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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