Mm... many of them are sitting on oil-dependent fortunes?

Hopefully, high-tech millionaires will come to the rescue with vehicles like the Tesla Roadster. Or Europe? Japan? Anyone?

I dont think we'll see a viable alternative, until the oil industry has sunk its claws into it and owns the creation/distribution process and profit potential they had seen with fossil fuels.

From the really big picture, the problem is this: we are addicted to cheap energy. We have traditionally gotten a 10:1 return, or more, from pumping gasoline out of the ground; that is, for every unit of energy we spend pumping oil, we get 10 units of usable energy.

Any replacement will have to offer something in the same range, or we're in real trouble. We can gradually cope with reduced efficiencies in energy production (that's the kind of thing where markets can really do their thing), but abrupt transitions will be very painful.

That's the primary reason why electric cars won't work, at least not right away. Going to electric cars actually INCREASES the amount of power they need to travel a given distance, because of the losses involved in electricity generation, transmission, and storage. The biggest problem with electricity is that it just doesn't store very well. Hydrogen is one method of storing that power, but it's not very dense, so it causes other issues, primarily shortened ranges. And, as CC is pointing out, the methods we use to generate electricity are, at the moment, profoundly polluting.

We need to get over our fear of nuclear power, and embrace it. Ionizing radiation is very bad for humans, so we have this insane fear of the stuff, but it's a particular weakness of our species; nature as a whole is pretty damn rad-resistant. The Earth was once a far more radioactive place, and dormant in most animal genomes is the ability to repair radiation damage. Animals and plants live quite happily in Chernobyl, and Bikini Atoll, where we did all the nuclear testing, is a tropical paradise. (just don't eat the bananas.) Nuclear power is extremely green, in that if we DO blow it and irradiate a large area, it matters only to us. We're the only creatures that really suffer if we screw up.

Coal also has a lot of uranium in it, so it releases a great deal of background radiation when burned. I looked into this last year, and if I understand what I read correctly, one coal plant for one year releases more radiation into the environment than the entire nuclear industry ever has.

Deaths are similarly low. The death toll for the entire civilian nuclear program: about 200. Ever. For all of the reactors worldwide. From The West Virginia Mine Safety Site: The last year mining deaths exceeded 100 was in 1968 when 152 miners lost their lives in West Virginia mines.

In other words, in that one state, in that one year, we lost almost as many people as nuclear power has EVER killed, worldwide, in the 50 or 60 years since it was invented.

There's a big discussion thread on Metafilter about this issue; I posted at some length there on this same subject.

I am not sure I buy this point Malor. Internal combustion engines are amazinly ineffcient. In fact I think about 65-70% of the energy is wasted in an internal combustion engine. I do not believe there is a 70% loss in energy for the electiricty creation and transmission and then use of said energy. I would be ineterested though in seeing something that backed that up that using electricity is less effcient then using gasoline power.

I also read several articles that basically say that unless the electiricity is being generated by the oldest of coal plants the pollution of generating the electricity is less then that created by a car.

--edit--

Here is a link to an article that talks about the ploution created by electirical vs hybrid vs gasoline

http://news.com.com/Plug+in+your+hybrid,+pollute+less/2100-11389_3-60663...

Another reason people don't seem to consider about the dire need to drastically reduce our oil consumption for fuel/power drastically is that we need oil for plastics (unless I'm missing something) and many other utilitarian goods. Sure, if we run out of oil (which, if we're at or past peak oil, is a growing danger; that's a debate for another thread), we can just go "ok, time to find an alternative vehicle fuel!"

But if we go that far, we're not just going to need new fuel, we're going to need a new raw material for manufacturing. Think about just how much plastics have infiltrated everything around us, how much we depend upon plastics.

The "energy crisis" is a misnomer. It's a big threat to people because we see high gas prices and panic. What we miss is the greater long-term danger of oil depletion.

Lithium Ion can explode if you put too many in close proximity. There was an FAA warning passed out a few years ago stating that packages of Lithium Ion batteries can not be air mailed.

(I used to work for a battery distributor)

What are your sources for this though as I am trying to see if that is true.

I found this stat, Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995, from Wikipedia which is a lot less then your figure of 50% for the transmission of power in the US.

I been having trouble finding other numbers so if you could point me to some sources I would be interested in seeing them.

--edit--

Found another document saying that generating electricity in most power plants is 35% effcient.

I am still looking though for this information so if you do have a good source please point me to it.

OK no problem but I am guessing your numbers are way off then based off 2 sources I have found have transmission loss at 7.5% vs 50% you stated and electricity generation effciency at 35% vs your 60% (at best) numbers.

While I certainly can accept the idea that electricity production and use, uses more energy then gasoline. I am really curious if that is true and what the true numbers are. Just having a hard time finding that information.

What I do know though is that unlike the internal combustion engine, electricity can be generated by any number of sources, many of which are renewable.

I also know that based off some fact that only the oldest of coal power plants produce as much pollution as the standard gasoline car so moving to electiricity based cars is a win there.

