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by philipallstar 50 days ago
> By contrast, a combined cycle power plant gets over 60%.

Over 25% of this is then lost in transmission and distribution[0] (down to 45%). Then 10-25% of that lost in charging the car[1] (down to 40%). Finally, the car itself loses about 10-15% of that[2] (down to 35%).

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/322834/transmission-dist...

[1] https://go-e.com/en/magazine/ev-charging-losses

[2] https://evreporter.com/understanding-the-complete-efficiency...

2 comments

Total UK electricity consumption is around 300 TWh annually. That would put the grid losses at less than 10% based on your link. The charging is never as bad as 25% (internal house losses are negligible for any sensible charging rate) and the car is typically ~12% charging loss. Moreover, EVs recover quite a bit too. Even in purely dissipative driving (highway driving), I get around 4 miles/kWh, which is about 4 times better than an ICE vehicle.

Furthermore, if you're going to include distributional losses, then let's also drop the available petrol by 10-15% to account for refining etc.

Finally, on anything resembling a sunny day, my car charges entirely of rooftop solar, so what efficiency do we assign to that?

That first chart is in absolute units, not percentage.

25TWh annual distribution losses off of ~300TWh usage per year is 8% loss.

Oh! Sorry, yes. @dang can I edit it, please?