Guest essay by Philip Foster
COP21 Paris climate conference urged that all home heating should move away from gas to be all electric. In the UK the Climate Change Act already assumes this scenario will be put into practice.1
Just how realistic is this for the UK?
There are around 16 million (16 × 106) households connected to the gas grid network in the UK.
The average household boiler is rated at 60 kiloWatt
To replace that with electric home heating would still require about the same electrical capacity. (Remember even a single electric shower is 7 kW, and an oven approaching 10 kW).2
Here’s the math(s):
16 × 106 × 60 kW = 96 × 107 =~ 100 × 107 = 109 kW = 106 MegaW = 103 GigaW
or about 1 TeraW of extra power.
Drax, in Yorkshire England (which was the UK’s biggest and most efficient coal fired power station), generates about 4 GW, therefore to generate this extra 1 TW we would need to build about 250 Drax sized power stations, or erect half a million 5 MW (in reality, 2 MW) wind turbines [for reference: current requirement in the UK is a mere 40 GW, that is 0.04 TW].
Now let’s go to COP21’s second idea that all cars should be electric.3
In the UK there are about 35 million cars (just over double the number of households).
1 Horsepower is about 750 W
So an average 100 HP car engine = 75 kW (marginally more than the average household boiler)
This means we need, not just 1 TW extra electric power to charge up these vehicles, but more than 2 TW.
That is 500 Drax-sized power stations or one million wind turbines.
Combining household heating with electric cars the UK would need an extra 3 TW of generating power.
Although, arguably, the 3 TW are not always needed, they will be, frequently so, around 5-6pm on a weekday. People return home, plug their cars, switch on their heating, and start cooking – all on electric.
So COP21 (and our very own Climate Change Act) is asking the UK to build 750 more Drax sized power stations4 or 1.5 million more wind turbines. And, of course, we would need to completely rebuild the electricity Grid to take this nearly 75 fold increase in load. Also every street in the UK will need to be dug up to install much higher capacity cabling.
I’m not sure the English language has a word strong enough to describe this. It’s beyond insanity. Perhaps, as Roger T. put it: “the British like their understatement: ‘problematic’?”
Notes
1. See Christopher Booker:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11305122/Forget-your-gas-cooker-were-headed-for-zero-carbon-Britain.html
2. Much talk about using heat pumps. But here again this is nigh impossible:
a. Most houses using gas are terraced or semi-detached in urban areas where there is obviously a limit to how much heat can be extracted from the ground without creating a local ‘permafrost’.
b. The necessary excavations in such areas would almost certainly hit gas mains (however defunct!), sewers, water pipes and electricity cabling.
3. Issues about electric cars:
a. The Tesla’s battery weighs 800kg – nearly a tonne. That is the equivalent of about eight extra passengers present for a whole journey. Range, if you are lucky, 200 miles. If it’s cold then less, as the power available from the battery drops by 50% for every ten degree drop in temperature. A petrol (gasoline) car for the same range would use fuel that weighed perhaps 16kg, diminishing, with no measurable change in available power for a ten degree drop in temperature.
b. Now imagine you are out on a lonely road in a blizzard in a Tesla. You have no heating; power diminishing due to the cold; you meet a snow drift; the vehicle slowly grinds to a halt with no available power. What can you do? Find a recharging point? Fat chance! Stay in the vehicle and hope for rescue? You’ll probable freeze to death. Get out and walk? a similar fate.
In a gas vehicle, unless you run out of fuel, you have heating, you are less likely to get stuck. Even if you do run out of fuel, you’ll probably have a spare can in the trunk: half a minute and you running again.
4. Just how many US forests will this require? Currently Drax consumes 7 million tonne per annum of ‘biomass’ – mostly imported wood pellets from the USA – for half its boilers. Assuming the new requirement of 750 Drax sized stations have to be built, they will consume a minimum of 5 billion tonne of wood pellets per annum!
Philip Foster
convenor Paris Climate Challenge www.pcc15.org
author, ‘While the Earth Endures: Creation, Cosmology and Climate Change’
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Philip Foster
To most environmentalists you might as well have put your article in encrypted Greek. in my experience the mathematical ability of those who join Greenpeace and FOE is rather less than I acquired aged eleven.
