What do the new CAFE standards mean for the Z?

FlashBazbo · 05-21-2009, 08:40 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wstar

I really think all-electric cars are the future, . . . The only thing holding back that vision of the future, at this point, is the need for more advanced batteries and/or supercapacitors to be developed, and for the cost of those components to drop drastically. It will happen, it's just a question of when.

Actually, there's much bigger problem holding them back. The technological hurdle is huge, don't get me wrong, but I could see that hurdle resolved over the next 15 years. In fact, except for price issues, for MOST commuters (40 miles or less), feasibility is almost here.

But here's the 800 pound gorilla NOBODY in Washington wants to talk about: We don't have NEARLY enough power generation capacity to juice up that many electric cars. Even if you charge them during off-peak hours, the U.S. power generation industry is stuck with antiquated powerplants and insufficient capacity for what we're already doing. The current infrastructure needs off-peak in order to stay intact. The environmental lobby essentially killed powerplant construction thirty years ago. No nuke plants. No big coal plants. It is getting critical even without the added load of fifty million cars. (Google news articles on blackouts and brownouts.)

Electric cars, if they come online, will create the same kind of surprise that ethanol as an alternative fuel did. Ethanol use as a fuel taught us that we didn't have nearly enough grain production to both fuel cars AND feed people. Electric cars will teach us that there are no free lunches. They won't become feasible until / unless we spend hundreds of billions on new powerplants. (It would take decades to permit and build that kind of capacity. If you started today -- which the environmental lobby won't permit -- it could take 40 years to bring that much capacity online. And there are no large-scale powerplants that don't pollute big-time. Even wind has its problems.)