Originally Posted By: EdwardC
Originally Posted By: SeaJay
Originally Posted By: surfstar
Originally Posted By: SeaJay
Last I looked, burning coal and natural gas accounts for a good chunk of electicity generation. Diesel oil, or #2 oil is still used in some plants.
Guess what large power plants are very good at? Efficiency. Taking electricity from a power plant and putting it into your car for fuel, is much more efficient than extracting oil from the ground, refining it into gasoline, transferring it into a tank in the ground, then into your car, which then burns it, quite inefficiently, as fuel.
So look a little harder.
It is easy enough to toss around statements such as "much more". Can you quantify, even if only a ballpark estimate how much is "much more"
I think that's a valid question. I did a quick Google out of curiosity and found this article:
http://truecostblog.com/2009/01/04/electric-vs-gasoline/
At the very bottom, it says:
Footnotes:
[1] Electrical energy is created by burning fossil fuels in a power plant at 40% efficiency, followed by transmitting it to your house at 93% efficiency, and using it in an electric vehicle at 92% efficiency, providing a total efficiency of around 34% for an electric vehicle. Crude oil refineries operate at 75% efficiency, and gasoline distribution might cause another 6% energy loss. Since internal combustion engines are only 20% efficient, total efficiency would be around 14%. Assuming that the natural gas and oil to power our vehicles comes from the same well, we can directly compare these efficiencies, and thus conclude that electric vehicles are significantly more efficient.
Obviously no reference or anything, but it's something. I imagine if the power was from some other source (solar/wind/nuclear), the 34% would be higher.
Correct and a lot of states don't get the majority of their power from coal, a lot comes from natural gas and other sources. Again the article goes into this in great depth. Overall coal accounts for 39% of US domestic energy production and is decreasing.
Again lifted from the article because no one seems to want to invest the time to actually read up on the subject. This is where we are now, also lets compare apples to apples. The Model S does not compete with a 40mpg Civic, It competes with a 20mpg S550.
So in all states its ahead of the S550, and in some its out of the ball park ahead.
Now this is at today's power generation numbers which again as it was spelled out in the article are improving. Musk wants to drastically increase solar generation which would throw those MPG's averages by state up into the thousands literally.
I disagree with Musk I don't think solar is the total solution, but I do think it can be a pretty big chunk of the US energy pie:
SolarCity is an electric generation company no different than oh lets say CL&P. The only difference is instead of building power plants they are using already existing structures IE your houses roof, and putting generation on them, ie solar panels. Lets see if it works.
Interestingly its actually much closer to Edison's idea for the grid, IE local generation and in Edison's case DC. Edison's idea with Tesla's current?