If you really want to run cars on clean energy, then they should run on LNG, not electricity — but, of course, the environmentalists killed that.
It’s still more efficient to run a EV off the grid using natural gas combined cycle turbines located anywhere closer than 250km via the HVAC grid than to run a spark ignited engine directly off the gas. This does not count the extra energy to compress the gas to CNG grade pressures which takes an additional 13% off the top.
The math is easy to find two minutes will the Google will show you it.
The short version is
Natural gas combined cycle at 60% efficiency, HVAC grid at 3% losses under 250km, a Tesla is 75% efficient putting watts to motion. Out of 100 btus of original energy a Tesla puts 43.65 of them into motion down the road.
A conventional ICE car is 16% tank to wheel efficiency.
With liquid petrol out of 100 btus of HHV only 16 are actually used to move down the road.
With CNG you have to compress the natural gas to 3000+ psi to store it. That uses an additional 13% of the original HHV this again is easy to find specs for. So taking an additional 13% off BEFORE your burn it in your 16% efficient combustion engine yields 13.92 btu of usable motion from the original 100 btus that’s abysmal.
Why is this so? Easy a natural gas combined cycle runs at temperatures in their turbines that would liquify a conventional engine and have compression ratios of 50 to 1 in the compressor stage. Both are factors in the Carnot efficiency that all thermodynamic cycle engines must obey. The higher the compression ratio and the higher the temps vs the heat sink the higher the efficiency. NGCC also have a second steam turbine bottoming cycle that takes waste heat from the gas turbine exhaust and extracts even more electricity. The overall effect is no ICE engine can touch the efficiency of a NGCC turbine set up only huge slow speed ship diesels approach 50% to the shaft eff. They are the size of a building and weight 500+ tonnes.
The HVAC grid has so much improved since Edison’s day the avg losses are in the 2 to 3% range to the plug. You could even burn natural gas in a simple cycle turbine at 33% efficiency and still come out on top with an EV. Why it’s second law machines vs first law machines physics dictates electric motors will ALWAYS be vastly more efficient you cannot cheat the three laws.
33% less 3% HVAC losses at 75% plug to wheel is 24 btus to motion that still beats 13btus CNG tank to wheel all day every day and twice on Sunday.
Here is the high school version of the tank to wheel, hybrids do way better than conventional ICE but even a hybrid wouldn’t beat a EV charged from a NGCC turbine.
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~pu4i-aok/cooldata2/hybridcar/hybridcare.htm
This says nothing of using a solar panel with a 25 year life time to charge that same EV. Two commercial sized 500 watt panels on the shortest day of the year in Texas would generate just under ten kWh of power that is enough to send a tesla 40 miles down the road. Why is that important well the avg American commutes less than 40 miles per day. Three panels would certainly power a Tesla for the average daily distance of the average American for an entire year in a sunny location like Texas. We get 220 days of sunlight here our shortest day on the winter solstice has full sunshine for 10.1 hours with 30 minutes of civil Twilight on each end. Our longest day is over 14+ hours of sun. Even with only ten hours of daylight those three panels will make close to 15kWh that’s 60 miles in a tesla S the full size. With 220 days of sun you have a minimum of 13200 miles of yearly range that’s also the average distance a typical American drives in a year. Before the supply crisis those panels could be had for $90 each in bulk orders I personally have brought them for that and less delivered by the pallet full.