There’s nothing like the thrill of watching a huge project come together. When done correctly, it looks a lot like months (or sometimes years) of careful planning. Then the day arrives when it’s time to execute. If you’ve done your prep-work correctly, there’s really not much to do except sit back and watch the plan unfold. You’ll have a few meetings, talk everyone through the broad strokes of the launch, and then say “go.” That’s when teams of people jump into action. And all of the pieces of the big machine come to life.

Living in a quaint condo here in Glendora, my husband and I realized one day that California had created a pathway for condo owners towards a green energy and electric vehicle future. We just needed a well thought out plan. Wasting little time, I began. Almost a year’s worth of planning, research, and coordination commenced. As time progressed, one little X factor kept emerging, a question: how much solar power does a two car EV family really need? 

I calculated the answer a few different ways, came up with a range of estimates, some satisfying, some not so satisfying. But at the end of the day, we lived in a condo. There was only so much roof on which I could build. And any amount of solar power offsetting our daily life was a huge help to our wallets. Being a maximalist,I chose to future proof my home and build on every available square foot of roof. This would amount to 140% of our daily average use.

And then the day finally came. “Go.” Teams of crews on site. Buzzing in and out of the front door. Walking around on the roof. Installing conduits throughout the walls. And like every huge project I’ve ever worked on there wasn’t much for me to do except to sit back and enjoy the fruits of a lot of planning. Everything went off without a hitch, and now the time came to relax, wait, and watch the meter.

But of course, the X in the X factor was quickly revealed. Gasp, an overage. Shock, we didn’t build enough to get to zero. The first bill was a punch to the gut. And then the second. And so on. 140% was indeed a great help to our family. But I kept thinking, “How could this possibly be? You mean to tell me that if every American family switched to electric vehicles tomorrow, that the net energy conversion would increase their electrical use by over 140%? If the whole country switches to electric vehicles, we’d need more than 140% of our current grid capacity?” 

And then it hit me. Sure, we have homes full of nice little lightbulbs. Yes, from time to time, we turn on a TV or three. Fine, we like those lovely little phones we carry around every day. Granted, when it’s hot out, we spin up that nifty motor in our AC to compress some inert gases and cool our home down.

However, while homes themselves are quite efficient these days, in the garage of the average American family lurks roughly three to six imperial tons of smelted boulders on wheels. The engines for these monstrously heavy objects are an order of magnitude larger and more powerful than the next nearest motor in our homes, an AC compressor. All of this is meant to move — in most instances — a single person from the place they spend two thirds of their life to the place they spend the remaining third of their life.

It dawned on me: we’re heading for an energy crisis. While I still believe deeply in moving away from fossil fuels and electrifying our roads or building more efficient forms of mass transportation, I had never contemplated as a life long proponent of progressive environmental policy the sheer scale of the energy transition before us. 

Please sit back and join me in the thought experiment. The average Californian home consumes 16.1kWh of electricity. To put that in perspective, an electric car usually has a battery capacity at or above 40kWh. So even a vehicle designed to go on short trips of about 150 miles is carrying enough energy to power your home and everything in it for two and a half days. According to the US Department of Transportation, an average round-trip commute is around 27 miles. That’s 14kWh per family per weekday of pure energy just to go to and from our jobs. That means a regular two car working family is burning almost as much energy per weekday as their entire home consumes in a single day.

Most cars in California are still powered by combustion engines. As of 2024, the Department of Energy says 84.6% of  the light duty cars on our roadways, which are among the most electrified in the nation, contain gasoline engines. If it takes an EV almost as much energy as a home uses in a day to move someone to and from their job, how much energy does a combustion engine use? And how much energy is it pumping into our atmosphere? 

A single British Thermal Unit of energy is all it takes to raise the temperature of a pound of water one degree Fahrenheit. According to the Energy Information Administration, if you lit a match and tossed it into a gallon of gasoline, the chemical energy making that neat explosion singeing your eyebrows also produces over 120 thousand BTUs. How much thrust does that produce? The DOE says that the average American car can produce 22mph of thrust on a single gallon of gasoline. That means 5,272 BTUs are generated per mile. But they also note that only 16-30% is actually converted to thrust in the drivetrain and wheels. Remember, cars have a radiator constantly working to pull heat out of the engine. They also have a tailpipe where hot gases escape into the air. The other 68-72% of that chemical heat goes straight into our atmosphere. That’s 3,585 BTUs of energy per mile going right into the air we breathe for every mile a single car drives. But our air isn’t liquid water. It’s gases. A BTU will make 56 cubic feet of air hotter by one degree. Which means a car, driving a single mile will raise the temperature of 200,760 cubic feet of air by one degree. Which means that a single family, driving two gas vehicles on a regular 27 mile commute, will burn 2.45 gallons of gas and raise the temperature of 10.8 million cubic feet of air by a single degree in a single day.

Setting aside the antiquity of the combustion engine, one must marvel at the amount of energy created by little more than two gallons of gasoline. It’s no wonder that in the early turn of the century, when solar power and batteries were in their nascent stages, that the proposition of propelling an automobile on a few cups of chemical energy convinced the world that oil and gasoline were the right choice to serve as the energy source of the future.

So here’s the conclusion of our thought experiment. A family with electric vehicles will use almost as much energy as their home uses per day. A family with gas vehicles will generate 10.8 million cubic feet of heat per day. That is a staggering amount of energy for a single American family to consume to meet their basic needs, as well as a staggering amount of heat energy to pump into the atmosphere. Our cars, which are the heaviest objects in our homes, require so much energy that we’re pumping mountains of heat plumes into our atmosphere every day. Converting them to more efficient electricity, which is decoupled from the source of production, will be a herculean lift. It will consume vast quantities of electric energy to perform the same task accomplished by chemical energy.

According to the DMV’s open datasets, Glendora has 33,673 light duty gas powered cars registered within its zip code. If all of those cars are driving the national mileage average of 22mph and the national average commuter distance of 27 miles, our town is consuming at least 10.7 million gallons of gasoline per year just on our daily commutes. That’s 16 olympic swimming pools of gas burned per year. That’s a heat plume of 69.7 trillion — with a T — cubic feet of warmth that our small town added to the atmosphere in a single year. If we wanted to convert all of those 33,673 cars to electric, then just the daily commute would amount to 227.3mWh. And the annual capacity we’d need to create is 59.1 gigawatt hours.

The planner in me sits back in wonder and amazement at the thought. If we’re to take the threat of climate change seriously, we need a cosmic sum of energy to complete the energy transition. But we also need to rethink how we’re using and designing cars. We need to consider more efficient forms of transportation and housing for people closer to their transit destinations. We need to decide what forms of energy should be tapped. All of this must be taken seriously to create a realistic transition plan away from our antiquated transportation infrastructure. 

It is going to take one hell of a plan to make this change. Indeed, a huge project for our time. But while the sheer scale of the task is daunting. We should remember our proud history as Americans! We can double our energy capacity to meet the demands of tomorrow. We can redesign our transportation infrastructure. The same people that defeated Nazism and Communism,; that went to the moon and sent probes into the reaches of interstellar space,; and that designed the world’s fastest computational marvels are more than capable of reimagining how we move people. We simply need to take the challenge seriously. And we must demand that our leaders summon our brightest minds to do the same.

There’s nothing like the thrill of watching a huge project come together. And this project will be one for the ages. We need only say a single word: “go.”