I just watched a video where the speaker is arguing that the amount of trucking we have in the US will be impossible to achieve if we electrify it all. This sounded wrong to me, so here are a few numbers.
There are about 13M trucks over 10,000 lbs in the US, about 3M of them doing long haul. The vast majority are doing short haul delivery. Tesla claims it's semi can do 1.7 miles per KWh. My model S gets about 2.8 miles per KWh and it weighs less than 5000 lbs, so I suspect that 1.7 is optimistic. Let's guess a full size long haul truck can actually get 1.5 miles per KWh. Long haul trucks are limited to about 500 miles a day by driver's hours regulations, which works out to about 333 KWh per day. So to power all 3M of those trucks would take 1 million megawatt hours or 1 terrawatt hour.
That sounds like a big number and it is. But here's another big number. In 2022, the US produced about 434 Terrawatt hours of electricity from wind turbines. That's about 1.2 TWh per day--about 20% more than would be needed to power all those trucks. Could we add enough additional wind turbines to achieve this? Yes, definitely. Present deployment rates have us doubling every 6 or 7 years.
The other 10 million trucks do not consume nearly that much power. The vast majority of trucks average much less than 100 miles per day, doing deliveries, moving containers around in seaports, etc. The postal service, Amazon and others have been finding that their fleets of electric vehicles are vastly cheaper to operate than fossil fuel counterparts. It's certainly well under 1TWh per day.
