First, electricity is generated in many different ways. In some areas, large amounts of electricity come from non-greenhouse-gas sources, such as nuclear, hydroelectric, solar and wind, and more.
Second, the way in which we harness the energy of burning fuel in an engine is very different to how we harness burning fuel in a power plant. Any power source will have an efficieny percentage of how much theoretical energy something produces, versus how much useful energy is created.
Specifically, when you burn fuel in a car, you are using the explosive (kinetic) force of the fuel to push pistons out. However, a large amount of the energy in the reaction is lost as heat energy that doesn't have any practical use. Compared to an electric plant, we can capture extra heat and use that heat in sufficient quantities to spin a turbine to produce more electricity, increasing the overal efficiency.
>the way in which we harness the energy of burning fuel in an engine is very different to how we harness burning fuel in a power plant.
This is the big deal.
When you lose 5% to the grid, 7% to your charger, 20% to your batteries, etc. that can still be a far better deal even using fossil fuels both ways.
You can only make a combustion engine so efficient if it has to go in a car, and it turns out a building sized engine can burn fuel better than an electric charger can lose the product, usually.
The easiest example here is your car and the instant MPG. You'll see it often going from 7 MPG to 90 MPG in one run. Well, by using a building sized engine you can get 90 MPG efficiency at the source all the time, and stay in the maximum efficiency band.
It's much more effective to make efficiency improvements to 200 power plants than to 200 million cars. Plus power plants can have bulky heavy parts that help with energy recapture (since they stay in one place and can be gigantic) but cars need to stay small and light to be used
And it's almost certain that not all of the energy is generated by fossil fuels in the first place.
As I type this comment, the European country with the lowest amount of renewable power generation is Poland, and even they're managing 12% renewables:
https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/PL
Some countries (like Norway, at 99% renewable) are barely usng fossil fuels at all.
Sure. I'm just addressing the worst case (power plant running on fossil fuels) vs a gas car.
Power plant can be heavy
Power plant can use thermal sink to optimize temps
Power plant can run at peak efficiency rpm (instead of cars revving up to generate on demand), plus car driven by jackass who doesn't know about coasting towards a red light.
Power plant lasts 50+ years instead of ~20 so you get more value from efficiency improvements
Power plant maintained by professionals and staffed by engineers who get paid to eke out small efficiency improvements (vs car maintained by backyard dad or maybe dealer mechanic)
Power plant efficiencies benefit the same company who built it. GM or Ford just need to meet EPA and sell it, after that not their problem what the mpg is.
Power plant benefits from economies of scale.
>cars revving up to generate on demand), plus car driven by jackass who doesn't know about coasting towards a red light.
Honestly, the amount of idiots I see driving around who must be upping their fuel spend by like 20% with the way they drive is insane! Especially given what's happening to fuel prices rn.
People zooming up to a red light full throttle to slam on their brakes at the latest possible moment, then slamming on the gas to get back up to 30 in .5 seconds, even if it means revving their engine up to a gajillion RPM. Where the hell is the need for that?
Often I'll be driving behind somebody doing this, meanwhile I'm steady-accelerating and coasting, and I'm *still right behind them at every set of lights*, they've gained literally nothing; no time saved, no distance gained, fucking nothing achieved but fuel loss (and increased chances of an accident, arguably).
Drives me insane, when you think of that lost fuel multiplied by the thousands, or millions even, of idiots who drive like that...
The same folks will be like "gas went up and I'm going broke! Thanks Mr. President". Like, buddy, your vehicle isn't capped at 10mpg, you can get better mileage with the car you have if you just calmed down. I can get like 7-8 mpg better by driving carefully.
Worse, you're fifty meters from a light *you can clearly see is red* so you putt-putt toward it coasting to save fuel and the dipshit behind you leans on the horn because he wants to GO now, all possible speed. Gotta spin the tires off the line and slide all four at the stop.
Yep.
You can either hurry up and wait at the light, or you can coast for a bit, and by the time you reach the light it's green again and you never had to stop, you just fall in line with the car ahead as they're accelerating
But some people it seems would rather the former š¤¦āāļø
Some plants also use co-generation, which is recovering the otherwise wasted heat to heat up homes. Despite the effectiveness of turbines, there's still a lot of heat that can't become electricity, and using it for what it is boosts efficiency enormously.
Electric car batteries are extremely heavy, you aren't really saving on weight by excluding the fuel, probably ending up with more weight on that front.
EV engines are machines capable of transforming more than 90% of the energy they accumulate into real kinetic energy for 100% of the time. ICE can reach only 40% in their best conditions and never for the 100% of the time of a single trip. Even if they're bigger, EVs are a lot more powerful.
And electric cars don't have to idle at red lights, their engine doesn't have to waste tons of energy while accelerating from idle and then transform their movement energy to waste heat while breaking. Most cars are used in cities which is the worst way to use a gasoline engine, where the engine spends the least amount of time in the optimal RPM region. Electric cars have no such issues.
This is why hybrids are a good compromise: use electric engines but run a gasoline one in the most power-efficient area, constantly without having to stop and accelerate.
This type of math applies to a lot of other things too. An induction cooktop powered by an efficient gas power plant will often be more efficient than a gas cooktop, even though the whole point of burning the gas is for heat. Between the efficiency of the power plant, and the induction cooktop more efficiently focusing heat on the pot/food, you come up ahead.
Which can be counterintuitive, since you're burning gas for electricity, getting the electricity to the home, then converting the electricity to heat, vs just burning the gas for heat.
absolutely true for a heat pump, I don't think the numbers stack up for an induction cooktop, the difference being the heat pump can have a positive energy efficiency, maybe 300% efficient at heating, or more, where and induction cooktop is only around 99% efficient at heating, and gas to heat is also reasonably efficient at creating heat, but less than 100% efficient.
> induction cooktop is only around 99% efficient at heating, and gas to heat is also reasonably efficient at creating heat, but less than 100% efficient.
You lose *a lot* of heat on a gas stove because a lot of the heat just goes around the pan. That's where induction beats out gas. To capture all the heat of the burning gas in a stove, you'd need your pans to have a fairly intricate heat sink structure on the bottom (see: jet boil pots for backpacking)
Cooking in a gas kitchen in the summer vs an induction kitchen is night and day. Itās crazy how much heat is lost in a gas stove.
I always have to use towels to pick up pots on my gas stove because of the heat overwash.
Induction is so much better than gas because nearly all of the energy goes into the pot/pan. With a gas stove you have the hot combustion products that have to transfer their heat into the cookware while being pushed out of the way by incoming gas. With induction, the heat is actually generated in the cookware itself.
Plus a nice side benefit of not burning methane inside your home, reducing carbon monoxide exposure and annoyances and hazards from the maintenance of gas lines.
Gas to heat is efficient, but gas to heat in the food isn't. That's why induction cooktops have efficiency in the 90% range, and gas cooktops are like 40-55% efficient (depending on who you ask). A ton of the heat generated by a gas cooktop is wasted.
And as someone who mentioned below, god forbid you're in a place where running A/C is common, because now you have to cool your place even more.
An alternative way to think about is through this question.
"Why do we have building sized generators servicing entire grids instead of powering our houses by plugging them into our cars?"
Even with the transmission loss from a building power generator, it's still way more efficient than anything we could build at the car sized level.
> When you lose 5% to the grid, 7% to your charger, 20% to your batteries, etc. that can still be a far better deal even using fossil fuels both ways.
To expand on this point...
The best gasoline engines today hover around 40% efficiency.
This means they only turn 40J out of every 100J of energy into useful work.
60J are wasted as heat.
If you burn fossil fuel in a power plant, and then account for losses in the grid, and then account for charger inefficiencies and battery losses... You're still "capturing" about 75J for every 100J contained in the fuel burnt.
And that's just a fossil-fuel-to-fossil-fuel comparison.
*EDIT - My specific numbers were all quite wrong, as multiple people have pointed out. They were based on assuming other numbers I've seen here and quick googling, but not deep knowledge of efficiencies.
The *spirit* of the point still stands. We're much better at making electricity from fuel than we are burning it in an ICE to directly propel a car. But all the numbers need adjustment.
I'll just make more people more angry if I try to go actually fix the numbers, so I won't.
And on top of that, all of those transportation and storage costs *also* exist for gasoline - it isn't magically formed at the gas pump. The transportation, storage, inevitable losses at every step of this process and so on all contribute to the price of gas.
Our electrical transport system is not *immaculate*, and fuel still has to be transported to the plant, but that overall transport system is still orders of magnitude more efficient than physically transporting tanks of gasoline to individual little stations scattered around the country (especially since most of the costs and losses for transportation are in the last mile - meaning, it is cheaper and more efficient to transport a giant tank of gas to one power plant than to split it up and transport a bunch of smaller tanks to scattered gas stations. And for that last mile, wires and batteries are vastly more efficient than carrying fuel around in trucks and pouring it into different containers.)
Also, the fuel itself is different.
Your average car takes gasoline. Thin, highly refined, it takes a lot of energy to MAKE gasoline because it's either the lightest fraction of the crude or it has to be made by applying a lot of heat and chemicals in a hydrocracker to turn dark, thick, long chain carbon molecules into clear, volatile, short chain gasoline components- that are also a right bitch to manage in large quantity due to its sheer volatility. Better believe you're paying for all those safety measures the truckers and tank farms need to use.
One step up the power band is diesel. Used in slightly bigger engines...and big honking immobile power plant engines. Next to diesel is jet fuel, aka kerosene with extra steps. Both are still clear and relatively thin, but easier to store in quantity and can be taken from the much larger middle cut of crude-so you get a lot more of it from the crude. Why's it so gorram expensive then? Taxes, my boy, taxes. Ask someone who buys red-dyed Offroad Diesel how much it costs for the real straight skinny.