That as the price of gasoline gets more and more expensive these options become more realistic and as I said in my first post this I think is a good thing.

Ok, well, note that while the transmission losses may not be as high as I thought, they're much HIGHER in the generation process, so it's not losing as much as you'd think. And I was guessing that batteries are extremely efficient, which they may not be... they do get pretty warm when charging and discharging, which is wasted energy. What I mention up there is definitely a ballpark figure, but even if transmission power is perfect and generators are as efficient as I thought (instead of your lower figure), gas is still gonna be 15 times "better" than electric, because it's cheating by using stored chemical power.

Per unit of energy, yes the renewable means are much much better than the old ways of generating power... but what I'm trying to point out is that by going to non-polluting cars, we're going to require a lot more power generation. A LOT more, because we're running on batteries now. If we go to renewable power and electric cars, we have to generate all the power ourselves. Even with very clean coal plants, we'll need so much more power generation that the net effect on the environment will probably be at least as bad, and probably worse, than good old reliable internal combustion.

Ultimately, we will need to do this anyway, but if we're just replacing oil with coal, we're probably taking a huge step backwards. We need, I think, to go to a nuclear power infrastructure along with our electric cars, or we're making the problem worse, not better.

As far as researching alternative fuels, I've always found that the sight of oogaba is electrifying, and leaves me with greater reserves of energy than i might've had moments before. I think oogaba actually bend the laws of physics and generate energy from nothing. If only we could find a way to leverage the untapped potential.

I think we might also use human power to generate electicity. Not like in early scenes of Conan the barbarian, but instead, imagine you go to the gym. and every lift, press and repetition, the energy is captured and added to the grid in some minute way. Maybe that recumbent bike at home actually feeds energy back into the power grid.

Find a way to capture all the motion generated by a couple having 'relations' and the problems solved. It would be a cause many people would love to contribute their time and effort too.

I'm just trying to think 'out of the box,' cause it sure is depressing to watch the gas prices ratchet up. I'm in New Jersey, we're the last stronghold of the under 3.00 a gallon avg. Like Helm's Deep I'm sure we're about to fall. Riders of Rohan where are you?!?!?!?!

I was under the impression that the 10:1 energy output ratio provided by the oil economy included the refining to get it into a useful state. But I don't have a direct source.. this is just general knowledge I've picked up over the years.

Regardless, taken from the broadest perspective, we're used to very cheap power. If we move to truly renewable energy, we have to make it all ourselves, instead of tapping into oil reserves. This will be tremendously more expensive. Switching to electric alone isn't enough, we need more nuclear power too. (or hydro/solar/fusion, but only the first of those three is ready for broad, industrial-scale production use.)

As far as the baseline usage thing goes... yes, absolutely. But remember that cars will be charging mostly in offpeak hours, meaning that the baseline for energy usage will move up without affecting the peak. If we currently use, say, 30% of peak power at night, we might move to 60 or 70% as we transition to storing power for the next day's use. That's a good fit for the nuclear power profile.

I think the biggest thing to keep in mind is that there is no humanly possible way to transition EVERYONE at once... if ever.
Hell, we'd be lucky to hit 20% in 10 years. But every person that uses electricity instead of gasoline to transport themselves TODAY is one less person kicking pollutants into the air.
In 2004 there were 243,023,485 registered vehicles in the United States. A short 8 million of those were new that year. That 8 million new cars a year figure is fairly stable going back to 1970s. If EVERY new car sold from now on is a 100% electric car, how many years would it take to overload our electrical generation capacities at our CURRENT levels?

Also... found a neat little chart on the Tesla site while answering some of my own questions:
Energy Efficiency.

If something DOES happen. And we get a national initiative to Clean up our Act. Is it easier to convert millions of cars or hundreds of power generators to be more efficient?

I guess the short version of all this is: The argument that the increased power requirement would offset any gains just doesn't make much sense to me.
I understand the argument, and I understand the math. I just don't understand the rationale. Spreading the pollution around to millions of tiny sources instead of one, focused, localized source sounds like simply spreading the crap heap wider so it doesn't look quite as tall. That smokestack is spreading crap whether there are electric cars or not.

I also read that thing about the hydrogen 'battery' the other day. I didn't see any info on how fast this reaction works, but I'd be curious to see how this sort of system would work out with the Chevy Volt solution that uses a combustion engine to power a generator. My thinking is that the hydrogen created might not flow fast enough for a combustion driven vehicle... but if the engine only needs to run in short bursts when assisting the battery... interesting!

I like to mention again as I found in an article I posted that the pollution created by electricity generation to power a car is only as bad as the pollution a gas car in the worse case. Basically if all your electiricity is generated by old coal plants then moving to electric gains you nothing on the pollution front.

But that is worse case scenario and we should want to improve/upgrade those plants no matter what so while yse electric cars are not the savior it is a step in the right direction.

We have to do this in steps and build on lessons learned.

maladen, does that include the pollution from the batteries?