Slow thinker…

Originally posted by GiddyYup: ↑

I neither said nor assumed charging your EV every day in my calculations. Maybe you should try reading it again and try to understand it.

But lets hear your theory, or more appropriately your "master strategy" shall we. I really hope you aren't going to try and tell us that you would use a single battery to just partially top up your EV at the end of each day thus requiring only a single battery because only a ""simpleton" (your words) forgets that battery life is directly linked to charging cycles and doing so will shorten the life of your EV dramatically. Charging every few days doesn't reduce the number of batteries required to store your power unless you are willing to partially charge and thus prematurely kill your EV.

Of coarse its obvious to most that my back of the envelope calculations were to provide context to the commonly held idea that as diesel and petrol cars are removed from the market, that EVs somehow like magic won't consume fossil fuels from the grid because most will charge from their own home self produced power. I believe this utopian idea is a nice one but a very, very long way from reality any time soon.

New battery technologies will emerge which may change the equation but that said we have been talking about this for decades and still don't have any such technologies available so they don't change the energy debate in the hear or now, nor in the likely lifespan of an EV that you choose to buy today. Endless waffle about some unknown new tech providing a solution at some unknown point in time is as useful and Gerry Harvey's comments that we shouldn't worry about overpopulation because its the job of future technology to resolve the issues that eventuate from this and that we should take the benefits of a larger population now and worry about the problem later.

Many people buying EVs today are under an illusion that they are doing something good for the environment and they like to believe that some wind turbine somewhere is exclusively pushing out electrons to charge their EV, and that some giant grid battery is out there somewhere which exclusively holds power to charge EVs at night. The fact is your EVs are being charged from burning coal and gas. Its a simple undeniable fact that the total of all "Green" power pushed into the grid is insufficient to make any reasonable dent in our demand for traditional baseload power for homes and businesses alone. Now try loading on the charging of several million EVs onto the grid and convince me that any of this new additional load is in any way being serviced by "green" power. We don't have any plan to build sufficient green power to replace existing demand for homes and businesses so none of the new load (EVs) can possibly be serviced from green grid power.

There are alternatives such as hydrogen fuel cells. The tech exists. The cars exist in other markets but our govt is hell bent on supporting the car industries car equivalent of the 3D TV. In 10 years we will throw them in land fill creating untold pollution due to the significantly reduced lifespan than traditional cars and we will replace them with the latest fad. One thing you can bet on is whatever the car industry come up next will be in the best interests of their business model, not consumers or the environment. But hey, I'm not the "Master Strategist" as you claim to be.

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Great post. Two key points:
A current EV recharged from the grid, fully acknowledging that it is primarily coal and gas fired, is more efficient than an equivalent petrol or diesel car.
A 20 year old Toyota Prius is more efficient than the most theoretically perfect hydrogen fuel cell car.

Notes:
Using grid power at 33% efficient by the time it is delivered to the consumer and an 85% efficient EV gives 28% efficiency. ICE vehicles are typically 25%
Hybrids are more efficient than typical ICE cars (IE: better than 25%), hydrogen fuel cell cars are around 20% at best due to the extremely low efficiency of hydrogen production (95%), compression (85%), supply (90%), and use (50%) from an electricity supply (50%... super generous just to be nice). Total efficiency driving that hydrogen powered car around... 18%.

The only reason we are still talking about hydrogen is that it appears to seamlessly replace the fossil fuels we currently use. Who is promoting it??? Well that isn't hard to work out... +99% of industrial hydrogen production is by steam reforming natural gas, and the fossil fuel companies already have the infrastructure in place to deliver it... so they see it as a simple transition which keeps them fat and happy.