Thanks for giving this a try. Not quite right though. Let me see if I can explain.

Let's start with a useful number. How much energy does something like a Tesla Model 3 require, on average, per year?

I am using this article for the data:

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/08/12/tesla-model-3-owner-dri...

The owner drove just over 15K miles in 12 months and bought about 5200 kWh that year.

The reason the average numbers I use are higher than this number is simple: I can guarantee you that vehicles like the electric Ford F150 will require far more energy, probably twice as much. We already know that the Mustang Mach E requires more energy per mile than a Model 3.

When we say 300 million vehicles, we are not talking about 300 million Tesla's. There will be a wide range of vehicles, from large trucks to minivans, cargo vans, large and small SUV's, performance cars, commuter cars, etc. And then we have to include semi trucks and large commercial trucks. The average energy-per-mile figure isn't going to be that of a Model 3.

However, for the purpose of a discussion, I'll go with the number from the article for a Model 3. In fact, because I want simple numbers, I'll round it down from 5,200 kWh to 5,000.

So, the for the entire year we need to pump back 5,000 kWh into the car.

How long is a year?

Hmmm. People don't drive the same distance every day. We have to be VERY careful not to average ourselves into an artificially low power requirement number. Please note I am using upper case for highlight because this doesn't really do the job. Not yelling at you.

This point deserves highlighting: This issue is about POWER generation, not energy.

For those who might not be comfortable with the concepts:

A 1,000 W light requires 1 kW of POWER every instant it is on. If it happens to be on for one hour, it will have used 1 kWh of energy. Ten hours, 10 kWh.

If I have a thousand 1 kW lights I need 1 GW of POWER every instant the lights are on. It doesn't matter if they are on five seconds or three days. I need a gigawatt. Energy is a function of how long the lights are on. A kilowatt-hour means you used 1 kilowatt of power for one hour, not five minutes.

OK, back to cars.

This is why "How long is a year?" matters. There are three possible answers to this:

200 days, 365 days or some complex formula that accounts for average weekend driving.

There are roughly 200 working days in an year, which is when most of the driving happens. Put a different way, this is when people will most likely drain their batteries the most.

The difference between 200 and 365 is massive. It's almost double. This is significant because the next question we have to answer is:

When do people charge and how much?

The Model 3 owner from the linked article didn't have one massive 5,000 kWh charge on January 1st. to then drive the entire year. That would require a battery the size of a large building.

For the purpose of modeling we have to either choose to develop a complex model, one where we divide the population into behavioral groups and assign a wide range of utilization and charge scenarios to each group. That's a lot of work when all you are trying to get is a sense of proportion rather than an accurate answer.

I think it's sensible to pick 200 days as a starting point. That assumes all of the driving is done during the week and ignores the weekends. We can look at the 365 day case as well and compare notes. This is why throwing this into a spreadsheet is useful.

I spent some time discussing power because this is what we are after. If I now take the annual 5,000 kWh baseline from the article and divide it into 200 days, we get 25 kWh per day.

That's the energy you need to pump into the car every one of those 200 days. However, you are not going to be plugged in for 24 hours. The more likely scenario is that you are going to plug in after work while you sleep. The assumption I have made is that the average car will be charged in eight hours.

So, that means you have to deliver 25 kWh in 8 hours. Which means you need 3.125 kW of POWER. Here's where the difference becomes important, if you could charge 24/7 you would only need a little over 1 kW of power. Because we can't do that, our power delivery system would have to provide us with THREE TIMES the power when compared to averaging over 24 hours.

What if we charge every day for 8 hours each day? 5000/365 = 13.7 kWh per day. That means 1.7 kW of power for eight hours.

Now we have two scenarios we can compare:

200 day year -> 3.125 kW power for 8 hours
365 day year -> 1.7 kW power for 8 hours

How many vehicles would be charging simultaneously?

My simple model states that the minimum is around 188 million and the maximum would be 300 million. This is a model where I divide the fleet into time-zone groups, each of which starts charging the entire fleet for that time one hour after the prior time zone. A simple model, yes. I am just trying to get a sense of proportion here. A more accurate answer would require regional as well as behavioral modelling. For example, places like New York and Los Angeles are going to behave differently from Las Vegas, NV or Wakefield, MA.

What matters is the peak power requirement, not the minimum --unless we are willing to ration electricity.

Two scenarios then, 200 day and 365 day year and 300 million car peak utilization.

200 day year -> 3.125 kW (power) x 300M cars = 938 MW
365 day year -> 1.7 kW (power) x 300M cars = 510 MW

In other words, at a minimum, given this model, we would need an additional 500+ megawatts over and above current utilization, with the peak being over 900 megawatts.

Now it is necessary to put this into context. A typical nuclear power plant produces 1 MW of POWER. In other words, we are talking about needing somewhere in the range of 500 to 900 new nuclear power plants.

We can't say something like "air conditioning alone uses x megawatts" because we don't get to use that power for cars. That power is an existing requirement. In order to have 300 million electric vehicles we need to ADD power generation AND transmission capacity throughout the country.

That's the other part of the story that is often waved over. Moving an extra 900 megawatts of power isn't something one can assume the current infrastructure can handle at all. Here in CA we are already struggling with blackouts and forest fires caused by a range of issues, including the aging power grid. We should not hand-wave our way around the realities of what we are facing if we want this electric vehicle future.

So, 500 to 900 nuclear power plants. That means, just guessing, somewhere between 5 to 20 per state (some states will need more than others). Well, we can't build ONE nuclear power plant in, say, ten years. If we want to go full electric in 30 years we would have to build 15 to 30 nuclear power plants per year, every year, for the next thirty years.

I'll repeat what I said in my prior post: Even if I am off by a factor of 2 to 10, the problem is of massive proportions. At the low end it means we need 50 nuclear power plants (off by a factor of ten and using the low estimate). At the high end we need 900 of them, if not more.

All I see out there is hand-wavy, blue-sky, just install solar panels wishful thinking. Not a single honest mathematical model in sight (that I know of).

The important take away is that, while range is about energy, the reality of charging is that it is about power. It is far too easy to fabricate numbers that are artificially low by making assumptions like 24/7/365 charging and that nobody ever wants or needs to pump the aforementioned daily requirement of 25 kWh into their vehicle in just one hour, something that requires EIGHT TO TEN TIMES MORE POWER (due to losses) than when charging in eight hours.