I’ve been seeing lots of articles recently about how someone has solved the “last remaining technical problem” to make electric cars a practical reality.
The one thing all these articles have in common is that none of them ask the most important question – where is all the electricity going to come from ?
An average car (say 80 horse power) uses the equivalent of 60 Kilowatts of electricity. I’ve no doubt that we can build electric cars that are more efficient than their petrol equivalents but nonetheless, cars need a lot of “juice”.
To put this in perspective, the chart below shows “primary energy usage” for the UK in 2008 in “barrels of oil equivalent”.
It’s pretty clear that if we switch to electric cars, we are going to need to generate *a lot* more electricity, approximately 600% more !
As natural gas runs out, we’re going to need *even more* than that if we still want to heat our homes (roughly a further 600% increase). This means that over the next 10 to 20 years, we’re going to have to increase our electricity production by 1200% to maintain our currently relatively carefree energy lifestyles.
Houston, we have a problem !
