Have you ever wondered why so many of the items we use on a daily basis are switching away from fossil fuel power to electricity? About 80% of the world’s GHG emissions are a direct or indirect result of extraction and burning of fossil fuels. Electricity offers a more efficient, lower-cost, and sustainable energy alternative to fossil fuel power.
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| Yes, we need to electrify everything. |
Consumer energy technologies fall into two basic types: those that run on electricity (anything that plugs in or has a battery) and those that directly combust fuels like oil, gasoline, natural gas, or biomass. Let’s zoom in specifically on vehicles to understand the importance of electrification.
The gas-powered internal combustion engine is intrinsically inefficient. Less than a quarter of the energy consumed is used to drive the vehicle — the balance is rejected as waste heat. The preferable scenario is to choose electricity to drive our vehicles of all sizes and capacities. If that were the case, more than 90% of the energy devoted to our personal transportation would be deployed usefully. Let’s translate that in a different way. We could provide the driving potential of a gallon of gasoline by substituting as few as 8 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity.
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