Quote:
Originally Posted by Doctor///M
As it stands today, natural gas and coal are the main sources for electricity generation. Not to mention the scale of surface mining required to produce the batteries and convert the transportation fleet to electric. Getting off fossil fuels is a little more complicated than that, and still has a very important role to play in the transition, wherever it may take us.
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I agree on the battery materials, there's no getting around that but as EVs scale up, recycling of those materials is improving significantly.
In regards to the sources of electricity generation, it's much better to generate electricity from fossil fuels and then power EVs than it is to burn fossil fuels in an ICE. EVs are *really* efficient for the energy used and you can produce electricity really well at scale in power plants. As a rough example, a US gallon of gasoline has about 33 kWh of power ('gasoline gallon equivalent'). So an X5's full tank has ~700 kWh of 'energy' in it compared to the iX's ~100 kWh. I don't know how accurate these numbers are and there are obviously losses throughout the energy system but it's widely accepted that the efficiency of EVs is significantly better than ICEs, which are quite inefficient at turning raw resources into driving force.
It'll all work a lot better as national power generation moves more to renewable sources, of course. There's been a *huge* change here in the UK over the last few years with renewables accounting for 43% of the power in 2020, double what it was in 2014 and renewables now account for more energy generation than fossil fuels here. Obviously, the US has a way to go yet and is going about it a lot slower than the rest of the developed world but c'est la vie.