> Its definitely much more involved, just as you say.

That's all I am trying to convey. I am mostly sick and tired of the reduction of reality to a single variable or culprit and then pounding on that ad-nauseum as if that is actually how we are going to solve anything. This is how one gets to stupid ideas like seeding the ocean with chemicals to promote CO2 capture. What? I don't care what anyone says, that's far more likely to kill all life on earth than save it.

Our history is full of unintended consequences of sure "solutions", like that island in Australia, where they introduced one species to get rid of another. The end result is that they swapped one plague for another that might actually be worse. We can't even do something like that successfully --because reality isn't a single variable problem-- and we actually dare to suggest we can modify climate at a planetary scale? The hubris in this kind of thinking is thick and dangerous.

The single variable reduction is how we get idiot politicians like AOC pushing absolute nonsense day after day. Because it is simple they are successful at linking <variable> to "bad" and, after that, position their hairbrained idea as the savior. This kind of thing should inspire projectile vomiting, not a following.

> One thing I strongly agree with you about is that nuclear energy is likely a critical help to this endeavor.

Nuclear has been the elephant in the room for decades. OK, I get it, plants build in the 1960's might not have been optimal. We can say that about cars, planes and even ballpoint pens. That's the history of humanity. Well, I think we can build them to be very safe these days. Don't build them where a tsunami can hit them, etc. To paraphrase, there's a list for that (or there should be).

What's interesting about nuclear is that you can simply (OK, not so simple) connect them to the grid and your energy and power delivery capacity instantly increased, 24/7/365. Build a 1 GW class plant and you have 1 GW, rain or shine.

Nuclear, from my perspective, is the ONLY way we can support the conversion of the entire ground transportation fleet to electric power.

Here are the results of a simple model I threw together trying to answer a simple question:

How much power do we need to support the entire US fleet of cars going electric?

The simplest assumption is one where 100% of the fleet uses 8 hour long charge cycles:

daily charge energy 50,000 Wh
cars 300,000,000 cars
long charge 8 hours
fast charge 0.5 hours

Portion charging long 100%
Portion charging fast 0%

% of long-chargers charging simultaneously 100%
% of short-chargers charging simultaneously 0%

Total daily energy requirement 15,000 GWh

Cars long-charging simultaneously 100,000,000 cars
Cars short-charging simultaneously 0 cars

Power for simultaneous long charging 1,875 GW
Power for simultaneous short charging 0 GW
Total power requirement 1,875 GW

This isn't realistic, you are not going to have 300 million cars charging simultaneously during the same eight hours. Or, are we?

If every hour we have, say, 1/8 of the entire fleet plug in for eight hours to charge, what's the maximum number of vehicles that will be charging simultaneously at any point in the day? The assumption is that car will charge for eight hours and be off charge for 16.

Well, eight hours into the day we will, in fact, have 300 million cars charging simultaneously. After a full 24 hours from the start of this approach, the minimum number of cars charging simultaneously will be 187.5 million and the maximum 300 million.

So, yes, at peak utilization we will will have 300 million cars, requiring that we deliver 50 kWh in 8 hours, which means a peak requirement of 1,875 GW.

This means we need nearly two thousand giga-watt class nuclear power plants to support a fleet where 100% of the vehicles will slow charge.

What happens when some percentage of the fleet needs to fast charge? I am defining fast charging as delivering 50 kWh in 30 minutes:

daily charge energy 50,000 Wh
cars 300,000,000 cars
long charge 8 hours
fast charge 0.5 hours

Portion charging long 80%
Portion charging fast 20%

% of long-chargers charging simultaneously 100%
% of short-chargers charging simultaneously 20%

Total daily energy requirement 15,000 GWh

Cars long-charging simultaneously 240,000,000 cars
Cars short-charging simultaneously 12,000,000 cars

Power for simultaneous long charging 1,500 GW
Power for simultaneous short charging 1,200 GW
Total power requirement 2,700 GW

Now we need 2,700 giga-watt class nuclear power plants in order to be able to deliver the power needed to support the bulk of the fleet slow-charging and the remainder fast-charging spread across the day.

TWO THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED nuclear power plants.

Even if I am off by a factor of ten (I threw this together and it is very simplistic), that means nearly 300 nuclear power plants to be built in, say, 30 years. We have to build ten per year and we had to get started yesterday.

This is the kind of thing I look at when I talk about not reducing reality to single variables. The amount of energy we delivery by using petroleum is of a scale that is hard to imagine. To go electric we have to find alternative means to deliver some percentage of that energy (because electric cars are more energy-efficient than IC vehicles) to every car on the road every day. This task is far from being simple. Beyond that, the unmitigated mess that US politics has become over the last few decades virtually guarantees we cannot build a single nuclear power plant, much less ten, fifty or a hundred.

Frankly, I have no clue how this could even be possible. I think we are going to have some number of people driving electrics and, in the hubris of it all, we are going to ignore the fact that we are going have to burn twice or three times more coal to charge those cars every day. It has all the potential to be a larger mess than what we currently have.

I would love for someone to take the time to develop and publish a better model than my mindlessly-simple quick calculation. I know a lot of subtlety could be introduced. That said, I somehow don't think we can escape physics.