argument is false, I'm afraid, although many people fall for it, understandably.qcnr wrote: ↑Mon Apr 05, 2021 12:47 pm Electric schmectric. As mentioned electric vehicles are not the way forward. They died out at the beginning of the vehicle revolution.
Why?
Consider the amount of energy used by road vehicles today in ICE, you will need to produce a similar amount of energy as electricity to replace ICE.
The current infrastructure can barely cope with todays demands. Now imaging the population getting home from work and plugging in their cars.
As an addition to ICE, yes. As a replacement, no.
It's all about cradle-to-grave impact assessment. You can carry out an EIA (environmental impact assessment) or an Energy Impact Assessment - not quite the same thing, although closely related for obvious reasons.
If you simply count the electricity used to make the petrol that's burned in an ICE vehicle, you need more electricity than you do to move an EV the same distance. First you need to factor in the actual gasoline used (and the resulting CO2 emissions). Plus, don't forget, it also takes a lot of water to refine gasoline, and of course it takes energy to pump that water. Add it all together and you have a positive energy efficiency argument in favor of plug-in vehicles.
The industry accepted amount of electricity it takes to drill, transport and refine a litre of petrol is around 2 kWh. For 2 kWh you can go around 6-10 miles (depending on the vehicle). So an average petrol car uses just under 40 kWh to go 100 miles. An EV, on the other hand, uses around 30 kWh to go 100 miles (given 3.3 miles per kWh, which is on the low side for some EV cars). Even if the exact numbers need to be shifted a bit one way or the other, you're just comparing electricity use here – not the petrol that needs to be factored in for the ICE vehicle. So, if you were able to magically use all the electricity that is currently spent to give us petrol and shove it into automotive battery packs instead, you'd use less energy and no petrol. Plus no tailpipe emissions of course.
In terms of overall EIA, the key to transition over to EVs is the grid system - already in place - and vitally the means of electricity production. In countries where the energy source mix for making electricity is a typical average western european mix of CNG (gas), Nuclear and Renewables EVs already make far more sense than ICEs, and as the proportion of renewables used to fire the grid increases (which it is all the time at present) they make even more sense again. The problem is where a country is very heavily dependent upon old fossil fuel tech (coal) for its electricity supply, which is when the advantages are marginal, but most countries are moving rapidly away from this model (sure, not rapidly enough, but nonetheless...).