Originally Posted by
newenglandbike
It is misleading to talk about electricity production alone when discussing the transition from fossil fuels for transportation to other sources. In the US, less than 6% of our total
energy consumption of 100+ exajoules (100x10^18 joules), including electricity, heat, transportation etc., is provided by nuclear power. Over 33-40% of our energy consumption comes from oil, nearly all of that burned in our cars (some burned in industrial agriculture, etc). We burn 25% of
all the worlds oil, by conservative estimates (IEA).
If you make all of that traffic dependent on electricity instead of gasoline, that electricity is going to need to come from coal, which is currently 26% of the US energy consumption. Nuclear power does not have the same EROEI that coal has, due to astronomical plant construction costs.
All of the above figures come from the IEA, and can be found in various reports here:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/
It's misleading to talk about replacing oil per unit energy since converting chemical energy into mechanical energy is relatively inefficient. An EV powered by renewables only needs about a fifth of the energy per mile an oil powered vehicle need, and there is a fair degree of synergy between a lot of rolling battery storage and renewable electricity resources. I would also be careful about mixing and matching EROEI with cost.