Quote:
Originally Posted by Isaac Zachary
3.2 trillion miles a year sounds right. There are some 276 million cars registered in the USA and at a little over 11,500 miles per year would equal 3.2 trillion.
So 3.2 trillion at 0.3kWh per mile would equal 960TWh of electricity per year. But the USA can produce at least 4PWh (4,000TWh) of electricty per year (it did in 2018), or more than 4 times that.
So we'd need to increase the total power output by about 25% or 960TWh, right? Divide 960TWh into 3,650 hours (10 hours charging per night if spread out evenly) would be 260GW needed.
So we'd need a 1GW station every week for the next 260 weeks and we haven't even factored in the extra electricity already available during night charging hours...
So 260 weeks would make for 5 years. That would put us at 2026, not 2035. To reach 2035 we'd need that kind of power (a GW power plant every week) if everyone charged during the same 3.5 hour period, again, not factoring in the currently off-peak power available.
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Great post. The doom and gloom predictions are always based on converting 100% of miles to EVs and having everyone plug in at the same time. They also have us going 100% EV in impossibly short times.
The key number is that going 100% EV would require us to increase power generation by about 25%. As the link I posted from the DOE points out we have added more than that in short period of times twice in the past. With EVs we have a much longer window.