Interesting Take on Electric Cars

Interesting Take on Electric Cars

http://www.scsconservatives.club/2019/04/interesting-take-on-electric-cars.html

As one of those obsessive-compulsive science types, I always wondered about the bottom line for electric cars, that is, first, cost per mile, and second, driving range. This article answers those questions. Here's a simple bottom line for people to consider. Everything we do requires energy. Where does energy come from? First, for all of recorded and a lot of unrecorded history, burning things. Secondly, wind power for sails, etc, then water power for turning mill wheels, etc. You might include solar power, in the sense of using sunlight to dry things, like salt basins. In more recent times, a bit of energy from geothermal, but the big difference from modern science is nuclear power. Power from sunlight making electricity is another new one, but not a huge game changer. When you need power that's transportable, like vehicles, what are your options? Well, you could go for batteries, but they tend to be heavy, which means you just added to the load you want to move, which means you need more energy to move it. You can manage this with land vehicles, but not with aircraft. As I once posted on a forum of fanatic ban-fossil-fuel activists, there is never going to be a 747 plane that takes off using batteries. (They subsequently banned me from the forum for "making people uncomfortable"- you can see they were truly modern Liberals.) Well, if you want to pack energy as efficiently as possible, what are your choices? Not batteries, not wound up springs, not compressed air, they all have too many limitations if you just want to drive a car long distance. The most concentrated form of energy (other than nuclear fuel and concentrated chemical explosives) is in the form of liquid hydrocarbons that you can burn in controlled explosions using the oxygen in the air. The 15 gallon gas tank in the car contains far more energy than a battery of the same weight, and besides, refueling time for the gas tank is a few minutes, while for the battery it's several hours. The electricity to charge the car battery has to be generated somewhere, if by combustion with some energy loss, then transmitted long distance through a power grid, with more energy loss. So the cost per unit energy that drives the vehicle has to go up and unless the kilowatts are coming from nuclear, solar, or wind power, plenty of CO2 got generated anyhow. So electric vehicles appear to be one of those ideas that sounds great, but the reality doesn't quite meet the ideal. Anyhow, take a look at the article below, see what you think. --Del