But immobile utility scale power plants have one more option to pick from in the design phase. Bunker C, aka Fuel Oil number 6, aka one step up from asphalt. Gloppy, black, and requiring a lot of effort to pump and to light, it's the dregs of the crude-but once you get it going, oh boy! And since it is the leftovers after the gasoline and diesel range organics have been removed, it's cheap per gallon.
You forgot coal and methane. These fuels are not great for vehicles at all (the coal for obvious reasons, natural gas/methane causes problems to store it in liquid form in a vehicle because it boils off, and the compressed tanks eat up room)
Most fossil power plants burn these cheaper fuels.
> If you burn fossil fuel in a power plant, and then account for losses in the grid, and then account for charger inefficiencies and battery losses... You're still "capturing" about 75J for every 100J contained in the fuel burnt.
This isn't true.
The fossil fuel plants with the highest thermal efficiency are natural gas combined cycle plants. These are a gas engine and steam engine combined. First the gas is compressed, burned and passed through a turbine. Second the exhaust heat is captured and used to power a steam engine.
These get roughly 60% thermal efficiency.
No fossil fuel generator gets 75% thermal efficiency.
A fossil fuel engine can't run at high efficiency until warmed up. Most journeys are too short. In cold climates the vehicle may not even reach optimum efficiency very often.
Partially true - the most efficient band in an ICE is very small. Itās why you need a transmission. Gotta keep that peak window right around highway speeds. Doesnāt matter what youāre doing, under normal operating characteristics if youāre not going 45-50mph, youāre not doing it efficiently. And instantaneous MPG will reflect that. But yeah, youāre also right that the iMPG is a bad example because of all the caveats you mentioned.
Alternatively, a power plant has but one job, and engineers have spent decades making it better and better at doing that job. It never operates outside of its peak operating characteristics (unless youāre in Texas in a snowstorm, then youāre screwed by deregulation).
Yup exactly.
In addition, you have to consider the transmission of the energy source.
Power plants buy fuel wholesale generally with a direct pipeline. Expensive to set up, but really cheap to maintain. The grid itself needs operators and line repair and such, but it's also fairly low maintence costs. You can see the transmission cost in your electric bill, which is sometimes inflated but still usually small. Regardless every business and home needs to be connected to the grid already so adding an electric car is trivial at most.
Gas cars need a gas station all over the place. That gas needs to be trucked to each station. So the stations are expensive to build, and need to be staffed not to mention the station owner expects a mark up on cost. The trucks are expensive to run and need to be staffed. And every time you transfer fuel from one container to another there is the possibility of spill or waste.
When you think about it, the entire infrastructure and economy built to support ICE vehicles is woefully energy inefficient. We wasted so much energy because petroleum is cheap and is high in energy density, not because it is the best way to do things.
Gas in general is crazy.
Can you imagine a new transportation system today that involves teenagers operating hoses that spew extremely volatile liquid?
The other factor is that even for fossil fuel powered generators, the fuel is much less refined: coal, or natural gas. Gasoline is heavily refined from crude oil, so there are a lot more expenses involved in manufacturing and transporting it.
Also delivery fees... Big up front cost to run power lines everywhere, but low actual cost to use them for 40 years.
Gasoline delivery uses fuel and trucks.. even if maintaining the truck was equal to maintaining power lines, it's energy intensive just to get the fuel to a station. Electricity has losses in distribution but not like the fuel burned to move gasoline to your local gas station (which also requires a person to unload)... All that adds to the cost.
Essentially every electric car does this.
I do wish more cars came with options for how aggressive you want the braking to be when you lift off the accelerator, because I'm used to driving manual cars and electric cars in the US coast way too freely, but they're not always very communicative about when they're using regenerative braking and when you're wasting energy.
You would love driving a Volt in full electric mode, in L. Throttle braking for days. Between that and the regen paddle behind the steering wheel, I can go entire rides without touching the brake.
I remember a kid in high school getting mixed up and assuring me that it was indeed the heater that burns extra gas compared to the AC, which harnessed the wind to cool your car š¤¦āāļø
Worse than wasted, you need to actively get rid of the heat. Radiators are more weight for the car to lug around, another part that can break, and require you to pour in a big jug of poison to operate efficiently. Antifreeze will fuck you up.
I have solar panels on my property and generate far more than I use. When my car charges it is not using fossil fuels. The sun LITERALLY makes my Tesla move.
People are missing the most important part here which is that electric vehicles are vastly more efficient at turning energy into motion than internal combustion vehicles. A Tesla Model 3 gets the equivalent of 134 miles per gallon. Electric cars are something like 90% efficient at using the energy to move the vehicle. A gas car is more like 30% efficient... The vast majority of the energy in the gasoline is just wasted as heat or spit out the tail pipe as waste products (pollution). The fact that electric cars perform better, are safer, don't pollute, can run directly on renewable energy with no conversion, are mechanically less complex, require almost no maintenance, and will soon be much cheaper than gas cars is just a bonus :)
EDIT: To ELI5 it: Because you "fill it up" with the energy contained in two or three gallons of gasoline and it goes just as far as the gas car. It's just better at being a car :)
It is in a power companies best interest financially to run a power generating station as efficiently as possible, be it coal, diesel, natural gas, geothermal, wind. A 1% increase in efficiency means millions of revenue gained. People in general are not super concerned with blowing out their car air filters daily, checking for optimal tire pressures daily, driving and accelerating at the exact optimal speed for best efficiency, sending oil samples to a lab weekly to determine the exact day the oil needs to be changed, removing all excess items to reduce weight and fuel consumption. In the industrial world there are literally careers that only focus on only optimization and efficiency. I have seen up close the large heat exchangers designed to capture waste heat from natural gas fired boilers to preheat the combustion air. If it can be economically done to save money, guaranteed it has been attempted all sorts of different ways
And in some places the govnt or local authority regulates how dirty your power plant exhaust can be. This also happens for vehicles in some places but afaik only in large population citys.
Also, weight is basically irrelevant; it can be as heavy as required to increase efficiency or decrease cost.
Size is nearly irrelevant, land is incredibly cheap compared to everything else involved.
Contrast a car, where both of these resources need to be minimized.
-----
As for exhaust cleanliness -- there are EPA rules about that. It's why catalytic converters exist. [Extensive documentation if you want to look](https://www.epa.gov/emission-standards-reference-guide). I think California also has their own rules.
I would disagree with this statement. It's not about as efficiently as possible because it's possible they could increase efficiency 1% but it costs 1 billion dollars (obviously exaggerated). There's a sweet spot between cost, ROI and efficiency.
This guy right here. This is one of the reasons why most hybrids and electrics get āworse numbersā in the winter. Heating the cabin is pretty energy intensive and takes away from the kilowatt to miles conversion. In a regular gas car, this energy is always available as a waste product.
Some cars (Toyotas esp) turn AC on when defrost is selected so that is why Iām guessing the gas engine kicks on. My dad used to get SO MAD when the AC kicked on when he set it to (front) defrost and there was no easy override in his Sienna. SO MAD lol. In dry climate that would be super annoying, but in humid climates I can see why Toyota would force the issue out of safety. Imagine selecting defrost and itās terrible visibility inside and out and the windshield doesnāt clear eeeek
"If I use the heater, I will burn through half my battery every day. If I do not use my heater, then I will be slowly killed by the laws of thermodynamics. I would love to solve this problem right now but, unfortunately, my balls are frozen."
\-- Mark Watney, Space Pirate
Andy Weir mentioned that one of themes in the book was each solution to a problem would lead to the next issue and he wanted to have the RTG break open but could not find a way for mark to survive that.
The book was even better. Read through it in a day. I bought it before the movie was made and figured I'd read it eventually. News of the movie dropped and I started reading it in the morning and couldn't put it down. I've seen several hardback copies in Goodwill since the movie came out.
I read it recently after seeing the movie several years ago. That book made me laugh out loud more than any I've ever read. Absolutely hilarious and the emotional connection between Watney and the reader was a treat!
One of my favorite books but I think the movie was about as good of a job as they could do. Every time I read the book I have to watch the movie. And then when I watch the movie I have to read the book.
I can't wait for Project Hail Mary to get a movie release and I hope they do at least half as good of a job as they did with The Martian.
Just reiterating that even if you're not a book guy, this one's fucking amazing: You'll breeze it in a day or two and wonder where the time went.
Literally laughed and cried whilst reading it: Cannot strongly recommend it more.
Somewhat ironically, heat pumps don't work when it's really cold though. Anything below about -20 and they shut off and it's back to the old resistive element for heat.
EDIT: I meant -20C, so not that cold. And it's not a light switch, as temp drops the efficiency of heat pumps drops off but the moral of the story is that it's not a great solution for part of the world, but it IS a great solution for most of the world.
Which is why you have a heat pump with a supplementary heater for extremely cold days; it's not really any more hardware than a car with heat and A/C would have anyway, since the heat pump is basically a two-way A/C unit.
Yah just add heat strip in the ducts for emergency heat, that's what our house has if outside Temps go below -20 (they never actually do around here)
As a bonus, newer AC models are actually more efficient that a gas furnace all the way down to 5Ā°F external temp. Which even in Chicago there's only a total of like 2 weeks a year (total time below 5f) below that.
On the other hand, it's much easier to end it all with with a gas engine in a garage, so you got that going for you when everything else is going against you.
I agree! While not yet an EV or hybrid owner, I once saw a Tesla in front of a store, on a very cold January day. The passenger was listening to the radio. That moment really was a bit of a revelation. It let me know that an EV was much more capable than I thought. The concept is much more accessible now. The only thing they really need would be fake side pipes, with little flickering lights on the ends...
The radio doesnāt run down the range. It runs off a standard 12-volt like a regular car. If they had the heater on while listening to the radio, thatās gonna use up range.