Sadly the case for green can be put glibly and dishonestly in words that are very convincing. The case against is totally dependent on numbers so more and more I realise we are doomed and might as well give up and die now.
I have my view blighted by a wind farm so I have a constant visual reminder that whenever it is cold the output is zero. In the last few months we have had only ten days below zero and on only one has the wind farm had a turbine running and even on that day only two were actually turning the remainder static and all pointing different ways.
As it is the feeling that the gas is controlled by an electric system is worrying enough without the additional loads proposed.
How is burning wood pellets instead of coal in Drax a good idea, even for the CO2 thingy? Ostensibly coal and wood poduce the same CO2 per MJ heat when they burn, so there’s no immediate reduction in CO2 output to the atmosphere. Ah, but trees are renewable, and when they re-grow, they suck the CO2 back out of the atmosphere again goes the claim. Snag is they do it slowly, say 50-80 years from sapling to maturity, and as you get the same CO2 output at the time of burning, you have created the same ‘impact’ on the climate as with burning coal. And according to the catastrophists, we need to cut our emissions NOW!. From a CO2 mitigation perspective, they would have been better off continuing to burn coal and leaving the trees standing, as big trees fix more C02 than saplings, and maybe also planted some more forest. But the coneheads who run our energy policy can’t even get something as simple as this right.
The Drax power station is on top of a coal field. That is the obvious place to build a coal fired power station. Unfortunately coal is not “renewable” whereas wood is. Therefore the British government decided that the Industrial Revolution, which started in Britain and then spread to other countries, was a mistake. That is why Drax now uses wood as if the Industrial Revolution never happened. Unfortunately Britain does not have enough trees which is why coal mines were developed in the first place, kick starting the Industrial Revolution. Therefore we are importing wood pellets from the United States.
How environmentally friendly is that?
It’s monetary friendly to someone.
An oven 10Kw? I suggest you look at the rating plate attached, around 2.5Kw.
A fossil fueled engine becomes more efficient as the temperature difference increases, See the 2nd law of thermodynamics.
You need a new term for people that come up with ideas like this. Perhaps “Homo Stupidus”.
Someday in the future one will be able to earn a PhD in Anthrostupidus.
@Sandy In Limousin ,The main point is that this article is flawed thru slipshod assumptions.
Now as you say his bad assumptions work both ways some too high some too low. Like as you say may have underestimated the values for EV’s and failed to take into account that gas heating is only used in winter.
But the “workings have to be correct”, it’s no good in an exam just guessing the correct answer.
..so Phil needs check and come back with a new post.
Also
#1 Some Canadians seem to be saying, but we mostly use electric heating.
Yes but the UK is well set up for gas with a supply in the seas, shale gas to come, whereas Canada has houses probably much further apart and more distant from the supplies.
#2 Some people talked about UK houses having hot water tamks, but as people upgrade boilers most choose to move to instant hot water systems and so cut out the tank and it’s wastage.
#3 The solar paradox ..they’d be massive wastage if you put solar PV panels on the roof and then use the electricity generated to heat water..that’s hugely wasteful compared to just using having hot water panels on the roof. But the advances in gas efficiency have been so good that it’s cheaper overall to just use a gas boiler than to mess around with the EXTRA* work of installing hot water panels
..*You need the gas boilers for cold days anyway.
#4 Lot of countries probably have lower fossil fuel heating values, cos they use masses of wood logs .. I don’t they are particularly good for saving CO2 aswell as being bad for particulate pollution.
#5. If electric heating was such a great thing then the market would already be driving people that way,. It isn’t.
stewgreen,
The main point is that however many errors there are in all our guessimates the people who came up with the zero COP21 plan didn’t do any calculations.
The article has it right in several points, heat pumps, wood for electricity, current battery technology makes virtually all EVs useless as a practical alternative to diesel/petrol(gasoline)
On a couple of your points, here in this part of France a lot of wood is used for heating, even in this very rural part (Population density (people per km2): 42) the wood smoke hangs heavy in the air on still frosty days. There is also quite a high usage of electrical heating for instance when it’s not worth lighting a fire.
