First of all, I am not sure what the article you posted has to do with my statement about losses in transmission of electricity and that it is perhaps better that cars burn it at the source rather than plug in.
How much energy is lost along the way as electricity travels from a power plant to the plug in your home? This question comes from Jim Barlow, a Wyoming architect, through our IE Questions project. To find the answer, we need to break it out step by step: first turning raw materials into...
insideenergy.org
California loses 9.2% of the electricity produced in distribution of that electricity to its end destination.
Based on those losses it could be argued that it is less efficient to burn gas to make electricity to power your car than to burn gas to power it directly.
As to the 95% claim in this article...well it is completely and utterly false. If you look at the source article, which is from the LA Times,
Sharing solar and wind power across the American West could help fight climate change.
www.latimes.com
it says that California hit 94.5% renewables... for 4 seconds!
"There are several caveats. For one thing, Saturday’s 94.5% figure — a record, as confirmed to me by the California Independent System Operator — was fleeting, lasting just four seconds. It was specific to the state’s main power grid, which covers four-fifths of California but doesn’t include Los Angeles, Sacramento and several other regions. It came at a time of year defined by abundant sunshine and relatively cool weather, meaning it’s easier for renewable power to do the job traditionally done by fossil fuels."
Talk about misleading!! The Hill article seizes on this and doesn't include ANY of the caveats of the first article and is clearly a propaganda piece by a very conflicted author:
Andreas Karelas is the founder and executive director of RE-volv, a nonprofit clean energy advocacy organization that has brought solar energy to nonprofits in 10 states.
Now the REAL data for the sources of electricity in California comes from the California energy commission;
www.energy.ca.gov
48.4% of electricity generated in California was from natural gas
8.5% from nuclear
9.4% from large hydro
2.7% from coal (imported electricity not burned in California)
Total non-renewables was about 67%
Solar was 15.4%
Wind was 7.2%
So much for 95% of anything renewable...more than half is from gas and nuclear and just over 20% is from Solar and wind. Please don't go back into biomass as an argument...one of the reasons we still have trees on this planet is because we switched to fossil fuels in the early 20th century.