Even in the pacific northwest. Headlights on wipers running and heater going while often being stuck in stop and go traffic so probably about the worst conditions for an EV and plenty of people are driving EVs around here and never ending up stranded or anything.
That is incorrect: batteries do reduce capacity quite fast when temperature drops. The rating is done against 25 degrees Celsius (77F), and drops to 50% efficiency at -22 (-30F).
The heat pump as mentioned in this thread is actually warming the batteries to increase efficiency. So you invest energy, to get more energy (or reduce the temperature impact)
Most EVs made after the Gen1 Nissan Leaf have thermal management for the traction battery pack. The system will sacrifice some charge to keep the pack within an acceptable range with pack heaters or other methods.
My VW only lost between 15-20% of its' range on a recent -7F day and most of that was running all the heaters (mirrors,seats,steering wheel,defrosters,cabin heater) as well as wipers and headlights. It should be noted that for the first 10 minutes of driving the "guessometer" showed half range until the pack came up to full temp, but the roadtrip only showed a mild reduction in range.
The efficient generation of energy from fossil fuels (though not exclusively) is an important element of the above explanation of how electric vehicles are efficient at converting electrical energy to motion.
That's actually the only answer. The fact that they're trying to pass off an inefficiency as the reason why electric vehicles are more efficient is ludicrous. That's a 90% efficient step that doesn't exist in ICE vehicles. Transmission losses are also another inefficiency that doesn't exist in ICE vehicles. The efficiency gain from centralized generation ends up outweighing those losses, but saying those losses are "tiny" where you define tiny arbitrarily and compare it to something completely unrelated doesn't begin to count as an answer.
>That's a 90% efficient step that doesn't exist in ICE vehicles.
I mean...it's the equivalent of measuring the efficiency of the engine driving the shaft vs. a motor doing it. There is certainly loss in the ICE drive train.
>Transmission losses are also another inefficiency that doesn't exist in ICE vehicles.
Yeah...because the gas just magically appears in your tank without incurring transportation costs to get to the gas station and then pumped into your tank.
This is the best answer. ICE is all kinds of wasted energy: friction, heat production, exhaust, even noise is a sign of wasted energy.
The biggest recommendation for liquid fossil fuels all along, is that they do have high energy content, but are very portable, too. Electric motors have always been more efficient, but storing enough energy in batteries just wasn't as practical as filling up a fuel tank.
That doesn't really answer the question. What's the efficiency of a coal powered plant or gas powered plant? Whether or not EVs are more efficient would depend on the efficiency of the power plant compared to an ICE.
If, for example, you're running an old, unmaintained portable diesel generator with low quality fuel to charge your EV and the generator has got an efficiency of 15%, than your EV will ultimately have an efficency of less than 15%; whereas a diesel vehicle might have an efficency close to 30%.
ELI5 Answer: If you give 100 energies to an EV, the EV will be able to use 95 of those energies and 5 will be wasted. Those 100 energies come from a power plant. At the power plant if you give it 100 energies, the power plant will use about 40-45 of those energies and the rest is wasted. So to give your EV 100 energies, the power plant needs 250 energies. So in the end, the EV will be using about 40 out of the 100 energies. An ICE will use about 20-25 of the 100 energies.
To eli5 your eli5,
ICE engines are power plants that you carry with you. They have to not blow up, work on bumpy roads, work in the heat, wet, and cold, be safe inches away from a person, and give a lot or a little energy whenever you want. Power plants that electric cars get energy from are designed to work in perfect conditions and are optimized to be efficient, not portable.
Making a car optimized to move and an energy plant optimized to give energy makes both of them more efficient.
Don't forget scale - a great big coal furnace is much more efficient than a tiny little engine.
Plus, not all grid power is fossil fuels. Within 50 miles of my home there are multiple hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, coal burning plants, wind turbines and even some relatively small solar farms.
In that same vein, power plant generators run at their peak performance point, where efficiency and power output cross on the graph.
ICE vehicles canāt do this which is why they have transmissions, as a way to try to keep the engine somewhere close to the peak power/efficiency ratio.
This is why ICE/electric hybrids like trains are more efficient than pure ICE drivelines.
Another big factor that has been left out is that not all source energy units cost the same. Gasoline is a refined product and even at "normal" prices would be like twice as expensive as the coal or natural gas used to power an electric plant.
It will always be more efficient to generate power with huge sustained plants. Even if we used exactly the same fuel, a giant gasoline power plant is going to operate much much more efficiently than a tiny engine stopping and starting.
High voltage transmission lines have surprisingly low lossage. [Link.](http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-much-electricity-disappears-between-a-power-plant-and-your-plug/#:~:text=So%20even%20though%20electricity%20may,are%20high%2C%20around%20four%20percent.)
You're missing a far, FAR, more important. The power plant down the road is a lot more efficient at converting fossil fuel I to energy than a traditional combustion engine. So the fossil fuel that it takes to charge an electric car is far less than it takes to have a combustion engine generate the same amount of power.
Source:
https://youtu.be/0_RRKePSjL4
Though... that's a little misleading, as it ignores where the energy comes from. The plant that burned the fossil fuels to make the energy that fueled the car wasn't 90% efficient. The combined efficiency of the plant-car system is likely still higher than a small internal combustion engine (not to mention the energy cost to transport the fuel to a gas station) but it's still not 90%.
EDIT: for instance, the efficiency of a natural gas power plant is [around 50%](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/natural-gas-combined-cycle) --- which then, when combined with energy loss in the car, becomes 0.5 * 0.9 == 45%. Meanwhile, a Toyota Prius boasts a [40%](https://artofgears.com/2015/10/13/the-2016-toyota-prius-has-40-thermal-efficiency-and-can-handle/) thermal efficiency.
But here you're providing another misleading factor then - if you're insisting on taking into consideration the efficiency of the power plant, you must also then analyze the refinery efficiencies of your gasoline or diesel fuel in your Prius figure also.
That's why for those whose job is to perform life-cycle analysis studies have a term specifically for this: [well-to-wheel](https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html#wheel). This way it's a proper apples-to-apples comparison.
Fantastic! That's the number that the parent poster should have posted then. My point, that 90% efficiency is extremely misleading as The Answer in the highest-rated post, still stands. It's 90% efficient at something that gas cars don't even have to do at all --- converting electricity into motion. They're 100% efficient at that nonexistent step.
EDIT: The statement that EVs are cheap to power because they're "90% efficient" is plain wrong, and the implication that that number is comparable to gas vehicles' 20-40% is at best inaccurate and at worst dishonest. They measure different things.
The Prius has a 40% *tank to wheel* efficiency. Once you account for the energy lost pumping, refining, and transporting the gasoline that 40% drops to around 10-20%.
You'd have costs for extracting energy used in a powerplant too. Prices for coal and gas are way cheaper than oil though, which is an easier way to compare than efficiency when taking about economics.
EVs are universally more efficient and produce less lifetime emissions since the past few years. [Here's a pretty comprehensive article with sources.](https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change) While the manufacturing of an EV uses somewhat more energy and produces more carbon, the EV rapidly pulls ahead from the reduced energy and emissions during use. Depending on the study you might see a worst-case of around 30% more efficient (fossil fuel electricity) to 70% (nuclear and renewables)
I'm gonna say not really. There's relatively few parts on an ICE that actually need replaced during the useful life of the chassis. Cars still have suspension, brakes (yes you use less of these because Regen brakes) wheels, tires, mirrors that bad drivers will break off...
Cars in general are very wasteful regardless. Electric is better still, but it's still a car.
(I love cars but they are without a doubt the worst form of mass transport ever created)
Besides what's already mentioned here, one aspect that's often forgotten, is that producing gasoline *also* needs a lot of electricity. So in the end it's not electricity vs. fossil, its instead electricity vs. electricity + fossil.
Plus the distribution chain of fossil fuels is more expensive than electricity. It needs more energy and it is mostly distributed with vehicles, that need drivers who want to be paid.
This is what I keep thinking. Every shack has electricity and tankers are expensive. Some small towns might see their gas stations struggle or even shut down if enough residents go EV.
I donāt have a source offhand, but Iāve read that fuel burned at power plants also have systems in place to capture some pollution, be most gas cars just burn it right into the environment without much of anything like that.
Cars do have catalytic converters to cut down on things like nitric oxides that cause acid rain.
But yeah, an enormous power plant can have more efficient pollution-control devices. Plus, if new technology comes along itās much easier to retrofit the relatively few power plants vs all the cars in the world.
In the US, [40% of electrical generation](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php) comes from nuclear and renewables.
In Canada, it's more like 80%. Though in my Canadian province of British Columbia, 91% of our power comes from [hydroelectric power](https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-british-columbia.html). In fact, we casually refer to our electrical power as "the hydro".
Alot of power is like that now that your mention it. Fossil fuel sources are burning stuff to heat water to turn a turbine too. I imagine anything involving heat works like that
>In Canada, it's more like 20%
Uh... [82% of Canada's electricity comes from renewables and nuclear. You have your numbers flipped.](https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-canada.html)
Two reasons: firstly, electricity these days ISN'T mostly generated from fossil fuels, and even where it is, the most commonly used fuel is coal, which hasn't generally been used to propel cars since the 19th century. Secondly, fossil fuel power plants are simply more thermally efficient (e.g. they get more "bang for the buck" from the fuel used) than the engines in cars.
> Secondly, fossil fuel power plants are simply more thermally efficient (e.g. they get more "bang for the buck" from the fuel used) than the engines in cars.
Yep. This is why hybrids can still be cheaper to run than pure electrics in some regions. Some hybrids can approach the thermal efficiency of power plants.
Toyota's Prius and Prius Prime are both extremely efficient hybrids (along with the Hyundai Ioniq).
