Well.... here's a company that says by 2013, they can produce 500,000 high tech battery packs for plug-in hybrid cars... all for just a mere 2.2 billion dollars in startup costs: http://www.a123systems.com/news/135 |
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I seriously wonder if the national power grid could handle the extra load from plug in cars. At least you folks back east have your nuclear stations, out here it's coal which the Prez has vowed to eliminate and replace with what, cow methane, wind which doesn't always blow and the power shafts bend when under snow load on the blade, or solar power which hasn't get developed a good converter %.
I laugh at the Tesla, $100,000 for a car that can only go 200 miles. Where am I suppose to recharge? I see a whole new industry, stop and recharge your car and take a nice 4 hour lunch break while the car charges. Still it is the wave of the future. Right now I can throw tomatoes at plug in cars, but in the future it will probably be quite common in dense urban areas. |
They're not for everyone or every circumstance! But they're great for urban areas where the daytime electric load from industry is high and overnight recharging can be done with all of that excess electric capacity. I calculated worst-case scenario for New England once... I'll have to go find it. I'm pretty sure my calculations showed that 8 million cars could be fully charged overnight during peak electric season using the existing infrastructure. Plus you're not dumping all the pollutants from burning fuels (in fairly inefficient and/or badly tuned cars) directly into the urban environment.
In your neck of the woods... or should I say in your very-large-open-spaces-area of the woods, full electric might not be best, but you've certainly got the right ingredients for generating electricity from the sun -- and solar THERMAL sites are about as efficient as coal plants (in terms of utilizing heat to generate steam to generate electricity). Solar farms just need more land to do it. |
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