Quote:
Originally Posted by RobertSmalls
@Clev: The W2W anaylsis I was referring to is this one. The beauty of a top-level analysis is it accounts for all the steps in between. |
If you use renewable energy to power your EV, then there is no generation loss; making EV's 92+% efficient, and if you have solar PV on your roof, then it is better still. The only carbon is used to manufacture and transport the panels. And as we transition to more and more renewables (as we must!), that amount of carbon used to make and transport the panels continues to be reduced, eventually to almost zero.
Your 250Wh/mile "battery-to-wheel" and 324Wh/Mile plug-to-wheel is off a bit: state of the art BEV (like say the TW4XP) are 85% efficient plug-to-wheel, so the 324 number becomes 288Wh/mile.
By the way, almost nobody uses a "battery-to-wheel" number, because it is virtually impossible to measure. The plug-to-wheel is what is typically used, because that is what is most easily measured. The Illuminati '7' can use just 155Wh/mile plug-to-wheel:
Illuminati Motor Works: Blog
So, by putting solar PV panels on your roof, you have "magically" made the carbon equivalency about 89kWh/gallon (92% efficiency because the generation losses are zero, and only the grid loss is applied), and with your example EV (324Wh/mile), that would be 274MPGe carbon equivalency. If it was similar to the TW4XP plug-to-wheel efficiency, it would be 309MPGe carbon equivalency. And the 4 seat Illuminati '7' would get 574MPGe.
So coal can be improved up to ~45% efficiency, and natural gas plants are already ~60% efficiency; and renewables that use zero fuel to generate power, only the carbon used to construct the system is used -- which gets amortized out over the lifespan of the system. It also takes carbon to build coal, natural gas, nuclear -- all types of power plants, so in fairness, renewable energy has about 99% generation efficiency.