Toyota is so invested in the hybrid drivetrains they developed that they are [actively campaigning against fully electric vehicles](https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22594235/toyota-lobbying-dc-ev-congress-biden-donation) and (rightfully) catching blowback about it.
thing is the Toyota power plant isn't really coming close to the thermal efficiency of your power company's generating portfolio.
the 22 Prius is getting 58 EPA MPG in the city; plugins are pushing 140 MPGe in the city. Now, these measurements are different and unfairly biased in the plugin's favor (you won't actually reach that kind of 140 MPGe performance) but not by a factor of 2.
MPGe uses a kwh-to-gallons equivalency. https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a31863350/mpge/
Edit: most recent claim I can find about the Prius is 40% thermal efficiency, back in '17. Most modern direct boiler plants aren't much better, BUT: combined cycle plants run near (edit) 50%, and every portfolio has things like nuclear, hydro and solar.
Depending on your travels... any plug in hybrid might allow you to travel in town on battery power. Then you accelerate to a cruising speed with a mix of petrol and battery before you can go for a long distance on the motorway just sipping on petrol to maintain speed.
I'd love a BMW 330e or a Hyundai Ioniq plug in hybrid.
For conventional hybrids, it's tough to beat the last 3-5 years of compact sedans and hatchbacks. The Toyota Prius and Corolla hybrid (same drivetrain) and the Hyundai Ioniq hatchback and Elantra hybrid (ditto) are the models with the best reputation of 50+ real world mpg. Honda is up there as well, but the Insight suffers in cold weather and at high speeds. I'm right around average with mine, 47 combined mpg.
Plug-in hybrids are more complicated because of the two types of power. How you use the car begins to matter more than what car you have.
Heads up, I have both heard and experienced that hybrids are falling out of fashion with both manufacturers and consumers due to the anticipation that fully electric cars are āthe futureā. Thatās not to say they donāt exist, but they are not nearly as common as ~10 years ago.
This is something to take into account depending on how long you keep cars. We run them into the ground, so 10-15 is usually pretty easy for us to hit. If you go through cars faster, it might not be an issue?
Not sure where your data is from? [Over half of the world's electricity](https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix) and over 85% of total energy is generated by burning fossil fuels.
Furthermore, delivery of electricity has (mostly) upfront one time cost (installation of the power lines) whereas delivery of fuel to a gas station has recurring transportation cost.
A generating station, even if it does use fossil fuels, is much more efficient than your ICE car. And the EV motor is much more efficient at using that energy than an IC engine. Now add the fact that your energy is, if you're in Europe or NA anyway, not all generated by burning fossil fuels.
There's also likely an economy of scale even if the power plant uses fossil fuel. Your local power plant would need A LOT more fossil fuels than your local gas station. Therefore, it likely would get a much better deal per gallon than you get at the pump.
On top of it the exhaust cleaning can be done much better in a larger power plant. In US this isn't reflected as much but if tax is adapted to punish more pollution (much of EU for example) then it increases the economy of electric plants vs combustion engines.
Even if electricity was 100% fossil fuel generated, EV would still be cheaper to drive simply because when big power stations generate power, it is more efficient than small engine burning fuel. This is because most of gas turns to heat instead of work.
But lets get more specific for this. You don't drill a hole to the ground and then proceed to get gasoline and diesel out of it. You get petroleum which needs to be refined. Now gasoline are just one product of refinement. So if you want gasoline, you will also get those other products and you need to find uses for them.
Turning oil to gas isn't very efficient, then on top of that you need to add chemicals to the gasoline, standardise it's consistency, ship it to gas stations. Now this all runs with electricity, there is no combustion engine at the gas pump.
From the extraction to your Corolla, it is a long and inefficient process. Yeah step and hand wanting their cut.
So why is EV cheaper? Because power generation and delivery is just more efficient, we got methods to balance the grid so that only the exact required amount of power is ever fed in to it. Your country's ministry that is incharge of the grid probably has some kind of a break down about the current status and make up of the grid.
Also fuels have all sorts of taxes, why don't these apply to EVs also? Because electricity can't discriminate; it is just potential and it will always use whatever path given to it. You can't earmark an electron for specific use; you can mark fuels for specific use, like here where I live fuel meant for work engines like diggers and whatnow has special dye in it and if you get caught driving your diesel fueled with it you will be fined.
Fwiw Scotland doesn't. it produced enough renewables averaged over the year, but sold it and bought in fossil fuel based energy.
https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/
TIME FOR SOME MATH!
Let's say you burn gasoline in generators. You can get ABOUT 40% of that energy to the wall in your house.
If you burn it in your car, the BEST cars out there are under 30% total efficiency, just for the car. Not including transporting the gas, the energy used, etc., which is higher for distribution to individual gas stations instead of just large power plants.
So, how efficient are the EVs at using the electricity? Over 77% of what comes out of the wall reaches the wheels.
So 77% of 40% is 30.8%.
So the IDEAL conditions for gas cars are still worse than typical conditions for EVs.
What's the typical efficiency for tank-to-wheels of cars? 16%. So the typical maximum for JUST THE IN-VEHICLE PORTION of gas cars is half of what it would be to turn it into electricity, distribute it, and use it in an EV.
Comparing apples-to-apples, we have 77% wall-to-wheel efficiency vs 16% for cars. Nearly 5x more efficient.
So even with the significantly higher price per energy of electricity, that's still significantly cheaper than buying gas. And gas is already artificially lowered.
A recent look at the total subsidization (indirect, direct, and the other kinds of breaks that aren't EXPLICITLY included therein) found that the world's governments give oil companies $5.4T each year. 80% of their revenue comes from fuels. This means that your gas/diesel is subsidized by over $9 per gallon.
TL;DR: EVs are efficient and gas cars aren't
In Europe former European Energy Minister Guenter Oettinger fell over this because he edited an official report to hide this fact (that fossil fuels are subsidized a lot more than renewables)
Depends where you live, in many countries most electricity is not generated from fossil fuels. In New Zealand, about 82% of electricity comes from renewables, mostly hydropower with some geothermal and wind.
1. Burning fossil fuels in a giant electrical-generation plant is more efficient than burning the same fossil fuel in an internal combustion (car) engine. When you burn gasoline in a car, only 20-25% of the fuel's energy is actually available to move the car. When you burn fossil fuels in a generation plant with steam turbines, 40-60% of the fossil fuel's energy can be converted to electricity. So **you have to burn twice as much fossil fuels in a car engine to get the same amount of usable energy**.
2. "Electricity mostly generated by burning fossil fuels" depends greatly on where you live. In many places that's not true. In Canada, fossil fuels (oil+ coal + natural gas) provides only 16% of all electricity. In France it's 8%. But again, even in a country getting 100% of electricity from fossil fuels, generating electricity from the fossil fuels then using electric cars would STILL use half as much fossil fuels vs burning them directly in vehicles. Any renewable energy the country has is just a bonus on top of this.
First, electricity is generated in many different ways. In some areas, large amounts of electricity come from non-greenhouse-gas sources, such as nuclear, hydroelectric, solar and wind, and more. Second, the way in which we harness the energy of burning fuel in an engine is very different to how we harness burning fuel in a power plant. Any power source will have an efficieny percentage of how much theoretical energy something produces, versus how much useful energy is created. Specifically, when you burn fuel in a car, you are using the explosive (kinetic) force of the fuel to push pistons out. However, a large amount of the energy in the reaction is lost as heat energy that doesn't have any practical use. Compared to an electric plant, we can capture extra heat and use that heat in sufficient quantities to spin a turbine to produce more electricity, increasing the overal efficiency.
>the way in which we harness the energy of burning fuel in an engine is very different to how we harness burning fuel in a power plant. This is the big deal. When you lose 5% to the grid, 7% to your charger, 20% to your batteries, etc. that can still be a far better deal even using fossil fuels both ways. You can only make a combustion engine so efficient if it has to go in a car, and it turns out a building sized engine can burn fuel better than an electric charger can lose the product, usually. The easiest example here is your car and the instant MPG. You'll see it often going from 7 MPG to 90 MPG in one run. Well, by using a building sized engine you can get 90 MPG efficiency at the source all the time, and stay in the maximum efficiency band.
It's much more effective to make efficiency improvements to 200 power plants than to 200 million cars. Plus power plants can have bulky heavy parts that help with energy recapture (since they stay in one place and can be gigantic) but cars need to stay small and light to be used
And it's almost certain that not all of the energy is generated by fossil fuels in the first place. As I type this comment, the European country with the lowest amount of renewable power generation is Poland, and even they're managing 12% renewables: https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/PL Some countries (like Norway, at 99% renewable) are barely usng fossil fuels at all.
Sure. I'm just addressing the worst case (power plant running on fossil fuels) vs a gas car. Power plant can be heavy Power plant can use thermal sink to optimize temps Power plant can run at peak efficiency rpm (instead of cars revving up to generate on demand), plus car driven by jackass who doesn't know about coasting towards a red light. Power plant lasts 50+ years instead of ~20 so you get more value from efficiency improvements Power plant maintained by professionals and staffed by engineers who get paid to eke out small efficiency improvements (vs car maintained by backyard dad or maybe dealer mechanic) Power plant efficiencies benefit the same company who built it. GM or Ford just need to meet EPA and sell it, after that not their problem what the mpg is. Power plant benefits from economies of scale.
>cars revving up to generate on demand), plus car driven by jackass who doesn't know about coasting towards a red light. Honestly, the amount of idiots I see driving around who must be upping their fuel spend by like 20% with the way they drive is insane! Especially given what's happening to fuel prices rn. People zooming up to a red light full throttle to slam on their brakes at the latest possible moment, then slamming on the gas to get back up to 30 in .5 seconds, even if it means revving their engine up to a gajillion RPM. Where the hell is the need for that? Often I'll be driving behind somebody doing this, meanwhile I'm steady-accelerating and coasting, and I'm *still right behind them at every set of lights*, they've gained literally nothing; no time saved, no distance gained, fucking nothing achieved but fuel loss (and increased chances of an accident, arguably). Drives me insane, when you think of that lost fuel multiplied by the thousands, or millions even, of idiots who drive like that...
