" I suspect to shift to EV will be faster than projects I have seen. Battery prices continue to decline for a given range plus the infrastructure will bd built out for charging. Assuming batteries price declines to are 1/4 of todays price and energy density fully covers large trucks and high demand use cases, the conversion will likely be oo% by 2030."
Sir, you REALLY need to stop 'huffing' the Hope-ium and come back to reality.
“The gap between wishful thinking and reality is vast.”
So observes Vaclav Smil, a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. Smil, who has written more than a dozen books about energy and society, is concerned with the gap between the aspiration to fight climate change and the immense on-the-ground effort entailed in actually doing so.
He argues that studies that purport to show how the world could radically reduce or eliminate its carbon emissions by one date or another, tend to presuppose what they claim to be proving.
To arrive at the conclusion they want, they rely on a variety of unreliable assumptions. The most common are these:
That existing technologies will be deployed at fantastic rates.
That nonexistent technologies will be deployed at fantastic rates.
That humanity’s ever-growing appetite for energy will suddenly be curbed and everyone will voluntarily adopt a “low energy” lifeway.
Smil labels such studies “the academic equivalents of science fiction.”
Your ASSUMPTIONS are basically "delusional" they are so WILDLY optimistic.
Here’s a really important example.
The U.S.’s power grid has been called “the largest machine ever built by man.”
It comprises more than eleven thousand generating plants, more than six hundred thousand miles of high-voltage transmission lines, and some six million miles of distribution lines.
Several recent studies claim to show that decarbonizing the grid in the nearish future is feasible.
All of them, as per Smil, involve a certain amount of “science fiction”.
They describe what is technically possible while glossing over the barriers to implementation.
These barriers, are huge. Some are economic, some are legal, some are logistical, some are political, and some are legal-logistical or economic-legal-logistical-political.
Take what’s been called the “transmission quagmire.”
To clean up America’s grid, it’s not enough to build new generating capacity, or even new generating capacity plus new storage capacity.
Power has to be transported from places that have a lot of wind and sun to urban centers that use a lot of electricity.
Decarbonizing the grid will, by one estimate, demand more than a million miles of new transmission lines. The cost of stringing all these lines will, by another estimate, come to more than two trillion dollars.
Does that give you a sense of how laughably inadequate the great victory of Biden’s IRA “win” is?
He went to COP27 and touted the US commitment of $375 Billion for infrastructure projects as “massive”. We are on the brink of Global Warming causing catastrophic failures in the global food supply. We don’t have time for this “penny ante” investment.
Reaching net zero in the U.S. will require building out the transmission system while, at the same time, expanding its capacity so that hundreds of millions of cars, trucks, and buses can be run on electricity.
It will require installing tens of millions of public charging stations on city streets and even more charging stations in private garages.
The challenge of electrifying vehicles like trucks isn’t necessarily the electricity, as even under worst-case scenarios electrifying vehicles won’t put a massive dent in the electricity supply.
The acute problem is how to deliver that electricity to them.
It’s estimated that a new truck recharging station might require a connection to the grid that can handle 5 megawatts. Which would take years to build and cost tens of millions of dollars.
If we electrify the trucking industry as planned. In 2030, a highway plaza charging stop will require about the same amount of electricity as an outdoor sports stadium, and by 2035 could require as much electricity as a small town.
Just assembling the electric cars and trucks planned will necessitate extracting massive amounts of nickel and lithium for their batteries. Which will mean siting new mines, either in the U.S. or abroad.
The new cars and trucks will themselves have to be manufactured in an emissions-free manner, which will involve inventing new methods for producing steel or building a new infrastructure for capturing and sequestering carbon.
2030 as a GOAL for decarbonization of the transport industry is DELUSIONAL in it's CURRENT FORM.
ALL personal vehicles need to "go away". The "trucking industry" needs to "go away".
What we NEED is public transit and more RAIL.
