Europe backtracks on gas car ban
“The implausibility of a net-zero carbon energy future is becoming so obvious that even Europeans are starting to notice,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board noted on March 27th. “Witness the weekend decision to step back from the ban on internal-combustion automobile engines that the European Union had intended to implement by 2035.”
“Resistance from Berlin and several other European governments has forced Brussels into all but abandoning its engine ban,” note the WSJ.
Meanwhile Mathametician and writer Igor Chadov notes, “Running a gasoline car involves:
- Burning gas in the internal combustion engine and converting thermal energy to mechanical energy. That’s it.”
However, Chadov goes on, “Charging an electric car’s battery from the grid and driving the car involves:
- Burning gas at the power station and converting thermal energy of gas to mechanical energy of the gas turbine. This is only moderately more efficient in a power station than gasoline cars.
- Then, losses begin:
- Converting the mechanical energy of the turbine into electrical energy in the generator involves generator losses
- Converting medium voltage from the generator into high transmission voltage involves transformer losses
- Transmitting the power along the high voltage lines involves transmission losses
- Stepping down the voltage in several substations involves transformer losses again
- In a home charging station, converting 220v power into DC for car charging again involves conversion losses
- A chemical process in the battery being charged heats the battery, involving charging losses
- Running the car’s electrical motors from the battery requires inverter losses to generate electricity for traction motors and motor losses.”
“If a fraction of the billions of dollars wasted on electric cars and climate grandstanding were spent on nuclear fusion, we’d possibly have a clean, safe, and limitless energy source much sooner,” Chadov notes.