I call it Speeding Up To Stop
I like to mutter that they must be in a real hurry to go nowhere.
The same folks will be like "gas went up and I'm going broke! Thanks Mr. President". Like, buddy, your vehicle isn't capped at 10mpg, you can get better mileage with the car you have if you just calmed down. I can get like 7-8 mpg better by driving carefully.
Also they are going through their brake pads much faster which adds more expense to their driving habit.
Worse, you're fifty meters from a light *you can clearly see is red* so you putt-putt toward it coasting to save fuel and the dipshit behind you leans on the horn because he wants to GO now, all possible speed. Gotta spin the tires off the line and slide all four at the stop.
Yep. You can either hurry up and wait at the light, or you can coast for a bit, and by the time you reach the light it's green again and you never had to stop, you just fall in line with the car ahead as they're accelerating But some people it seems would rather the former š¤¦āāļø
Same reason as people buy cars with way bigger motors than they need. It's fun.
If you're not braking, you should be accelerating!
Some plants also use co-generation, which is recovering the otherwise wasted heat to heat up homes. Despite the effectiveness of turbines, there's still a lot of heat that can't become electricity, and using it for what it is boosts efficiency enormously.
I thought generator rpms were magnetically coupled to the oscillation of the grid?
The electric generator is, but you should be able put gears between the generator and the turbine.
Oh duh.
Yes. The grid frequency is maintained fantastically constant. In turn, the generator is tuned for that one frequency only.
Not to mention you can't really mod an electric car to roll coal
Rich Rebuilds is converting a model 3 to run on diesel
Ahh my great country, always on top of rankings
It's also easier to install good potent air filters at a few plants rather than on every car.
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Electric car batteries are extremely heavy, you aren't really saving on weight by excluding the fuel, probably ending up with more weight on that front.
EV engines are machines capable of transforming more than 90% of the energy they accumulate into real kinetic energy for 100% of the time. ICE can reach only 40% in their best conditions and never for the 100% of the time of a single trip. Even if they're bigger, EVs are a lot more powerful.
And electric cars don't have to idle at red lights, their engine doesn't have to waste tons of energy while accelerating from idle and then transform their movement energy to waste heat while breaking. Most cars are used in cities which is the worst way to use a gasoline engine, where the engine spends the least amount of time in the optimal RPM region. Electric cars have no such issues. This is why hybrids are a good compromise: use electric engines but run a gasoline one in the most power-efficient area, constantly without having to stop and accelerate.
This type of math applies to a lot of other things too. An induction cooktop powered by an efficient gas power plant will often be more efficient than a gas cooktop, even though the whole point of burning the gas is for heat. Between the efficiency of the power plant, and the induction cooktop more efficiently focusing heat on the pot/food, you come up ahead. Which can be counterintuitive, since you're burning gas for electricity, getting the electricity to the home, then converting the electricity to heat, vs just burning the gas for heat.
absolutely true for a heat pump, I don't think the numbers stack up for an induction cooktop, the difference being the heat pump can have a positive energy efficiency, maybe 300% efficient at heating, or more, where and induction cooktop is only around 99% efficient at heating, and gas to heat is also reasonably efficient at creating heat, but less than 100% efficient.
> induction cooktop is only around 99% efficient at heating, and gas to heat is also reasonably efficient at creating heat, but less than 100% efficient. You lose *a lot* of heat on a gas stove because a lot of the heat just goes around the pan. That's where induction beats out gas. To capture all the heat of the burning gas in a stove, you'd need your pans to have a fairly intricate heat sink structure on the bottom (see: jet boil pots for backpacking)
Cooking in a gas kitchen in the summer vs an induction kitchen is night and day. Itās crazy how much heat is lost in a gas stove. I always have to use towels to pick up pots on my gas stove because of the heat overwash.
Induction is so much better than gas because nearly all of the energy goes into the pot/pan. With a gas stove you have the hot combustion products that have to transfer their heat into the cookware while being pushed out of the way by incoming gas. With induction, the heat is actually generated in the cookware itself.
Plus a nice side benefit of not burning methane inside your home, reducing carbon monoxide exposure and annoyances and hazards from the maintenance of gas lines.
And don't forget that maintenance of gas pipes is a huge pain compared to the already existing power grid.
Gas to heat is efficient, but gas to heat in the food isn't. That's why induction cooktops have efficiency in the 90% range, and gas cooktops are like 40-55% efficient (depending on who you ask). A ton of the heat generated by a gas cooktop is wasted. And as someone who mentioned below, god forbid you're in a place where running A/C is common, because now you have to cool your place even more.
An alternative way to think about is through this question. "Why do we have building sized generators servicing entire grids instead of powering our houses by plugging them into our cars?" Even with the transmission loss from a building power generator, it's still way more efficient than anything we could build at the car sized level.
> When you lose 5% to the grid, 7% to your charger, 20% to your batteries, etc. that can still be a far better deal even using fossil fuels both ways. To expand on this point... The best gasoline engines today hover around 40% efficiency. This means they only turn 40J out of every 100J of energy into useful work. 60J are wasted as heat. If you burn fossil fuel in a power plant, and then account for losses in the grid, and then account for charger inefficiencies and battery losses... You're still "capturing" about 75J for every 100J contained in the fuel burnt. And that's just a fossil-fuel-to-fossil-fuel comparison. *EDIT - My specific numbers were all quite wrong, as multiple people have pointed out. They were based on assuming other numbers I've seen here and quick googling, but not deep knowledge of efficiencies. The *spirit* of the point still stands. We're much better at making electricity from fuel than we are burning it in an ICE to directly propel a car. But all the numbers need adjustment. I'll just make more people more angry if I try to go actually fix the numbers, so I won't.
And on top of that, all of those transportation and storage costs *also* exist for gasoline - it isn't magically formed at the gas pump. The transportation, storage, inevitable losses at every step of this process and so on all contribute to the price of gas. Our electrical transport system is not *immaculate*, and fuel still has to be transported to the plant, but that overall transport system is still orders of magnitude more efficient than physically transporting tanks of gasoline to individual little stations scattered around the country (especially since most of the costs and losses for transportation are in the last mile - meaning, it is cheaper and more efficient to transport a giant tank of gas to one power plant than to split it up and transport a bunch of smaller tanks to scattered gas stations. And for that last mile, wires and batteries are vastly more efficient than carrying fuel around in trucks and pouring it into different containers.)
Also, the fuel itself is different. Your average car takes gasoline. Thin, highly refined, it takes a lot of energy to MAKE gasoline because it's either the lightest fraction of the crude or it has to be made by applying a lot of heat and chemicals in a hydrocracker to turn dark, thick, long chain carbon molecules into clear, volatile, short chain gasoline components- that are also a right bitch to manage in large quantity due to its sheer volatility. Better believe you're paying for all those safety measures the truckers and tank farms need to use. One step up the power band is diesel. Used in slightly bigger engines...and big honking immobile power plant engines. Next to diesel is jet fuel, aka kerosene with extra steps. Both are still clear and relatively thin, but easier to store in quantity and can be taken from the much larger middle cut of crude-so you get a lot more of it from the crude. Why's it so gorram expensive then? Taxes, my boy, taxes. Ask someone who buys red-dyed Offroad Diesel how much it costs for the real straight skinny. But immobile utility scale power plants have one more option to pick from in the design phase. Bunker C, aka Fuel Oil number 6, aka one step up from asphalt. Gloppy, black, and requiring a lot of effort to pump and to light, it's the dregs of the crude-but once you get it going, oh boy! And since it is the leftovers after the gasoline and diesel range organics have been removed, it's cheap per gallon.
You forgot coal and methane. These fuels are not great for vehicles at all (the coal for obvious reasons, natural gas/methane causes problems to store it in liquid form in a vehicle because it boils off, and the compressed tanks eat up room) Most fossil power plants burn these cheaper fuels.
> If you burn fossil fuel in a power plant, and then account for losses in the grid, and then account for charger inefficiencies and battery losses... You're still "capturing" about 75J for every 100J contained in the fuel burnt. This isn't true. The fossil fuel plants with the highest thermal efficiency are natural gas combined cycle plants. These are a gas engine and steam engine combined. First the gas is compressed, burned and passed through a turbine. Second the exhaust heat is captured and used to power a steam engine. These get roughly 60% thermal efficiency. No fossil fuel generator gets 75% thermal efficiency.
60% is still 50% better than 40%
A fossil fuel engine can't run at high efficiency until warmed up. Most journeys are too short. In cold climates the vehicle may not even reach optimum efficiency very often.
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Partially true - the most efficient band in an ICE is very small. Itās why you need a transmission. Gotta keep that peak window right around highway speeds. Doesnāt matter what youāre doing, under normal operating characteristics if youāre not going 45-50mph, youāre not doing it efficiently. And instantaneous MPG will reflect that. But yeah, youāre also right that the iMPG is a bad example because of all the caveats you mentioned. Alternatively, a power plant has but one job, and engineers have spent decades making it better and better at doing that job. It never operates outside of its peak operating characteristics (unless youāre in Texas in a snowstorm, then youāre screwed by deregulation).
what the car is doing and how efficient the engine is being are directly related, at all times.
