How much power do autonomous vehicles use? A lot
The real problem isn&#x27;t the autonomous part (although it is an issue).  Full electrification of just the US will require a doubling of our power generation and transport capacity.  This isn&#x27;t trivial at all.<p>The US currently produces 1200 GW (power, not talking energy, that is not the correct conversation).<p>For context, a typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW.  Which means that this doubling effect would be the equivalent of building 1200 new nuclear power plants.  I am not saying that&#x27;s what we have to do, it&#x27;s a useful mental tool to be used in understanding the scale of the problem.<p>Solar isn&#x27;t going to make this happen.  For starters, a solar system has to be overbuilt at a minimum of 10 times the required steady-state output.  In other words, if you are after 1 GW steady state you need a minimum of 10 GW of solar.  The scale is so massive that you start running into regional, weather and MTBF and other issues.<p>The right solutions is likely a combination of lots of nuclear along with lots of solar, wind and hydro (where possible).  We are going to need a serious shift in culture to be able to accomplish this, otherwise, electric cars are going to end-up requiring burning all kinds of fuels just to generate the power to keep them charged.  And then you have all the battery issues.  At some point you have to honestly ask for an honest accounting of what it might all lead to.  I have these images in my mind of massive land areas devastated by strip-mining and other activities just to be &quot;clean&quot; in lands far and away from the mines.<p>Electric cars are a good idea.  We all want them.  We just need to be sure we have honest discussions in order to ensure we do it right and don&#x27;t create a bigger long-term mess than what we manage today.<p>EDIT:<p>Why do I say that energy isn&#x27;t the correct conversation?  Because energy allows one to fall under the fallacy of thinking that things can happen over time.  That is not the case here.  When you have a thousand cars plug in to charge at the same time, you need enough power to service that load.  Yes, of course, the objective is to store a certain amount of energy.  However, the critical path, the thing that will break systems and overload power generation and transmission is their simultaneous power requirement.  The conversation has to be about power.  In a place like Los Angeles you might have a million cars simultaneously connecting to the grid to charge.  That imposes an instantaneous power requirement that has to be met or things go wrong very quickly.  This is how the electric transition is more complicated than a lot of these hand-wavy energy estimates which conveniently ignore what needs to happen instantaneously.