Guest essay by Larry Hamlin
EVs have been hyped by the climate alarmist renewable energy activist crowd as an effective approach for reducing greenhouse gas emissions regarding transportation energy consumption, which for many nations is a large portion of their total energy use.
EVs are fundamentally energy handicapped due to the low energy density of batteries versus the high energy density available in fossil fueled vehicles which results in significantly reduced mileage capabilities for EVs compared to fossil fueled vehicles.
These EV mileage limitations versus fossil fueled vehicles become even more exaggerated when additional energy demands are needed to support vehicle air conditioning and heating loads, hill climbing requirements and operation in cold temperatures that decrease battery stored energy capabilities.
Additionally the higher cost of EVs compared to fossil fueled vehicles dictates government mandated cost incentives being applied that attempt to make EVs more financially attractive with these incentives paid for by taxpayers.
A recent article in the Wall Street Journal addressed these complex and generic problems with EVs.
The article notes the improvement in EVs sales comes at a price and is subject to limitations:
“But that progress comes with two big caveats: First, it has relied on extensive public subsidies and, second, it has done little to reduce planet-warming emissions of carbon dioxide. If electric cars are ever to displace gasoline engines without government putting its thumb on the scale, they must not only keep innovating but outrun fossil fuels where productivity also keeps advancing.
The federal government offers a tax credit of up to $7,500 each for the first 200,000 electric or plug-in hybrid cars a manufacturer sells. Throw in state tax credits, subsidies for recharging infrastructure, relief from gasoline taxes, preferential lanes and parking spots and government fleet purchases, and taxpayers help pay for every electric car on the road.
What happens when the credits go away? When Hong Kong slashed a tax break worth roughly $55,000 for a Tesla in April, its sales ground to a halt. In Georgia, electric vehicle sales plummeted 80% the month after a $5,000 tax credit was repealed.
Many optimists think falling battery costs mean electric vehicles (EVs) will inevitably displace the internal combustion engine (ICE). Last week, Bloomberg predicted electric cars would become “price competitive” with ICE cars in eight years without subsidies.
But such scenarios hinge not just on the cost of batteries but on the price of oil and the efficiency of competing vehicles. Economists Thomas Covert, Michael Greenstone and Christopher Knittel, in an article for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, estimate that at the current battery cost of $270 per kwh, oil would have to cost more than $300 a barrel (in 2020 dollars) to make electric and gasoline equally attractive.
If battery costs fall to $100, as Tesla Founder Elon Musk has targeted, oil would have to average $90.”
The WSJ article presents the Covert, Greenstone and Knittel study graph demonstrating the superior cost performance of fossil fueled vehicles versus EVs based on battery cost and oil prices.
The study also demonstrates the very significant changes in battery costs and oil prices that would have to occur to change the clear advantage that fossil fueled vehicles enjoy.
The impact of lower EV subsidizes has a significant and dramatic negative outcome on sales resulting in greatly reduced purchase of EVs as documented in numerous articles.
In the case of China the EV purchase “speed bump” is quite significant and described as:
“According to UBS, sales growth of new-energy vehicles including pure electric cars and plug-in hybrid automobiles, are expected to slow to 20 per cent for the whole year in 2017, compared to the 63 per cent year-on-year increase recorded in 2016.”
“In China, policies always have a huge impact on the auto market,” said UBS analyst Hou Yankun. “As government subsidies drop, the market is losing a major driving force to spur the growth [of the electric-car segment].”
This cutting of EV subsidizes by Beijing with the resulting decrease in EV sales is yet another defeat for California Governor Brown who amazingly regards China as his partner in “leading” the fight against global climate change even though China is committed to building over 700 new coal plants in the next decade.
The financial viability of EV producers is also in question as noted in an article from business financial watch guard UBS.
Despite the many unanswered questions and thorny issues facing EVs the UK government has decided to throw caution and any pretense of rational thinking to the wind and mandate an end to the sale of all diesel and petrol cars by 2040.