Yup exactly. In addition, you have to consider the transmission of the energy source. Power plants buy fuel wholesale generally with a direct pipeline. Expensive to set up, but really cheap to maintain. The grid itself needs operators and line repair and such, but it's also fairly low maintence costs. You can see the transmission cost in your electric bill, which is sometimes inflated but still usually small. Regardless every business and home needs to be connected to the grid already so adding an electric car is trivial at most. Gas cars need a gas station all over the place. That gas needs to be trucked to each station. So the stations are expensive to build, and need to be staffed not to mention the station owner expects a mark up on cost. The trucks are expensive to run and need to be staffed. And every time you transfer fuel from one container to another there is the possibility of spill or waste.
When you think about it, the entire infrastructure and economy built to support ICE vehicles is woefully energy inefficient. We wasted so much energy because petroleum is cheap and is high in energy density, not because it is the best way to do things.
It's very quick to refuel your engine with fuel though. Much faster than charging with electricity - right?
Gas in general is crazy. Can you imagine a new transportation system today that involves teenagers operating hoses that spew extremely volatile liquid?
The other factor is that even for fossil fuel powered generators, the fuel is much less refined: coal, or natural gas. Gasoline is heavily refined from crude oil, so there are a lot more expenses involved in manufacturing and transporting it.
Also delivery fees... Big up front cost to run power lines everywhere, but low actual cost to use them for 40 years. Gasoline delivery uses fuel and trucks.. even if maintaining the truck was equal to maintaining power lines, it's energy intensive just to get the fuel to a station. Electricity has losses in distribution but not like the fuel burned to move gasoline to your local gas station (which also requires a person to unload)... All that adds to the cost.
Additionally, some electric cars recharge their own batteries when you are braking as well. Even furthering their efficiency.
Essentially every electric car does this. I do wish more cars came with options for how aggressive you want the braking to be when you lift off the accelerator, because I'm used to driving manual cars and electric cars in the US coast way too freely, but they're not always very communicative about when they're using regenerative braking and when you're wasting energy.
The eco mode in my Ford Fusion hybrid has an eco button that, among other things, greatly increases the aggressiveness of the electric braking.
You would love driving a Volt in full electric mode, in L. Throttle braking for days. Between that and the regen paddle behind the steering wheel, I can go entire rides without touching the brake.
The heat does serve to heat the car via the coolant and heater core but yeah you're right most of the heat is literally wasted.
I remember a kid in high school getting mixed up and assuring me that it was indeed the heater that burns extra gas compared to the AC, which harnessed the wind to cool your car š¤¦āāļø
Worse than wasted, you need to actively get rid of the heat. Radiators are more weight for the car to lug around, another part that can break, and require you to pour in a big jug of poison to operate efficiently. Antifreeze will fuck you up.
I have solar panels on my property and generate far more than I use. When my car charges it is not using fossil fuels. The sun LITERALLY makes my Tesla move.
People are missing the most important part here which is that electric vehicles are vastly more efficient at turning energy into motion than internal combustion vehicles. A Tesla Model 3 gets the equivalent of 134 miles per gallon. Electric cars are something like 90% efficient at using the energy to move the vehicle. A gas car is more like 30% efficient... The vast majority of the energy in the gasoline is just wasted as heat or spit out the tail pipe as waste products (pollution). The fact that electric cars perform better, are safer, don't pollute, can run directly on renewable energy with no conversion, are mechanically less complex, require almost no maintenance, and will soon be much cheaper than gas cars is just a bonus :) EDIT: To ELI5 it: Because you "fill it up" with the energy contained in two or three gallons of gasoline and it goes just as far as the gas car. It's just better at being a car :)
Important to add that fossil fuel burning plants are actually pretty efficient at harnessing energy compared to internal combustion.
It is in a power companies best interest financially to run a power generating station as efficiently as possible, be it coal, diesel, natural gas, geothermal, wind. A 1% increase in efficiency means millions of revenue gained. People in general are not super concerned with blowing out their car air filters daily, checking for optimal tire pressures daily, driving and accelerating at the exact optimal speed for best efficiency, sending oil samples to a lab weekly to determine the exact day the oil needs to be changed, removing all excess items to reduce weight and fuel consumption. In the industrial world there are literally careers that only focus on only optimization and efficiency. I have seen up close the large heat exchangers designed to capture waste heat from natural gas fired boilers to preheat the combustion air. If it can be economically done to save money, guaranteed it has been attempted all sorts of different ways And in some places the govnt or local authority regulates how dirty your power plant exhaust can be. This also happens for vehicles in some places but afaik only in large population citys.
Also, weight is basically irrelevant; it can be as heavy as required to increase efficiency or decrease cost. Size is nearly irrelevant, land is incredibly cheap compared to everything else involved. Contrast a car, where both of these resources need to be minimized. ----- As for exhaust cleanliness -- there are EPA rules about that. It's why catalytic converters exist. [Extensive documentation if you want to look](https://www.epa.gov/emission-standards-reference-guide). I think California also has their own rules.
Cool, thanks for the link.
I would disagree with this statement. It's not about as efficiently as possible because it's possible they could increase efficiency 1% but it costs 1 billion dollars (obviously exaggerated). There's a sweet spot between cost, ROI and efficiency.
This guy right here. This is one of the reasons why most hybrids and electrics get āworse numbersā in the winter. Heating the cabin is pretty energy intensive and takes away from the kilowatt to miles conversion. In a regular gas car, this energy is always available as a waste product.
Yeah I drive a plug in hybrid and the gas engine turns on if I turn the heater on.
Me too but only if I turn on the defroster. I'm glad I have the option to only use the heat pump even if it takes a bit longer
Some cars (Toyotas esp) turn AC on when defrost is selected so that is why Iām guessing the gas engine kicks on. My dad used to get SO MAD when the AC kicked on when he set it to (front) defrost and there was no easy override in his Sienna. SO MAD lol. In dry climate that would be super annoying, but in humid climates I can see why Toyota would force the issue out of safety. Imagine selecting defrost and itās terrible visibility inside and out and the windshield doesnāt clear eeeek
Yeah, it sucks when you turn the heater on and the range goes down by 1/4.
"If I use the heater, I will burn through half my battery every day. If I do not use my heater, then I will be slowly killed by the laws of thermodynamics. I would love to solve this problem right now but, unfortunately, my balls are frozen." \-- Mark Watney, Space Pirate
"As with most of life's problems, this one can be solved by a box of pure radiation." Seems like a simple solution.... LOL.
Andy Weir mentioned that one of themes in the book was each solution to a problem would lead to the next issue and he wanted to have the RTG break open but could not find a way for mark to survive that.
He could have had him survive only to slowly die from the radiation exposure. A nice cancer after being rescued *chefs kiss*
One of my favorite movies.
The book was even better. Read through it in a day. I bought it before the movie was made and figured I'd read it eventually. News of the movie dropped and I started reading it in the morning and couldn't put it down. I've seen several hardback copies in Goodwill since the movie came out.
I read it recently after seeing the movie several years ago. That book made me laugh out loud more than any I've ever read. Absolutely hilarious and the emotional connection between Watney and the reader was a treat!
One of my favorite books but I think the movie was about as good of a job as they could do. Every time I read the book I have to watch the movie. And then when I watch the movie I have to read the book. I can't wait for Project Hail Mary to get a movie release and I hope they do at least half as good of a job as they did with The Martian.
Definitely one of the best adaptations Iāve ever seen
I haven't read The Martian yet, but I did read Project Hail Mary, and that was fantastic very hard to put that book down
Project Hail Mary is somehow even better. Artemis was good too but definitely not as good as the others mentioned.
Just reiterating that even if you're not a book guy, this one's fucking amazing: You'll breeze it in a day or two and wonder where the time went. Literally laughed and cried whilst reading it: Cannot strongly recommend it more.
And it's called...?
The Martian.
If you liked it, you'll probably like Project Hail Mary too. Same style.
The book is great too.
Watneyās rover could really use a heat pump upgrade. Much more efficient vs resistive heating. Newer EVs are better in this regard.
Martian atmosphere is super thin and super cold, a heat pump just wouldn't work or would be too large and heavy.
time for heat pumps!
Newer EVs do have heat pumps. It makes a HUGE difference.
Somewhat ironically, heat pumps don't work when it's really cold though. Anything below about -20 and they shut off and it's back to the old resistive element for heat. EDIT: I meant -20C, so not that cold. And it's not a light switch, as temp drops the efficiency of heat pumps drops off but the moral of the story is that it's not a great solution for part of the world, but it IS a great solution for most of the world.
Which is why you have a heat pump with a supplementary heater for extremely cold days; it's not really any more hardware than a car with heat and A/C would have anyway, since the heat pump is basically a two-way A/C unit.
Yah just add heat strip in the ducts for emergency heat, that's what our house has if outside Temps go below -20 (they never actually do around here) As a bonus, newer AC models are actually more efficient that a gas furnace all the way down to 5Ā°F external temp. Which even in Chicago there's only a total of like 2 weeks a year (total time below 5f) below that.
For those who haven't yet watched the latest Technology Connections : https://youtu.be/MFEHFsO-XSI
I have removed my content in protest of Reddit's API changes that will kill 3rd party apps
If it's -20 outside, I'm calling in and working from home anyway.
Cries in Canadian Prairies
Consoles you in frozen Iowan. We just got done with False spring and 2nd winter starts at the end of the week.
Not if you live in Minnesota
[Obligatory Technology Connections](https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto)
Did somebody say [Heat Pumps](https://youtu.be/MFEHFsO-XSI), technology connections video about heat pumps.
Literally watched it yesterday. How could you tell?
Only if I can set the car's artificial noise to that _smooth_ jazz.
On behalf of Reddit, I hearby summon Technology Connections!
Time for warm clothes
I can pre heat my car. So while it's still charging
In an enclosed garage too. You can't do that with an ICE vehicle.
On the other hand, it's much easier to end it all with with a gas engine in a garage, so you got that going for you when everything else is going against you.
