https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
that table is thoroughly fascinating. i mean all of them, there’s more than one table on that article
apparently walking is the most energy-efficient transport mode of all?!?!? apart from bicycles
what i find mind-blowing is that airplanes consume approximately the same amount of energy as cars and trains. I mean i can easily see cars and trains being on the same level, but i always thought that airplanes consumed like an order of magnitude more fuel than cars. considering how everybody keeps saying that “airplanes consume so much fuel” and such. crazy.
and also boats are less efficient than i thought? boats consume 16 L/100 km while cars, trains and airplanes consume 6 L/100 km?
They should do this for the fossil fuel modes as well and see what that does to the numbers!
Yeah for the diesel/petrol/gasoline ones they’ve excluded energy wastage at the extraction point (eg if they have a flare), moving the oil to the oil refinery (from wherever in the world it came from), during the refining process (definitely a lot of energy used there), transporting the end product to wherever the filling station is, and finally pumping it into the vehicle.
But they included all the comparable costs for electricity. They wanted fossil fuels to look as good as possible. I’m extremely skeptical about data that suggests air travel is efficient when people have been talking for years about how wasteful and environmentally damaging it is.
For long travel, like intercontinental level distances, it probably is pretty efficient with a full plane. I’ve always understood that the waste and environmental damages are more from a combination of the use of private planes, and short routes that really ought to be train trips with the infrastructure to make them a preferable option to flying.
For example, if I suddenly found out that I needed to get from NYC to Boston by midnight tonight, without using a car, it should be a no-brainer to take Amtrak up there. Yet, even with fuel costs for airlines being quite high right now, there are exactly 4 trains leaving Penn Station for Boston that are cheaper than just catching a flight from JFK, and in the best of cases, they take about 4 times as long to cover that distance. It should really be significantly cheaper than flying in order to deter the majority, if not all of those people who do not expressly need to make that trip in just over an hour, for whatever reason, from taking those sorts of flights. Cheap enough that flying simply isn’t price competitive, and that people don’t mind the extra travel time.
They should also add the cost of harm done to the environment. Then it would be close to infinitely.
Is that generation and distribution within the vehicle or in the grid?
Distribution throughout the vehicle would be laughibly trivial, and calling using batteries ‘generation’ is weird, but they are still like 99% efficient.
Probably means the efficiency loss burning gas (in power plants much more efficient than cars) is counted for electric vehicles, but ignored for gas vehicles through some crazy mental gymnastics.
Its also a US study published in 2018, so this is an expected bias.