Petrol and diesel vehicles will not be sold in France after 2040 as part of a package of environmental measures announced by Emmanuel Macron’s government
Ecological and social transition minister Nicolas Hulot announced the new measures earlier this week, stating that France planned to entirely carbon-neutral by 2050, and that the country hopes to be “the number one green economy.”
Owners of diesel vehicles more than 20 years old and petrol vehicles made before 2001 will be offered tax incentives to replace them. Hulot, who before entering politics as a member of Macron’s new party was an environmental campaigner, said the ban was motivated by a desire to improve air quality, which was a public health issue.
Other aspects of the policy include an end to oil and gas exploration on French territory by the autumn — Macron opposed fracking in French Guiana during his pesidential election campaign — and phasing out coal-fired power stations, of which only two are currently in operation, by 2021. New laws will encourage households to generate their own electricity, Hulot added.
Bloomberg News reports that shares in Peugeot and Citroen’s parent company, PSA Group, rose 2.4 per cent after Hulot’s announcement, while Renault’s rose by 1.9 per cent. PSA plans to launch electric versions of 80 per cent of its models by 2023.
How will households generate their own electricity? Every house with an anerobic digester? I doubt it. Treadmills? Massed hamster cages? Has someone been at the metal polish.
This strategy all sounds terrific but it may cripple France’s economy even further.
Being less facetious, France has a large installed base of photovoltaic capacity; it exceeded 7GW last year, and almost 2.5GW of that is installations of less than 100kW — that is, domestic scale.
Households will have diesel or petrol powered generators at home to charge their electric vehicles.
…Macron opposed fracking in French Guiana during his presidential election campaign…
It may not be well known that the former colonies of France are ‘treated’, for political purposes, as though part of the land-mass of France. Elected MPs have equal status. The long dependence on significant Nuclear power generation by France has also guided that nation’s retention of its colonial links: former colonies/countries with uranium ores are favoured. Rather different to the manner we treated Cayenne’s neighbour, now Guyana, but formerly British Guiana.
I recall from my childhood a sarcastic comment from some political media commentator- “that on a small island (ours) built upon vast coal stocks and surrounded by seas, teeming with fish, it has taken a particular political skill to ensure a shortage of both, at the same time!” Ah me?
Several countries are proposing the replacement of fossil fuelled (petrol and diesel) cars with electric cars. I decided to look briefly at the electricity requirements required to do this. These figures are for Germany, I would expect the figures to be similar for France possibly with a higher proportion of diesel fuelled cars.
First step how much petrol and diesel is currently used?
From the IEA
http://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/GermanyOSS.pdf
Germany petrol and diesel consumption 2010-2011.
Petrol 450 000 barrels per day
Diesel 1050 000 barrels per day
As a cross check on the total consumption:
http://world.bymap.org/OilConsumption.html
Total consumption petroleum consumption for Germany 2015
2 372 000 barrels per day
Next step what is the electrical energy equivalent of 1 barrel of Petrol/Diesel? From a couple of sources:
http://peakoil.com/generalideas/how-much-energy-is-there-in-a-barrel-of-oil
1 barrel (crude) is 1,700 kilowatt hours
http://letthesunwork.com/energy/barrelofenergy.htm
A barrel of oil contains about six gigajoules of energy. That’s six billion joules or 1667 kilowatt-hours
If we take 1.7 MWh per barrel for petrol annual automotive energy input is:
Petrol 765 000 MWh per day= 765 GWh per day = 279 000 GWh = 279 TWh
Assuming an efficiency of 20% for a petrol vehicle the energy required for petrol automotive use in Germany is 55.8 TWh per year.
Taking an overall efficiency for an electric vehicle to be 80% (electricity transmission losses, battery charging efficiency) replacing the petrol vehicles with electric vehicles would require 70 TWh per year.
What proportion of the diesel is for automotive use against road or rail transport is not obvious. Suggesting a total of 100TWh for the annual automotive consumption seems reasonable.
If all the diesel consumers were replaced by electric vehicles the annual electricity consumption would increase by around 220 TWh per year
Currently Germany produces around 600 TWh of electricity annually.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-consumption-and-power-mix-charts
Increasing this to 700 TWH to allow for the charging of electric cars is not trivial, nor is the reinforcement of the distribution infrastructure. Increasing to 820 TWh to replace all fossil fuelled transport is probably impossible in the suggested time scales.
Best regards
Roger