11 Responses

1. Lefties will use gas. They want everybody else to stop using it.
   Look up hypocrite in the dictionary and you will see a picture on an environmentalist

2. Yes, I keep hearing how lithium is a desperately rare chemical. If nickel-iron was winning the battery race, I’d fully expect to hear how iron is extremely rare.

   The way you power electrics is by using the empty space under hte green line here:
   http://www.caiso.com/outlook/SystemStatus.html
   Green line is available spun-up capacity. Red line is actual consumer load.
   The stuff doesn’t store, you know. All those power plants that it’s too expensive to shut down and spin up, have no choice but spin all night for nothing. They’d be happy to find customers for their power, and they price accordingly at ~4 cents a kwh. Not only is there power… it’s cheap.

3. I think they are focused on their utopia not really thinking about energy sources but I’d say they’d go for oil or gas, or something their countries have available…

4. The want windmills but no power lines to people . Who knows they are wacky people.
   They have no idea.

5. don’t call those people lefties!! I am a lefty but I agree with you USE A DIFFERENT WORD!

6. What Emissions and Byproducts Are Produced from Burning Coal?

   The combustion of coal produces several types of emissions that adversely affect the environment. The five principal emissions associated with coal consumption in the energy sector are:

   * Sulfur dioxide (SO2), which has been linked to acid rain and increased incidence of respiratory illnesses
   * Nitrogen oxides (NOx), which have been linked to the formation of acid rain and photochemical smog
   * Particulates, which have been linked to the formation of acid rain and increased incidence of respiratory illnesses
   * Carbon dioxide (CO2), which is the primary greenhouse gas emission from energy use.
   * Mercury, which has been linked with both neurological and developmental damage in humans and other animals. Mercury concentrations in the air usually are low and of little direct concern. However, when mercury enters water — either directly or through deposition from the air — biological processes transform it into methylmercury, a highly toxic chemical that accumulates in fish and the animals (including humans) that eat fish.

   we will use “gas” for a long time, but less and less as time goes by, nuclear is becoming more of an option for “lefties” no green house gasses emitted. even idiots may be able to figure out that putting a bunch of sh*t in the atmosphere may not be a good idea, as you have to breath that and eat things that are polluted by that crap in the air. So what do you think about the little incident in the gulf???, make sure you take your vacation there to help the people support themselves while the can no longer do anything to make a living, send a check or 20.

   now go to your nearest coal fired power plant and inhale the smoke, oh sorry i think that has happened already

7. This sounds less of a thoughtful question on how to power electric vehicles than another attack on the nonexistent ‘left’…the favorite straw man of the right wing radio dummies. Of course the right wing radio dummies in turn stooge for the Republican/Teabag Party who in turn stooge for the oil and coal mafias. It’s so transparent. Propaganda and disinformation…’ya gotta’ love these guys!

8. Perhaps you should look up the term “renewable energy”. Dams, wind farms, wave farms, tidal power, geothermal power, solar power and other renewable plants are already being built. As a matter of fact most of them already exist in the US alone. Did you know that 50% of all energy within the US comes from renewable energy? Nuclear is another form of clean energy. Every person that supports the use of green power that I’ve spoken to also supports that advancement of nuclear energy.

   Note that hybrid cars and electrical cars are two different things. Perhaps before you start shoving something away you should learn what you are shoving away first?

9. The Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt both claim 0.15 kWh/km or less.

   The UK grid produces 430-550 g CO2 per kWh depending on the year (and on gas, coal prices etc). Therefore an electric car driving in the UK, with a mostly coal/gas natural grid, produces 65-85g CO2. This compares with 155g for a common ’09 Ford Focus, or 89g, the lowest I’ve seen for a combustion engined car with the 2010 prius.

   The UK is also going to build some CCS power stations, a new wave of nuclear power stations and a massive expansion of wind power which will be providing 20%+ of our electricity by 2020.

