Although electricity is already everywhere, it’s still not going to be an easy transition. Globally, electricity production in 2012 was somewhere around 20 PWh/year, while transport used around 30 PWh/years.
I’m optimistic about cheap solar — a one or two meter wide strip of PV next to every interstate, highway, motorway, Autobahn etc. should suffice — but it’s still not trivial.
This article disagrees with the factoid that it takes 6.5 kWh of electric power to refine a gallon of gas. It says it's a few tenths of a kWh of electric power.
1) Non-car storage (including but not limited to immobile batteries, pumped hydro, and hydrogen electrolysis)
2) Non-solar renewables (including but not limited to wind, geothermal, and tidal)
3) Inter-time-zone power grids (because PV is getting so cheap that 67% losses, 1000 watts at source being 330 watts at the plug, isn’t totally insane).
Electric vehicles use roughly a third of the energy so that 30 PWh only needs to be an extra 10 PWh for the grid. We need to increase overall capcity by 50%.
I doubt that; PV is cheap compared to storage, so it makes more sense to install twice as much PV as needed and include the charging plugs in existing car parks (and waste some power during commuting and lunch breaks), than to add enough immobile storage to allow most car charging to happen at night.
Only when the power doesn’t come from PV. If it does, you need (three?) times as much battery capacity: the car’s battery, the immobile battery that the car charges from, and the battery which powers your houses (and some industry and commerce) overnight. If you charge your cars during the day, you can use some of the battery capacity in the electric cars, partially discharging some of them overnight to supply your nighttime needs.
Chances are the network isn’t used at full capacity, so if people are willing to charge their cars outside peak hours (e.g, between midnight 7 AM, we wouldn’t need 50% more, network wise.
I’m optimistic about cheap solar — a one or two meter wide strip of PV next to every interstate, highway, motorway, Autobahn etc. should suffice — but it’s still not trivial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption