I'm not saying they need to build less capable cars, although I'm sure there's a sweet spot in terms of power:effeciency. This also isn't my statement, it's just something I plucked from the only solid path forward we have to Net Zero by 2050. The IEA says that to reach those goals, we need to limit roadway speeds to 100 km/hr by 2030 and have a greater emphasis on eco-driving habits. And the whole purpose is to improve energy efficiency and reduce consumption, because we need to not consume more energy if we want any hope of achieving these milestones on the path to curbing climate change.
There is no way your 2013 Model S is not more efficient when using eco-driving habits (gradual acceleration etc) than when putting the pedal to the metal and expending far more energy to travel the same distance. Does it not seem strange that it's 2021 and we're pushing out a 1,000+ horsepower production EV and its insane performance numbers when, in less than nine years, we should be driving 100 km/hr max and focusing on eco-driving to reduce energy consumption?
If driving were going to be fossil fuel based as its energy source, then a focus on efficiency and apparently an attempt at a mandate to tell people what they can and can't do, and make then want to do it, makes some sense to me. Not a great deal as any solution that depends on making people do things they don't want to looks like a sound path to defeat and failure.
But we aren't going to be using fossil fuel as the basis of energy for transportation - at least not the transportation that happens on roads. We'll be using electricity and the cost curve already tells us that electricity will be generated by solar, wind, and stored / stabilized with batteries (or some battery like technologies such as pumped hydro). The only question here is whether it will happen fast enough (both the transportation change, and the energy generation change). If you want to impede the progress to EVs then one of the best ways to succeed is to mandate and harshly enforce a performance cap. (Or keep an eye on what the lobbyists are doing to slow things down - significantly more expensive registration fees for EVs are spreading throughout the US for example).
Because whether we individually like it or not, humans as a group like faster over slower. And faster sells. And the more EV sales the better off we all are. In answer to your question - no - it doesn't seem at all strange that we're "pushing out a 1,000+ horsepower production EV". I consider it essential, just as I consider the new Roadster to be equally essential. They're halo cars that shows the art of the possible and lead the way for everything else. And they do it at better efficiency than just about anything else on the road (which, yes, can be made better through eco driving habits).
My own ridiculously huge Model X is, on the surface, a gargantuan waste of energy. We use it effectively as a 2 person station wagon and there is usually just me in it. It replaced a 27 year old Honda CRX that never did worse than about 33 mpg in all the time we owned and drove it as our primary vehicle, already putting me well above the median in transportation efficiency for 3+ decades (my driving life). And based on the mpg ratings, the Model X starts off ~3x as efficient as the CRX. It's more efficient than virtually anything else I encounter on the road, even many motorcycles, at 89 mpge.
Do I NEED it? No - I want it and it provides me with a lot of utility that I want, but that I could probably live without if I had to. And I BADLY WANT to contribute to making things better. So I'm happy I've improved my personal transportation efficiency that much, and I like getting friends and family in the car so they can go wow at the smooth and insane acceleration, even in my non-performance version (high 4s 0-60). The tradeoff works for me and if there were anybody that you could convince to lower their energy footprint as you describe, I would have to be in that camp. I want the end results, and yet my personal transportation isn't in that ballpark (or in danger of going there).
How many of us in this forum already live that low energy footprint life you describe? Surely just everybody here is in favor of the outcome - this looks like a great place to start recruiting your first 50 recruits.
On the electricity generation front, the best way I've seen for how to think about renewable energy generation -- the target isn't to replace current energy consumption. The target is to generate dramatically more electricity than we do today. One reason for dramatically over gearing the generation side is that there are days that are less than perfect for renewables (shocking I know
). Most of those can be bridged over if the renewables are producing 2x, 3x, or more of what is typically needed. In Australia there is at least one state / group / country talking about 700% renewables.
The key to making 7x renewables work though will be new and renewed businesses that can consume huge quantities of energy AND have the ability to coast or store locally what they need to keep running for some amount of time. The consumption needs to be highly variable / dispatchable. In Australia one of the business cases that is being floated is renewable hydrogen generation for export. I believe it gets created in the form of ammonia (which is a LOT easier to store, move, and otherwise manage than liquid hydrogen). Anyway - the intent is to have a grid with all of that excess energy specifically to support the creation of all of that ammonia, and secondarily provide virtually free electricity to the retail grid. Seriously.
My own silly thought for what to do with dramatically more electricity than we need is desalination plants and pumps to move really large quantities of saltwater-turned-freshwater inland. Maybe for agriculture. Maybe to enhance river flow. Maybe just to use along the coast in desert areas for the city water supply, leaving more river flow for agriculture. Southern California and the Middle East come to mind quickly as two examples with good renewable resources and a need for freshwater.
The key isn't that we need to know now what we'll do with vast quantities of virtually free electricity produced via solar / wind. Any more than we needed to know about Netflix / Facebook / Google before we started making broad use of the Internet for virtually free marginal cost communication. Creative and driven business people figured it out.
Unless the claim is that if we were 100% renewables today then we would still need to dramatically lower the energy consumption? I don't believe it offhand, but I'm more than willing to read a study that explains how renewables or fossil fuel based electricity generation is fundamentally close enough that either way energy per person has to drop dramatically.
What I DO see coming as a result of renewable electricity generation, plus over generation of the needed electricity, is a flat fee network access to the energy network. Exactly like internet service, we'll cough up some monthly fee for effectively unlimited electricity. That will drive nat gas, propane, heating oil, and any other fossil fuel out of the heating market (and electric generation) at any and every price.
What will change when we have "
approximately zero marginal cost energy" available? Look to the Internet which I see as roughly 30 years old (general use - I know its older than that) to see what "
approximately zero marginal cost communication" has done. THAT is what's coming, and it is NOT a lower energy world. It is a dramatically higher energy world.
There are numerous applications that we're making little, some, or a lot of progress on electrifying, but that we definitely can't do at scale today. Tractors on the farm (ag industry in general), steamrollers and other construction equipment (even if we've got the batteries for them to run for a day, how do they recharge overnight when the process today is to bring the diesel to them - there won't be a power cable), ocean going shipping, air travel all come to mind. Maybe somebody will figure out how to run fuel cell type systems using ammonia instead of liquid hydrogen (the supply chain is many orders of magnitude easier for ammonia than liquid hydrogen).
Heck we've got signs of life on short range commercial trucks going to electric. Signs of life though are little more than engineering scale prototypes. Actual general production at 000's of units still isn't here and we need 300k/year to fully replace new Class 8 tractors in the US, and something closer to 2x or 3x that to replace the current fleet on the road. The commercial truck fleet needs to make the transition before a lot of that other stuff. Include the rest of the world and it'll be 2-5x the US numbers.
Oh and trains. And oddly enough (and thankfully a field that IS going like gangbusters) the small gas engines we use to run blowers, mowers, edgers, etc.. Those things have no pollution controls and are collectively one of our worst contributors.
ALL of this has to electrify. Fortunately some clever and motivated people are going to figure it out as the light duty and then commercial transportation electrifies as that will take so much O&G demand out of the equation that the rest of the industries will figure out how to stop being dependent.
Anyway if you are actually proven right and what humanity has to do to survive the mess we're in is to dramatically reduce our individual energy footprint, then we're doomed. Achieving that is going to require not just individuals but all of humanity to willingly and eagerly implement a dramatic reduction in their total energy consumption. And its got to be the big energy consumers (USA) taking the lead as we're the ones that can move the needle. We can't even agree whether the last presidential election was stolen, or whether covid is real, or whether the vaccines work, or ... OMG - we can't even agree on what are true facts and which are alternative facts, which media is in the entertainment business and which is in the information business. The only two topics that I've seen our two major political parties agree on is the importance of expanding the defense department budget, and to find new ways of surveilling citizens and improving our implementation of an authoritarian state.
Do you think that we can get all of us to agree sufficiently to put a 100km/hr speed limiter and acceleration limiter into new and existing cars? And that's just the start to achieve what you're describing.
I don't
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