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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/20/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...Their short (7 minutes) summary of findings is good. It might compel some to dig deeper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REDKd3wT220
Listening to the long interview now. They are hitting on points that I have been talking about for years. Points that earned me countless, and sometimes vicious, attacks here on HN and relentless down-voting. This is an audience that is supposed to be analytical. Sadly, I have discovered the hard way that the loud-mouths, the bullies, are nothing of the sort. As is always the case, the moderate thinking majorities tend to not get involved, and the bullies win.
The part you did not know is that I wrote a simulation model some five years ago to try and help me understand all of this. It would be fair to call it a Monte Carlo Simulation. It created millions of behavioral avatars with randomized patterns of electrical vehicle usage (driving, charging, etc.). It also distributed these across all six time zones in the US. It then calculated peak charging requirements per region and cranked out a range in the aggregate. The result was an estimate between 900 GW and 1400 GW.
I was not able to confirm this until last year, when someone asked Elon Musk about this and he said we need to more than double our power generation capacity. That's why I became so confident in my estimate.
I am also going through the entire research report. This will likely take a few weeks (I only have weekends available for something like this).
I did discover I am wrong about something I've been claiming.
I've been saying we need approximately 1200 GW of new power.
That's not correct.
We need 2400 GW.
Why?
Silly mistake on my part. I forgot that part of the objective is to replace our "dirty" power generators with clean energy. If the objective was to support electric vehicles, the answer is somewhere around 1200 GW. However, this report made me realize I had skipped over the obvious part: We want our entire power system to be clean.
This means we need 1200 GW of brand-new clean energy to replace the dirty power we have right now. And then, we need another 1200 GW to power electric cars. My guess is likely much more than that once we account for electric heat pumps and stoves in every home.
So, yeah, I was wrong. My estimate made the problem far simpler than what it actually is.
We have to rip-up our entire power generation infrastructure, replace it with a new one and then more than double it. All by 2050. Good luck.
I can't even imagine the degree of verbal violence I will be subjected to on HN when I say we need 2400 GW and the "true believers" blow a fuse.
Fantastic study. Thanks for posting it. Much to learn and think about. I am glad that I hear them talk about things a hundred years away as options rather than being all-in on getting there in 20 years or some of other seriously flawed claim.