Just how many US forests will this require? Currently Drax consumes 7 million tonne per annum of ‘biomass’ – mostly imported wood pellets from the USA – for half its boilers. Assuming the new requirement of 750 Drax sized stations have to be built, they will consume a minimum of 5 billion tonne of wood pellets per annum!
Anybody care to do the maths about how many additional locomotives and rolling stock would be needed to haul all that extra bio-mass?
A bit hypothetical really as the UK has nowhere need the rail capacity to haul that amount of stuff.
http://www.drax.com/biomass/biomass-videos/biomass-rail-freight-wagon/
And here’s what a bio-mass train looks like:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/neil_harvey_railway_photos/23197797452
By the way that train is hauled by a Class 66 locomotive. Class 66 locomotives were built in Canada by Electro-Motive Diesel (EMD), then a division of General Motors.
So we’d need to order lots more of them. How much fossil fuel would be required to transport them across the Atlantic?
Then there’s the area of woodland required. Good Sitka Spruce yield is 15 cubic meters per hectare per annum, and let’s assume favourably that it could be burnt as is without drying. For 7m tonnes p.a. that Drax burns, we require 4666 sq km of woodland for a ‘sustainable’ supply. That’s an area the size of Devon, or Lincolnshire, where you’d no longer be able to grow food.
Coal is good. Burning coal is better than burning trees.
You can make electricty and still have that nice forest to enjoy.
Apologies to lead post author Philip Foster for my corruption of his post’s title, as follows:
‘If the UK were to try and achieve COP21 ideas –
hold on to your hats!it would look at night like a satellite image of North Korea ’John
Artist’s depiction of the road to implementation of COP 21 ideas . . . .
John
A couple of quick points:
‘Heating only needed in winter’
So? If you are unable to supply the power in winter then the grid goes down. That’s why my sums are all about power not energy. A supply MUST be able to cover the maximum requirement (and some slack in case a power station is down for repair).
Cookers are usually rated at about 10kW. Each hob ring is around 1kW (usually 4 of them), a grill another 2kW and oven 4kW. in the UK it usually has a 45A fuse at 240v.
Google ‘diversity in electrical supplies’
No one has everything on at once.
Even the famous Coronation Street Kettle Rush is only about a GW over the whole country.
Some rough and useful factoids.
A litre of diesel or petrol (gasoline) is about 10Kwh in energy
Generator to wheel on an electric car is about 80% efficient, its about 20% fuel to wheel. So you need 1/4 the amount of electrical energy as you do fuel energy.
A typical house will take between 2 and 10Kw to heat in a UK winter. There are 20 million house so that’s at say an average of 5KW and not using heat pumps, around 100GW more of national power about 2 x the existing grid.
The average car does about 8000 miles a year at say 40 mpg that is 200 gallons or roughly 1000 liters, or 10Mwh. BUT the efficiency is around 4 times a fuel burner, so lets say 2.5MWh, averaged over say – 10,000 hours a running average of just 250W per car. If there are 20 million cars in daily use, that’s around 5GW average to run domestic cars..maybe treble or quadruple that for electric freight transport. I did do the calculations based on DECC figures for total energy use of all types, in the UK, but it was a few years back
These are very broad brush strokes, but my contention that around 3x – 6x grid and power station upscale is enough to do everything with electric, is not far off.
And it wouldn’t be done at one go..Rationally you start to go massively nuclear, and extend the grid as needed, and keep the nuclear price below carbon pricing until the transformation is complete. Or rather in a rational world you don’t. You make nuclear regulations rational, and let them compete with fossil. As cheap fossil gets scarce, you upscale the nuclear grid as demand dictates.
At 60p a litre for heating oil, electricity – around 6p a unit at the power station, was dangerously near parity. At 30p a litre is is no longer interesting. Except with a heat pump, and the capital cost of that is horrendous.
But if heating oil were up at 100p a litre ex of tax, and we had sane nuclear power, suddenly its not such a crazy thing. A LOT of houses in Nuclear France are electrically heated, as they are in other countries with cheap hydropower like Canada or Sweden.
Of course we won’t ever do what COP21 dictates. However that is no excuse for using bad assumptions to make the point. You dont need to lie.. The truth is already damning enough
And the truth is that if we HAVE to, we can run the nation on non fossil power. It won’t be cheap, but its possible…eventually. It wont be in my lifetime, but it may well be in this century.
The most stupid thing (except for trying to do it now [Energiewiende]), is to pretend that fossil fuel will last forever, economically, and we won’t need to look at phasing it out, gradually, over many decades. The first step – which the UK is embarking on – is getting some – any – form of new nuclear in play. After that, its all down to adjusting the rate of transition to ‘as much nuclear as is economically advantageous’ ..and ‘as little renewable as is politically acceptable’ .
Make nuclear possible, and cheap, and it will naturally displace what it is appropriate for it to displace. Stop making renewables artificially profitable and they will be gone in a decade.
If you actually give a rats ass about carbon emissions, then sort out the nuclear regulations so that you can bang in bog standard nukes fast , cheaply and safely.
Otherwise ruin qas for now, and do that in a decade when (cheap) gas runs out (again).
Brilliant work, thank you. If these educated approximations had been contained in the original article then I would have seen no obvious reason to doubt the information provided.
It is immediately obvious when a person has a grasp of the meaning of the terms and concepts used in these discussions.
Without that – the errors multiply up, so quickly, that a baffling fantasy can be generated within just a few paragraphs.
Here in Quebec the biggest part of my electricity (hydro) is charged at the equivalent of 4 UK pence (0.08 CDN$) per Kwh. In other words our electric heating is quite cheap. Everything is electric and our average total annual consumption is around 15,000 Kwh (CDN$1200/GBP600). It makes me cringe when I read what people in other jurisdictions pay!
I believe our site host, Anthony, has a peak demand charge that’s about 1.00 CDN$/kWh. That’s right, there’s a “1” before the decimal.
COP 21 – what a waste of money it was!!! They set up rules for CO2 emissions and for the use of fossil fuels, but they said no word about the oceans, which play the most important role in the climate change process. I wonder way?! Maybe because the oceans play also an important role in their economic plans…. The future generation will be the one who will answer for our mistakes! Sad but true….
As an economy 7 user (UK overnight electricity) I would like to correct the false impression a number of correspondents have given regarding the cost of this. My present tariff which ends at the end of February is 4.998 pence per kwh. The new tariff will be 5.103 pence per kwh. The same rate is used for immersion water heating, use of tumbler dryer (most welcome in our climate) as well as washing machine and dish washer. Gas is also generally around 5 pence per kwh. Gas scores of course when being used during the day as electricity day rate is far higher. But how much does maintenance of modern gas boilers cost?
Regards
Ian
Ian;
I have a gas-fired furnace in my home, and I pay the service tech about $200 (US) every year to check it out before the heating season. That includes cleaning the heat exchanger coil as well.
Sandy In Limousin January 24, 2016 at 12:33 am Edit
OK. From those numbers, we need residential electricity for heating which is five times the current usage of residential electricity. For the total households number of households, we’d need:
27E+6 households * 16.5E+6 watt-hours / year = 4.5E+14 watt-hours / year
How much more installed capacity would that take? Well, for capacity we need to divide the previous result by 8,766 hours per year, which gives us a needed additional capacity of 51 gigawatts (51E+9 watts).
Now, the head post says to replace gas with electricity we’d need one terawatt (1,000E+9 watts), twenty times what is actually required.
As you can see, the problem is not the underlying data. It is that he does not do the math correctly.
w.
gareth January 24, 2016 at 1:02 am
Thanks, Gareth. Let’s take a look at the situation. The head post says:
The problem is that the 60 kW is the nameplate capacity, which means it is what it the boiler draws, but ONLY WHEN IT IS ON. Lets assume it is on for an hour a day, call it 365 hours per year.
That means that in a year, the boiler will use a total of 6E+4 kW * 365 hrs/year = 2.2E+7 kilowatt-hours/year.
Additional needed generating capacity is that last value divided by 8,766 hours/year, which is only about 2.5 kilowatts/household. That number times his figure of 16 million households gives a value of 40 gigawatts of additional capacity.
