Saturday, September 08, 2018

Reefer Madness (Revised)


I have been curious as to whether Elon Musk's  (ditto California's) chimera of converting ALL our petroleum-driven vehicles to electric ones. I have performed the following very rough calculations ... which I welcome you dear readers to check and, hopefully, verify:

Daily US number of vehicle miles driven: 8.8 brillion  miles (2015)

Range of electric vehicles (Tesla): 250 miles

= 35.2 million ... average number of daily recharges of US electric vehicles

X  94 KWh ... power used per vehicle recharge (Tesla cars ... much more for trucks)

= 3.3  billion KWh total additional US electric power demand per day

versus 10.7 billion KWh current (2016) US electric power usage per day

Ergo: For the US to go all electric vehicles, we would have to expand our electric power generation capacity by something like 30%. It ain't gonna happen ... certainly not with just wind and solar ... which now represents 10% of our generation ... and would have to expand at least 13 fold.

I think you may now guess why Elon Musk is smoking weed.

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