A study was made for Switzerland. If all private cars were going electric, it will only require an additional 17% to the current electric generation. This is not a shitload... People keep forgetting that the yield of an ICE is really really bad.
First, you are only talking about generation component. 17% may not seem like much until you consider that 1. it is roughly half of existing nuclear generation, which is already decided to be phased out 2. some nuclear reactors provide heating 3. that "only" 17% is equal to total consumption of one Baltic state.
That is for Switzerland alone, which is measly small compared to EEA population. For the sake of argument round that 17% to be 10 TWh. Switzerland owns roughly 6 mio private vehicles. EEA owns roughly 250 mio. According to referenced study EEA needs "only" roughly 400 TWh additional generation, or something like 60 nuclear reactors.
You just proved my point with data - it is shitloads of additional energy.
Second, that additional energy will have to be moved somehow. You not only need ample generation, but also cross-region links, transmission grids and distribution lines to actual homes/chargers.
Even if Switzerland just buys LPG and transmits electricity using that LPG, it is much more efficient to generate energy in big plants than in car motors. I do not see electricity generation a problem. Long routes are still problem though in Europe where I am used to going with 170km/h, but 150km/h is normal on the highway in Eastern Europe.
This is a problem only in corrupt countries. Switzerland is one of the few countries where government projects finish on time in the planned amount of money.
Ah yes. In non-corrupt countries those plants and pipelines and distribution grids appear out of thin air.
It's just amazing how "we need to build huge ass plants and all the infrastructure" is just dismissed as insignificant (also in a similar discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32992808).
Yes it's an issue when people have decided that energy generation should be outsources somewhere else... If you close your nuclear reactor you can only blame yourself if your power generation infrastructure is undersized.
Can we please stop to compare to a Baltic state when their size is smaller than that of a western Europe large city. It doesn't bring anything to the comparison. (I'm pretty sure it's an order of magnitude of what San Marino need)
Just to put in perspective your 60 nuclear reactors, currently China is building 36 new reactor, 50 more are in final project phase and in total they will add 160 new reactors in the next 20 years. This coupled with the massive installation of renewable, China is the only country that is going to handle the CO2 problem in the foreseeable future.
> Can we please stop to compare to a Baltic state when their size is smaller than that of a western Europe large city. It doesn't bring anything to the comparison. (I'm pretty sure it's an order of magnitude of what San Marino need)
Ah yes. Some countries are more equal than others.
Estonia is 15% of Swiss population if you want to compare populations. So, to indulge your insistence to only talk about Switzerland and completely ignoring the bigger picture, Estonia's population is more than Zurich, Geneva, Basel, Lausanne, Bern, and Winterthur combined. Ah yes, and consumes more than San Marino of course.
But that's not the point
The point is: It's not just Switzerland that has to increase power generation by ~17%, and build all the infrastructure to distribute that electricity, and make sure all those new plants are properly connected to the grid.
Pretending that "we need 17% more electricity is nothing, and is easily solvable" is uneducated at best.
China is building those very fast because you wouldn't want to be a worker in one of those construction projects. Even though I agree on principle that the dismantling of nuclear energy in EU is a disgrace.
> it will only require an additional 17% to the current electric generation.
That.... That is not an "only". Switzerland's total consumption is 58.46 billion kWh [1]. "Only" 17% increase is another 9 billion kWh. That's the equivalent of Estonia
Estonia is 1.3M inhabitants or about 15% of Swiss population…
And that’s if all cars were going electric which is going to take many years. Not like you need to increase power generation by 15% overnight. This perfectly doable and not even a real engineering challenge.
And population of Switzerland is 8.6 million. What's your point?
It is an actual engineering challenge because it's not just Switzerland that will increase its power demands.
Total energy consumption of EU is on the order of thousands of petajoules: "Final energy consumption in the EU in 2020 amounted to 37 086 PJ" [1]
"Not an egineering challenge" is in reality "we need to increase energy supply by 6 thousand petajoules which amounts to sum total of all renewable energy currently available in the EU" (renewables account for 17% of EU's energy production). Plus add all the infrastructure needed to distribute it to charging stations.
My point is that 15% is still 15% even it represents the population of Estonia or of a suburb of NY.
By the way you are mixing everything. I talk about private transport and you give me the figure for total energy consumption... Total energy consumption is not going to increase!!! The petrol burnt in an engine is already counted. Because of all the loss due to the pathetic yield of IEC engines, your are not going to increase the total energy consumption but decrease it when you will electrify transport.
For Switzerland electrification of all private transport represent the addition of 2 nuclear reactors, so no nothing to write home about regarding sizing of the grid.
> 5% even it represents the population of Estonia or of a suburb of NY.
So? Why can't you make the next logical step? If it's a 17% increase for Switzerland, then it will be at in the same ballpark much for all other countries, won't it? Then an increase for Germany will be probably as much as two Switzerlands etc.
> By the way you are mixing everything. I talk about private transport and you give me the figure for total energy consumption.
I'm not. I'm just pointing the flaws in the insistence that "it's not even an engineering challenge"
> For Switzerland electrification of all private transport represent the addition of 2 nuclear reactors
Ah yes. It's just such an easy not an egineering challenge to do.
Switzerland built and put online 3 reactors in 6 years between 1965 and 1971, so yes it's a proven fact that's it's technically easy.
Now from a political point of view that's another issue.
> renewables account for 17% of EU's energy production
That's yearly production. Solar has very poor seasonality, wind is not that bad is still nowhere close to nuclear/gas, therefore capacity-wise these numbers are the floor, not the ceiling.
To add on top of that Europe is migrating from nuclear in generation altogether :)
Hehe, seasonality and load-following... Some other discussions on this topic have people saying things like "just build more solar and wind, build twice as much or however you need to sustain the energy". So, a 17% increase becomes a at least a 34% increase in required new energy...
All these discussions (not just on HN, but in political contexts etc.) lack so much of long term vision and planning.
> So, a 17% increase becomes a at least a 34% increase in required new energy...
With solar in particular, due to high seasonality we effectively have 3 solutions and none of them make much sense:
1. Install huge-ass batteries to hold "summer" energy for "winter". LCOE goes down the drain.
2. Install "winter" season capacity. In the summer you have overproduction, that in the long term noone wants to buy, because everyone is on solar. LCOE goes down the drain.
3. Install gas plant along solar for "winter" backup. Unit cost skyrockets due to low utilization, LCOE goes down the drain. You save some GHG per unit when "summer" generation is covered by PVs.
This is not accounting that with non-dispatchable solar cost of balancing for the grid also goes up. It's not really long term planning per se. Renewables are expensive, period. There is almost zero actual political discussion on cheap energy vs renewable energy. If anything, this discussion is consciously dishonest: marginal cost of energy for producers is most often given as the true cost of renewables.
And then we have efficiency. Wind energy is especially sensitive to location. As the best spots are gobbled up first (duh) the marginal efficiency of wind generation declines, which is to be expected. However, various analysts like Lazard give LCOE numbers based on existing averages, which cannot - by definition - be sustained.
