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The only reason that we might all be driving electrics in the future, is because all the rest of our economic downturns will have made it impossible for anyone to travel far enough on one trip to require the recharge. All travel will be local, so electric works. The electric car as we know it is useless for a cross country trip.
The only reason that we might all be driving electrics in the future, is because all the rest of our economic downturns will have made it impossible for anyone to travel far enough on one trip to require the recharge. All travel will be local, so electric works. The electric car as we know it is useless for a cross country trip.
Electric motors are more efficient than combustion.
The technology is fairly new and improving rapidly. I think Ford's upcoming electric car is supposed to get several hundred miles to a charge. Not to mention once the infrastructure in place you will have charging stations roadside.
Nuclear sounds great, but unless they also fix the grid it will still be a risky venture. Having plentiful electricity doesn't mean a thing if a portion of it fails and takes half the country with it.
I think a gradual overhaul of grid infrastructure will come as a result of the demand increase, it has too. Electric vehicles will drive this (no pun)... as they are probably our greatest energy consumer. While our current grid has quite a bit of room for improvement, at the end of the day it works for us. It's not like we don't have a solution, just a matter of implementing it.
It has little to do with planning and everything to do with money. Petroleum is bountiful and CHEAP however it is finite; as is coal and anything else we exhume from the earth's crust. I really see algae biofuels taking off big time. It is renewable and can be utilized by century-old technology; the latter being a huge driving factor.
Electric vehicles are the future... FUTURE being key word. Once all the brainwashed generations of nuclear-ignorant people die off, we will have more energy than we know what to do with. Windmills are old fashioned and invasive... however they are decent interim solutions. The other big one (perhaps the biggest outside of nuclear) is solar power; a sq. meter of sunlight can generate a kilowatt in about an hour (sea level)... unfortunately the semiconductor processes involved are currently cost prohibitive for large scale energy production, this however is only a matter of time (10yrs?) before it is cost effective.
Pray tell what is the disposal plan for all the nuke waste that will be generated from all the new nuke power plants that you see in our future??
Hell, nuke waste can't be gotten rid of now and there will soon be more!?!?
Pray tell what is the disposal plan for all the nuke waste that will be generated from all the new nuke power plants that you see in our future??
Hell, nuke waste can't be gotten rid of now and there will soon be more!?!?
Actually, it can. What do you think France does with its nuclear waste? The recycling process adds around 10% to the total cost of generating nuclear energy.
If GM loses upwards of $ 50,000 on ever Volt they sell( due to incentives to get them to sell), I'm not sure any other car company will be breaking down the doors to design more electric vehicles. Luckily GM doesn't sell many Volts and is scaling back production accordingly.
Electric vehicles are the future... FUTURE being key word. Once all the brainwashed generations of nuclear-ignorant people die off,
I am not fully against nuclear power, but the Japanese nuclear plant and tsunami incident put a big hurt to that, even with the media downplaying it like crazy, it is still a giant disaster.
Electric motors are more efficient than combustion.
The technology is fairly new and improving rapidly. I think Ford's upcoming electric car is supposed to get several hundred miles to a charge. Not to mention once the infrastructure in place you will have charging stations roadside.
This is distant future though.
Several hundred miles to a charge would mean that I'd need only 3 or 4 charges on a day of long-distance driving. But my point was that there will be very little long-distanced travel in future decades, due to factors unrelated to fuel limitations and off-topic in this forum, and that is why electric cars WILL be feasible.
Roadside charging stations will be of no value unless a car can be fully charged in a few minutes, and I'm not seeing much progress, actual or theoretical, toward that goal. Today I can't even charge a cell phone in less than several hours, during which my combustion car can be carrying me two hundred miles down the road.
It is not progress to say that electric motors are more efficient than combustion, if you are still using another layer of combustion to inefficiently generate the electricity, which is where much or most of America's electricity comes from today, and we can't even jump over that hurdle. As another poster pointed out, we could have a nuclear-powered car in our driveway, just by putting nuclear electrical power into the grid.
Tell the democrats that....it's time they learned....
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