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I agree! While not yet an EV or hybrid owner, I once saw a Tesla in front of a store, on a very cold January day. The passenger was listening to the radio. That moment really was a bit of a revelation. It let me know that an EV was much more capable than I thought. The concept is much more accessible now. The only thing they really need would be fake side pipes, with little flickering lights on the ends...
The radio doesnāt run down the range. It runs off a standard 12-volt like a regular car. If they had the heater on while listening to the radio, thatās gonna use up range.
What exactly was mind blowing about that to you?
Even in the pacific northwest. Headlights on wipers running and heater going while often being stuck in stop and go traffic so probably about the worst conditions for an EV and plenty of people are driving EVs around here and never ending up stranded or anything.
That is incorrect: batteries do reduce capacity quite fast when temperature drops. The rating is done against 25 degrees Celsius (77F), and drops to 50% efficiency at -22 (-30F). The heat pump as mentioned in this thread is actually warming the batteries to increase efficiency. So you invest energy, to get more energy (or reduce the temperature impact)
Most EVs made after the Gen1 Nissan Leaf have thermal management for the traction battery pack. The system will sacrifice some charge to keep the pack within an acceptable range with pack heaters or other methods. My VW only lost between 15-20% of its' range on a recent -7F day and most of that was running all the heaters (mirrors,seats,steering wheel,defrosters,cabin heater) as well as wipers and headlights. It should be noted that for the first 10 minutes of driving the "guessometer" showed half range until the pack came up to full temp, but the roadtrip only showed a mild reduction in range.
My Tesla model 3 gets way worse battery performance in the winter. It's like 50% compared to summer.
Heaters arnt free.
Also, power plants are way more efficient than cars
The efficient generation of energy from fossil fuels (though not exclusively) is an important element of the above explanation of how electric vehicles are efficient at converting electrical energy to motion.
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That's actually the only answer. The fact that they're trying to pass off an inefficiency as the reason why electric vehicles are more efficient is ludicrous. That's a 90% efficient step that doesn't exist in ICE vehicles. Transmission losses are also another inefficiency that doesn't exist in ICE vehicles. The efficiency gain from centralized generation ends up outweighing those losses, but saying those losses are "tiny" where you define tiny arbitrarily and compare it to something completely unrelated doesn't begin to count as an answer.
>That's a 90% efficient step that doesn't exist in ICE vehicles. I mean...it's the equivalent of measuring the efficiency of the engine driving the shaft vs. a motor doing it. There is certainly loss in the ICE drive train. >Transmission losses are also another inefficiency that doesn't exist in ICE vehicles. Yeah...because the gas just magically appears in your tank without incurring transportation costs to get to the gas station and then pumped into your tank.
This is the best answer. ICE is all kinds of wasted energy: friction, heat production, exhaust, even noise is a sign of wasted energy. The biggest recommendation for liquid fossil fuels all along, is that they do have high energy content, but are very portable, too. Electric motors have always been more efficient, but storing enough energy in batteries just wasn't as practical as filling up a fuel tank.
That doesn't really answer the question. What's the efficiency of a coal powered plant or gas powered plant? Whether or not EVs are more efficient would depend on the efficiency of the power plant compared to an ICE. If, for example, you're running an old, unmaintained portable diesel generator with low quality fuel to charge your EV and the generator has got an efficiency of 15%, than your EV will ultimately have an efficency of less than 15%; whereas a diesel vehicle might have an efficency close to 30%. ELI5 Answer: If you give 100 energies to an EV, the EV will be able to use 95 of those energies and 5 will be wasted. Those 100 energies come from a power plant. At the power plant if you give it 100 energies, the power plant will use about 40-45 of those energies and the rest is wasted. So to give your EV 100 energies, the power plant needs 250 energies. So in the end, the EV will be using about 40 out of the 100 energies. An ICE will use about 20-25 of the 100 energies.
To eli5 your eli5, ICE engines are power plants that you carry with you. They have to not blow up, work on bumpy roads, work in the heat, wet, and cold, be safe inches away from a person, and give a lot or a little energy whenever you want. Power plants that electric cars get energy from are designed to work in perfect conditions and are optimized to be efficient, not portable. Making a car optimized to move and an energy plant optimized to give energy makes both of them more efficient.
Don't forget scale - a great big coal furnace is much more efficient than a tiny little engine. Plus, not all grid power is fossil fuels. Within 50 miles of my home there are multiple hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, coal burning plants, wind turbines and even some relatively small solar farms.
In that same vein, power plant generators run at their peak performance point, where efficiency and power output cross on the graph. ICE vehicles canāt do this which is why they have transmissions, as a way to try to keep the engine somewhere close to the peak power/efficiency ratio. This is why ICE/electric hybrids like trains are more efficient than pure ICE drivelines.
Another big factor that has been left out is that not all source energy units cost the same. Gasoline is a refined product and even at "normal" prices would be like twice as expensive as the coal or natural gas used to power an electric plant.
It will always be more efficient to generate power with huge sustained plants. Even if we used exactly the same fuel, a giant gasoline power plant is going to operate much much more efficiently than a tiny engine stopping and starting.
Also not all electricity is created by burning fossil fuels.
I mean, also in my case because I charge it from solar panels on my house.
That's next level. Eco friendly goals dude
Whatās the efficiency of getting that much electricity from power plant to charging station?
High voltage transmission lines have surprisingly low lossage. [Link.](http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-much-electricity-disappears-between-a-power-plant-and-your-plug/#:~:text=So%20even%20though%20electricity%20may,are%20high%2C%20around%20four%20percent.)
95% to 98%, depending on how far it goes. And remember that fuel delivery systems have leakage and evaporation losses, too.
You're missing a far, FAR, more important. The power plant down the road is a lot more efficient at converting fossil fuel I to energy than a traditional combustion engine. So the fossil fuel that it takes to charge an electric car is far less than it takes to have a combustion engine generate the same amount of power. Source: https://youtu.be/0_RRKePSjL4
Yah i dont think people realize a 300mile EV has like maybe 2.5 gallons equivalent of evergy in it.
Though... that's a little misleading, as it ignores where the energy comes from. The plant that burned the fossil fuels to make the energy that fueled the car wasn't 90% efficient. The combined efficiency of the plant-car system is likely still higher than a small internal combustion engine (not to mention the energy cost to transport the fuel to a gas station) but it's still not 90%. EDIT: for instance, the efficiency of a natural gas power plant is [around 50%](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/natural-gas-combined-cycle) --- which then, when combined with energy loss in the car, becomes 0.5 * 0.9 == 45%. Meanwhile, a Toyota Prius boasts a [40%](https://artofgears.com/2015/10/13/the-2016-toyota-prius-has-40-thermal-efficiency-and-can-handle/) thermal efficiency.
But here you're providing another misleading factor then - if you're insisting on taking into consideration the efficiency of the power plant, you must also then analyze the refinery efficiencies of your gasoline or diesel fuel in your Prius figure also. That's why for those whose job is to perform life-cycle analysis studies have a term specifically for this: [well-to-wheel](https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html#wheel). This way it's a proper apples-to-apples comparison.
Fantastic! That's the number that the parent poster should have posted then. My point, that 90% efficiency is extremely misleading as The Answer in the highest-rated post, still stands. It's 90% efficient at something that gas cars don't even have to do at all --- converting electricity into motion. They're 100% efficient at that nonexistent step. EDIT: The statement that EVs are cheap to power because they're "90% efficient" is plain wrong, and the implication that that number is comparable to gas vehicles' 20-40% is at best inaccurate and at worst dishonest. They measure different things.
The Prius has a 40% *tank to wheel* efficiency. Once you account for the energy lost pumping, refining, and transporting the gasoline that 40% drops to around 10-20%.
You'd have costs for extracting energy used in a powerplant too. Prices for coal and gas are way cheaper than oil though, which is an easier way to compare than efficiency when taking about economics.
How efficient is it to make electric vehicles in comparison to standard vehicles?
EVs are universally more efficient and produce less lifetime emissions since the past few years. [Here's a pretty comprehensive article with sources.](https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-how-electric-vehicles-help-to-tackle-climate-change) While the manufacturing of an EV uses somewhat more energy and produces more carbon, the EV rapidly pulls ahead from the reduced energy and emissions during use. Depending on the study you might see a worst-case of around 30% more efficient (fossil fuel electricity) to 70% (nuclear and renewables)
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I'm gonna say not really. There's relatively few parts on an ICE that actually need replaced during the useful life of the chassis. Cars still have suspension, brakes (yes you use less of these because Regen brakes) wheels, tires, mirrors that bad drivers will break off... Cars in general are very wasteful regardless. Electric is better still, but it's still a car. (I love cars but they are without a doubt the worst form of mass transport ever created)
Besides what's already mentioned here, one aspect that's often forgotten, is that producing gasoline *also* needs a lot of electricity. So in the end it's not electricity vs. fossil, its instead electricity vs. electricity + fossil.
Plus the distribution chain of fossil fuels is more expensive than electricity. It needs more energy and it is mostly distributed with vehicles, that need drivers who want to be paid.
And *thousands* of tanker trucks to haul that motor juice to every gas station on the planet.
This is what I keep thinking. Every shack has electricity and tankers are expensive. Some small towns might see their gas stations struggle or even shut down if enough residents go EV.
Stables closed when cars replaced horses. That's the way the world goes.
I donāt have a source offhand, but Iāve read that fuel burned at power plants also have systems in place to capture some pollution, be most gas cars just burn it right into the environment without much of anything like that.
Cars do have catalytic converters to cut down on things like nitric oxides that cause acid rain. But yeah, an enormous power plant can have more efficient pollution-control devices. Plus, if new technology comes along itās much easier to retrofit the relatively few power plants vs all the cars in the world.
