[JSH]

Originally Posted by Big Dave

I'd say the IC engine has at least forty years of service life left.

1. They still don't have the range/charging problem beat. A 150 mile road trip takes as much planning as the Apollo program.

2. The electrical production infrastructure will be overwhelmed quickly if Problem #1 is beat. An electrical engineer calculated that to got 100% electric by 2040, we would have to be putting three 1000 Mw(e) nukes (or dispatchable upon demand equivalents) into service every day until 2040. The scope of the problem is that immense.

From a report prepared for the DOE:

Despite this flat energy generation growth within the last decade, the U.S. electric power system added an average dispatchable generating capacity of 12 GW per year, with years that exceeded 25 GW when including intermittent resources. In an unmanaged charging scenario intentionally chosen as an illustrative worst case, 12 GW of dispatchable generating capacity is equivalent to the aggregate demand of nearly 6 million new EVs. This accounts to 1 to 3 times the projected EV market growth through 2030 in the high and medium scenarios respectively. This case does not account for managed charging (i.e., using smart communications technology to coordinate EV charging over the course of a day), which offers additional flexibility to reduce peak demand and which will play an important role in integration of EVs at Scale.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/fi...%20Nov2019.pdf