Exactly how this UK government mandate is to be accomplished and how much it will cost is now the subject of many articles in the UK which are spelling out the enormous costs and complexity that such a mandate will create since the government announcement completely evaded and ignored these critical issues.
The Telegraph article lays out the massive increase in UK electric system loads of 30 GW per year this “mandate” will create and explores the power plant options available and required to meet this growth which it quantifies as costing about 200 billion BP.
The article also provides information clearly demonstrating how difficult and unprecedented this UK government mandate will be in trying to accomplish a more than 30 million vehicle transition from petrol and diesel vehicles to EVs.
Additionally the article shows the extremely limited options that are available for UK residents to select from regarding their “choice” of EVs.
In another article The Telegraph notes the huge infrastructure costs associated with eliminating petrol and diesel cars in favor of mandated use of EVs.
Regarding Tesla’s and the UK government “zero” emissions claim for EVs Bjorn Lomborg notes:
“Like other electric cars, it has “zero emissions” of air pollution and CO2. But this is only true of the car itself; the electricity powering it is often produced with coal, which means that the clean car is responsible for heavy air pollution. As green venture capitalist Vinod Khosla likes to point out, “electric cars are coal-powered cars”.
The people of the UK might be forgiven for their considerable skepticism of yet another clueless government mandate dictated by their arrogant and ignorant politicians given the debacle of the decade old UK government mandate requiring the sales of increased numbers of diesel vehicles to address climate change.
Government incentives provided to push the increased sale of diesels in the name of climate change have resulted in diesels becoming 36% of UK cars up from only 14% in 2001.
After providing government incentives encouraging the sales of diesels driven by claimed benefits for climate change the UK government will now impose new pollution taxes on diesel vehicles and ban diesels from traveling on roads during rush hour.
The proposed banning of petrol and diesel vehicles with mandated conversion to EVs along with new diesel vehicle pollution taxes and driving restrictions now proposed by the UK governments climate alarmist politicians clearly signals to the populace that these officials are truly a complete bunch of idiots.
As WUWT noted the emissions performance of diesels is terrible and does not significantly reduce CO2 but definitely increases other harmful pollutants which are negatively impacting cites all over the UK. and Europe.
Further the government mandated diesel emissions debacle is growing elsewhere in Europe with major announcements that all major car manufacturers in Germany have colluded in hiding flawed emissions performance of diesel cars whose sales they have been promoting in the name of helping climate change.
Through these absurd actions the UK and European governments have demonstrated that they are absolutely incompetent at defining and implementing policy regarding climate and energy issues and that the politicians in charge are distinguished by their ignorance, gullibility and climate alarmist stupidity.
These outcomes clearly support that efforts by governments in the UK and Europe to address the transportation energy sector energy and climate issues need to be immediately curtailed and new approaches devised to explore these areas that hopefully involve other than the demonstrated political incompetence present in these governments.
Please consider the electric currents required to charge a large battery quickly. The bigger the battery and the faster you want to charge, the bigger the currents. This is pure physics, not even Elon Musk can invent that away. At 230 V, you would need maybe about 50 A. Who has that sort of capacity at home, on top of everything else that requires electricity? A workplace with hundreds of vehicle in the parking lot would require thousands of A. How is that going to work? I suppose everything is possible but it’s going to cost a lot of money.
Firget the ‘home’, most cars are parked on streets!
Troo dat. I have a 280 Amp alternator fitted to a 70 hp diesel to charge a 740 Ah battery bank for domestic use. I can do it also from a 2 kW petrol generator but again it’s pulling around 70 Amps for some hours and maxing out the generator. A model S Tesla has battery capacity of 3,680 Ah I understand. Anyone thinking we are going to replace all ICE with EV and charge them all overnight from a wind and solar powered grid is too stupid for any words of mine to properly convey.