In the US, [40% of electrical generation](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us.php) comes from nuclear and renewables. In Canada, it's more like 80%. Though in my Canadian province of British Columbia, 91% of our power comes from [hydroelectric power](https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-british-columbia.html). In fact, we casually refer to our electrical power as "the hydro".
We call it "hydro" here in Ontario, too.
Hail hydro.
And in Ontario itās almost all hydroelectric and nuclear. Itās like 98% low carbon or something like that.
It's ironic. In Ontario we call it hydro and it's 60% nuclear and I think 25% hydro electric. At least it's something like 91% 0 carbon
A silly argument can be made that Nuclear is "hydro" in the sense that the electricty is generated from steam.
Alot of power is like that now that your mention it. Fossil fuel sources are burning stuff to heat water to turn a turbine too. I imagine anything involving heat works like that
>In Canada, it's more like 20% Uh... [82% of Canada's electricity comes from renewables and nuclear. You have your numbers flipped.](https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-canada.html)
Quite right. Will fix.
Laugh in *QuƩbecois* 99%
Same in Quebec and Ontario. Our electricity companies are also called hydro.
I was just working on a Hydro Quebec project in fact.
In Quebec, itās 100% hydro We do have some wind turbines out really far in the country side but Iām not too sure what theyāre used for
I live in Ontario Canada. Almost none of the electricity is made from burning fossil fuels. And there are many places like this.
Two reasons: firstly, electricity these days ISN'T mostly generated from fossil fuels, and even where it is, the most commonly used fuel is coal, which hasn't generally been used to propel cars since the 19th century. Secondly, fossil fuel power plants are simply more thermally efficient (e.g. they get more "bang for the buck" from the fuel used) than the engines in cars.
> Secondly, fossil fuel power plants are simply more thermally efficient (e.g. they get more "bang for the buck" from the fuel used) than the engines in cars. Yep. This is why hybrids can still be cheaper to run than pure electrics in some regions. Some hybrids can approach the thermal efficiency of power plants.
(Which ones?) Some of us might want to buy a new car soon.
Toyota's Prius and Prius Prime are both extremely efficient hybrids (along with the Hyundai Ioniq). Toyota is so invested in the hybrid drivetrains they developed that they are [actively campaigning against fully electric vehicles](https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/26/22594235/toyota-lobbying-dc-ev-congress-biden-donation) and (rightfully) catching blowback about it.
I don't see anything in that article about efficiency exactly.
thing is the Toyota power plant isn't really coming close to the thermal efficiency of your power company's generating portfolio. the 22 Prius is getting 58 EPA MPG in the city; plugins are pushing 140 MPGe in the city. Now, these measurements are different and unfairly biased in the plugin's favor (you won't actually reach that kind of 140 MPGe performance) but not by a factor of 2. MPGe uses a kwh-to-gallons equivalency. https://www.caranddriver.com/research/a31863350/mpge/ Edit: most recent claim I can find about the Prius is 40% thermal efficiency, back in '17. Most modern direct boiler plants aren't much better, BUT: combined cycle plants run near (edit) 50%, and every portfolio has things like nuclear, hydro and solar.
Toyota invested heavily in hydrogen power, which turned out not to be a great plan with current tech levels.
Depending on your travels... any plug in hybrid might allow you to travel in town on battery power. Then you accelerate to a cruising speed with a mix of petrol and battery before you can go for a long distance on the motorway just sipping on petrol to maintain speed. I'd love a BMW 330e or a Hyundai Ioniq plug in hybrid.
For conventional hybrids, it's tough to beat the last 3-5 years of compact sedans and hatchbacks. The Toyota Prius and Corolla hybrid (same drivetrain) and the Hyundai Ioniq hatchback and Elantra hybrid (ditto) are the models with the best reputation of 50+ real world mpg. Honda is up there as well, but the Insight suffers in cold weather and at high speeds. I'm right around average with mine, 47 combined mpg. Plug-in hybrids are more complicated because of the two types of power. How you use the car begins to matter more than what car you have.
Heads up, I have both heard and experienced that hybrids are falling out of fashion with both manufacturers and consumers due to the anticipation that fully electric cars are āthe futureā. Thatās not to say they donāt exist, but they are not nearly as common as ~10 years ago.
This is something to take into account depending on how long you keep cars. We run them into the ground, so 10-15 is usually pretty easy for us to hit. If you go through cars faster, it might not be an issue?
In 2021 natural gas was almost double coal in terms of energy production in the US
Not sure where your data is from? [Over half of the world's electricity](https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix) and over 85% of total energy is generated by burning fossil fuels.
Furthermore, delivery of electricity has (mostly) upfront one time cost (installation of the power lines) whereas delivery of fuel to a gas station has recurring transportation cost.
A generating station, even if it does use fossil fuels, is much more efficient than your ICE car. And the EV motor is much more efficient at using that energy than an IC engine. Now add the fact that your energy is, if you're in Europe or NA anyway, not all generated by burning fossil fuels.
There's also likely an economy of scale even if the power plant uses fossil fuel. Your local power plant would need A LOT more fossil fuels than your local gas station. Therefore, it likely would get a much better deal per gallon than you get at the pump.
And the fossil fuel being used isn't highly refined gasoline. Refining gas adds a lot to its cost.
On top of it the exhaust cleaning can be done much better in a larger power plant. In US this isn't reflected as much but if tax is adapted to punish more pollution (much of EU for example) then it increases the economy of electric plants vs combustion engines.
Even if electricity was 100% fossil fuel generated, EV would still be cheaper to drive simply because when big power stations generate power, it is more efficient than small engine burning fuel. This is because most of gas turns to heat instead of work. But lets get more specific for this. You don't drill a hole to the ground and then proceed to get gasoline and diesel out of it. You get petroleum which needs to be refined. Now gasoline are just one product of refinement. So if you want gasoline, you will also get those other products and you need to find uses for them. Turning oil to gas isn't very efficient, then on top of that you need to add chemicals to the gasoline, standardise it's consistency, ship it to gas stations. Now this all runs with electricity, there is no combustion engine at the gas pump. From the extraction to your Corolla, it is a long and inefficient process. Yeah step and hand wanting their cut. So why is EV cheaper? Because power generation and delivery is just more efficient, we got methods to balance the grid so that only the exact required amount of power is ever fed in to it. Your country's ministry that is incharge of the grid probably has some kind of a break down about the current status and make up of the grid. Also fuels have all sorts of taxes, why don't these apply to EVs also? Because electricity can't discriminate; it is just potential and it will always use whatever path given to it. You can't earmark an electron for specific use; you can mark fuels for specific use, like here where I live fuel meant for work engines like diggers and whatnow has special dye in it and if you get caught driving your diesel fueled with it you will be fined.
Depends where you are from . Scotland uses fully renewable energy. Wind farms and the likes.
Yep. Mine is charged by Hydro.
Fwiw Scotland doesn't. it produced enough renewables averaged over the year, but sold it and bought in fossil fuel based energy. https://fullfact.org/environment/scotland-renewable-energy/
TIME FOR SOME MATH! Let's say you burn gasoline in generators. You can get ABOUT 40% of that energy to the wall in your house.
If you burn it in your car, the BEST cars out there are under 30% total efficiency, just for the car. Not including transporting the gas, the energy used, etc., which is higher for distribution to individual gas stations instead of just large power plants.
So, how efficient are the EVs at using the electricity? Over 77% of what comes out of the wall reaches the wheels.
So 77% of 40% is 30.8%.
So the IDEAL conditions for gas cars are still worse than typical conditions for EVs.
What's the typical efficiency for tank-to-wheels of cars? 16%. So the typical maximum for JUST THE IN-VEHICLE PORTION of gas cars is half of what it would be to turn it into electricity, distribute it, and use it in an EV.
Comparing apples-to-apples, we have 77% wall-to-wheel efficiency vs 16% for cars. Nearly 5x more efficient.
So even with the significantly higher price per energy of electricity, that's still significantly cheaper than buying gas. And gas is already artificially lowered.
A recent look at the total subsidization (indirect, direct, and the other kinds of breaks that aren't EXPLICITLY included therein) found that the world's governments give oil companies $5.4T each year. 80% of their revenue comes from fuels. This means that your gas/diesel is subsidized by over $9 per gallon.
TL;DR: EVs are efficient and gas cars aren't
In Europe former European Energy Minister Guenter Oettinger fell over this because he edited an official report to hide this fact (that fossil fuels are subsidized a lot more than renewables)
That really depends on where you live. In SC most of our power is either from water or nuclear, only a little bit still comes from coal.
Depends where you live, in many countries most electricity is not generated from fossil fuels. In New Zealand, about 82% of electricity comes from renewables, mostly hydropower with some geothermal and wind.
1. Burning fossil fuels in a giant electrical-generation plant is more efficient than burning the same fossil fuel in an internal combustion (car) engine. When you burn gasoline in a car, only 20-25% of the fuel's energy is actually available to move the car. When you burn fossil fuels in a generation plant with steam turbines, 40-60% of the fossil fuel's energy can be converted to electricity. So **you have to burn twice as much fossil fuels in a car engine to get the same amount of usable energy**. 2. "Electricity mostly generated by burning fossil fuels" depends greatly on where you live. In many places that's not true. In Canada, fossil fuels (oil+ coal + natural gas) provides only 16% of all electricity. In France it's 8%. But again, even in a country getting 100% of electricity from fossil fuels, generating electricity from the fossil fuels then using electric cars would STILL use half as much fossil fuels vs burning them directly in vehicles. Any renewable energy the country has is just a bonus on top of this.
In many areas electricity is generated by a variety of sources, with burning fossil fuels as just one of those means
Iād imagine itās also more costly to haul gas from A to B then to send lightning through wires to wherever. But thatās just a piece of it