Compare that to the calculation based on the figures Sandy gave us just above, which said we’d need 51 gigawatts of additional capacity. We’re certainly close given that the figures are from different sources … and neither of the results are anywhere near his claimed need for 1,000 gigawatts of additional energy (1 terawatt).
So no, you can’t do it without going by way of kilowatt-hours.
Best regards,
w.
Hi Willis,
You seem good at math’s, so if the U.K. Consumption of gas is say 898 terawatt Hours per year and the consumption of electricity is 275 Gigawatt Hours per year(see earlier posts) how much electricity (roughly)would the U.K. need from ‘other sources’ to replace Gas.
Thanks in anticipation of your reply.
D.I.
D.I.
Well, if the heat equivalent is generated by windmills at .21 efficiency factor for a nameplate rating, then you need
898 terawatt Hours per year / .21 = 898 TWatt-hr/yr / 0.21 = 4,276 Twatt-hrs/yr
If the heat equivalent is generated by conventional superheated steam fossil plants at .43% thermal efficiency,
898 Twatt-Hrs/Yr / .43 = 2,088 TWatt-Hrs/Yr
If the heat equivalent is generated by new generation dual cycle Gas Turbines with heat recovery steam generators at .63% combined thermal efficiency,
898 Twatt-Hrs/Yr / .63 = 1,425 TWatt-Hrs/Yr
If the heat equivalent is generated by PV cells operating 6 hrs/day at 17% solar-electrical efficiency,
You need 4x the area of the 6-hour charge rate available at 17% efficiency (an almost unheard-of conversion efficiency!)
4 x 898 Twatt-Hrs/Yr / .17 = 21,129 TWatt-Hrs/Yr. But that assumes 100% efficiency of electricity-energy-into-storage-energy each afternoon, 100% energy storage efficiency overnight, and then 100% energy-from-storage-back-into-electricity the next morning.
Ain’t gonna happen. Today’s batteries are about 80% efficient energy-convevrsion-into-chemical energy, 95 efficient energy storage, and 85% battery-chemicals-back-to-electricity. And then you lose a lot of energy (2-7% more) reconverting the final DC volts back to very high volt AC for transmission across the country and cities.
So, that means the 21,129 TWatt-hrs/yr / (.80 x .95 x .85) = 32,708 Twatt-Hrs/Yr.
As long as the UK has perfectly clear skies and no rain during the 6 daylight hours available to charge her batteries every day.
Hi Willis & thanks for comments.
My point was that the number that we are after is the extra electricity generating capacity needed. That capacity has to be enough to provide the worst case winter heat load that is currently done by gas, and that will be a power not an energy – how many extra GW of generating capacity above the current “full throttle” 85 GW or so capacity (source gov.uk) or the worst case demand of (from memory )about 60 GW.
The rating of individual boilers is largely irrelevant because, as you say, it depends on how much of the time it is on, and that depends on the amount of heating it needs to do to keep the house up to temperature, and that depends on the boiler rating, the outside temperature, the insulation of the house and the setting of the thermostat. To get back to the actual power being supplied by gas we can (as you do) make an assumption about the fraction of the time that the boiler is running (1/24 in your estimate). This is a valid method but I think it is difficult to know what that fraction should actually be.
This is why I was suggesting that a better way is to take the figure for actual gas consumption – ideally the worst case figure on a cold winter day on as short time resolution as we can get (so as to approximate the peak, rather than the mean). I haven’t found this yet, but using the 16,500 kWh per year that Sandy In Limousin quotes, and knowing that the UK heating season is about half the year, I make that about…
16,500 kWh / 183 days / 24 hours = 3.8 kW on average per household
or 100 GW for the country (using 27 million households – again, as above, 16 is too low).
So 2.5 times your estimate but in the same order.
We also need to account for the peak heating load which will be quite a bit higher than the average. How much? I don’t know – guess 3x ? If so we get about 300 GW, compared with the current peak electricity load of about 60 GW – five times as much (and that’s without the electric cars added in).
Isn’t it quaint that a load of bloggers and comentards can do the sums that politicians can’t?
All the best…
Instead of guesstimates, why don’t you just look at countries with a lot of electric heating and extrapolate from these numbers?
