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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

Solar, wind, and nuclear don't provide a threat to fuel used for transportation, which is a major percentage of how it's used.

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Until battery tech gets within a decent percentage of a gas tank. Commercial batteries are currently worse than gas tanks, but catching up fast. If they get to 20% volume/weight/price of a gas tank I would predict a switch is going to happen very very fast.

Currently commercial batteries are price limited (about the price of a gas tank + filling up the gas tank 400 times, which would keep a normal car moving for 5-10 years), and weight limited at about 5% of the energy/weight of a gas tank. Given how it's evolving, I'd expect another 2-3 years before the necessary technology becomes available.

I think 20% will be about the turning point because while gas tanks provide a 1000km range, if you can charge at home, then what's the problem with 200km range, decreasing to 160km over 2-3 years ? Especially if you can solar charge (and combined with a house battery ... watch out)

And Teslas don't count. Anything over 20000$ starting price just isn't going to start the migration.

Its not just the batteries and cars. Can the grid really handle the huge increase in demand ? How much investment needs to be done to upgrade it? How long will that take?

And not just the main grid, which is not that hard to upgrade, but we're talking about also upgrading the grid and transformers on every street in the western world.

The grid should be fine with a few upgrades and implementation of charging strategies:

"The short-term impacts for most utilities should be minimal and localized. There is a possibility, however, of isolated impacts on some distribution transformers and secondary drops, particularly in neighborhoods with older distribution systems including underground systems."

http://et.epri.com/Communications_Potential_Impacts_of_Vehic...

Edit: added quote.

That won't cut it for industrial use (trucking, airlines, shipping, etc). For these things where fuel is a major cost, a swap to batteries is untenable until they are cheaper or equal either via heavy carbon taxes or an improvement in battery tech well beyond the 20% number you have in mind.

Electricity is already way cheaper than gasoline per mile. All that's required for it to be an existential threat to gasoline is a drop in the price of battery tech (much like what happened to solar).

That's been true for a really, really long time. Battery tech being the limiting factor has been the issue since the first battery powered vehicle was invented in the late 1800s.

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