Re: Oil Peaked !


"Dave Head" <rally2xs@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:44ej5411at1kh5p27oge51l04429qav8dj@xxxxxxxxxx
Electric cars. Think electric cars. Every parking meter a charging
station.
That would free up refineries to produce fuel for the essential
transportation you mention. It would be a sensible beginning to dealing
with
the problems we're facing. Drilling more holes in the ground only
postpones
the inevitable.

That's great, but think 20 years - it may take that to get real electric
cars
happening for anyone that doesn't have $100K or so for the battery, and
20
years to wire all those parking meters with electricity.

The Tesla costs $100,000. The target price for the Volt hasn't been
confirmed, but it's believed to be below $20,000 to make it competitive
with
hybrids. We don't have to reinvent electricity, the country is already
wired
and ready to go. Installing smart meters would be far less trouble than
installing fiber optic cable was, and that took only 6 years to reach
overcapacity. Compare that with the problems involved in setting up
hydrogen
refilling stations throughout the country.

You're way off on the Volt. I've been watching it closely, and the price
will
be about $35K.

Like all new models and badges, the first year or two will be sold below
cost to build a market for it. The online consensus seems to be around
$20,000. As production ramps up the costs will drop like a rock. I paid
$3,300 for my first IBM PC, a sizzling 4.5MHz with no hard drive. My latest
cost $600 with a dual-core gigahertz chip and a 128GB hard drive.

Remember that the hottest market for electrics will be greens and the
under-35s, the people with the least money to spend. A $35,000 car would be
priced out of their market, even with the gas savings figured in.

As for the electricity, have you missed all the news about the power grid
being
in extremely sad shape and needing to be rebuilt? That was discussed at
length
after that sagging wire south of Cleveland plunged the entire northeastern
USA
into darkness for an extended period of time.

Yes, the rash of acquisitions in the early years of this century produced
energy companies that were shareholder-driven, not public utilities, and
they cut costs on maintenance to boost profits.

And, stringing power-carrying
copper is WAAAAAAAY more complicated than building out fiber. Fiber can
be
strung underground with a "ditch witch" sort of machine, but power wires
require towers and large diameter copper wires, and concrete, and
construction
crews, and snorkel trucks, and sometimes even helicopters.

Transmission lines use aluminum conductors as a rule, not copper.

And you're assuming that the old way is the only way. We're on the edge of
practical superconducting mains, all of which would be buried, probably
alongside roadways so they could later be adapted to recharge passing cars
on the fly. Even if conventional cables are used, they'd be lots more secure
buried than the pylon-borne setup we have now, a leftover from the 1950s.

In 10 years, if we had a
visionary energy policy, you could look for 300-mile ranges and
near-instantaneous recharging. In 20 years induction cables under the
streets would provide an infinite range and no need to recharge.

Closer to 20 years, probably, and the induction coils under the roads
probably
couldn't be metered to each car to have the electricity paid for.

Nothing could be simpler. As you drive, you broadcast your location and
time
on the road to the nearest microwave tower, which charges (no pun
intended)
your credit card.

That's if everyone would cooperate, but you know that there will be
hoardes of
people stealing the power, and there'd be no metering possible in order to
catch them.

How do you steal induced power? If you tried to drive an unmetered car it
probably wouldn't start, and if it did you'd be broadcasting your position
to every police car in the vicinity. Metering would be the same as your cell
phone. Are there hordes of people stealing air time? If you try to rejigger
your cell it stops working. Ditto your induction car. We have electrical
telemetering here. If I tried to bypass it the power company would notice
instantly and shut down the power.

(Of course
the environmental bunch would be jumping up and down that the induction
coils
cause cancer, AIDS, or hangnails, and would be against it even if they
couldn't
find a reason...)

Yes, any change is resisted. Look how reluctant you are to give up
gasoline.
:-)

Am not. I'm only reluctant to give up gasoline-equivalent performance -
the
electric car I buy needs to perform as well or better than my gasoline
engined
car, that's all.

That may not be possible. You may have to make some sacrifices for the
greater good. Americans used to be able to do that. Witness the public
response to WWII. I wonder if we're still capable of it?


I also hope to buy a Chevy Volt at the earliest opportunity,
but it'll need the gas engine a lot, 'cuz I'll run out its 40 mile range
pretty
often.

The actual range is 640 miles with the tiny recharging engine, or about
150
mpg. Since Ditty and I would be using battery power almost exclusively I
expect we'd be getting about 10,000 miles per tankfull of gas. Not too
shabby.

Yeah, I love it. Hopefully I will be able to move back to the big city,
and
not have to drive too far for anything.

A sensible move. Most of the world will be living in cities by 2050. The
long commute will become a thing of the past. And even if it doesn't, an
electric car consumes no power unless it's moving, unlike gasoline and
diesel engines.


Think of the space program. All we need is the will to accomplish it.
There
are many new battery designs in the works, including a
carbon-fiber/plastic
assembly that acts like a giant condenser, permitting near instantaneous
recharges. And selling electric car technology to the rest of the world
might make us a net creditor country again.

Yep, there's all kindza things out there, but they are experimental.
There's a
Lithium Ion battery invented at Stanford last December that is supposedly
10X
the capacity of a regular Lithium Ion battery - if that works, then the
electric car is here. But... its development is being done in Saudi
Arabia now
- I look for the professors that are the inventors to be kidnapped and
beheaded
in an "unfortunate" security breach, and of course all the designs and
prototypes of this battery will, of course, be stolen.

Saudi Arabia has no research capacity to speak of. That's why its scientists
are here in the states. However the current administration has badly
crippled scientific research through underfunding, which is why I suspect
the big breakthrough will be in the EU, which has taken the lead.

The envirowackos and NIMBYs will have to be overcome, and that will also
take
time. The NIMBYs just recently forced 5 miles of overhead power wires
to
be
buried here in Virginia, at great expense, supposedly adding 10 cents a
month
to all our electric bills.

Oops. Scratch my comment above about not responding to the electrical
transmission line nutcases. :-) But at least those power lines are immune
to
ice storms and hurricanes/tornados now.

Yeah, burying them is not all bad, its just hideously expensive.

We're spending more than $2 billion a week in Iraq. More expensive than
that? And we'd be getting something back for it, too.

All we need is the national incentive. How many people have protested
against cell phones or airport scanners? If the benefit far outweighs the
cost, people will come around. And I really can't see Californians
preferring to stick with internal combustion engines rather than switching
to electric vehicles. They'd be a pariah state. As for nukes, if we
adopted
the French method of building to a single design rather than designing
each
plant from the ground up, the permit process and construction times would
be
speeded up tenfold, the cost halved and we, like France, might be getting
75% of our power that way.
-- Ernie

Well, it sure would be nice, but I'm not holding my breath. The forces of
obstructionism don't really need reasons, just a few things that they
think
they can scare people with, and things will come to a grinding halt, as
usual.

If we want it done badly enough it will be done. The interstate highway
system, rural electrification, satellite phones, FedEx, personal computers--
all were impossibly expensive and far too complicated until somebody with
vision came along and did them. Now they cost next to nothing and we take
them for granted.
-- Ernie


.

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