> No Politics here but . . .
> The electric car myth that "electric" is good for the environment is one
> of the greatest hoaxes on the American public.
Mike,
You're barking up the wrong tree on this one.
You are correct that we can not go to 100% electric vehicles overnight.
Not possible. California's 2003 mandate of 4% of Zero Emission Vehicles
is doable (not all are electric, CNG - Compressed Natural Gas is also
a ZEV vehicle).
Electric vehicles are usually charged after midnight, until 6 am or so. Yep,
perfect time as the Electric Utilities have a surplus of generated power
at that time. Typically if there an electric vehicle program you can get the
"off hour" power of 3 to 4 cents per KW/H . Not bad. Con-Edison does
this one a bit more, as they have a huge reservoir at the top of a hill...
at night the surplus power is used to pump water up the hill, which during
the day is then allowed to flow back down hill to spin turbines generating
extra power for those peak demands. Seems odd, but heck it works.
As to the pollution being moved to another part of the county. Sorry,
I don't buy it at all. Even the coal burning plants are extremely efficient
and have massive pollutant controls on them. They are orders of magnitude
cleaner than the cleanest vehicles. No cold start, sudden acceleration,
leaking fuel, etc. Much easier to keep those plants running at constant
temperatures, scrubbers, etc.
Are electric vehicles for everybody... heck no! Is there a future for them,
yes!
Lots of technology that has yet to be tried, but even the series hybrid
(vehicle driven by pure electric power, but has a small gas/diesel engine
powering a generator) can get much better mileage as the engine is tuned
to run only one rpm range for maximum efficiency. Typically we can only
extract about 33% of the heating value from gasoline to be used as power
moving the vehicle. You can get about 55% with a "constant speed" engine.
Power stations have so many tricks, they get something like 90% of the
energy out of the fuel, meaning about 75% by the time it makes it to your
electric vehicle. Not all my numbers are on the high side for "best in class".
Sigh, I really disagree with Clinton & Gore on their conservation policies.
Don't get me started on Gore, alas I also horrified by Bush's policies in
Texas (oil companies love running refineries here for a reason... then again
I like to breath clean air, but there are some parts of Texas that I can not
go near! Sigh).
I sat in one of the CARB (California Air Resource Board) Meetings about
the 2003 mandates earlier this year in Sacramento. It was quite interesting
to hear the other folks in the audience. Even better was that I was sitting
between folks from Con Edision (Electric Power producer in Southern
California) and some big oil lobbyist next to me. It was interesting.
Cheers,
Tom Walter
Austin, TX
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