Will a UK government official or one or their sympathizers please point me to the incentives provided to move the nation from horse-powered transportation to gasoline powered transportation. And from wind-powered ships to coal powered ships.
Jgriggs3: We call it: “Look, a squirrel!” in the UK. It has distracted the MSN for a few days….The Government is happy. Much like the Mooch has given the NYT and CNN something to do while Trump gets on and runs the Country.
The current aim of our government is that we should all wear burkhas whilst living as transgender EV drivers and share our homes with “refugees” (Unless we are rich and famous; in which case we are exempt….We can have private islands, Hummer collections and palaces on Lake Garda) The rules only apply to the middle class tax payers. Non-taxpayers are also exempt and get paid to demonstrate violently against us.
Enjoy.
Considering where they should be at by now, EVs are lagging.
However, Fastest Pikes Peak Run Ever – Sébastien Loeb in 875HP Peugeot 208 T16
Repotedly, he didn’t even practice. Spank time.
If he lived at the bottom and worked at the top, or vice versa, and liked to sleep in, that would be useful. Otherwise, not so much!
I live in the UK, in a small dispersed hamlet of 22 domestic dwellings and one agricultural business. When we moved here 17y ago the nominal 230V mains dropped to 180V when we put ONE electric shower on. All 22 houses were fed off a single 25kVA transformer, primary single phase 11kV. It took us nearly 3 years to get upgraded, they had to bring 3 phase 11kV in from several poles away, install a new transformer (100kVA) and new thicker overhead conductors. Probably cost them well over £100K, for 22 houses!
How much of an additional upgrade do we need for full EV. Well I think most houses round here have at least 2 cars, and one has 6. Lets be generous and say 2 on average, thats 44 EVs to be kept topped up. Assume just half are going to be in use daily for work commutes so we are going to have 22 plugged in EVERY night. Some of the other half are going to need topping up too, so lets take an extra 5 for that. So the typical weekday night time charging of 27 EVs at a modest rate of 10kW is 270kW extra.
Of course that’s just the “typical”. We need to account for more intensive use, maybe that will be around Xmas when we are all off visiting relatives 100+ miles away or they are visiting us in their EVs which need topping up from our supply. shall we add an extra 505 then to allow for “maximum demand”. Thats 405kW extra, on top of our existing 100kW, so it looks like we are going to need a MUCH bigger transformer. 500kVA for just 22 houses. And the overhead lines will need uprating too. Will £250K be enough?
Reverend, spot on.
I expect those of us in the UK living in small village hamlets will be told to use our heating oil to fuel oil burning generators to power zero emission electric cars. Crisis averted.
And 90+% of UK cars are parked on streets. The infrastructure alone required to charge these is mind-boggling.
As is often the case, all these new developments only work as long as very few people actually use them. I have been in contact with my local electricity provider here in Sweden and asked them how they prepared for the EV tsunami. The answer was that most vehicles do not need a full battery charge every day, they just need a topping up (which I guess is correct to a certain degree). In other words, they are happy to promote the new planet-saving technology but at the same time they hope people won’t use it.
My bet is that the EV will never become a product for the wider market. I reckon it will be used in certain applications and maybe for city dwellers who only drive short distances. I look forward to seeing how it develops! Right now, it seems to be the perfect product for the “rich and righteous”. I wonder when Prince Charles will order his first Tesla?
Might I remind everyone that batteries are NOT a source of energy. They merely store energy that has been generated elsewhere.At a cost.
Charging and discharging batteries is not 100% efficient either.
