How Much Power Does An Electric Car Need?

I was corrected! And I’m grateful and overjoyed!

At our seminar in Lund in September about training needs for electromobility strategists and architects I said that “each electric car will need about 2,000 kWh of electricity to drive the average 11,500 km of a European car”.

At the seminar our friend Professor Joachim Landrath of the German Ostfalia University said that my estimate was too conservative.

Each car will need close to 3,000 kWh.

I was overjoyed at this remark, because I have all the time had to make conservative calculations, because nobody else had started to investigate these things and I believed the large numbers would sound outrageous to people who had not thought about this or done calculations themselves.

According to Joachim’s calculation, there will be:

• a need for almost 750 TWh,

• or the power generated by 65 nuclear reactors

• or 200,000 wind turbines to charge all EU cars on a regular basis.

This is how knowledge develops. I started to calculate this and a few years later Joachim corrected me and said that my calculation was too conservative.

When I correct people saying that we can not only focus on the vehicles, we need to also focus on power generation, grids, charging infrastructure, and the need to develop strong businesses that offer all the necessary products and services, this also needs to be scrutinized and built on by other people.