Electric Transportation By 2050

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

I’ve written before about the insanity of the “Net-Zero By 2050” push in a post called “Bright Green Impossibilities“. Today I thought I’d talk about a different impossibility, that of changing all of our land-based transportation (light vehicles, plus our buses and heavy trucks) to being battery powered.

Here’s how I went about it. I use the computer language R for my calculations. I used a few functions to do my conversions, as follows:

---

# joules to watt-hours
j2whr=function(x) x*0.0002777777777

# gallons of gas to kilowatt-hours
galgas2kwh=function(gal) gal*j2wh(130927880)/1000

# gallons of diesel to kilowatt-hours
galdiesel2kwh=function(gal) gal*j2wh(146765930)/1000

# calculates the months from now to some future date
monthstodate=function(thedate) {
	if (is.double(thedate)) thedate = paste0(thedate,"-01-01")
	as.double(as.Date(thedate)-Sys.Date())/(365.25/12)
}

# terawatt-hours per year used to gigawatts generation needed
twh2gw=function(twh,peakfactor=2,capfactor=1,transmission=.95) (twh/hrsperyear*1e3*peakfactor)/capfactor/transmission

---

The first function converts joules to watt-hours. The next two convert gallons of diesel and gasoline to their energy content in kilowatt-hours.

The next function calculates the number of months until some date in the future. And the final function converts terawatt-hours of electricity used in a year to the amount of gigawatts of generation needed. It takes into account

• a peak factor to account for the fact that peak usage needs to be covered and is generally about twice average usage.

• a capacity factor to cover downtimes for maintenance, and

• a transmission loss factor.

Then I went and got the figures for the number of miles driven and gallons of fuel used in the US in 2017 from the US Department of Transportation. Now, it’s very likely that by 2050 many more miles will be driven … how many? Well, this document says about 50% – 60% more miles, so I’ll use 40% as a conservative number.

With that in hand, here are my calculations. We can’t just divide total miles driven by electric vehicle miles per kilowatt-hour, because we need to figure in the trucks and buses as well. So the first part of my calculation is to figure out the difference between the energy used per mile for light cars and that used for trucks.

In the following, the lines starting with “>” and a hashmark are comments, the lines starting with just “>” are instructions to the computer, and the lines starting with the “[1]” are the computer output.

---

> # miles driven light cars/trucks
> (light_miles=2877378e6)
[1] 2.877378e+12
 
> # miles driven heavy trucks
> (heavy_miles=297593e6) 
[1] 2.97593e+11
 
> # gallons gas light vehicles 
> (light_gal=129178914e3)
[1] 1.291789e+11 

> # gallons diesel heavy trucks
> (heavy_gal=45963416e3) 
[1] 4.596342e+10
 
> # kwh in gas used, light vehicles
> (light_kwh=galgas2kwh(light_gal))
[1] 4.698089e+12

> # kwh in diesel used, trucks
> (heavy_kwh=galdiesel2kwh(heavy_gal)) 
[1] 1.873851e+12

> # miles per kwh light vehicles
> (light_mpkwh=light_miles/light_kwh) 
[1] 0.6124571
 
> # miles per kwh trucks
> (heavy_mpkwh=heavy_miles/heavy_kwh) 
[1] 0.1588136
 
> # extra kwh for trucks
> (truckextra=light_mpkwh/heavy_mpkwh) 
[1] 3.856453

---

OK, so that’s the first part. Heavy trucks use about 3.9 times the energy per mile as light cars.

Next, we need to calculate the amount of electricity we’ll need. The wall-to-wheels efficiency of light electric cars is about 2.5 miles per kilowatt-hour. Note that this is less than the battery-to-wheels efficiency because of losses in the transformer used to charge the battery and the losses in the battery itself in the form of heat.

---

> # electric vehicle miles per kilowatt-hour
> (ev_milesperkwh=2.5) 
[1] 2.5

---

From this point, we need to divide the estimated miles driven in 2050 by the relevant miles per kilowatt-hour to get the total power needed.

---

> # kwh needed, electric light vehicles
> (light_kwh=light_miles*milesinc/ev_milesperkwh) 
[1] 1.611332e+12

> # kwh needed, electric heavy vehicles
> (heavy_kwh=heavy_miles*milesinc*truckextra/ev_milesperkwh) 
[1] 6.426858e+11


> # total terawatthours needed/yr
> (tot_twh=(light_kwh+heavy_kwh)/1e9) 
[1] 2254.018

---

So we’ll need ~ 2,250 terawatt-hours of electricity per year to move the people and the goods around. And how much new generation will this require? Well, by comparison, the US currently uses about 3,800 terawatt-hours per year, so we’ll need a huge, unimaginable 60% increase … and that just for electric cars and trucks and nothing more.

How much generating capacity will that take? Here you go:

---

> # gigawatts new generation needed

> (generation_needed=twh2gw(tot_twh,capfactor = .95)) 
[1] 569.8329

---

We’ll need an additional ~ 570 gigawatts of generating capacity. And how long do we have to do that?

The only currently available technology capable of delivering that is nuclear. And it takes about ten years from conception to completion for a nuclear power plant.

Figure 1. Timeline from feasibility studies to actual startup for a new nuclear power plant.

So that means we have only until 2040 to begin the power plants we need by 2050. How many do we need?

---

> # months from now until 2040
> (time_available=round(monthstodate(2040))) 
[1] 215
> 
> # gigawatts of new power plants needed per month
> (round(generation_needed/time_available,1))
[1] 2.7

---

So … to provide for an all-electric transportation fleet, starting tomorrow we’d have to build a new 2.7 GW nuclear power plant each and every month for the next 215 months … and those are huge plants, 20% larger than the giant Diablo Canyon power plant in Californa that the eco-fools are planning to shut down.

( … gotta love California. We can’t even keep the lights on now, and the idiots in charge want to shut down Diablo Canyon and require only electric cars to be sold in the state after 2035 … but I digress.)

Oh, and besides building 215 new giant nuclear power plants at the rate of one per month every month for the next 18 years starting this month, we’d need to upsize our entire power grid by 60% from end to end, all the way from the generators down to the transformers and the electric wires feeding your house.

I’m sorry, but doing all of that is politically, practically, logistically, and financially impossible.

And what will it accomplish? Sweet Fanny Adams, as our British cousins say. The entire US could go net-zero tomorrow, and even if we accept the alarmists’ hysterical figures, the temperature difference it would make in 2050 is too small to even be measured … we’d be throwing trillions down a rathole and we’d get nothing in return.

Well, except for greatly increased taxes and much higher energy prices …

The stoopid, it burns.

w.

My Usual Request: When you comment, QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE REFERRING TO, so we are not left in mystery as to who and what you are talking about.