   A combination of nuclear and renewables expansion in most countries seems like the way to go IMO, with a slow phasing out of non-CCS coal. The extra required capacity isn’t that large: the average Briton drives ~10,000 miles a year and there are fewer than 30 million cars. The total electricity demand for that would be under 20% of our current electricity demand and a significant portion of this could be met by night time power stations that are currently held in spinning reserve anyway, or they could be used in a smart grid as a way to dump excess electricity without spinning up reserves when it’s windy.

   The reason the figures for extra capacity look relatively small are because power stations (30-60%) are far more efficient than combustion engines (12-20%), and electric motors are very efficient (90%+).

10. Do you know the largest oil deposits are in Russia and the middle east? Last I checked neither of them were our great friends. Before you say Saudi Arabia loves us let me remind you that most of the 9/11 terrorists came from there.
    My electricity comes from my roof and the tiny stream running down the hill behind the house.
    The rest of the electricity for people like you could easily come from the grid at night when coal is still being burnt at pretty much the same rate as in the day time, but power not being produced in the quantities it could be if anyone was willing to buy it.

11. The amount of solar energy that falls upon the Earth is several orders of magnitude greater than what we currently use from all sources of energy, available solar energy is measured in hundreds of petawatts while global energy consumption is only 15 terrawatts. The only thing stopping us from harvesting what we need from solar energy is the capital costs involved. You have to remember that oil is also solar energy captured by photosynthesis and transformed into convenient chemically stored form of oil over millions of years and that the only reason why it is bad is that the carbon and hydrogen has been sequestered for millions of years hence it’s use result in a net increase in CO2 and H2O as well as a net decrease of O2 (the oil is only half of the combustion equation) in our environment. Basically oil is no different than the Lithium Ion batteries of the so called eco friendly electric cars except that we’re not recharging the CO2 and H2O back into oil. We could easily put solar energy into CO2 and H2O and synthesize oil, the process of using solar power to produce syngas from Co2 and H2O has been proven by Sandia Labs and the use of syngas to synthesize fuel has been done since the 1920’s and indeed is how we currently dilute our high sulfur diesel to meet the new ultra high sulfur diesel requirements (which is why diesel is suddenly so much more expensive) and it’s how we obtain usable fuel from the tar sands (the heavy bitumen is gasified into syngas which then synthesizes useful products). So in fact, electric cars is really no different from gasoline powered cars except that we intend to recharge them. Were we to require our fuel be synthesized from CO2 and H2O in our environment then gasoline and diesel vehicles would have the same net effect on the environment as electric cars but the problem is that it will always be cheaper to open a valve on a pipe from the ground then it will be to synthesize our own oil.

    There is one aspect of conventional cars that electric cars can’t match. The syngas can be produced by gasfication of biomass such as trash and dried sewage with the charcoal byproduct used as biochar thereby sequestering the carbon (not the CO2 as CO2 sequestration also sequesters the oxygen and as Biosphere 2 proved can be disasterous). Such a process would be carbon negative so unlike an electric car, a conventional car could help undo some of the damage that we have done to our environment.

    Electric cars are more reliable and more efficient than our conventional cars but fundamentally they are not anymore environmentally sound as the problem with existing cars is where we get the fuel not that we use such a fuel as a form of chemically stored energy. Both electric and conventional vehicles employ chemically stored energy to move the vehicle.

    What electric cars are about is selling more new cars, basically electric cars allows the automobile industry to continue to grow at a rate greater than what’s needed to provide utilitarian transportation. Unfortunately our economy has been based on such unsustainable growth for at least a hundred years. To not continue such a growth would mean incredible hardships for millions of people.

    It’s ironic that so many people will believe they are making a decision to better the environment when choosing to purchase an electric vehicle when in fact they are reducing our capacity to sequester the carbon from our environment. If people really wanted to benefit the environment, they would lobby for synthetic fuels from biomass gasification with biochar carbon sequestration.