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According to [1] an electric garbage truck traveling 15,000 miles a year uses about 38,960 kWh. An 84 MW power plant produces 84,000 kWh every hour, or enough to power more than two trucks for an entire year. Even if we assume that the diesel equivalent uses a hundred times as much it's still a tiny fraction of what the plant in TFA produces.

[1] https://www.oregon.gov/deq/ghgp/Documents/ElectricGarbageTru...




Couple issues with that comparison: 15k seemed low given I drive ~10k a year and I don't work a job that uses my car, so I checked refuse trucks drive on average more like 25k miles per year and there are many servicing a single dump. Also most garbage trucks are still diesel so you've got to 5-10x that power usage number and there's all the vehicles used to compact and move the trash once it reaches the landfill which are also (currently) pretty exclusively diesel powered (think bulldozers and soil compactors with some excavators thrown in).

https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10309


So, you use more of that "enough energy to power them for an ear" that your power plant is outputting every hour.

There are plenty of hours in an year. You won't get any meaningful problem by complaining about the OP's approximations.


The point is this is free energy - all of the energy sent to the trucks is going to be done either way.




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