Electric Vehicles

[jennythereader]

So I'm listening to an episode of the Commonwealth Club where they're talking to a bunch of people involved with different aspects of the electrical vehicle industry.

The moderator asked a very good question about how much of a difference switching from gas cars to electric cars really makes today, when so much of our power still comes from coal burning plants. I mean, we're still putting carbon and other pollutants in to the air, right? The people had several good answers, but they left off one that I think is very basic: namely, that it's a lot easier to put a filter on the smokestack of one power plant than on the tailpipes of thousands of individual cars.

Added: And here's the episode I'm listening to - Turning Over A New Leaf

Comments

[ioldanach.livejournal.com]

Also, you lose quite a lot of electricity to the transmission process. I actually think the future is in farmed biofuels. We have the infrastructure to distribute and dispense liquid fuels, they can be made practically identical to either gasoline or diesel, and they take in the same carbon they emit.

Electric vehicles are great for certain niches, but there are a couple big blocks to their adoption: refuel time and grid capacity. 300 miles worth of gasoline or diesel can be dispensed in under 5 minutes, whereas a similar portion of electricity takes 4-12 hours. Grid capacity was already addressed.