I disagree. It's pretty clear that natural gas, coal and oil (yes we still have some oil fired power plants) have EROI (energy return on investment) numbers that closely mirror gasoline. That's why "Oil and Gas" EROI numbers are considered ONE AND THE SAME.
My point remains, the BTU's consumed at the power plant really does matter and is more or less directly comparable to the liquid fuels used in transportation.
UD, it's good to recognize that EROI is in essence, energy wasted producing the fuel, and with oil and gas, it's about 5% worldwide. Coal is not far off. The numbers are too small to matter.
What matters is how much fuel is burned to go a mile in each type of vehicle. I maintain that an EV, powered by a fuel burning power plant is not as efficient as a modern hybrid.
Put another way, the power plant in a hybrid is 41% efficient, and directly drives the wheels.
Im not at all debating there aren't losses in power generation, I totally get and understand that.
Fossil EROI peaked in the 30s' and has been on a downward trend since. Crude isnt exactly fungible has varying costs to process and refine and as the mix of shale grows EROI continues to diminish. I'm curious to read more on it and welcome anything you can contribute link wise.
EROI is itself a construct that's highly variable, here's one article on that.
https://reader.elsevier.com/reader/...56520C37430890540D4ED1328BEFEEFFEE9DDE5653F21
The cost for liquid fuel delivery has tremendous losses/ costs, subsidies, and military cost implications aren't part of EROI making the true number nearly impossible to glean - but it's a real cost nonetheless.
The consumer of the product is shielded from that true cost on both sides - and only has to deal with the price per unit delivered to the vehicle.
The grid all over the North America is a blend of multiple sources so one computation for loss or EROI simply isn't good enough.
To your point of charging with a fuel burning plant - what if only 3/4 of a charge comes from a fossil plant?
How about 1/2 and the rest other? Californias fossil burn (nat gas) is about 50% of its total delivery MWH.
This % of fossil burn is sliding down all over the grid in the US continuously.
I do agree that an electrics greenness directly relate to the power source, but Im separating green from efficiency in this discussion.
If the formula you present for loss on the electric side were universally applicable I would expect the EPA to include this conversion in MPGe but they dont. Im not saying that MPGe is a completely accurate construct but when efficiencies are computed by the metric of the unit delivered to the vehicle - the EV is vastly more efficient which mirrors the MPGE on a hybrid vs a model 3.
Again Im not saying that makes the EV cheaper to drive - only that it does a better job of creating forward's movement per BTU of energy it has onboard.
I enjoy our dialogs and thank you for your gentlemanly discussion.