I hate acronyms…
Just once at the start of the article you could mention that EVs = Electric Vehicles::
EV Extended Validation
EV Electro Voice
EV Electron Volt
EV Enterprise Value
EV Exposure Value (photography)
EV Earned Value
EV Expected Value
EV Escape Velocity
EV Evansville (Indiana)
EV Evanston (Illinois)
EV En Vogue (female singing group)
EV Embedded Value
EV Escape Velocity (computer game)
EV Electoral Votes
EV Event Horizon (movie)
EV En Ville (French: In Town)
EV Eingetragener Verein (German: Registered Association)
EV Ebola virus
EV Extreme Value
EV Exhaust Valve
EV Effort Values (gaming)
EV Erdöl-Vereinigung
EV Eesti Vabariik (Estonian Republic)
EV Epidermodysplasia Verruciformis
EV External Verification
EV Experimental Version
Great article though otherwise…JPP
Expensive Vanity
Ron L said: “…Renewables in the grid reduce carbon emissions of the whole grid. Step by step. It is a fact. All else is irrelevant….” Except electricity consumption is increasing faster than what energy renewables provide. There is no CO2 reduction….. common logic tells you that. Do the math. Think about it.
Beyond that, since you need spinning reserve ready to go on a moments notice, even the renewables that are up and running don’t actually reduce fossil fuel usage.
One get get an idea of price comparison if they look at what it costs to lease EV vs gas car.
Wall Street Journal: Electric cars are the future?
Thomas Edison: No. Electric cars are the past. I built this electric car in 1895. It couldn’t compete with the Ford Model T
“…Thomas Edison: No. Electric cars are the past….” No, they just aren’t the panacea that they are made out to be. They have a niche in low mileage high density applications and nothing more….. today and the near future.
Yup. I like electric carts
http://sharktankblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/caddy-girls.jpg
“the Journal of Economic Perspectives, estimate that at the current battery cost of $270 per kwh, oil would have to cost more than $300 a barrel (in 2020 dollars) to make electric and gasoline equally attractive.”
That’s the Tesla Powerpack. It’s 1.3 m x 0.82 m x 2.2 m = 2.34 cubic meters LOL
You must be driving this EV
http://www.sketchup3dconstruction.com/const/images/off-road-dump-trucks1.jpg
I still can’t see how all these cars will be charged. I don’t mean the power available, I mean the infrastructure.
Look around any UK town or city. Almost every car is parked on the road. Do we have millions of power outlets and cables strewn over our pavements (sidewalks in USian)? Can nobody see any potential for damage, either accidental or deliberate?
All sorts of other minor circumstances could make charging fail too, leaving whole groups of people unable to drive the next day. Is anyone going to investigate the potential issues, or will the just see how it stuffs up and apply bandaids as issues arrise? No, don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical.
If only someone could invent a gasoline fuel cell.
Only 6% of UK car journeys are over 50 miles…
56% are 25 miles or less.
no real range problem for much of the UK.
The Telegraph 61 GWpeak demand figure is way out of date: only twice in the last 2 winters has demand got as far as 53 GW and demand (leaving out any impact from EVs) is still falling, as it has for a decade, due to massive LED rollout and energy efficiency.
The UK evening winter peak is increasingly being handled by hydro, pumped storage and demand management and will be helped out by batteries…in other words the peak is being ‘smoothed off’ demand without extra power stations being needed on the grid
given that smart charging is likely to allow balanced overnight charging when demand is low midnight to 6 am, looks like worrying about cars and the winter evening peak is over hyped.
where will we charge all those cars? Given the pattern of UK life I suspect at work, at the supermarket, the commuter car park at rail stations or at the convenience store: Shell has many convenience stores located at petrol stations and is already talking about installing charge points
Griff,
A few problems for the grid:
Indeed many cars will be charged at the shops, offices and factories in daytime, as that is for most cars the best option, as most cars sleep on the streets, not at home, which has no garage. That thus is an extra power use at high load, mainly in towns and industrial areas.
Wind and solar are outside towns and mostly outside industrial areas, wind at any moment when you don’t need it and not when you need it. Even when at the right moment: lots of extra cables to bring the extra power at the right place. See Germany: 600 km high voltage lines from the North Sea wind parks to mid-Germany where the main industry is in the Ruhr country.
Solar: same probem. For solar on private roofs even worse: local distribution networks are made for a certain load for every houshold at peak time (usually 6-8 p.m.). If one in 4 housholds has solar on their roof, that is no problem. If solar density increases, there is more power generated during the day than the local network can have, as there is locally little needed and most use (including the cars) is in the work environment. That is what Germany is confronted with now and that will cost all households a lot of money.
Of course, every houshold can install Tesla batteries to fix the load/use cycle, but as solar here has already a negative ROI (no subsidies anymore and a new tax for network use!), adding a battery backup makes that even worse…
And forget storage by hydro: if you want 40% power from renewables in Europe, you need about 600 times the current pump capacity. In our country we have pump capacity for maximum 10% winter use during 5 hours. They are planning to double that, but then it stops as there are no more hills available to that use (or you have to kill valuable natural habitat)…
#I’ve looked at the existing Norwegian charging patterns – plus UK life involves frequently parking at work, using supermarkets and parking at commuter rail stations. I think we will charge there.
The UK grid is already being upgraded in many places fir renewables – e.g the Western HVDC link
and it is better developed than the German one.
I’m not aware that Germany – or Queensland, another place with very high domestic solar – have the loacl grid problems you describe.
I think you are over hyping the problem.
The national grid ‘future scenarios’ have long since modelled grids with this sort of load.
You also miss out developments like power to gas, tipped as the storage solution for Germany in coming decades (store the gas in existing distribution network – supplement gas from excess renewable power with gas from sewage). UK has tidal lagoon potential and at least one large pumped storage proposal.
Griff,
Norway (and Iceland) are big exceptions in this world, as they have (near) 100% power supply out of hydro (and geo) energy. Norway can afford to heat houses with electricity, because they have enough hydropower, but including transport will be a huge challenge as they normally do break even or even may have a small shortage in very dry years (if I remember well 1976, which was a very dry and sunny year). On the other side Denmark and in the near future Germany (extra HVDC links between Germany and Norway) may help by selling their surplus wind energy when not needed at a very low price, so that they don’t have to use their own hydro and have more reserve…
At this moment the main additions in the network are the high voltage connections between windparks and industrial areas and interconnections between countries to distribute (wind and solar) over more users and back when there are shortages.
Local distribution still is secondary, but getting a huge problem in some dense solar areas.
Here an example from Australia:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/rooftop-solar-panels-overloading-electricity-grid/news-story/5ea583571dde0830ec34d3cd8c32b9dc
Most systems nowadays limit their output when the network voltage gets too high, but that is a waste of power when overall use is high at daytime…
It seems to be difficult to find real life figures from Germany, but I suppose they have the same problems…
Power to gas (to power) is the next question… Besides the gigantic quantities needed to store all energy from e.g. daylight generation for nightly use, solar generation mid-winter is about 10% of summer generation. Seasonal storage besides hydro (even that would be gigantic) is simply impossible.
Further: hydrogen can be mixed into natural gas up to 1% (some say more…) Hydrogen is one of the worst energy carriers due to its very low energy density. There are experiments with transfering power to methanol and fuel cells base on methanol. That will have more chance to survive as much of the existing infrastructure can be used and energy density is a lot higher…
“I think you are over hyping the problem.”
I think – no, sack that, I’m absolutely damn certain – that you don’t have the first idea what you’re wittering about.
Have you apologised yet?
Efficiently maximizing performance while minimizing materials use, at a cost customers will pay, is what a free and open market is all about. The use of inefficient methods such as subsidy, and providing products without the performance that customers expects is project doomed to failure. Green products are all about the latter not the former.
I see where Elon Musk just announced his being bipolar. Call that a marker to be used later in legal defense.
I guess you would go a bit mental after screwing $9 billion out of the American taxpayer. Way to go, as they say over there, eh?
The truth is that EVs are balanced on the cusp of viability and a niche market exists. This is not true of renewable energy.
However a nuclear-electric society is probably where we will end up one way or the other, just not that fast.
For those of you who think EVs will result in having to reinforce the grid or constructing many more power plants, I have to disagree. You are looking at a status quo future.
Smart meters, which the UK has been installing for some time now, will allow variable, time-of-day pricing for electricity, so no change in the grid or power production is required. The good people of the UK will simply have to decide whether they want to heat their homes, charge the car, or wash their clothes during the three hours a day they can afford electricity, and the power company will decide what time those three hours are, so they can balance the load.
Good luck in the Brave New World.
Charging 100% of the cars used by individuals would require more power than the grid is currently designed to deliver. And that leaves nothing for keeping the lights on.
Reread my comment. There won’t be anywhere near 100% of the cars on the road TODAY being replaced be EVs needing to be charged. The cost will be too much, i.e., power will be rationed by price. I’ve lived ling enough to see this for what it is, a move to force people out of their personal vehicles and onto mass transit. Private car ownership will be equivalent to owning your own plane today. Of course, the bureaucrats will simply bill the taxpayers for the cost of their vehicles.
This article is an obsolete, ficitious bunch of crap that manages to produce invalid but silly and
irrelevant arguments concerning gasoline’s supposed “energy density advantage” over battery
power. One cannot simply compare the weight of a gallon of gas to the weight of a battery that
contains the same amount of energy. If one wishes to produce a meaningless comparison such
as this, one must compare the energy systems of each vehicle – and weigh all of the parts required
for the energy to be delivered to the road. For a gas powered car, that includes a very heavy cast
iron engine, an exhaust system, a fuel tank to hold the gasoline and all the parts required to
pump it at high pressure to the engine, also the transmission, no lightweight itself . Also a cooling
system as well. Except sometimes for the cooling system, an electric car only requires a battery pack
and controller (very light weight) and an electric motor, which often weighs less than a third the
weight of a gas powered engine. That pretty much invalidates any claims about a gas powerd car’s
“energy density advantage.”
But even if an advantage did exist, well, so what? Where’s the advantage? In terms of around town,
non-travel driving, an electric owned by someone who has a garage or carport, or curbside
electrical outlet, or access to a condo or apartment recharging space, refueling an electric is easier
and requires less effort than refueling a gas powered vehicle.
These days the typical commuter probably would require a battery recharge once every 5 days.
If it takes 10 hours using household 220 volt power, who cares? It is recharged at night. And it
normally doesn’t have to be fully recharged either. So it would only be on a trip that driving
range and recharge times could possibly be an issue for today’s electric vehicles. But are
driving ranges and recharge times really an issue even during travel? The short answer is ” not likely.
An electric car owner will always begin each travel day with a fully charged battery, compliments
of the long time span between stopping one day and resuming the next day. Not that much time is
needed these days – the Tesla Supercharger stations can recharge to 80% in 30 minutes, to 100%
in about an hour. Those are times required for lunch and dinner breaks. At 100%, the first segment of
of a traveller’s day’s drive gets him around 230 to 340 miles down the road, depending on his car’s
battery size. That’s roughly 3 1/2 to 5 hours of driving – stop for lunch, get either an 80% or 100% recharge
(one half or one hour) and continue until stopping for the night and getting a full recharge.
So has that purported all-important “energy density” of gasoline actually made any difference, even
in the worst case – during a trip?
A big lie : “Car batteries cost $270 per kWhr.” Those prices are about two years old. General
Motors 5 months ago stated that they are paying $150 per kWhr for the batteries they are installing in
their Volt and all electric Bolt vehicles this year and Elon Musk made a remark at about the same time
that his company is spending $190 per kWhr, but that includes everything – the installation, controllers,etc.
