Oils4AsphaultOnly said:
It's as if you have a narrative that you want pushed!
For a guy who tries to stay informed about alternative vehicles and energy, you sure have a fairly biased slant against EV's. The whole argument about how dirty EV's are (because of coal-based electricity) has been countered by the fact that renewables are replacing fossil fuels at an exponential rate. Just because it's dirty today, doesn't mean it won't get cleaned up tomorrow.
And if you cite the IEA's forecasts as proof about how long that would take, here's proof that the IEA/EIA have been under-predicating the shift every year for over a decade: https://cleantechnica.com/2017/09/06/iea-gets-hilariously-slammed-continuously-pessimistic-renewable-energy-forecasts/
Stop trying to find evidence to justify your position and open your eyes to the fact that BEV's powered by renewable energy is the future and it's coming much faster than the fossil fuel industry would like.
I'm aware of IEA/EIA numbers and projections, as well as others. I'm not biased against BEVs, but I recognize that all techs have environmental and societal impacts, and we need to do what we can to minimize the negative ones. For example, BMW is doing something about sourcing cobalt that isn't produced by child labor in the DRC.
And let's not forget that the above spun off from whether or not I'd have a smaller GHG output by keeping my current car.
As to the fact that cleaner energy will (gradually) replace coal and other fossil fuels, no one's arguing that it won't, but the fact is that energy transitions have heretofore taken 60-100 years (or longer), and even while the percentage of the old energy source was declining its total amount was increasing. For example, IIRR (need to check this) coal use worldwide reached the highest its ever been in total terms this century, thanks largely to China's huge expansion for both electricity generation and industrial use (coke for steel, etc.), and India is following the same path albeit slower. Similarly, petroleum and NG use are increasing as well.
I'm hopeful that, given the different motivation driving us this time we can halve the time to transition, but it will require a major commitment of money and effort to do so (akin to fighting a major war), and barring some unmistakable evidence of AGCC its very unlikely that the existing fossil fuel electricity generation infrastructure will be thrown away en masse before its economic lifetime is up, especially when (in countries like China and India) so much of it has been built recently. All the countries above (not sure about Thailand) have RPSs, but the amount of energy needing to be replaced is so large that it is not going to be easy or quick.
I highly recommend either of Vaclav Smil's two books on Energy Transitions, which delineate the scale of the problem; the first edition was 2010, and the 2nd edition was published in 2016, and includes data through 2015; I've read both, and have the 2nd ed. at home now. We'll be dependent on fossil fuels for decades yet, although the share of renewables will be increasing. And one thing that has been consistent through all transitions is that there are always unknown/unpredictable factors which occur and slow things down. Sometimes its due to wars, other times to economic, political, technical or social factors (e.g. OPEC and Iran price hikes in the '70s, or post-TMI and Chornobyl abandonment of most nuke building in the west). There are also differences in how renewable electricity and fossil fuels get converted for comparison in some reports, so it's necessary to be careful when comparing one report with another. I forget whether IEA uses the direct thermal energy equivalent or the useful energy method (used by BP IIRR) for converting RE, but the latter's about 3 times greater for RE in the energy values.
The article you cite mentions S-curves. It's true that most transitions do follow such curves, but there are different ones (Smil lists several) and actual curves always have major discontinuities due to unexpected factors that occur. About the only thing you can say about long range forecasts of market share for any particular energy source at any given time is that it will almost certainly be wrong by a wide margin. Smil gives numerous examples of such.
