From Ron Bailey at Reason:
In 2006, a U.S. Department of Energy study concluded that if 84 percent of all cars and light trucks were plug in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), fueling them would not require any additional electric generation capacity. The study assumes that the PHEVs would travel an average of 33 miles per day solely on electric power and could be charged using off-peak power at night. PHEVs would cost between $6,000 and $10,000 more than conventional cars. Such a PHEV fleet could reduce oil consumption by 6.5 million barrels per day, or approximately 52 percent of our oil imports.
That’s good news. One of the concerns about electric power for cars is that the existing power generation and infrastructure wouldn’t support it. This DOE report suggests that those concerns are largely unfounded.
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I’m still highly skeptical, as capacity isn’t the same thing as actual load. More coal, or whatever is being used for heat generation, will need to be used (burned) during the current “down time” to keep up with the increased demand. That seems to be a factor that seems conspicuously absent in the attached assessment, which I did scan.
The conversion of various fuels (mostly coal, here) to electricity is a big power loss too, and using electricity for locomotion just makes little sense unless the trips are of very short duration.
Watts are the best apples to apples comparison to make, on the whole, and I’d really like someone to run the figures (I’d do it, but am just too lazy to do so) in an objective manner, from begining to end, to see what they’d say.