Electric power data is widely available.
simple-touriste
Because very, very few countries (and very few regions within countries) use electricity for heating, because electricity is a very inefficient way to generate heat inside houses and buildings. (Unless you are literally siting right in the middle of a field of existing hydroelectric dams, each already built and with an eco-greeny political blessing for those (existing) dams to remain in place.)
The enviro’s will not permit more dams to be built in any area where they control the political/press, and the developed areas in western countries already have most of their sites already damned by the eco-greenies. We will see very, very little more hydro power developed in the western countries.
“The enviro’s will not permit more dams to be built in any area where they control the political/press”
OTOH the increase of highly variable, unpredictable, unreliable power generation will necessitate these dams as energy buffer, as no other storage technology is even close to being enough mature, economical or scalable. Unless the population accepts random power restrictions (or even blackouts), which I see as extremely unlikely.
I expect civil unrest when people discover that their energy became not only costly, but also very unreliable.
Did anyone say that electrical heating cost 4 times gas? Try that on consumers. Check the tariffs. The underlying reason is that electricity is pure energy produced relatively inefficiently in power staions and too valuable to be wasted in heating applications. Gas boilers make over 90% efficient use of primary fossil fuel as heat in modern condensing boilers. etc.. The physics denies the stupidly regressive rhetoric. Sorry about the laws of physics.
If you have the necessary infrastructure (distribution infrastructure, boiler, chimney) burning stuff may be cheaper.
If you don’t, building houses with electric heating may be cheaper. Then you use the money on better isolation. This was the model promoted by EDF. Energy is more expensive, but you use less, and you don’t need to check the safety of your boiler each year.
Of course, too much electric heating creates a systemic issue as it causes power spikes in winter, and EDF created contracts with different pricing (called “EJP” = “effacement jours de pointe” = erase peak days) with a very high price on very few days each year.
Load management existed long before “smart metering” was a buzzword. (I think there is going to be civil unrest when people discover that “smart metering” means load management.)
Each country has a different electric energy mix, and different ability to cope with large variations of demand. Choice of energy for heating is an individual choice, but the promotion of some energy can be a national policy choice with significant systemic impact.
A peak month of demand is 25 mtoe, or of the order of 1 mtoe per day, which is 12 TWh per day/500GW of primary energy, or no more than about 200 GWe .
Chart of monthly energy consumption
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=97&t=3
In 2014, the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 10,932 kilowatthours (kWh), an average of 911 kWh per month. Louisiana had the highest annual consumption at 15,497 kWh per residential customer, and Hawaii had the lowest at 6,077 kWh per residential customer.
1.26 average rate of consumption
Keep in mind that few people heat their homes with electricity in the US but Southern states use a lot more electricity for summer AC
Leo Smith January 24, 2016 at 11:53 am
Sorry, Leo, but you are not comparing fuel to wheel efficiencies, because electricity is not a fuel. It’s just a way to move energy around the planet. For “fuel to wheel” in an electric car, you have to add in the inefficiencies in generating the electricity. Power plants are on the order of 30% efficient, times your “generator to wheel” efficiency of 80%, gives an overall fuel to wheel economy for an electric car of 24% or so … not much different from gas-powered autos.
w.
Sorry, but you can only compare efficiency when both points are the same, otherwise it’s apple to orange. You can compare two methods to convert crude oil to motive energy, you can’t compare a method to convert crude oil to energy and a method to convert coal to energy based on their efficiency.
So you should compare a coal powered Tesla to a coal powered regular car.
You also can’t badmouth solar PV on the basis of its solar flux to electric power conversion losses (unless you can make a case for another solar to electric energy conversion, say biomass to electric). But you can based on the energy required to produce the panel.
(Or maybe you can, as a joke to tease ecoloons, cause they do it all the time and it’s funny to make them eat their own crap. But only in such context. Not in serious discussions.)
You can compare oil and coal based on other criteria than conversion efficiency, like:
– air pollution (fine particulate, sulfur, NOx…)
– water pollution
– accidental pollution rate (oil spills, coal ashes spills…)
– mining/extraction accidents
– overall accidents
– overall impact on ecosystems
– overall impact on human health
– medium/long term expected availability
– market price stability
– diversity of producers
– political stability of producing countries
– overall impact on national politics
…
but NOT efficiency.
simple-touriste January 26, 2016 at 6:26 am
Perhaps you can’t compare those two methods, but the rest of the world makes such comparisons routinely.
