* Supertanker emit a lot of soot, not so much CO2. Again: Talking about pollution in generic terms does not help. Also supertankers won't be needed anymore, if no oil is consumed. So electric cars will help with this as well. Replacing all fossil fuels would remove need for 40% of all tonnage shipped worldwide.
* Sweden and Norway already have basically completely renewable electric grids. Germany is exiting coal by 2038 (this will hopefully be accelerated to 2030). Every year some of the existing coal plants are being shut down: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Elektrizitaet...
* No new gas heatings will to allowed to be installed in most EU countries by 2025. Heat pumps are already the default in Scandinavia and will be in other countries soon.
UK, Ireland, France, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece and Cyprus are lucky enough to have vast areas of ofshore wind and tidal capacity. Morocco, Libya, Algeria have vast areas of desert ripe for Solar which can be exported via HVDC under the Med. France seems competent enough to be able to build and run nuclear power at an affordable level, they could expand that ability to the rest of Europe
> Morocco, Libya, Algeria have vast areas of desert ripe for Solar which can be exported via HVDC under the Med.
The EU currently learns every day that depending on unreliable countries is a bad idea for your energy needs. But I think we will still find solutions without involving unreliable partners by extending the cooperation within the EU.
Unlikely that wind drops in the north sea, bay of biscay and med at the same time.
Nuclear also goes stale once in a while, when plants are taken offline for maintenance.
Solar is predictable, it generates in the day (when demand is highest), not at night. With connected vehicles you have massive battery banks of power that can be bought back from people, and as you've used the excess energy when you have been producing more than the demand from those resources to create green hydrogen, you reverse the process.
Average yearly wind won't drop. But it may slower for a day or week. Unless you want to stop some parts of society for that time, you'll have issues.
Same for solar. It's not predicatable on day-by-day bases.
With using cars as battery banks, even if you skip the problem of having cars connected all the time, you'll need to redo grid in a big way. Both to fill simultaneously cars if cheap solar energy hits the grid and keep the grid going on a stale cloudy day.
Well we do that all the time at the moment, if it drops, prices increase, and your car sells power back (because you've got 300 miles in the battery but only need 30 tomorrow), green hydrogen halt production, bitcoin miners stop usage, grid level storage comes online
On the flip side when there's surplus that's used to make the hydrogen, to recharge the resovoirs, etc.
Many people feed back to the grid with their home solar etc, no difference to electric charging.
The problem is you can't plan for „this is rare“. Given how grid is getting more and more away from guaranteed sources, a once-in-few-years perfect storm may become a big event where shutting down hydrogen plants may be not enough to save the grid.
The other issue is, how much grid upgrades do you need to allow to keep it up from electric cars? Maybe even on green front it'd be better to have stable power generation with simplified grid. All those beefy substations don't come out of thin air.
The average car in Europe drives 30km a day and is parked more than 23h. So a charged battery will have a moving 10 day window to be charged again. This is a great use case for renewable energy. 10 days of Dunkelflaute does not happen a lot. Smart charging for cars will stabilize the grid.
* Cows produce methane, cars produce CO2. Talking about "pollution" just muddies the waters. According to https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector lifestock produces 6% of greenhouse gases, road transport 12%. Also looking at Germany (I don't have data for all of Europe), drinking milk production fell by 7% in one year (replaced by plant based milk) https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/05/PE22_N034_51.html . Beef production fell by 2.4% (https://www.destatis.de/EN/Press/2022/02/PE22_050_413.html ) So changes are happening in agriculture as well.
* Supertanker emit a lot of soot, not so much CO2. Again: Talking about pollution in generic terms does not help. Also supertankers won't be needed anymore, if no oil is consumed. So electric cars will help with this as well. Replacing all fossil fuels would remove need for 40% of all tonnage shipped worldwide.
* Sweden and Norway already have basically completely renewable electric grids. Germany is exiting coal by 2038 (this will hopefully be accelerated to 2030). Every year some of the existing coal plants are being shut down: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Elektrizitaet...
* No new gas heatings will to allowed to be installed in most EU countries by 2025. Heat pumps are already the default in Scandinavia and will be in other countries soon.
* Hydrogen production is being ramped up: https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/germany-s-fir... or https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insight... to replace gas usage where electricity does not work.
So a lot is happening in all sectors. And you can see results: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t... This is not just virtue signalling.