Some Perspective on Vehicle Electrification

At present we can read that during a certain day a certain nation operated for several hours on 100 percent renewable energy sources, which currently means wind and solar. Surely that’s progress toward a carbon-free energy future?

We are also bombarded with powerful and haunting images of giant wind turbines ponderously revolving as they make their growing contribution to world energy, or the glint of light reflecting from vast solar arrays, often located in desert regions where sunlight is powerful and the sky mostly clear. News bulletins tell us that this or that nation, state, or city plans to ban the sale of new combustion-powered vehicles as soon as 2035 or even 2030.

At the same time, we know or at least suspect that we’ve gotten ahead of ourselves here and there in this process. Seeking to anticipate trends, investors have started withholding financing necessary for “traditional” power generation. Have we persuaded ourselves that we can magically force electrification into being by ceasing to develop new sources of such traditional energy—heating oil, diesel, Jet-A, and natural gas?

A moment’s thought reminds us that the rate at which we can develop replacement energy sources is limited by what potential investors are willing to support. In addition, let us consider the extra energy we will need to carry out that transition.

Related: Choose Your Energy Source

Extra energy? The US presently has about 115,000 gas stations. Creating, wiring in, and powering ever more electric-vehicle charging stations will require capital, and the only thing that attracts capital is the promise of profit.

Just for perspective, and to see how far we still have to go to achieve carbon-free or at least carbon-neutral energy, I’ve dug out the following figures for world energy use during 2021.

From these figures (from the 2021 71st annual BP Statistical Review of World Energy) we see that over 80 percent of total annual world energy consumption is fueled by combustion.

How fast can the people of this earth afford to change this?

One illustrative example is the fleet of registered cars and light trucks in the US—roughly 260,000,000 vehicles. Americans are at present replacing their vehicles at the rate of 6 percent per year, and the average car on the road is a surprising 12 years old. If all 260 million were to be replaced by electrics this year, we’d have to come up with quite a lot of money. According to Kelley Blue Book, the June 2022 average price paid for new cars in the US was just over $48,000. Multiply that times 260 million and you get a bill for $12.48 trillion, or roughly half of the nation’s GNP.

But wait. The average price paid for electric cars in the US during that period was closer to $66,000, so we must revise our fleet replacement cost upward by about 37 percent, bringing it to $17.1 trillion.

EV sales in the US during 2021 were 2.5 percent of the total sold.

These figures suggest that the process of decarbonizing world energy will be gradual, taking many years, and it will have to be thoughtfully managed to prevent energy shortages and the economic downturns we have learned to expect from them.