Why? People compare gas powered cars with diesel powered cars and fuel cell powered cars and hydrogen powered cars to see which one is more efficient at converting fuel to mechanical motion. For that matter, people compare cars to planes and trains to see which one is more efficient.
Why should electric cars be exempt?
w.
People often compare the energy required to move some goods via boat, trains, trucks over a given distance. I think one of my school books had such comparison.
But this is meaningless if you only take the energy required for the motor and not the overall cost including the infrastructure (the cost of the rail isn’t a one time cost, the more it is used, the more it needs to be replaced).
So people do it, and they are wrong. A better comparison is the total cost, including all the subsidies for infrastructure.
People routinely do a lot of stupid stuff.
This is a silly game so everyone is exempt.
(Electric cars don’t want to be exempt.)
Is it just me? Every time the Drax facility is mentioned I remember the Bond uber-villain in the movie “Moonraker”, who wanted to exterminate the human race and start over with his own perfect eugenic specimens. I guess it’s all the tree-hugger wackos who are constantly bleating about how much better off the world would be without humans. The difference is this time the eco-terrorists are clear-cutting forests in the US to produce “green” energy for the UK.
For a 2015 summary of electrical generation cost on an LCOE basis (all CAPEX and OPEX cost including construction, operation and remediation, at three rates of return on capital employed. This is very authoritative, as are all the other national and global data sets here. GIves the lie(s) to the partial assertion and absolute science fiction of ignorant eco-worriers, by far the largest body of science deniers on the planet. When you have proven enrgy physics and established data, opinions are irrelevant. https://www.iea.org/Textbase/npsum/ElecCost2015SUM.pdf
I also took an average estimate of energy conversion efficiencies in the Excel spreadsheet I posted re substituting electricity for gas in heating and fuel in road transport, Again, the biggest real problem in heating electrically is it is a waste of pure energy and costs 4 times as much as gas per kWh. CCGT thermal efficiency 60% x battery charger efficiency and other losses (hard to find the truth re enrgy out/electrical energy in in all the Tesla BS, which specifies “efficiency” as DC power supplied to battery vs. power out to drive, not real conversion efficiency from the AC mains. Simple deceit but fools most Californians who knowingly debate Tesla’s false premise rather than the actuaity of end to end electrical efficiency in their green delusion. Electrical power in a car includes so many losses from primary fuel used in generation through distribution, battery chargers, etc, that it is also no better than just burning the fuel in the car when needed, so much more conveneint and w/o carrying a ton of batteries which murders efficiency in stop start driving. This means would be much cheaper because the fuel is relatively cheap to deliver to the fuel pump per unit energy, but the massive Duty and VAT burden vehicle make primary fuelling of vehicles with petrol and diesel vaguely comparable in cost, so enourages the wrong solution on straight utility grounds. Transferring the emissions to a power station maybe a good idea in cities, though. PM’s and NO2 are killing people prematurely. Long haul primary fuelling is clearly best use of primary energy and far greater utility to the car owner. I am agnostic on current hybrids, if they harvest barke enrgy and that’s generally enough to get them through most traffic jams, great.
I covered this when looking at making synthetic fuel from nuclear energy, CO2 and water. At the end of fossil, electrical transport makes sense for urban use, also drive on drive off Carrail or train/drive long haul. Le Shuttle overground.
Asked why he switched to steam from sail for trade, one Victorian entrepreneur had a simple answer. “Only the wind is free” (he is not recorded as saying “when it’s there”). Look at what you need in men and materials to collect enough energy, when available. Running out of motive energy is also a bad idea at sea. Not too many solar powered bulk freighters/tankers around either. Actually if I ran tankers I’d lok at using the cargo as bunker fuel for my Wartsila diesel. 50% thermal efficiency at a few hundred rpm. . Why not? Alternative energy source FAR too weak and diffuse to collect enough on a ship. Commercial nuclear propulsion coming, though? etc.