Musk may have at one time claimed that battery prices need to reach $100 for EV costs to be equal
to equivalent gas powered vehicles, but that’s nonsensical, since an electric is superior in every way to a
gas powered vehicle. It also depends an awful lot on the price of the vehicle one is talking about. A cheap
gas powered car would be cheaper than an equivalent electric, but that’s not true when one gets to the $35K
price range and up. Ever wonder what happened to all those gas powered golf carts that dominated
courses 40 years ago? Well, they’re all electric these days. Try to find a gas powered vehicle that
is superior, either in terms of performance or looks, to the new Tesla Model 3. Even the slowest, base
model ($35,000, no govt incentives needed) can accelerate faster than probably 95% of the cars out there
(5.6 seconds zero to sixty). Go for the larger, more powerful battery pack and it’s probably faster than 99.5%
of the cars out there. I’d say that electric cars are actually superior in the $35,000 and up
price range. That encompasses a very large portion of the automotive market.
As for the amount of electricity required for an all electric fleet, one has to understand that the vast
amount of battery recharges are going to occur at night, either thru personal preference or thru incentives
from utilities that make it fiscally desirable to charge at night, when prices are lowest. With the long driving
ranges available in today’s best EV’s, there are hardly any times when a battery needs an immediate recharge during the day. This means that the enormous and unused overnight grid capacity can be devoted to recharging vehicles, which has the added advantage of driving down the cost of electricity, since the power
plants would be operating at a greater utilization, which has the direct effect of lowering per unit prices.
Estimates of unused capacity in THIS country show there to be plenty of unused nighttime capacity to
keep all motor vehicles charged. There is also the case of the Tesla Supercharger stations, some, perhaps
most, are largely solar powered and not a big consumer of grid power. And the changeover from gas powered to electric will take some time – plenty time enough to increase grid capacity.
Those who argue that electrics are not worth it because they don’t reduce emissions as some morons
claim by claiming “zero emissions” (California) miss the point. Electric cars are a superior technology
that has nothing whatever to do with emissions. Henry Ford realized this almost a century ago when he
attempted to build a practical electric car. It is just as true today – simply sit down and examine the relative
complexities and reliabilities of electric versus gas powered cars. Don’t be surprised if you start laughing
out loud at how many damn parts a gas powered vehicle requires and how much they cost. If cars did not
exist and were being designed today, who in the world would ever come up with as complicated and costly
and unreliable and hard to repair and maintain vehicle as a gas powered vehicle? Imagine, if you will,a gas
powered refridgerator. Yikes!!
Prolix, scientifically illiterate drivel, and so badly formatted it is practically unreadable.
“Imagine, if you will,a gas powered refridgerator. Yikes!!”
Yes, there are many millions of gas-powered refrigerators in the World – often found in caravans and motorhomes – based on the Electrolux system. No moving parts whatsoever, just a single flame little bigger than a pilot light, a very elegant and sophisticated system indeed.
http://www.solarmirror.com/www_jul01/fridge.gif
http://www.solarmirror.com/www_jul01/fridge.html
So basically, you really haven’t the first idea what you’re wittering about.
And you can’t even spell refrigerator either.
I think the author would do better without the scathing and pessimistic ridicule of others. I like this article as it takes a contrarian stance on an important topic.
However, I dislike that the author failed to mention a few important things:
– How unpriced externalities can be counter acted by government subsidy
– How harmful and local car pollution is.
– How EVs allow for a sustainable energy system.
– How in almost every regard EVs can be seen as superior to ICE based vehicles. Range is a problem for some uses, but fuel cells could cover these use cases possibly.
Will, by “government subsidy”, you mean of course “taxpayer subsidy” – whether they like it or not. E.G. Solar panels – those who can’t afford them get to subsidies those who can. **** that. Rob the poor to pay the rich. 90% of the “subsidies” (i.e. government larceny) for EVs in the USA have gone to wealthiest 10%. Again. **** that. Sales of EVs collapse without government larceny.