CHARGING INFRASTRUCTURE IS A $2.7 TRILLION BARRIER FOR EVs

Making sure that there’s always somewhere to juice up your ride is going to be big business. That’s according to financial services firm Morgan Stanley, which, according to Bloomberg, estimates that the world will need to spend a dizzying $2.7 trillion on charging infrastructure if it’s to support 500 million electric vehicles. (That may sound like a lot of cars and trucks, but it’s worth noting that there are over a billion on our roads right now. So even if robo-taxis erode the number of cars in city centers and autonomous trucks cut the number of 18-wheelers needed for commerce, it’s not a crazy number.)

The rollout of charging points is often cited as a key incentive to convince a public with range anxiety to adopt electric vehicles. Without a place to charge in a city center or, more importantly, beside a long and lonely highway, nobody would take the plunge and buy an electric car. In turn, that would render impotent even the most ambitious of regulatory pushes to incentivize automakers to build electric vehicles.

So far, building out a suitable network has seemed to require both private and public investment. We’ve already seen that to be the case, with the likes of Tesla building its own charging stations and the U.S. government committing to build a series of national electric-vehicle charging corridors around the country.

With such a huge amount of potential revenue, we should expect to see some more original thinking about the best ways to build and run charging points. So assuming 500 million Electric Vehicles will be on the road in 20 years, how much electricity is actually needed to charge these every day? The battery pack for the pure 100% electricity is anywhere from 24 KWH to 100 KWH. Using just the lower end of the range at around 30 KWh, here are the electricity demand calculations:

500,000,000 EV x 30 KWh = 15,000,000,000 KWh/day = 15,000,000 MWh/day = 15,000 GWh/day = 15 TWh/day

Annually this equates to: 15 TWh/day x 365days= 5,475 TWh/Year

How Big are this numbers (5,475TWh/Year?) Here is the actual annual report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration: for 2016 the total U.S. power generation is (4,076.8 TWh). WOW, INCREDIBLE!!!

So as we can see, the total power demand for 500 million low powered EV worldwide will be greater than the entire US power generation per year!!! Simply incredible!! This also does not take into account the conversion and use of other vehicles such as planes, boats, and agricultural equipment…many of which are already well into development and come into use.

Cryptocurrencies global market capitalization has surpassed $500 billion USD rising over 2000% in 2017 alone. This trend is expected to continue for the foreseeable future as businesses increasingly embrace the elegant design and transparency that blockchain has to offer.

However, as of December 2017, Bitcoin mining energy use has officially surpassed the entire energy consumption of Denmark. As the difficulty of mining increases to reflect the influx of miners joining the network, this energy consumption will only increase.

The most astounding aspect of this is that the rate of expansion is exponential. At the current rate of energy consumption, next year, Bitcoin mining will consume enough energy to be listed as the twentieth country in the world! The model is simply unsustainable. The world relies primarily on the production of energy from the burning of coal and oil, which not only damages the environment but the economy as a whole. If Bitcoin has a great enough impact on the world’s coal and oil supplies, then the cost of a kilowatt will rise globally.

The more valuable one bitcoin becomes, the more energy can be justified to mine that token. Therefore, with cryptocurrencies price spikes, follows energy spikes and so on.