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We need your help to tackle the transport challenge!
Former Community Member
Our aim is not to “drain the ocean” in a few months but to add a voice of engineering insight to the debate, demolish potential myths and legends and suggest some sensible ways forward. We don’t expect to achieve pinpoint accuracy in our investigation, but we can be honest about that. We want to establish some genuine truths and point to where more work or funding should be focussed. We need more information and guidance to existing reliable reports and research on carbon in materials mining and manufacture, infrastructure provision, renewal and maintenance, and end of life recycling. Please share your thoughts by commenting below.
These are some calculations I made and posted on here a couple of years ago. This is based on Germany but I don't think the UK's numbers are that different:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is a lot written regarding the replacement of fossil fuelled (petrol and diesel) cars with electric cars. Some suggest it is easy, others suggest it is impossible. I decided to look briefly at the electricity requirements required to do this in Germany. First step how much petrol and diesel is currently used? From the IEA www.iea.org/.../GermanyOSS.pdf Germany petrol and diesel consumption 2010-2011. Petrol 450 000 barrels per day Diesel 1050 000 barrels per day As a cross check on the total consumption: world.bymap.org/OilConsumption.html Total consumption petroleum consumption for Germany 2015 2 372 000 barrels per day Next step what is the electrical energy equivalent of 1 barrel of Petrol/Diesel? From a couple of sources: peakoil.com/.../how-much-energy-is-there-in-a-barrel-of-oil 1 barrel (crude) is 1,700 kilowatt hours letthesunwork.com/.../barrelofenergy.htm A barrel of oil contains about six gigajoules of energy. That’s six billion joules or 1667 kilowatt-hours If we take 1.7 MWh per barrel for petrol annual automotive energy input is: Petrol 765 000 MWh per day= 765 GWh per day = 279 000 GWh = 279 TWh Assuming an efficiency of 20% for a petrol vehicle the energy required for petrol automotive use in Germany is 55.8 TWh per year. Taking an overall efficiency for an electric vehicle to be 80% (electricity transmission losses, battery charging efficiency) replacing the petrol vehicles with electric vehicles would require 70 TWh per year. What proportion of the diesel is for automotive use against road or rail transport is not obvious. Suggesting a total of 100TWh for the annual automotive consumption seems reasonable. If all the diesel consumers were replaced by electric vehicles the annual electricity consumption would increase by around 220 TWh per year Currently Germany produces around 600 TWh of electricity annually. www.cleanenergywire.org/.../germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts Increasing this to 700 TWH to allow for the charging of electric cars is not trivial, nor is the reinforcement of the distribution infrastructure. Increasing to 820 TWh to replace all fossil fuelled transport is probably impossible in the suggested time scales.
These are some calculations I made and posted on here a couple of years ago. This is based on Germany but I don't think the UK's numbers are that different:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There is a lot written regarding the replacement of fossil fuelled (petrol and diesel) cars with electric cars. Some suggest it is easy, others suggest it is impossible. I decided to look briefly at the electricity requirements required to do this in Germany. First step how much petrol and diesel is currently used? From the IEA www.iea.org/.../GermanyOSS.pdf Germany petrol and diesel consumption 2010-2011. Petrol 450 000 barrels per day Diesel 1050 000 barrels per day As a cross check on the total consumption: world.bymap.org/OilConsumption.html Total consumption petroleum consumption for Germany 2015 2 372 000 barrels per day Next step what is the electrical energy equivalent of 1 barrel of Petrol/Diesel? From a couple of sources: peakoil.com/.../how-much-energy-is-there-in-a-barrel-of-oil 1 barrel (crude) is 1,700 kilowatt hours letthesunwork.com/.../barrelofenergy.htm A barrel of oil contains about six gigajoules of energy. That’s six billion joules or 1667 kilowatt-hours If we take 1.7 MWh per barrel for petrol annual automotive energy input is: Petrol 765 000 MWh per day= 765 GWh per day = 279 000 GWh = 279 TWh Assuming an efficiency of 20% for a petrol vehicle the energy required for petrol automotive use in Germany is 55.8 TWh per year. Taking an overall efficiency for an electric vehicle to be 80% (electricity transmission losses, battery charging efficiency) replacing the petrol vehicles with electric vehicles would require 70 TWh per year. What proportion of the diesel is for automotive use against road or rail transport is not obvious. Suggesting a total of 100TWh for the annual automotive consumption seems reasonable. If all the diesel consumers were replaced by electric vehicles the annual electricity consumption would increase by around 220 TWh per year Currently Germany produces around 600 TWh of electricity annually. www.cleanenergywire.org/.../germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts Increasing this to 700 TWH to allow for the charging of electric cars is not trivial, nor is the reinforcement of the distribution infrastructure. Increasing to 820 TWh to replace all fossil fuelled transport is probably impossible in the suggested time scales.
